Carlos G. Vélez-Ibáñez awarded the Saber es Poder-IME Prize

The Regents' Professor is the inaugural recipient of the Knowledge is Power award

portrait of a man in an office decorated with ethnic masks and books

Carlos Velez-Ibanez in his office at the School for Transborder Studies on Tempe campus. Photo by Deanna Dent/ASU Now

April 19, 2018

The first national Saber es Poder-IME Award will be awarded on April 28 to Arizona State University Regents’ Professor Carlos G. Vélez-Ibáñez of the School of Transborder Studies and the School of Human Evolution and Social Change.

The award recognizes an outstanding scholar whose work has demonstrated sustained excellence in Mexican American studies and is selected by a panel of five scholars from throughout the United States from a national pool of candidates.

The $10,000 prize was created by the University of Arizona Department of Mexican American Studies, the Fundación Mexico, and the Consulate of Tucson in conjunction with the Instituto de Mexicanos en el Exterior (IME), a semi-autonomous institution of the Mexican Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Vélez-Ibáñez, the author of five monographs and six edited books and numerous articles and chapters, was inducted as a Corresponding Member of the Mexican Academy of Sciences in 2017 and previously as Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences as well as past Fellow of the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford.

He said that the award is “a manifestation of the importance of the field of Mexican American studies. It truly is a Mexican American award in that it is defined by its special place, unlike any other award, by the fact that it joins the academic and historical realities of this population separated by this border that is only two grandmothers old.”

Professor Vélez-Ibáñez will give a public lecture on April 27 at the Mexican Consulate and will be awarded the prize at a gala the following evening in Tucson.