Principal Investigator
Professor of American Studies & Ethnicity and History, University of Southern California
Dr. 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 Boyle Heights: How A Los Angeles Neighborhood Became the Future of American Democracy (California, 2021).
A former president of the American Studies Association, former president of the Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association, and former President of the Organization of American Historians, he received the first ever Equity Award for excellence in recruiting and retaining underrepresented populations in the historical profession from the American Historical Association and the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Immigration and Ethnic History Society.
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.