Ethnic groups in Los Angeles

The city has witnessed a development of a Hispanic (mainly Mexican) cultural presence since its settlement as a city in 1781. Mexican-Americans have been one of the largest ethnic groups in Los Angeles since the 1910 census, as Mexican immigrants and US-born Mexicans from the Southwest states came to the booming industrial economy of the LA area between 1915 and 1960, the Mexican-American or Chicano population was estimated at 815,000 by 1970. This migration peaked in the 1920s and again in the World War II era (1941–45).

The city's original barrios were located in the eastern half of the city and the unincorporated community of East Los Angeles. The trend of Hispanization began in 1970, then accelerated in the 1980s and 1990s with immigration from Mexico and Central America (especially El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala). These immigrants settled in the city's eastern and southern neighborhoods. Salvadoran Americans are the second largest Hispanic population in Los Angeles, a city which holds the largest Salvadoran population outside of El Salvador and the Salvadoran diaspora living abroad and overseas. These were refugees that arrived in the 1980s and 1990s during the Salvadoran Civil War which was part of the Central American Crisis. By 2000, South Los Angeles was a majority Latino area, displacing most previous African-American and Asian-American residents. The city is often said to have the largest Mexican population outside Mexico and has the largest Spanish-speaking population outside Latin America or Spain. As of 2007, estimates of the number of residents originally from the Mexican state of Oaxaca ranged from 50,000 to 250,000.[4] Central American, Cuban, Puerto Rican, and South American nationalities are also represented.

There's a shift of second and third generation Mexican-Americans out of Los Angeles into nearby suburbs, such as Ventura County, Orange County, San Diego and the Inland Empire, California region. Mexican and other Hispanic immigrants moved in East and South sections of L.A. and sometimes, Asian immigrants moved into historic barrios to become mostly Asian-American areas. Starting in the late 1980s, Downey has become a renowned Latino majority community in Southern California, and the majority of residents moved in were middle or upper-middle class, and second and third generation Mexican-Americans. [5]

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.[6]

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 unemployment, 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).[7]

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 slightly over 100,000.[8]

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.[9]

In the 1960s and 1970s, Chicanos and/or Mexican-Americans in Los Angeles organized protests and demonstrations calling for their civil rights and promoted self-empowerment in the Chicano Movement. 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.[10]

City council member Antonio Villaraigosa was elected mayor in 2005, the first Latino elected to that office since the 1872.[11]

In 2006 anti-immigration forces supported the federal Border Protection, Anti-terrorism and Illegal Immigration Control Act of 2005 (H.R. 4437). The act made "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.[12]

Hispanics are concentrated in San Gabriel Valley suburbs like El Monte, Baldwin Park, Irwindale, and West Covina.

Los Angeles was founded by settlers who were predominantly of African descent, and the city had 2,100 Black Americans in 1900. 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% of the city's African-American residents owning their own homes. Black leader W.E.B. Du Bois described Los Angeles in 1913 as a "wonderful place" because it was less subjected to racial discrimination due to its population being small and the ongoing tensions between Anglos and Mexicans. This 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.[8][13]

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 home ownership declined severely[13] 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.[8][14]

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.[8] 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 50 deaths, and billions of dollars of property losses, mostly in the Central City, the California Army National Guard, federal troops, and the local and state 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.[8] In 1970, blacks made up 18% of the city's population. That percentage has dropped to 10% 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. Blacks from Los Angeles have moved to the north suburbs of Palmdale and Lancaster.

Caribbean and African black immigrants are more recent. 7,000 Nigerians, 5,000 Ethiopians, 1,000 Ghanaians, 9,900 Jamaicans, 1,900 Haitians and 1,700 Trinidadians live in Los Angeles.[15][16]

Native Americans and Alaskan Natives (including Latin American Indian groups) are a low-percentage, yet notable, part of the population. Los Angeles is thought to have the largest Urban Indian community in the United States (est. above 100,000-about 2% or higher upwards to 5% of the city population) who belong to over 100 tribal nations. There are between 2,000 and 25,000 members of the Cherokee Nation based in Tahlequah, Oklahoma in the city and county respectively. There is the local Chumash tribe whose homeland encompasses the Los Angeles Basin and Central Coast of California. Native Americans in Los Angeles, like throughout the country, are referred to an "invisible minority" in the press.[37]

50,000 Romani people live in Los Angeles.[38]

The history of Rivertown, aka "Frogtown", a late 19th century enclave of French immigrants in downtown Los Angeles.[39]

Ethnic enclaves like Chinatown, Historic Filipinotown, Koreatown, Little Armenia, Little Ethiopia, Little Bangladesh in Central Los Angeles, the Byzantine-Latino Quarter near Downtown, Little Moscow in Hollywood, Little Tokyo, Croatian Place and Via Italia in San Pedro, several Little Saigons, Tehrangeles in West Los Angeles and Thai Town provide examples of the polyglot multicultural character of Los Angeles. Below is a list of many ethnic enclaves present in the Los Angeles metropolitan area.

Historically, there was limited immigration to Los Angeles from Europe through the ports of San Pedro, Long Beach, and Venice. In the first half of the 20th century there were Irish, Italian, Greek, Croatian, Serbian, Polish, German, Portuguese, and Armenian neighborhoods in Bunker Hill (in what is now the Civic Center of Los Angeles) and in Boyle/Lincoln Heights.

Los Angeles has a history of Jewish residents, and they used to have neighborhoods on the East side of Los Angeles in the early 20th century. Nowadays, Jews in Los Angeles tend to live in the West side and the San Fernando Valley.[40]

In the 1870s Mormons from Utah were recruited to settle in the Los Angeles basin and contributed to the development of its local economy. In the 1930s thousands of Okies and other displaced rural whites from the dust bowl-struck Great Plains and Southern United States settled down in the Arroyo Seco and Elysian Park neighborhoods.

Since World War II (1945 onward) most whites in these neighborhoods have relocated to other parts of the city (i.e. the San Fernando Valley and Westwood, Los Angeles), nearby suburbs including Orange County and Simi Valley in Ventura County, and other parts of Southern California.

• Demographics of Los Angeles

• Bozorgmehr, Mehdi, Claudia Der-Martirosian, and Georges Sabagh. "Middle Easterners: A New Kind of Immigrant" (Chapter 12). In: Waldinger, Roger and Mehdi Bozorgmehr (editors). Ethnic Los Angeles. Russell Sage Foundation, December 5, 1996. Start page 345. ISBN 1610445473, 9781610445474.

• Theroux, Peter. Translating LA: A Tour of the Rainbow City. W W Norton & Company Incorporated, November 1, 1995. ISBN 0393313948, 9780393313949.