Jorge Castaneda ’73
Mexico City, MX

Region II Candidate

Well-known politician, journalist, biographer and professor all describe Jorge Castaneda ’73. “The more the world communicates, it would seem, the greater the need for translators, connectors, decoders and synapses,” says Castaneda. And indeed he tries to meet that need.

He was Foreign Minister of Mexico from 2000 to 2003, and one of the main architects of Vicente Fox’s victory in the 2000 presidential elections, which put an end to 70 years of one-party rule in Mexico. During this time, he pushed the Bush administration to regularize the status of illegal migrants. His position was that amnesty and a guest worker program had to be addressed together, coining the somewhat inflammatory term “the whole enchilada.” This led to some friction with the U.S., although Bush later said he should have made immigration his priority in 2005.

Castaneda tried to run for President of Mexico as an independent in 2006, taking the case to the Supreme Court of Mexico. He ran as an independent, calling for changes in the government’s role and did not want to take monies from traditional parties. The Court ruled that he could not run without being a representative of a party.

Currently, Castaneda is on the Faculty of Arts & Science of New York University as a Global Distinguished Professor of Politics and Latin American and Caribbean Studies. He spends several months in New York in this capacity and the rest of the time abroad, mostly in Mexico. He has been a professor at several prestigious universities, including Mexico’s National Autonomous University, the University of California at Berkeley, Princeton University and the University of Cambridge.

He has written more than a dozen books. His goal is to help bridge gaps and translate “Mexicans to the United States and Americans to Mexico. I subsequently broadened my obviously excessive ambition, and hope to contribute to translating Latin America to the United States, and vice versa.” His books include: Leftovers: Tales of the Two Latin American Lefts; The Mexican Shock; Ex-Mex: From Migrants to Immigrants; The Life and Death of Che Guevara; Utopia Unarmed: The Latin American Left after the Cold War; and many more.

Castaneda is also a renowned journalist. He has written countless articles for newspapers, magazines and institutions. He is a regular columnist for the Mexican daily Reforma, the Spanish daily El Pais and Newsweek. He has also written for groups such as the Council on Foreign Relations, the Americas Society, Project Syndicate and more.

In addition to his undergraduate degree from Princeton, Castaneda also has an undergraduate degree from the Universite de Paris-I (Pantheon-Sorbonne). He received an M.A. from Ecole Pratique de Hautes Etudes, Paris I, and a Ph.D. in Economic History from the University of Paris.

Castaneda is involved in many charitable efforts. He is a member of the Board of Human Rights Watch; a member of the Board of One Laptop per Child (OLPC); an International Member of the American Philosophical Society; and in 2008 was elected Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was also a Senior Associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Castaneda has been a speaker at events, symposiums and conferences around the world.

He maintains ties to Princeton by teaching at the University on occasion. “Like many of the hemisphere’s distinguished novelists (some of whom have taught and lived in Princeton) and a smaller group of its political leaders, I ended up becoming a public intellectual and political actor who has now spent a significant part of his life in between two cultures, two political realities, two sensitivities, constantly striving to bridge the gap or at least analyze and explain its breadth.”