Robert Van Kemper
Department Chair
Heroy Hall, Room 405
(214)768-2928
rkemper@smu.edu
Robert Van Kemper has authored and edited ten books and nine journal special issues,
published 64 journal articles, written 62 book chapters, and numerous book reviews. His most recent
works include two articles titled “Dallas-Fort Worth: Toward New Models of Urbanization,
Community Transformation, and Immigration” and “From Freedman’s Town to Uptown:
Community Transformation and Gentrification in Dallas” in the journal Urban Anthropology.
He currently is writing a textbook on urban anthropology (forthcoming, 2007).
Kemper’s current interest in faith-based ommunities is reflected in a recently published chapter,
“The World As It Should Be: Faith-Based Community Development in America” with Julie Adkins
in Community Building in the Twenty-First Century, School of American Research Press, 2005.
Urban anthropology in Mexico and the United States Well-known as a pioneer in the field of
urban anthropology, Professor Kemper is interested in how people live in the large places we call
cities—whether in the enormity of metropolitan Mexico City, in the transitional neighborhoods
of Dallas’ Oak Cliff, or in the post-modernism of Dallas’ Uptown. He is especially
concerned with how people interact when they move between cities and smaller communities. The
comparative data from his long-term study of households in the community of Tzintzuntzan in Mexico
City provide the basis for understanding the impact of migration on community development in that area
for the past 100 years.
Campesinos en la Ciudad was his first monograph-length report on the
project, starting with fewer than 75 households in Mexico City and now involving
over 3,000 households throughout Mexico and the United States. Kemper finds that
migration not only influences patterns of family life but affects community development through tourism. For example,
when a father migrates and his spouse stays behind with their children, social stress usually increases,
even though the household’s standard of living may rise over time. For this reason, families try to
assemble all of their members in the places of destination, whether in Mexico City or in Los Angeles,
Chicago , or Tacoma—despite difficulties under current U.S. laws. Likewise, in spite of the problems
of going back to their home community, the immigrants in Kemper’s study continue to support
arts and crafts.
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