Features
Noteworthy & New
Celebrating And Investing In Research At SMU
Historian Honored By Academy, Institute
One of the nation’s leading historians of the American Southwest
and the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, David J. Weber, has been
elected to the American Academy of Arts
and Sciences. Weber, the Robert and Nancy
Dedman Professor of History, directs the
William P. Clements Center for Southwest
Studies at SMU.
In addition, Weber received the Lon Tinkle
Award for Lifetime Achievement from
the Texas Institute of Letters earlier this year.
He is the author or editor of more than 20 books and 60 scholarly
articles. His books have won numerous major awards, including the American Historical Association’s 2006 John Edwin
Fagg Prize for Bárbaros: Spaniards and Their Savages in the Age
of Enlightenment (Yale University Press, 2005).
Two governments have given Weber the highest honor they bestow
on foreigners: In 2002 King Juan Carlos of Spain named him
to membership in the Real Orden de Isabel la Católica, and in 2005
Mexico named him to the Orden Mexicana del Águila Azteca.
For more information: faculty.smu.edu/dweber/
Tech, Immigration Booms Tied Together
The ways in which immigration is reshaping the United States
today and its future impact are examined in Twenty-First Century
Gateways (Brookings Institution Press, 2008), a new book co-edited
by SMU Anthropology Professor Caroline Brettell.
The book’s case studies center on the fastest-growing immigrant
populations in metropolitan areas with previously low levels of
immigration, including the Dallas-
Fort Worth area. These 21st-century
gateways are home to one in five immigrants
to the United States. According
to Brettell, in 1970, only 2
percent of Dallas’ population was
foreign-born; by 2000, nearly onequarter
of the city’s residents were
born in another country.
Brettell’s research focused on 600
immigrants in Dallas, Tarrant, Collin and Denton counties. Her
findings mirror the trend in other new gateways: “high-capital
immigrants,” the more highly educated, highly skilled newcomers,
help fuel tech-sector growth, which creates jobs in construction
and service industries for lower-skilled immigrants.
For more information: www.brookings.edu/press.aspx
