Santiago Perez (dressed in a white button-up shirt and black pants) stands with his Mom and Dad at the Buenos Aires Book Fair.
UC Davis economist Santiago Pérez, right, with his parents Enrique Pérez and Maria Fabiana Vaccaro at the Buenos Aires Book Fair. (Courtesy of Santiago Pérez)

Economics Faculty Santiago Pérez Speaks at Buenos Aires Book Fair

  • by Kathleen Holder

Anyone who traces their family history knows the challenges and triumphs of documenting the lives of their ancestors. Multiply that effort by thousands and you’ll glimpse the daunting scope of Santiago Pérez’s economic history research.

Pérez, an assistant professor in the UC Davis Department of Economics, gave a snapshot of that expansive research at a talk during the opening weekend of the 2023 International Book Fair of Buenos Aires, the most popular book fair in the Spanish-speaking world. The three-week event in Argentina’s capital is expected to draw more than a million readers and 12,000 book professionals by the time it closes May 15.

Pérez was one of two scholars invited by the FamilySearch organization to share how they use genealogical data in academic research. 

A flyer with portraits of two male scholars giving FamilySearch talks at the 2023 International Book Fair of Buenos Aires and text, in Spanish, for date, time, location and topic: "New technologies for better knowing our history."
A flyer in Spanish promotes talks at the Buenos Aires Book Fair by economists Joe Price of Brigham Young University and Santiago Pérez of UC Davis. They both spoke about their use of technology and genealogical data to study economic history. (Courtesy of Santiago Pérez)

In the presentation he gave on April 28 and 29, Pérez used a personal example: his great-great-grandfather Mateo Vaccaro, who immigrated from Italy to Argentina in 1889. Pérez shared images of passenger lists, census records, baptism records, family trees and other documents found on FamilySearch’s free site for Vaccaro and three generations of his family.

Pérez then asked his audience to imagine repeating that research process for thousands of families in Argentina.

That’s exactly what he did for two scholarly articles that look at the long-term trajectories of immigrants in Argentina and the United States during the Age of Mass Migration in 1850–1913. During that period, 55 million Europeans moved to the New World, with 6.2 million of them landing in Argentina, the second largest destination after the U.S.

The articles appear in The Journal of Economic History and The Economic Journal.

For the papers, Pérez used automated methods to link families with digitized historical records to study if they moved up the social ladder.

“The cool feature of the data is that you can follow the same immigrant over time and across different sources and learn how much progress they are making in terms of occupational attainment, what happened to their children, etc.,” he said.

While visiting his native country, Pérez made some new family memories of his own. Among the audience for his talk were his parents, Enrique Pérez and Maria Fabiana Vaccaro.

— Kathleen Holder, content strategist for the College of Letters and Science

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Society and Culture

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Economics economic history Immigration genealogy family history Italy Europe Age of Migration Santiago Pérez Buenos Aires Book Fair UC Davis College of Letters and Science