By Teresa Watanabe – LATimes.com – Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times.
UC Irvine may seem an unlikely haven for Latino students. The campus is located in what used to be a largely white Republican community, home now to so many Asians that people joke that UCI stands for University of Chinese Immigrants. But the Irvine campus is now the most popular UC choice for Latino freshmen applicants, topping longtime leader UCLA for the first time last fall. And last month the campus won federal recognition for serving Latinos — a still-rare distinction among elite research universities.
