Op-Ed: What Asian immigrants, seeking the American dream, found in Southern California suburbs
With the help of a local developer and his firm, Davenport Associates, and a local school district, this family moved into a four-bedroom house in a suburban enclave of Irvine nearly two years ago.
Ricardo M. Cesar was born in the Philippines in 1970 and immigrated with his parents and two sisters to the United States when he was 5 years old. From elementary school on, he attended Orange County schools – first McKinley, where his father taught economics and taught American English at night, and then Santa Ana College in Costa Mesa – where he majored in economics.
While he was in Orange County, he began to feel pulled toward the West, and he moved back East after college to study at New York University and then at the University of California at Berkeley.
“My mom was very much of an immigrant,” Ricardo said. “She had to move from the Philippines to find what she wanted, and she really had to try to do this.”
He never had much of the Philippines in his life, so he didn’t have a strong relationship with his ancestral roots. During his stay at UC Berkeley, he met his future wife, a California native. They got engaged during his freshman year at UC Berkeley, where he studied economics and business administration.
“We met at a party that he was having at the [UC Berkeley] student union, just by chance,” Ricardo said, laughing.
But it wasn’t much of a party. He hadn’t really known her that long either; they just met at the party but then went their separate ways.
“I felt like it was the first time I was happy without really feeling like it was my happiness,” Ricardo said. “She was very much in love with [her] life in New York, and I felt like I had to be very happy too for a