Dr. Kevin Starr is a professor of History and Policy, Planning and Development at the University of Southern California. He recently retired as the California State Librarian. He is the author of the ongoing six-volume history of California, Americans and the California Dream. His most recently published volumes are entitled: The Dream Endures: California Enters the 1940s; and Coast of Dreams: California on the Edge, 1990-2003. He is a contributing editor at the Los Angeles Times.

Gregory Rodriguez has written widely on issues of race, immigration, ethnicity, politics and America's changing demographics in such leading publications as the New York Times, the WallStreet Journal, The Economist, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times, where he is a contributing editor. Rodriguez is currently at work on a major book on how contemporary Mexican immigration will change the way Americans view race. It is scheduled to be published simultaneously in English by Pantheon and in Spanish by Editorial Planeta Mexico in 2005.