Felipe Dias grew up in a working-class neighborhood in São Paulo, Brazil’s largest city, and his parents worked multiple jobs to send him to a private school. He couldn’t help but notice the contrast in social status between his wealthy classmates and kids like him who didn’t come from money.
October 3, 2022
Felipe Dias grew up in a working-class neighborhood in São Paulo, Brazil’s largest city, and his parents worked multiple jobs to send him to a private school. He couldn’t help but notice the contrast in social status between his wealthy classmates and kids like him who didn’t come from money.
He didn’t know anything about sociology at the time, but these days he thinks that experience might have planted a seed of curiosity about social issues and inequalities. Now he’s an assistant professor of sociology in the School of Arts and Sciences—and the new director of the Latin American Studies program—and focuses his research on social stratification and inequality in the U.S. and Latin America.
Some of that research has touched on immigration, which he knows firsthand. As a teenager, he was deeply into basketball and played for his school in São Paulo. A classmate spent a semester as an exchange student in New Jersey, and suggested to Dias that he could play basketball in the U.S.
Dias ended up sending a videotape of himself playing basketball to a Newark, New Jersey, high school basketball coach, who invited him to come enroll and play for his team. He did, and it was a life-changing event. As high school ended, he decided to stay in the U.S. He tried for a college basketball scholarship, but didn’t quite have the chops, so he sold vacuum cleaners for a year to make money before heading out to California and eventually UCLA.
By then, academics was his strong suit, and he was on a pre-med track. But he happened to take a sociology class, and then another, and soon switched his major. An undergraduate summer research program in sociology at UC Berkeley cemented his interest, and after graduation he started a Ph.D. program in sociology at Berkeley, focused on race and inequality in Brazil.
As a doctoral student, he focused his research on race in Brazilian labor markets. He decided to take what was at the time a fairly new approach in sociology, focusing on field experiments. It became his hallmark: testing theories in real world settings.
He set up an experiment with fictitious people applying for jobs. While similar field experiments had been done in the U.S. and Europe, he had to design it a little differently for Latin America, because the regions have different histories.
In colonial times, more than 4 million enslaved people were forcibly taken from Africa to toil in Brazil, 10 times as many as were taken to the U.
