Angelo Falcón

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.

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.

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.

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.

During this period, he often visited his high school friend and collaborator, Jose Ramon Sanchez, who attended the University of Michigan as a graduate student in the Political Science Department.

It was during this 1975 to 1977 period that they agreed that their academic studies had given them new and useful skills that had to be put to use to lift the economic, political, and cultural plight for their community.

Angelo and Jose put together a proposal to create an institute that would identify how public policy decisions and programs had a distinct impact on the Puerto Rican community.

Angelo and Jose decided to use that money to buy a computer to begin parsing through available data and identify a Puerto Rican focus to public policy research.

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.

In 2001, he was profiled in a "Public Lives" column in the New York Times ("A 20-Year Battler for Puerto Rican Political Pull" by John Kifner, June 20, 2001, Section B, page 2).

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.

[1] Angelo Falcón's research on Puerto Rican and Latino politics and policy issues has made a number of important contributions to these fields.