Roberto Alvarez’s career and life have been guided by a commitment to social justice and the empowerment of underserved communities. This commitment stems from both his personal history growing up along the U.S.-Mexico border and his experience across a wide range of social change contexts. These include the U.S. Peace Corps (Panama and Puerto Rico), where he discovered the value of anthropology in addressing the effects of social change, inadvertent power, and inequality. He completed a PhD in Social Anthropology at Stanford in 1979, focusing on migration and social change, and conducted research on his extended family on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. He then joined the Institute of Urban and Minority Education (IUME) and the Program in Applied Anthropology at Teachers College, Columbia University, where he taught in the Applied Program and served in IUME Centers for Race Desegregation, Title IX, and National Origins, working in New York City Schools and urban neighborhoods. In 1982, he returned to California to participate in the grassroots Cross Cultural Research Center (CCRC) at Sacramento State University, serving as Director of Research and Evaluation and Associate Director of the College for Migrants Program. At the CCRC, he conducted leadership and ethnographic training with teachers, community and indigenous leaders in the Federated States of Micronesia, the Republic of Belau, the Northern Marianas (Guam and Saipan), as well as in Chicano/Mexicano and Indigenous communities in the U.S.

In 1985, he returned to work in a family-owned produce company in the U.S.-Mexico fruit industry. This became a five-year ethnographic experience that gave him a deep understanding of the U.S.-Mexico Border, U.S. government policy, transnational processes, and ethnic entrepreneurial strategies. A number of his publications (many in Human Organization) focus on ethnic markets, entrepreneurs, and global agriculture. He has also published extensively on the U.S.-Mexico Border. From 1990 to 2001, he returned to academia at Arizona State University (ASU), where he founded the Program in Applied Anthropology to engage graduate students and the local community in effective educational and policy efforts. He served as Director of Ethnography and Evaluation for various university programs aimed at high-risk educational populations and communities. This included a ten-year commitment to the Project for the Improvement of Minority Education, the Office of Youth Preparation, and the President’s Building Great Communities Program. He joined the Department of Ethnic Studies At UCSD (2001-2012), where he continued community outreach and directed the Logan Heights Ethnography Project in the Chicano/Mexican community where he was raised. As Director of the Center for Global California Studies, he maintained outreach in San Diego’s immigrant communities through health and food security programs while overseeing the recruitment of nontraditional and native faculty across the campus.  He is currently Professor Emeritus.

Roberto has been an active member of SfAA since the early 1970s, serving on a variety of committees and as SfAA President (2013-2015). He received the Sol Tax Award for Distinguished Service in 2019. As a member of the American Anthropological Association, he served on the Ethics Committee and chaired the Committee on Minority Affairs. He was also a founding member and later President of the Association of Latina and Latino Anthropologists (ALLA).