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An excerpt from Brown and Gay in L.A.: The Lives of Immigrant Sons ANTHONY CHRISTIAN OC AMPO
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n the fall of 2004, when I started grad school in sociology at UCLA, I set out to become an expert on immigration and race. In my statement of purpose, the essay in which applicants propose their future research ambitions, I wrote that I wanted to study how race shapes the lives of children of immigrants, a group that sociologists call the “immigrant second generation.” I read hundreds of research studies about their everyday experiences with their families, and in their neighborhoods, schools, and workplaces. As the son of Filipino immigrants who arrived in this country in 1980, I was especially interested in the “new” immigrant second generation — the children of Latin American, Asian, African, and
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