Forty or so students looked up expectantly from their seats in a spartan classroom in Martin Luther King Hall. A hush came over the room as I entered and walked briskly to the lectern. It was my second year teaching at the U.C. Davis law school, but this was a new class and I was nervous. Five years in the litigation trenches had not fully prepared me for the butterflies that accompany looking out at all those young faces. “I am Kevin Johnson and this is Business Litigation,” I blurted. As I took the class step by step through the...

I was groggy and disoriented after taking the red-eye from Los Angeles to New York and another flight from there to Boston. It was a muggy afternoon in August 1980 as I lugged an overstuffed backpack and two bags into my dorm room in Oliver Wendell Holmes Hall, the low-budget dorms aptly described as “Skinner boxes.”¹ Where were the beautiful, ivy-draped dorms of classic New England architecture featured prominently in the movieThe Paper Chase? A structure of cement slabs, Holmes Hall looked out on one side at an aluminum structure some might call art, known as the “World Tree.”...

In the spring of 1996, Refugio Rochin, director of the Julian Samora Research Institute at Michigan State University, invited me to lecture on immigration and civil rights issues. While in Lansing, I met with a group of community activists. At an informal dinner in a community center in the Mexican part of town, I sat next to a member of the Lansing City Council, a warm, congenial Mexican American with whom I immediately felt comfortable. We talked politics and family, and I told him, among other things, that my mother was Mexican American. After we had talked for a while,...

On May 24, 1991, my wife Virginia gave birth to our first child, Teresa Salazar Johnson. Happy as we had ever been, we looked at baby Teresa with awe and delight. Like all new parents everywhere we said, “What a beautiful baby,” and she will always be our beautiful baby. But we were as shocked as we could be when we first saw her. She was very, very white! Blond hair, blue eyes, pink skin. Beautiful in every way—but not at all what we expected. Parents-to-be visualize their soon-to-be-born children. Will it be a boy or a girl? Who...

When I was living with my Mom, my Dad would drive twice a month to Azusa from Torrance to pick his two sons up for the weekend. During this hour-long drive, we went from a racially mixed area of whites and Mexican Americans to affluent white suburbs near the beach. I peered curiously out the window of the car and watched the change in scenery. The dusty heat of the San Gabriel Valley contrasted sharply with the windblown coolness of the beach communities. I lived in two very different worlds, not sure where I belonged.

My younger brother Michael was...

An affable law student named Sergio O’Cadiz, a miler as an undergraduate at UCLA, asked me if I wanted to go for a run with a couple of other students. Runners talk and as we ran, we chatted, and the subject soon turned to our backgrounds. One student had his father’s Spanish surname, though his mother was of German ancestry. I had always thought of him as Mexican American. The other student, with an Anglo surname, mentioned that his mother was Mexican American. I had always classified him as white. Three mixed Latinos, similar but different, reflect some of the...

In the summer of 1995, I returned to Los Angeles to attend the funeral of the best man at my wedding. Killed by AIDS at the tender age of 37, Ed left behind a wife and two young children. Another high school friend picked me up at an airport and at my suggestion we stopped at La Villa, a Mexican restaurant along Pacific Coast Highway in Redondo Beach, where I treated him to lunch. Funeral services were held at a church down the street from West High School, where we had graduated in 1976. It was mid-afternoon, and children were...

My lack of enthusiasm about working at a big law firm and my interest in social justice, particularly in immigration issues, had led me to contemplate a teaching career, and I began actively looking for a job in the fall of 1988. The prospect of writing on subjects of my choice was appealing. I also worried about the demands of practicing law and about the toll they would take on my family life. The example of attorneys who had been at the firm for long was not encouraging. Many were divorced. Of those who weren’t, most spent little time with...

On a balmy day in May of 1992, an all-white jury in Simi Valley had just acquitted the white officers of the Los Angeles Police Department in the savage beating of African American Rodney King, a beating that had been captured on videotape and broadcast repeatedly on television for the nation to see. Outrage and violence followed the verdict, and by evening, South Central Los Angeles was in flames. Watching the live television coverage, I worried that my wife and I had brought our one-year-old daughter Teresa into a violent, racially divided world. I wondered how I would explain the...

The conventional wisdom in the United States has long been that immigrants should assimilate into the American mainstream.¹ The “melting pot” metaphor says that it is both possible and desirable for immigrants to blend into the dominant Anglo culture, and that immigrants have a positive obligation to assimilate—to learn English, shed their “foreign” culture, and become “American.”²

At the same time, many whites refuse to accept minorities, whether they try to assimilate or not, because of physical and other differences. In response, minority scholars in recent years have forcefully challenged the assimilationist ideal for racial minorities on philosophical,³ historical,...

The lessons to be learned from the history of race relations in this country obviously are not limited to Latinos alone. Issues of race in the modern United States have become increasingly complex. If there ever was a black-and-white world demarcated by slavery and freedom, we no longer live there. Asians, Latinos, Native Americans and other racially subordinated peoples all press for redress of civil rights violations, sometimes even vying with each other for relief. Society often pits their demands against each other, sometimes with violent results, as when complex African American, Korean, and Latino tensions—which the media analyzed...