Angelo Falcón


Angelo Falcón was a Puerto Rican political scientist best known for starting the Institute for Puerto Rican Policy in New York City in the early 1980s, a nonprofit and nonpartisan policy center that focuses on Latino issues in the United States. It is now known as the National Institute for Latino Policy and Falcón served as its president until his death. He was also an Adjunct Assistant Professor at the Columbia University School of Public and International Affairs.
Falcón was able to combine academic and policy research with an aggressive advocacy style based on broad coalition-building and community organizing. Noted for his caustic sense of humor and his progressive politics, he became one of the longest-serving chief executives of a Latino nonprofit in the country.

Early years

Falcón was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico, on June 23, 1951, the only son of Dominga "Minga" Cordero and Angel Manuel "Mel" Falcón. He lived in New York City since the age of six months and grew up in the Los Sures section of Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
Falcón attended Public School 17 in Williamsburg, where his first grade teacher unilaterally changed his name to "Angelo" from "Angel," thinking it was a typo. He went on to attend the citywide specialized Brooklyn Technical High School in Ft. Greene, Brooklyn, where he graduated with a specialization in architecture. In high school, he joined with other Puerto Rican and Latino students to organize the El Nuevo Mundo Aspira Club, which began his involvement in community affairs. He went on to attend Columbia College of Columbia University where he continued his activism as Chair of the Latin American Student Organization and helping to establish the first HEOP, or Higher Education Opportunity Program, at the college. In 1976, he attended the State University of New York at Albany, where he did his graduate work in political science. He completed a master of science degree and most requirements for his doctorate, returning to New York City as an ABD in 1980 to write his dissertation. He was awarded the Nelson A. Rockefeller Distinguished Alumni Award from the SUNY-Albany in 1983.
In the early 1970s he worked with ASPIRA of New York, first as a Club Organizer and rising to the position of the Director of their Manhattan Center. This was during the period when Aspira of New York sued the NYC Board of Education, resulting the historic Aspira Consent Decree mandating transitional bilingual education programs for eligible Puerto Rican and other Latino students.
During his graduate studies in Albany in the late 1970s, he worked as a teaching assistant and as a technical researcher with the Capitol District Regional Planning Commission. He helped organize a graduate student organization as a result of a fight he led to overturn unfair plagiarism rules adopted by the faculty.

Institute for Puerto Rican Policy

Upon his return to New York City in 1980, he began teaching part-time to start work on his doctoral dissertation. He taught at Queens College and the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. In 1981, while at John Jay, he began organizing what became the Institute for Puerto Rican Policy, as a volunteer organization. In June 1982, the Institute became a 501 nonprofit corporation and received its first foundation grant from the New World Foundation.
Since that point, Falcón headed the Institute continuously for close to 30 years. During this period, despite its small size, the Institute developed a national reputation as one of the most innovative policy centers addressing Latino issues in the country. During 1986-1990 he also served as one of the Co-Principal Researchers of the , one of the largest privately funded social surveys of Latino political attitudes and behavior ever conducted in the United States. In the mid-1990s he was one of the key organizers of the Boricua First! march on Washington, DC and in the early 2000s of the Encuentro Boricua Conference in New York City, among other national initiatives.
In 1999, the Institute for Puerto Rican Policy joined in a strategic alliance with the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund at the Fund's invitation, where the institute was renamed the PRLDEF Institute for Puerto Rican Policy and functioned as PRLDEF's Policy Division. During this period he served as PRLDEF's Senior Policy Executive and Director of the PRLDEF Institute for Puerto Rican Policy. On November 18, 2005, the Institute became independent once again and in 2006 changed its name to the National Institute for Latino Policy, with Falcón as its president.
Since 2000, Falcón also co-chaired the New York Chapter of the National Hispanic Media Coalition. In 2001, he was profiled in a "Public Lives" column in the New York Times. In 2004, he wrote the Atlas of Stateside Puerto Ricans for the government of Puerto Rico and also co-edited the book, Boricuas in Gotham: Puerto Ricans in the Making of Modern New York. He was named as one of the top 25 "New York Latino movers and shakers" in 2006 by the New York Post, and was the recipient of the "Little Flower" Award for Outstanding Community Service from LaGuardia Community College in 2007. Also in 2007, he was elected to the National Steering Committee of the Census Information Centers program of the Census Bureau. In 2008, he was appointed by the U.S. Commerce Secretary to the 9-member Advisory Committee on the Hispanic Population of the Census Bureau's Race and Ethnic Advisory Committees program. In 2009 he was elected Chair of both the Census Advisory Committee on the Hispanic Population and of the Steering Committee of the Census Information Centers Program.
In 2006, Falcón created the Latino Policy Network to diffuse policy and political information of importance to the Latino community online. The NiLP Network, with more than 8,000 members, has become possibly the most influential online community of Latino political civic and academic leaders in the United States. Through this network, NiLP has also created the Latino Census Network and the Latino Voting Rights Network. Besides timely information dissemination, the network members have also been polled from time to time on critical Latino policy issues through its National Latino Opinion Leaders Survey.
Falcón lived in his childhood neighborhood of "the Sures" in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. A diabetic, Falcón suffered a fatal heart attack in front of his home on May 24, 2018.

Contributions

Angelo Falcón's research on Puerto Rican and Latino politics and policy issues has made a number of important contributions to these fields. These include:
;*In 2006, Falcón created what has come to be known as The NiLP Network, the national online community of Latino opinion leaders and advocates hosted by the National Institute for Latino Policy. This has become one of the most influential online information networks on policy and political issues in the Latino community today. The NiLP Network built on the powerful legacy of the ipr-forum, one of the first listservs on Puerto Rican issues that was hosted by the Institute for Puerto Rican Policy in the 1990s.

Directorships

As author

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