Edward Telles is an American sociologist whose work examines race, ethnicity, inequality, intermarriage, segregation and identity. Formerly a professor in the Sociology departments at Princeton and UCLA, he is currently a Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Irvine.
Telles is a leading figure in the study of race and ethnicity in the Americas and on immigrant integration, intergenerational change and mobility among Mexican Americans. His book Race in Another America and his work at the Ford Foundation in Rio de Janeiro were instrumental to changing discourse on race in Brazil and for producing major policy changes in Brazil, including instituting affirmative action in public universities. In the United States, Telles' research reveals how Mexican Americans have been incorporated in a largely distinct way from European Americans regarding education, socioeconomic status, language, culture, segregation and politics. By spanning the social sciences and the Americas in his research, Edward Telles has helped increase understanding of how race and inequality interact.
Focusing on race and ethnicity in Latin America, Telles' major books include Race in Another America: The Significance of Skin Color in Brazil, published in 2004 by Princeton University Press, winner of several awards, including the Distinguished Publication Award from the American Sociological Association, and the Otis Dudley Duncan Award for the best book in social demography (2005), as well as the Oliver Cromwell Cox Award for the Best Book from the Race and Ethnic Minorities section of the American Sociological Association (2006), the Best Book Award from the Brazil Section of the Latin American Studies Association (2006) and the Hubert Herring Award for the Best Book in Latin American Studies from the Pacific Council for Latin American Studies (2005).
Telles is also the author of Pigmentocracies: Ethnicity, Race and Skin Color in Latin America (with the Project on Ethnicity and Race in Latin America -PERLA) published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2014. Both books are published in Spanish and Portuguese and the former is available in Japanese. Pigmentocracies was based on random-sample surveys of race and ethnicity in several Latin American countries and conducted in conjunction with an international and multidisciplinary team of social scientists (PERLA), which Telles led. He has also published in this area in leading social science journals including the American Journal of Sociology, the American Sociological Review, Social Forces, and Demography, each multiple times.
Regarding his work on Latinos in the United States, he is best known for Generations of Exclusion, Mexican Americans, Assimilation and Race, which he co-authored with UCLA sociologist Vilma Ortiz. That book won the Otis Dudley Duncan Award (2009 )and the Best Book Award from the Pacific Sociological Association (2009). It is based on a longitudinal and intergenerational study of more than 1000 Mexican Americans in Los Angeles and San Antonio, who were interviewed in 1965-66 and who were reinterviewed in 2000 as well as interviews of a sample of their children. He has recently published Durable Ethnicity: Mexican Americans and the Ethnic Core with Oxford University Press, which he co-authored with Christina Sue.
About Race in Another America, writing in the Journal of Social History, George Reid Andrews noted: "This is a blockbuster of a book. To a topic — Brazilian race relations — historically fraught with ambiguity, uncertainty, and disagreement, it brings clarity, logic, and lucidity, not to mention several truckloads of data. The result is the most important work on race in Brazil since Gilberto Freyre's seminal The Masters and the Slaves (1933)…The clarity and lucidity of Telles’s findings, and the wealth of data on which they are based, make this book a genuine tour de force, and the most illuminating examination of Brazilian race relations that I have ever read." Reviewing the book for the American Journal of Sociology, Melissa Nobles noted, "Edward Telles's rich and important book is the latest, and most systematic, sociological study of Brazilian race relations. As its title implies, the book is also comparative, as the significance of race in Brazil is explicitly compared with its significance in the United States and in South Africa, to a lesser extent. American race relations have, and arguably continue, to serve as the paradigmatic case against which other countries are compared and from which sociological theories are derived."