Tomás Jiménez is Associate Professor of Sociology and Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity. He is also Director of Chicana/o-Latina/o Studies.  His research and writing focus on immigration, assimilation, social mobility, and ethnic and racial identity. His book, Replenished Ethnicity: Mexican Americans, Immigration, and Identity(University of California Press, 2010) draws on interviews and participant observation to understand how uninterrupted Mexican immigration influences the ethnic identity of later-generation Mexican Americans. The book was awarded the American Sociological Association’s Sociology of Latinos/as Section Distinguished Book Award. Professor Jiménez has also published this research in the American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology, International Migration Review, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Social Science Quarterly, DuBois Review, and the Annual Review of Sociology.

He is currently working on three projects. The first - which is funded by grants from the National Science Foundation, the Stanford United Parcel Service Endowment Fund, and the Stanford Institute for Research in the Social Sciences - examines how host-society individuals (US-born of US-born parents) participate in the assimilation process by drawing on in-depth interviews with host-society individuals and observations in three distinct sub-regions in the Silicon Valley: East Palo Alto, Cupertino, and Berryessa. A second project (with Stanford PhD Candidate, Lorena Castro) looks at how immigration becomes part of American national identity by studying a sample of high school US history textbooks from 1930-2005. A third project (with social psychologist John Dovidio (Yale), political scientist Deborah Schildkraut (Tufts), and social psychologist Yuen Ho (UCLA), uses lab experiments, survey data, and in-depth interviews to understand how contextual factors shape the sense of belonging and related intergroup attitudes, behaviors, and support for immigration policies among immigrants and host-society members in the United States. This project is funded by the Russell Sage Foundation.

Professor Jiménez has taught at the University of California, San Diego. He has also been an Irvine Fellow at the New America Foundation and a Sage Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University (CASBS). He was the American Sociological Association Congressional Fellow in the office of U.S. Rep. Michael Honda, where he served as a legislative aide for immigration, veterans’ affairs, housing, and election reform. His writing on policy has appeared in reports for the Immigration Policy Center, and he has written opinion-editorials on the topic of immigrant assimilation in several major news outlets, including the Los Angeles Times, CNN.com, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and the San Diego Union-Tribune.