Professor Robert Courtney Smith (Marxe School, Baruch College; Sociology Department, Program in Social Welfare, Graduate Center, CUNY) wrote Mexican New York: Transnational Worlds of New Immigrants (California, 2006), which won ASA’s 2008 Distinguished Book Award, three ASA section awards, and a CUNY Presidential award. His new book, Dreams Achieved and Denied: Mexican Intergenerational Mobility, was released in September 2024 by the Russell Sage Foundation, via the American Sociological Association’s Rose Series. Drawing on two decades of research, it analyzes what mechanisms promoted (and blocked) impressive intergenerational mobility among children of Mexican immigrants in New York, which is much higher than in other studies in other places. Smith is currently writing another book This Is Still America! Immigration, Voting Rights, and Contested Immigrant Political Incorporation, which analyzes how discrimination against Hispanic voters resulted in a Voting Rights Act lawsuit in Port Chester, and how adopting cumulative voting promoted greater Hispanic political participation and representation there. He has begun writing up two long-term fieldwork projects, one on the impacts of having, lacking, or gaining legal status or DACA, and the other on the impacts of the pandemic on immigrants in New York City and upstate New York.

Smith’s research and work seeks strategic sites for cutting edge research and for intervention to improve wellbeing and fight injustice and inequality. He has cofounded and served on the board of a Mexican community serving nonprofit, led a capacity building program at Baruch College’s Marxe School, and does deportation defense. He was the lead author on a 2019 amicus to the Supreme Court in the DACA case, and was an expert in a case resulting in a $20 million dollar settlement for DACA recipients from Wells Fargo. He teaches at CUNY (Marxe School, Baruch College and Sociology Department, and Political Science Department, the Graduate Center). In 2024, he received the 2024 American Sociological Association Distinguished Career Award for the Practice of Sociology.