Back More
Salem Press

Table of Contents

See Also

Rodolfo F. Acuña

Corky Gonzáles

José Ángel Gutiérrez

Great Lives from History: Latinos

Leobardo Estrada

by Joseph Dewey

American sociologist

A well-respected career academic in sociology—specifically in the burgeoning field of urban planning—Estrada has contributed his expertise to countless regional and national blue-ribbon panels investigating the impacts of economics and social policy on the size, movement, and integrity of the Latino immigrant population, particularly in the southwestern United States since World War II.

Areas of achievement: Sociology; scholarship; education

Early Life

Leobardo Estrada (lee-oh-BAHR-doh eh-STRAH-duh), born in El Paso, Texas, was raised in a comfortable middle-class home with a keen awareness of his Mexican heritage. Early on, success in school came easily, but Estrada lacked motivation. Interested generally in Latino culture in Texas, he matriculated at Baylor University in Waco to study sociology. Years later, he recalled how nonchalantly he approached academics at Baylor until he met the woman he would eventually marry. His prospective father-in-law agreed to the engagement on the condition that Estrada commit to attending graduate school. That led Estrada to apply to Florida State University.

At Florida State, Estrada focused on demography, the discipline within sociology geared to analyzing and describing the dimensions and movements of specific population groups—in his case the Latino population in the Southwest. Unlike social theorists, demographers gather a wide variety of empirical data—such as economic information, census data, birth and death records, employment numbers, housing and education statistics—and extrapolate from it a reading of the activity of a specific population group. Estrada discovered the challenge of gathering information on a significant population that had, to that point, attracted little academic interest.

Life’s Work

Certain that he would dedicate his career to academics, Estrada completed his doctorate and accepted an appointment at the University of Michigan. However, because his field of interest required that he work closer to the culture he was studying, he returned to Texas, accepting teaching positions first at the University of Texas at El Paso and then at the University of North Texas. Estrada became known not only for his dynamic classroom presentations but also for his advocacy of often-controversial causes related to the Hispanic community. He clashed occasionally with university administrators over his public political activism. In 1977, Estrada accepted a position as associate professor of urban planning in the School of Public Affairs at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA). The university proved a good fit for Estrada: It encouraged faculty members to extend their expertise beyond the limits of the classroom to benefit the wider community.

Over the next three decades, Estrada gathered data on the Latino population in the Los Angeles area with particular attention to the role of economics and the environment. As an ethnic demographer, Estrada published widely in the most prestigious journals in the field. His interest was in tracking developing trends within the city’s Latino population (during those years, Latinos accounted for aroud 45 percent of the city’s total population): its movements within and between neighborhoods, shifts in job opportunities and career selection, business startups, housing, birth and death rate fluctuations, and changes in education levels and family net income. His expertise was sought by educators, hospital administrators, business leaders, public transportation executives, and politicians. Estrada was asked twice by the U.S. Census Bureau to develop methodologies for accurately analyzing and gathering census data on the Hispanic population. He served as a special assistant to the chief of the bureau’s Population Division and later as staff assistant to the deputy director of the bureau. He published seminal material in the field of demography, most notably The Changing Profile of Mexican America: A Sourcebook for Policy Making (1986).

While maintaining his dedication to the classroom, Estrada served as consultant to public foundations (most notably the Ford Foundation), hospitals, charities (particularly those concerned with youths and education), and a variety of international corporations. He also made two notable contributions to the Los Angeles area. In 1990, given his familiarity with the census, he was called upon to lend his expertise in the controversial redistricting of the powerful Los Angeles Board of Supervisors, an effort designed to make the board better reflect the city’s diversity. The redistricting led directly to the election of the first Latino city supervisor since Reconstruction. A year later, Estrada was named to the city’s Christopher Commission, a blue-ribbon independent committee chaired by Warren Christopher (later President Bill Clinton’s secretary of state) that was impaneled in response to the national outcry over the videotaped beating of Rodney King. The committee was asked to review more than two thousand allegations of excessive force by officers of the Los Angeles Police Department and set an agenda for the reform of the department.

Into his sixties, Estrada maintained his public profile, promoting a range of public issues involving the Latino community, focusing specifically on entrepreneurial opportunities and wealth creation for urban families. In November, 2008, he was named to the transition team for President Barack Obama’s incoming administration.

Significance

Estrada earned a national reputation for the integrity of his research methodologies and for reaching conclusions that were grounded in and shaped by hard data rather than driven by personal agendas or biases. His measure of trends in the Latino immigrant population in Southern California influenced local government policy, research funding, and community development projects. He epitomized the academic whose work finds significant application in the world outside the classroom.

Further Reading

1 

Cannon, Lou. Official Negligence: How Rodney King and the Riots Changed Los Angeles and the LAPD. New York: Basic Books, 1999. Careful and exhaustive review of the controversial case and the Christopher Commission, which brought Estrada national attention.

2 

Ochoa, Enrique C., and Gilda L. Ochoa. Latino Los Angeles: Transformations, Communities, and Activism. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2005. Wide-ranging study that gives context to the specific analyses Estrada completed on the demographics of the Los Angeles Latino population.

3 

Poston, Dudley L., Jr., and Leon F. Bouvier. Population and Society: An Introduction to Demography. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. A helpful and accessible introduction to the science of population study, census analysis, and cultural sociology, with particular emphasis on the sort of racial and ethnic demography Estrada pioneered.

Citation Types

Type
Format
MLA 9th
Dewey, Joseph. "Leobardo Estrada." Great Lives from History: Latinos, edited by Carmen Tafolla & Martha P. Cotera, Salem Press, 2012. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=GLL_10013240022401001.
APA 7th
Dewey, J. (2012). Leobardo Estrada. In C. Tafolla & M. P. Cotera (Eds.), Great Lives from History: Latinos. Salem Press. online.salempress.com.
CMOS 17th
Dewey, Joseph. "Leobardo Estrada." Edited by Carmen Tafolla & Martha P. Cotera. Great Lives from History: Latinos. Hackensack: Salem Press, 2012. Accessed October 22, 2025. online.salempress.com.