Latinos Move to South-Central L.A. : Drawn by Low Rents, They Replace Blacks

[Ol’Otis]

From 1990….No black people didn’t get chased out, they just left

Latinos Move to South-Central L.A. : Drawn by Low Rents, They Replace Blacks

Denis Anaya, a Salvadoran notary, said his Latino friends could not understand why he moved his office last year to a black neighborhood on Central Avenue that they associated with "gang-banging" and drive-by shootings.

www.latimes.com

Denis Anaya, a Salvadoran notary, said his Latino friends could not understand why he moved his office last year to a black neighborhood on Central Avenue that they associated with “gang-banging” and drive-by shootings.

“My friends told me, ‘You’re crazy. How can you live there? They’ll kill you,’ ” recalled Anaya, 31. Even now, he said, “a lot of my friends won’t visit me here.”

 

[Ol’Otis]

Ironically, Anaya said he moved to South-Central Los Angeles to escape the violent drug trade that operated just outside his office in the Central American neighborhood near MacArthur Park. His new neighborhood, he said, is more peaceful.

In recent years, Anaya and other Latino merchants and residents have transformed much of South Los Angeles from a segregated black community to a Latino barrio. The changes can be both seen and heard near Anaya’s office at the intersection of Central Avenue and Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, two streets long synonymous with African-American Los Angeles.

Here, dance halls, theaters and shops catered in the 1940s and 1950s to a growing population of black migrants from the rural South and overcrowded cities of the North. At the nearby Dunbar Hotel, jazz greats Billie Holiday and Duke Ellington held court, occasionally filling the Art Deco lobby with the sounds of an impromptu jam session.

 

[Ol’Otis]

Today, however, the glory days of Central Avenue are only a memory, and the community moves to a distinctly Latin beat. Instead of jazz, passers-by hear the slow-tempo melodies of Mexican ranchera music drifting from the El Paraiso grocery. And in a sea of Latino-run appliance and furniture stores, only a handful of black-owned businesses survive.

One of those businesses is the two-chair barbershop of Andrew Brembry, 75, a Central Avenue entrepreneur since 1952. With each passing year, Brembry is doing business in an increasingly Spanish-speaking environment.

Indeed, so many Latinos have settled in the area that in 1988 it set a nationwide record for the greatest number of successfully completed applications for the immigration amnesty program.

 

[Ol’Otis]

Perhaps nowhere in Southern California did Latino immigration in the 1980s have a greater impact than in black enclaves of South-Central Los Angeles, its neighboring communities of Athens and Willowbrook and the cities of Compton and Lynwood.

The 45-square-mile area has long been the heart and soul of the largest black community in the western United States. Scarcely two generations ago large portions of the city were racially segregated either through property deeds or social barriers that kept blacks out of other neighborhoods. South Los Angeles was then one of few places in the city where blacks could buy homes and operate businesses.

Now, rising property values and gang violence are leading many black families to abandon the neighborhoods where they were born and raised. In the process, South Los Angeles has become one of California’s fastest-growing Latino communities.

 

[Ol’Otis]

According to a recent study by a USC researcher, the black population in South-Central Los Angeles declined an estimated 30% in the past decade.

By contrast, the Latino population in that area has increased an estimated 200% since 1980 and demographers predict the 1990 census will show that Latinos have become the community’s majority ethnic group.

The Latino population is expected to grow another 214% by the year 2005, according to Focus 2000, a black political research organization. The black population, meanwhile, is expected to decline 23%

 

[Savvir]

Central and mlk been latino for years

The real divide is the 110 between Hispanic and black south central. Who wrote this article?

 

[Ol’Otis]

On South Main Street and other major thoroughfares, storefront Latino evangelical churches have formed next to black Baptist churches. Soccer rivals basketball and football as the sport of choice at South Park and other neighborhood playing fields.

Four South Los Angeles high schools that had overwhelmingly black student populations in 1980--Fremont, Jefferson, Jordan and Manual Arts--now have Latino majorities. The change is most dramatic at Fremont, where Latinos constitute 70.4% of the student body as compared to only 3.9% in 1980.

James H. Johnson, a UCLA geographer who has studied black flight from South Los Angeles, said he believes the area has passed a historic turning point in its transition from a black enclave to a predominantly Latino community.

“I think parts of South-Central are already a (Latino) barrio,” Johnson said. “As the remaining older blacks die off, I don’t see younger blacks buying their houses and grabbing hold of these communities.”

 

[Ol’Otis]

Central and mlk been latino for years

The real divide is the 110 between Hispanic and black south central. Who wrote this article?

It was written in 1990

 

[Sir Richard Spirit]

Indeed, so many Latinos have settled in the area that in 1988 it set a nationwide record for the greatest number of successfully completed applications for the immigration amnesty program.


Behind this transformation has been the arrival of perhaps 1 million Latino immigrants--the exact figure is uncertain--as the result of political conflict and economic instability in El Salvador, Guatemala and Mexico during the last decade.

Not chased..PUSHED

 

[ItsPeople]

Not chased..PUSHED

 

[Ol’Otis]

Not chased..PUSHED

They were already leaving

 

[Ol’Otis]

LA brehs can y’all provide some insight
Again it’s an article from 1990
@Serious @Arithmetic @King Poetic @BrothaZay @getmoney310cpt

 

[The Fade]

in,

 

[Ol’Otis]

I’m not moving to the IE
Los Angeles might be on the come up

 

[Formerly Black Trash]

The middle class of other races aren't scared to venture into dangerous neighborhoods and eventually price ppl out

I wouldn't be either if I saw cheap property in a city I wanted to go to