Gregory Rodriguez, founding director of the Center for Social Cohesion, is a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, and executive director of Zócalo Public Square. He has written widely on issues of social cohesion, civic engagement, national identity, assimilation, race relations, religion, immigration, ethnicity, demographics and social and political trends in leading publications such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, Time, Newsweek, and the Los Angeles Times, where he is an op-ed columnist. The author of Mongrels, Bastards, Orphans and Vagabonds: Mexican Immigration and the Future of Race in America (Pantheon), which The Washington Post listed among the “Best Books of 2007,” Rodriguez is at work on a book on the American cult of hope.