Nicole Perez is originally from the San Francisco Bay Area and currently a doctoral degree candidate at the University of Notre Dame in the department of Sociology where she is affiliated with the Center for Research on Educational Opportunity. Nicole’s research interests include education, race and ethnicity, and immigration. Her dissertation investigates how 1.5/ 2 nd generation Latino adolescents are navigating the transition to postsecondary education and entry to the labor market within a new immigrant receiving context. The dramatic population growth and redistribution of the U.S. Latino population has disrupted the racial and ethnic landscape in new destination communities, and as a result, involves a number of individual and community level implications that warrants further study. Using qualitative methods, she unearths the tension between structural constraints, opportunity structures and agency encountered by Latino young adults as the first cohort of Latinos “coming of age” without a historic co-ethnic enclave.
