George J. Sanchez is a professor of American studies and ethnicity as well as history at the University of Southern California, where he also serves as Vice Dean for Diversity and Strategic Initiatives in the Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. He is the author of Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900-1945 (Oxford University Press 1993), co-editor of Los Angeles and the Future of Urban Cultures (Johns Hopkins University Press 2005), and Civic Engagement in the Wake of Katrina (University of Michigan Press 2009). Sanchez is currently working on a historical study of the ethnic interaction of Mexican Americans, Japanese Americans, African Americans, and Jews in the Boyle Heights area of East Los Angeles, California, in the twentieth century. He received his BA in history and sociology from Harvard University in 1981 and his PhD in history in 1989 from Stanford University.