Anthony Christian Ocampo, Ph.D. is Professor of Sociology at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. He is the author of Brown and Gay in LA: The Lives of Immigrant Sons and The Latinos of Asia: How Filipino Americans Break the Rules of Race, which has been featured on NPR, NBC News, Literary Hub, and in the Los Angeles Times. He is an Academic Director of the National Center for Faculty Development and Diversity and the co-host of the podcast Professor-ing. His writing has appeared in GQ, Catapult, BuzzFeed, Los Angeles Review of Books, Colorlines, Gravy, Life & Thyme, and the Chronicle of Higher Education, among others. He has received fellowships from the Ford Foundation, Jack Jones Literary Arts, Tin House, and the VONA/Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation. He was recently featured in the Netflix documentary “White Hot: The Rise and Fall of Abercrombie & Fitch,” as he was one of the employees involved in suing the company for racial discriminatory hiring practices. Raised in Northeast Los Angeles, he earned his BA in comparative studies in race and ethnicity and MA in modern thought and literature from Stanford University and his MA and PhD in sociology from UCLA.
In his free time, he loves reading memoirs and essay collections, watching figure skating and gymnastics clips on YouTube, playing with his rescue dog Schmidt, binging queer content on Netflix and HBO Max, and being chaotic with his multigenerational Filipino American family.
The Latinos of Asia: How Filipino Americans Break the Rules of Race
Is race only about the color of your skin? In this talk, Dr. Ocampo focuses on Filipino Americans to show that what “color” you are depends largely on your social context. Filipino Americans are officially classified as Asian, but share many cultural characteristics with Latinos. Are they “becoming” Asian or Latino? By elevating the voices of Filipino Americans, Dr. Ocampo will discuss how their racial identities “change” depending on the communities they grow up in, the schools they attend, and the people they befriend. This talk offers a window into both the racial consciousness of everyday people and the changing racial landscape of U.S. society.
Rethinking Race, Gender, and Education: Intersectional Approaches to School-Community Relationships
While there has been an explosion of research on the school experiences of LGBTQ students and the immigrant second generation, respectively, few studies have centered the experiences of second-generation youth who also happen to be queer. In this talk, Dr. Ocampo presents findings from his comparative research on Latino and Asian American queer male youth and demonstrates how an empirical deep dive into their educational lives reveals how schools are racialized, gendered, and heteronormative. He also discusses how research on students with intersectional identities holds important implications for theories of educational inequality, educational practice, and community engagement, especially as it relates to immigrant communities.
To Be Brown and Gay in the USA
Immigration, race, and LGBTQ rights have been headline issues the past few decades, but the experiences of individuals whose identities cut across all three issues have remained invisible to most. In this talk, Dr. Ocampo why this is and addresses the struggles that LGBTQ people of color face in order to be seen, not just by the public, but also by their immigrant families, ethnic communities, and the the mainstream gay community. Drawing on the experiences of Latino and Asian American gay men, Dr. Ocampo chronicles the creative strategies that they employ to embrace their identities and to create community, even while facing both racism and homophobia in their everyday lives.
Gay Minority Masculinities
Studies of masculinity examine the experiences of heterosexual white men and men of color, as well as gay white men. However, significantly fewer studies have thoroughly addressed the topic of masculinity among gay racial minorities. Drawing on ethnographic research of gay Latino social circles in Los Angeles, this talk discusses how Latino gay men negotiate boundaries of masculinity in their social interactions. These men employ specific strategies when “doing” masculinity, which in turn are shaped by their racialization as Latinos within the US context, their gendered socialization within their immigrant family, and feelings of exclusion within mainstream gay spaces. These findings hold implications for better understanding and addressing racial and class schisms within the larger LGBTQ movement.
Other Topics Dr. Ocampo can address include:
Race Beyond the Black-White Binary
The Casualties of Immigration Policies
Asian Americans and the Model Minority Myth
From C.S.U. to Ph.D.: Mentoring First-Generation College Students
