Immigrants

More than 1 million immigrants became U.S. citizens last year, the largest surge in history, hastening the ethnic transformation of California's political landscape with more Latinos and Asians now eligible to vote. Leading the wave, California's 300,000 new citizens accounted for nearly one-third of the nation's total and represented a near-doubling over 2006, according to a recent report by the U.S. Office of Immigration Statistics.

The documents Chan Share clutched as he left China were forged. It was 1939 and Asians were not allowed to immigrate to the United States. So, like many others, Share claimed he was a "paper son" and had a California-born relative whose records were lost in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.

Raheem's cellphone rang as we walked through a crowded market, stepping over piles of trash and weaving around slow-moving donkey carts. He spoke to the caller in his usual low murmur, then hung up. It was a U.S. immigration official, he told me. His application for refugee status in America had been approved. The flight was nine days away. "What do you think?" he asked, as calmly as if inviting my opinion on a new shirt.

Julia Moreno has been following the presidential campaign and studying the issues. She has even chosen her favorite candidate: "La Senora Clinton." Moreno, a legal immigrant from Guatemala who came to Los Angeles more than 30 years ago, applied for citizenship this summer so she would be able to vote -- starting with the 2008 presidential election. But U.S.

Civil rights groups filed a petition in federal court Thursday seeking a restraining order against immigration officials who allegedly blocked workers detained in a raid at a Van Nuys manufacturing plant from consulting with their attorneys.

The son of poor laborers in rural Mexico, Ocario Gonzalez doesn't remember his parents ever helping with his schoolwork. After struggling with his studies for a few years, Gonzalez left school at 12. Now the 42-year-old South Los Angeles factory worker is trying to break that cycle with his daughter, Carolina. When she entered Lillian Elementary School last year, 6-year-old Carolina was ill prepared, Gonzalez said.

This wisp of a town owes its existence to Chinese laborers who panned gold in the mid-1800s and laid railroad tracks linking Utah and Sacramento. Yet the immigrants were mostly ostracized, made to live in a wood-shack Chinatown that later was bulldozed to make way for Interstate 80. Now, their legacy is relegated to Larry De Leeuw's garage. On a recent afternoon, De Leeuw squeezed into a cubbyhole walled off from his power tools and bottle cap collection.

One punch was all it took. One punch to forever divide. One punch to kill a young man. On a hot summer afternoon along a placid lakefront in the Sacramento suburbs, Satender Singh had come with a group of fellow Fijians to celebrate his promotion at an AT&T call center. Three married couples and Singh, a lighthearted 26-year-old, drank and hooted and danced a crazy conga line to East Indian music. An innocent outing? Not in the eyes of the Russian family a few picnic tables away.

When Pomona Mayor Norma Torres returned to Guatemala in October, it was the first time she had been back to her native country since she was a child. But Torres got a hero's welcome. As she toured the country she barely remembered, people everywhere recognized her on the streets. "She's the mayor of Pomona," they said. Some brought magazines with her picture on the cover and asked for an autograph. They called her "the pride of Escuintla," her hometown, and "the hope of all migrants."

From a breezy country club veranda overlooking the rooftops in the seaside resort village of Avalon, Robert Gonzalez waited anxiously Saturday for his name to be called by Mexican officials renewing his passport. Gonzalez, a 21-year-old construction worker and restaurant waiter who grew up on Santa Catalina Island, estimated he was saving hundreds of dollars by using the service provided by Mexican Consul General Juan Marcos Gutierrez-Gonzalez and 26 staffers who set up shop here for a day.