Los Angles (Ethnicity)

Ethnicity

[edit]African-Americans

Despite the fact that Los Angeles is one of the few U.S. major cities founded by settlers who were predominantly of African descent, the city had only 2,100 Black Americans in 1900, according to census figures. By 1920 this grew to approximately 15,000. In 1910, the city had the highest percentage of black home ownership in the nation, with more than 36 percent of the city's African-American residents owning their own homes. Black leader W. E. B. Du Bois described L.A. in 1913 as a "wonderful place" since they were less subjected to racial discrimination due to their population being small and the ongoing tensions between Anglos and Mexicans. That changed in the 1920s when restrictive covenants that enforced segregation became widespread. Blacks were mostly confined along the South Central corridor, Watts, and small enclaves in Venice and Pacoima, which received far fewer services than other areas of the city.^[69][72]

After World War II, the city's black population grew from 63,774 in 1940 to 170,000 a decade later as many continued to flee from the South for better opportunities. By 1960, Los Angeles had the fifth largest black population in the United States, larger than any city in the South. Still, they remained in segregated enclaves. The Supreme Court banned the legal enforcement of race-oriented restrictive covenants in the Shelley v. Kraemer case (1948), yet black homeownership declined severely ^[72] during this period.

Decades of police mistreatment and other racial injustices eventually lead to the Watts riots of 1965, after a minor traffic incident resulted in four days of rioting. Thirty-four people were killed and 1,034 injured at a cost of $40 million in property damage and looting. So many businesses burned on 103rd Street that it became known as "Charcoal Alley."

The City strove to improve social services for the black community, but with many of the high-paying industrial jobs gone black unemployment remained high. The growth of street gangs and drugs in minority communities exacerbated the problems.^[69][73]

By 1990, the LAPD, which had followed a para-militaristic model since Chief Parker's regime in the 1950s, became more alienated from minority communities following accusations of racial profiling.^[70] In 1992, a jury in suburban Simi Valley acquitted white Los Angeles police officers involved in the beating of a black motorist, Rodney King, the year before. After four days of rioting, more than fifty deaths, and billions of dollars of property losses, mostly in the Central City, the National Guard and the police finally regained control.

Since the 1980s, more middle-class black families have left the central core of Los Angeles to settle in other California municipalities or out of state.^[69] In 1970, blacks made up 18 percent of the city's population. That percentage has dropped to 10 percent in 2010 as many continue to leave to settle elsewhere. Los Angeles still has the largest black population of any city in the Western United States.

[edit]Latinos

The anti-union, open-shop heritage of the Chandlers and the Los Angeles Times continued to assure Los Angeles of a steady supply of cheap labor from Mexico and Central America throughout the 20th century. This was met by the increasing opposition of anti-immigration forces throughout the country.

A steady migration of Mexicans to California from 1910 to 1930 expanded the Mexican and Latino population in Los Angeles to 97,116 or 7.8%. In 1930, a large repatriation of 400–500,000 Mexican immigrants and their children began after the onset of the Depression, massive unempoyment, encouragement by the government of Mexico, the threat of deportation and welfare agencies willing to pay for the tickets of those leaving (some 2 million European immigrants left as well).^[74]

At the same time, the city celebrated its 150th anniversary in 1931 with a grand "fiesta de Los Angeles" featuring a blond "reina" in historic ranchera costume. By 1940 the Latino population dropped to 7.1%, but remained at sightly over 100,000.^[69]

During World War II, hostility toward Mexican-Americans took a different form, as local newspapers portrayed Chicano youths, who sometimes called themselves "pachucos", as barely civilized gangsters. Anglo servicemen attacked young Chicanos dressed in the pachuco uniform of the day: long coats with wide shoulders and pleated, high-waisted, pegged pants, or zoot suits.

In 1943, twenty-two young Chicanos were convicted of a murder of another youth at a party held at a swimming hole southeast of Los Angeles known as the "sleepy lagoon" on a warm night in August 1942; they were eventually freed after an appeal that demonstrated both their innocence and the racism of the judge conducting the trial. Today, the event is known as the Zoot Suit Riots.

In the 1990s, redistricting led to the election of Latino members of the City Council and the first Latino members of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors since its inception. In 1994, California Voters passed Proposition 187, which denied undocumented immigrants and their families in California welfare, health benefits, and education.

With the growth of the Latino community, primarily immigration from Mexico, but also from Central America and South America, it is now the largest ethnic bloc in Los Angeles. By 1998, Latinos outnumbered Anglos in the city by over a million and account for 50 percent of the County's population.

City Council member Antonio Villaraigosa was elected mayor in 2005, the first Latino elected to that office since the 1872.^[75]

In 2006 anti-immigration forces supported the federal Border Protection, Anti-terrorism and Illegal Immigration Control Act of 2005 (H.R. 4437). The act would make "unlawful presence" an "aggravated felony." On 25 March, a million Latinos staged La Gran Marcha on City Hall to protest the bill. It was the largest demonstration in California history. Similar protests in other cities across the country made this a turning point in the debate on immigration reform.^[8]

[edit]Asians

Less than a century after the founding of Los Angeles, Chinatown was a thriving community near the downtown railroad depot. Thousands of Chinese came to northern California in the 1850s, initially to join the Gold Rush and then taking construction jobs with the railroads. They began moving south as the transcontinental railroad linked Los Angeles with the rest of the nation. The town's continuous Chinese presence dates from 1850, when two house servants, Ah Luce and Ah Fon, appeared in the census. The Chinese population increased to 16 in 1860 and 178 in 1870. Eighty percent of the Chinese residents then were male, and most worked as launderers, cooks and fruit and vegetable growers and sellers.^[76]

Later, Chinese workers who helped to build the aqueduct to the Owens River and worked in the fields of the San Joaquin Valley spent their winters in a segregated ethnic enclave in Los Angeles. In 1871, eleven years before the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, a violent anti-Chinese demonstration swept through Los Angeles' Chinatown, killing Chinese residents and plundering their dry good stores, laundries and restaurants.^{[citation needed]}

The labor vacuum created by the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was filled by Japanese workers and, by 1910, the settlement now known as "Little Tokyo" had risen next to Chinatown.^{[citation needed]}

During the years between the two world wars, Los Angeles' Asian American community also included small clusters of Korean Americans and Filipinos, the latter filling the void which followed the exclusion of the Japanese in 1924.^{[citation needed]}

Following the attack on Pearl Harbor, the United States government authorized the evacuation and incarceration in concentration camps of all Japanese living in California irrespective of citizenship.^{[citation needed]}

Since World War II, immigration from Asia and the Pacific has increased dramatically. The influx of immigrants from the Philippines, Korea, Taiwan, the Pacific Islands and Southeast Asia has led to the development of identifiable enclaves such as Koreatown in the central city and Samoans in Wilmington and a Thai neighborhood in Hollywood.