During an interview for a faculty position, a senior professor asked Kevin Johnson bluntly: "How did you get to be a Mexican?" On the other hand, a young woman at a Harvard Law School dinner party inquired: "Are you one of those people whose high school friends are all dead from gangs and stuff?" The son of a Mexican-American mother and an Anglo father, Johnson has spent his life in the borderlands between racial identities.

In this book, he uses his experiences as a mixed Latino/Anglo to examine issues of diversity, assimilation, Latino immigration, race relations, and affirmative action in the contemporary United States.