He is currently the Edward A. Dickson Emeritus Professor of History and co-director of the Health Equity, Social Justice, and Anti-Racism curriculum of the School of Medicine at the University of California, Riverside.
He has also been a consultant, speaker, and workshop presenter for hundreds of organizations, government agencies, higher education institutions, and school districts.
[1] In addition to having written or edited more than four hundred literary works, he performs his one-person autobiographical play, A Conversation with Alana: One Boy's Multicultural Rite of Passage.
After several years as a tire salesman, Carlos F. joined the small commercial construction firm that had been founded by his father-in-law, Morris Hoffman.
From 1952 through 1956, Cortés attended his parents’ alma mater, the University of California, Berkeley, earning a degree in Communications and Public Policy.
[11] At Cal he joined Alpha Chi Rho fraternity,[12] edited the school annual, the Blue and Gold,[13] and chaired the Student Publications Board.
Among his various honors were Phi Beta Kappa, while he participated actively in intramural sports, winning the university's light middleweight boxing championship.
[11] While at Columbia, he worked part time for the Frank Goodman theatrical public relations firm, being assigned to the American Shakespeare Festival.
[11] An article he wrote about William Lytle Schurz, director of area studies at the American Institute for Foreign Trade (AIFT), led to his becoming Schurz’ assistant[11] and an AIFT student,[14] earning a 1962 Bachelor in Foreign Trade and being named recipient of the Barton Kyle Yount Award as the top student in his graduating class.
[15] Receiving a three-year National Defense Foreign Language Fellowship, Cortés began graduate study at the University of New Mexico in the summer of 1962.
Cortés joined UCR at a time of higher education turbulence, including the rise of student activism and demands for ethnic studies.
[44] In 1994, at the age of 60, Cortés took early retirement from UCR in order to focus his attention on being a diversity consultant, scholar, lecturer, and workshop presenter.
[45][46] He was soon giving some 75-100 presentations a year throughout the United States, Latin America, Asia, Europe, Australia, and Canada,[47] as well as lecturing on comparative culture on cruise ships.
[36] While writing more than fifty media-related articles, he served as a columnist for the magazine Media & Values and as Scholar in Residence for Univision Communications.
At UCR he played both Bud Abbott and Shirley Temple in the campus’ faculty-staff follies to raise money for student scholarships.
[63][64] Then, in the early 2000s, Cortés began working on his memoir (ultimately published in 2012 as Rose Hill: An Intermarriage before Its Time –- a reference to his parents' pioneering 1933 interethnic marriage).
[65] One evening, after a public reading of selections from the manuscript, a theatre director approached him and suggested that he adapt the book into a one-person play.
In addition, Cortés and his wife, Laurel, wrote and present a performance piece about her friendship with novelist Raymond Chandler.
[73] Then, in the summer of 2020, at age 86, Cortés agreed to become the inaugural co-director of the UCR School of Medicine’s new Health Equity, Social Justice, and Anti-Racism curriculum.
[20] This new challenge drew on his decades of work in diversity, including giving lectures on health care cultural competence.
[71] Two years later, in 2021, he received one of the University of California's most prestigious system-wide honors, the Constantine Panunzio Award for outstanding achievements of a UC faculty retiree in the arts, humanities, and social sciences.