George J. Sánchez is Professor of American Studies & Ethnicity and History at the University of Southern California (USC) and an award-winning scholar of Mexican American history and immigration. He is the author of Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles (Oxford, 1993) and the newly published Boyle Heights: How A Los Angeles Neighborhood Became the Future of American Democracy (California, 2021). He was born in Boyle Heights to two immigrant parents from Mexico and is a first-generation college student, receiving his B.A. from Harvard College in 1981 and his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1989.