Angelo Falcón, ASPIRAnte from New York, was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico on June 23, 1951, the only son of Dominga "Minga" Cordero and Angel Manuel "Mel" Falcón. He has lived in New York City since the age of six months and grew up in the Los Sures (Southside) section of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where he currently lives.
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. He went on to attend the citywide specialized Brooklyn Technical High School (1965–1969) in Ft. Greene, Brooklyn, where he graduated with a specialization in architecture. 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. He went on to attend Columbia College of Columbia University (Class of 1973) where he continued his activism as Chair of the Latin American Student Organization (LASO) and helping to establish the first HEOP, or Higher Education Opportunity Program, at the College. In 1976, he attended the State University of New York at Albany, where he did his graduate work in political science, completed a Masters of Science degree and returned to New York City as an ABD (all but dissertation) in 1980 to write his dissertation. He was awarded theNelson A. Rockefeller Distinguished Alumni Award from the SUNY-Albany in 1983.
In the early 1970s he worked with Aspira of New York, first as a Club Organizer and rising to the position of the Director of their Manhattan Center. This was during the period when Aspira of New York sued the NYC Board of Education, resulting the historic Aspira Consent Decree (1974) mandating transitional bilingual education programs for eligible Puerto Rican and other Latino students.
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. He helped organize a graduate student organization as a result of a fight he led to overturn unfair plagiarism rules adopted by the faculty.
Upon his return to New York City in 1980, he began teaching part-time to start work on his doctoral dissertation. He taught at Queens Collegeand theJohn Jay College of Criminal Justice. In 1981, while at John Jay, he began organizing what became the Institute for Puerto Rican Policy (IPR), as a volunteer organization. In June 1982, the Institute became a 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation and received its first foundation grant from theNew World Foundation.
Since that point, Falcón has headed the Institute continuously for more than 28 years. 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. During 1986-1990 he also served as one of the Co-Principal Researchers (along with Rodolfo O. de la Garza of the University of Texas at Austin, F. Chris Garcia of the University of New Mexico, and John Garcia of the University of Arizona) of theLatino National Political Survey (LNPS), one of the largest privately funded social surveys of Latino political attitudes and behavior ever conducted in the United States. In the mid-1990s he was one of the key organizers of theBoricua First!march on Washington, DC and in the early 2000s of theEncuentro Boricua Conference in New York City, among other national initiatives. For further information on this 1981-1999 period, see the entry for the National Institute for Latino Policy.
In 1999, the Institute for Puerto Rican Policy joined in a strategic alliance with thePuerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund (PRLDEF) at the Fund's invitation, where the Institute was renamed the PRLDEF Institute for Puerto Rican Policy and functioned as PRLDEF's Policy Division. During this period he served as PRLDEF's Senior Policy Executive and Director of the PRLDEF Institute for Puerto Rican Policy. On November 18, 2005, the Institute became independent once again and in 2006 changed its name to theNational Institute for Latino Policy (NiLP), with Falcón as its President.
Since 2000, Falcón has also co-chaired the New York Chapter of the National Hispanic Media Coalition. 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). In 2004, he wrote the Atlas of Stateside Puerto Ricans for the government of Puerto Rico and also co-edited the book, Boricuas in Gotham: Puerto Ricans in the Making of Modern New York. He was named as one of the top 25 "New York Latino movers and shakers" in 2006 by theNew York Post(November 28, 2006), and was the recipient of the "Little Flower" Award for Outstanding Community Service from LaGuardia Community College (CUNY) in 2007. Also in 2007, he was elected to the National Steering Committee of the Census Information Centers (CIC) program of the Census Bureau. In 2008, he was appointed by the U.S. Commerce Secretary to the 9-member Advisory Committee on the Hispanic Population of the Census Bureau's Race and Ethnic Advisory Committees (REAC) program. In 2009 he was elected Chair of both the Census Advisory Committee on the Hispanic Population and of the Steering Committee of the Census Information Centers Program.
In 2006, Falcón created the Latino Policy Network (currently called The NiLP Network) to diffuse policy and political information of importance to the Latino community online. The NiLP Network, with 10,000 members, has become possibly the most influential online community of Latino political civic and academic leaders in the United States. Through this network, NiLP has also created the Latino Census Network and the Latino Voting Rights Network. Besides timely information dissemination, the network members have also been polled from time to time on critical Latino policy issues through its National Latino Opinion Leaders Survey (NLOLS).
Falcón is a longtime resident of "Los Sures" in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, NY