How Did You Get to Be Mexican?

During an interview for a faculty position, a senior professor asked Kevin Johnson bluntly: "How did you get to be a Mexican?" On the other hand, a young woman at a Harvard Law School dinner party inquired: "Are you one of those people whose high school friends are all dead from gangs and stuff?" The son of a Mexican-American mother and an Anglo father, Johnson has spent his life in the borderlands between racial identities. In this book, he uses his experiences as a mixed Latino/Anglo to examine issues of diversity, assimilation, Latino immigration, race relations, and affirmative action in the contemporary United States.

Kevin R. Johnson is Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and Professor of Law at the University of California, Davis.