Jody Agius Vallejo

Jody Agius Vallejo is Associate Professor of Sociology and American Studies and Ethnicity. She is also Associate Director of USC Equity Research Institute and Chair of the International Migration Section of the American Sociological Association. She also co-edits the USC Equity Research Institute Blog.

Her research areas include immigration, immigrant integration, race/ethnicity, and inequality, poverty, and mobility. Her book, Barrios to Burbs: The Making of the Mexican American Middle Class (Stanford University Press, 2012) examines the mechanisms—such as parental legal status, access to higher education, and business ownership—that expedite social mobility and integration into the middle class for Mexican Americans. The book also examines middle-class Mexican Americans’ racial/ethnic and class identities, their connections to family and community, financial and social obligations to kin, and civic engagement.

Agius Vallejo’s next book, in progress, investigates middle-class Latino entrepreneurs and the Latino economic elite. The research examines the institutions that support the Latino economic elite and argues that the Latino elite have developed an alternative, ethnic-based economic system of ethnoracial capitalism to facilitate a pathway of marked economic integration and mobility.

With Lisa Keister, she has also published on wealth attainment. In 2020 they co-edited a special issue of Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies on Immigrants and Wealth Attainment.

Agius Vallejo’s research has been funded by The National Science Foundation, The American Association of University Women, The Lusk Center for Real Estate, the American Sociological Association and National Science Foundation Fund for the Advancement of the Discipline, the John Randolph and Dora Haynes Foundation, the UC Davis Center for Poverty Research, and the USC Office of the Provost. She has held an American fellowship from the American Association of University Women and also a postdoctoral fellowship at the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies and U.S.-Mexican Studies at the University of California, San Diego.

In 2023, she received the Award for Public Sociology in International Migration from the ASA Section on International Migration. Also in 2023, she, along with Stephanie Canizales, received the 2023 Oliver Cromwell Cox Article Award from the ASA Section on Racial and Ethnic Minorities for their paper, “Ethnoracial Capitalism and the Limits of Ethnic Solidarity,” published in Social Problems. She has received two USC Provost Mentoring Awards for mentoring graduate (2022) and undergraduate students (2010), as well as the USC Raubenheimer Outstanding Junior Faculty Award for Research, Teaching, and Service (2012).