Douglas Massey, recent recipient of the Princess of Asturias award for Social Sciences, is the sociologist of migration, a world reference in the ethnographic look at the processes that lead people to leave their home to try to reach another where they can live better. The methodology developed with his Mexican colleague Jorge Durand in the Mexican Migration Project - the ethnographic survey that connects migratory family networks to try to understand the real functioning of these processes - has been replicated in many other origins. In our case, as professors of the Geography area of the University of Navarra, to the study of Moroccans in the Comunidad Foral.

But Professor Massey's desire is not only to understand the migratory processes but also to understand the personal stories of the migrants, their sorrows and joys, using as a source study the Mexican votive paintings that are collected in one of Massey's most original books (co-authored with Durand) graduate "Miracles on the Border: Retablos de Migrantes Mexicanos a Estados Unidos" (Miracles on the Border: Altarpieces of Mexican Migrants to the United States).

We were fortunate to meet him, hand in hand with our colleague and friend Magaly Sanchez-R, also a researcher at the Office of Population Reseach (OPR) at Princeton University. Douglas Massey not only gave the three of us the opportunity to do a research stay at the prestigious center, but also participated in the Workshop "Mestizaje, Identity and Social Cohesion. The governance of population movements" that we organized in May 2011 at the University of Navarra, with the Institute for Culture and Society.

The times shared on both sides of the ocean allow us to show a portrait of Professor Massey a little more staff, which complements the information that has flooded the media and that sample his impressive professional career as a researcher of migration and residential segregation. Massey is a true teacher, approachable, affable, and with a special sensitivity to perceive the needs of others. He is a cultivator of academic friendship, so necessary in today's university, and that includes not only his Degree and doctorate students, but also his colleagues and even the guest professors that we would show up at the OPR when he directed it. His ability to listen, to speak with restraint despite his profound wisdom or his openness to try to understand the postulates of others are qualities that bring a closeness rare in the attention with people of his intellectual stature.