Patricia Fernández-Kelly

Position
Professor of Sociology
Role
Associate Director, Effron Center for the Study of America
Title
Faculty Associate, Office of Population Research
Office Phone
Office
Wallace Hall, Room 255
Bio/Description

Patricia Fernández-Kelly is professor of sociology and research associate at the Office of Population Research at Princeton University, where she is also director of the Center for Migration and Development and associate director of the Effron Center for the Study of America. Fernández-Kelly is a social anthropologist with an interest in international economic development, gender, class and ethnicity, and urban ethnography. As part of her dissertation research in the late 1970s, she conducted the first global ethnography focusing on export-processing zones in Asia and Latin America. Her book on Mexico’s maquiladora program, For We Are Sold, I and My People: Women and Industry in Mexico's Frontier (1983) was featured by Contemporary Sociology as one of 25 favorite books in the last decade of the 20th century. With Lorraine Gray, she co-produced the Emmy-award winning documentary The Global Assembly Line. She has written extensively on migration, economic restructuring, women in the labor force, and race and ethnicity. With Paul DiMaggio, she produced Art in the Lives of Immigrant Communities in the United States (2010). With Alejandro Portes she is the editor of The State and the Grassroots: Immigrant Transnational Organization in Four Continents (Berghahn Books, 2016). Her book The Hero’s Fight: African Americans in West Baltimore and the Shadow of the State (2016) received a C. Wright Mills Finalist Award from the Society for the Study of Social Problems. She is currently working on a book entitled Hialeah Dreams: The Making of the Cuban-American Working Class in South Florida.