TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/111891/11189911.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 17KB | 353 lines

                                                                                SOCIETY, Page 66

CALIFORNIA

Shades Of Difference


Immigrants are building an ethnic mosaic, but the pieces don't
quite fit together

BY NANCY GIBBS -- Reported by Sylvester Monroe/Los Angeles


    To travel the streets of Los Angeles is to glimpse
America's ethnic future. At the bustling playground at
McDonald's in Koreatown, a dozen shades of kids squirt down the
slides and burrow through tunnels and race down the catwalks,
not much minding that no two of them speak the same language.
Parents of grade-school children say they rarely know the color
of their youngsters' best friends until they meet them; it never
seems to occur to the children to say, since they have not yet
been taught to care.

    By high school, ethnic diversity has become an issue, but
it still competes with the distractions of hormones and grades
and social status and sports. Most schools are teaching
students to celebrate diversity and search for common ground.
Inglewood High School, 90% white 20 years ago and 90% black 10
years ago, is 48% Latino today. "We have the same challenges,
and I've learned to see that if everybody united, we could be
a big force," says Efrain Nava, a 16-year-old Mexican American.
"We are all minorities, but together we are a majority."

    At the University of California, Berkeley, most entering
freshmen say they were attracted to the school because of its
cultural variety: there is no ethnic majority. But very soon,
university officials note, the students tumble into groups that
celebrate division, not diversity. There is a Korean Catholics
group, a Korean Baptists group, black engineers, Hispanic
engineers, Chinese business students. Asian students may be
divided among some 30 groups, including Thais, Cambodians,
Filipinos and three Chinese organizations representing students
from Hong Kong, Taiwan and mainland China.

    There, in a nutshell, is the story of California's ethnic
landscape. As recently as 1980, California was 76% white. During
the past 10 years, the Hispanic community grew nearly 70%, the
Asian community 127%, so that by last year's census, California
was only 57% white. It is clear that early in the next century
there will be no racial majority at all. The children may have
no trouble adjusting, but their parents still have much to
learn. Metaphors of conciliation don't seem to apply: no one
talks of a melting pot anymore, or even of a rainbow coalition.
"I could not imagine anyone running for mayor on a platform of
greater diversity and winning," says Leo Estrada, a professor of
urban planning at UCLA. To be anti-immigrant and antiminority,
he says, is a more promising platform. "If you are for
diversity, you hide it."

    California is, by any measure, America's most colorful
state. The richness of its culture, the liveliness of its
fashions, the nuttiness of its fads and the ruthlessness of its
politics all reflect the mix of races and cultures that blend
and clash throughout the state. This is the land where Asian
dragons dance at Cinco de Mayo parades, where viewers can tune
in the evening news spoken in Tagalog, where suburban developers
study the ancient Chinese concept of feng shui to ensure
harmonious building design and smooth cosmic energy flow. It is
not the Beach Boys or the Eagles or the Grateful Dead who
provide the voice of California today; it is Los Lobos, a
Mexican-American rock band. Amy Tan novels and Boyz N the Hood
are the artifacts of the new United States of California. And
when it comes to the latest groups of immigrants -- as with the
settlers in Steinbeck country -- few of the stereotypes apply:
most of the state's Hispanics and Asians, not notably
self-indulgent, are a long way from hydrotherapy classes or from
sleeping with their therapists. The Filipino punk joint may be
a symbol of the latest form of California strangeness --
polyglot multiculturalism -- but it hardly seems out of place
in a state where tire stores are built in the shape of Mayan
temples and movies are screened in a replica of a palace at
Thebes.

    If California represents the future of America, then Los
Angeles may be the future of California. Already there is no
racial majority in either Los Angeles city or county, "a
situation encountered by few large urban areas anywhere in the
world," says Eugene Mornell, executive director of the Los
Angeles County commission on human relations. "All our
stereotypes are obsolete. Many immigrants are conservative, many
poor people are patriotic, and vice versa. All groups include
those who desire to maintain their original culture, reinterpret
it or leave it behind."

    The most visible fights are occurring on the political
battleground of local and statewide elections. Though the
state's economy has expanded over the years to provide
opportunity to new waves of immigrant workers and entrepreneurs,
the political arena is less spacious. Any gain by one ethnic
group represents a loss to another, so the fight over drawing
new electoral-district lines based on the 1990 census has been
fierce. The only point of agreement is that by 1992 the
political map is likely to look very different than it has in
the past.

    On the basis of numbers alone, the redistribution of
political power is long overdue -- and it may be hastened by a
new law that will force state representatives to leave office
after two or three terms, creating openings for minority
candidates. Despite the phenomenal growth of California's
minority populations in the past 20 years, just two blacks and
one Asian have been elected to statewide office. Of the 120
members of the state legislature, only 10 are black, six Latino
and none Asian. The 45 members of Congress from California
include only four blacks, three Latinos and two Asians.

    Los Angeles was the arena for the first bitter round of
fighting, when Hispanics campaigned for a seat on the county's
powerful five-member board of supervisors. While Los Angeles
County's 3 million Hispanics are fully one-third of the region's
total population and represent the largest concentration of
Latinos in the nation, it was only this year that newly drawn
districts enabled them to win a seat. "We have the numbers, but
the numbers are not reflected in the political and economic
power structures," says Antonia Hernandez, president and general
counsel of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational
Fund, which led the redistricting battle.

    And although 35% of the nation's 7.2 million Asians live
in California, they too remain almost invisible in California
politics. "While we've made progress educationally and
economically, we still have some major challenges," says Stewart
Kwoh, executive director of the Asian Pacific American Legal
Center of Southern California. "Our main problem is that we are
locked out of the political process."

    Given the concrete challenges that California faces in
trying to absorb and appease so many diverse groups --
challenges to the school system, the housing market, the job
market, the infrastructure -- it is ironic that some of the
fiercest battles revolve around largely symbolic issues. Much
of the tension arises from misunderstandings rooted in the clash
of cultures. These days it is impossible even to formulate
stereotypes about Asians or Hispanics, because those categories
conceal much more than they reveal. Koreans and Japanese
continue to deride one another; Peruvians resent being mistaken
for Mexicans. The largest Asian group is not the Japanese or the
Chinese but the Filipinos, who have different traditions.

    Blacks and Hispanics are fighting over jobs at Martin
Luther King hospital in Watts, where nearly 9 out of 10 babies
born are Hispanic. As the hospital comes to serve a more
diverse community, Hispanic leaders have demanded more of the
health-care jobs. But blacks view the facility, built after the
Watts riots in 1965, as a symbol of their hard-fought struggle
for civil rights. Says Eugene Grigsby III, acting director of
UCLA's Center for Afro-American Studies: "The feeling is we've
been left out so long, now these new kids on the block who
haven't paid their dues, who haven't fought in the streets, who
haven't put up with racism and discrimination, all of a sudden,
because they have only 3% of county hospital jobs, they should
have that grievance redressed at our expense."

    In June blacks began a boycott of a Korean-owned store in
South Central Los Angeles after the owner shot a black man he
thought was a robber. Korean storekeepers have become a highly
visible economic presence in what were traditionally black
neighborhoods; blacks charge that the owners treat black
customers like criminal suspects and fail to hire local workers.
In the past six months alone, three blacks -- and two Koreans
-- have been killed in Korean-owned stores. Though police
concluded that the fatal shooting in South Central Los Angeles
was justified, the boycott lasted four months, ending only after
the Korean owner agreed to close the store and give blacks the
opportunity to buy it.

    Other Korean shopkeepers donated more than $20,000 to help
keep the boycotted owner's business going during the protest.
"We don't make trouble first," says Do Hyun Chung, who owns a
liquor store in Compton. "We try to make money first." The
31-year-old merchant came to America nearly seven years ago with
scarcely a penny in his pocket, in the hope of finding what he
refers to, without irony or embarrassment, as "the American
Dream." The previous owner of his store was shot dead by a
robber. For Chung and his wife Sue Hee, it is a constant
struggle to maintain peace with their customers. Every morning
they provide free coffee and breakfast to poor people in the
neighborhood, and they donate sodas and snacks to community
groups organizing picnics for local kids.

    But it is still difficult for the Chungs to understand the
resentment of his patrons, some of whom he sees as too lazy to
go to work for themselves. "In America you get what you work
for," says Sue Hee. "If you don't get it, then you didn't work
for it." The rage that African Americans direct at Korean
merchants, says Wayne Gibson, a black barber in Compton, stems
from a feeling of exploitation and lack of respect. "It seems
everybody's just trying to get over on the residents of Compton
without giving anything back," he says. "That's where the
hostility comes in. So the people out here resent these
immigrants getting a leg up on them."

    One appalling tendency is for the newcomers to adopt
historic American racism. UCLA's Estrada says he is "amazed" at
how quickly immigrants move "from never having seen a black
person to becoming racist against them." Their view, he argues,
is shaped by the media, the movies, the countless subtle and
obvious expressions of hostility to blacks and "black issues"
that immigrants encounter. "It's all part of a process of
arriving," adds Estrada.

    In the coming decades, while California's population grows
ever more diverse, it will also become less black. As
immigrants flood into formerly black neighborhoods, many black
families are deciding that it is time to leave. During the past
decade, the black populations in both Los Angeles and San
Francisco declined. Many African Americans fled to suburban
cities in search of space and safety and jobs. But a great many
African Americans are leaving the state, some to return to the
Deep South that their parents and grandparents fled years ago.

    Some white Californians, meanwhile, welcome the new
arrivals. In their 49 years on Clinton Avenue in Richmond, a
blue-collar refinery center on the eastern side of San Francisco
Bay, Gladys Parks, 76, and her husband Bruce, 81, have seen the
city go from white to black, then to Hispanic and Asian, and
finally to mixed-white again on the gentrifying edge of the
city. Bruce, a Stockton-born "prune picker," as native
Californians are called, recalls having real misgivings when the
"coloreds" first came to town during World War II. Today he and
Gladys call the black family next door the best neighbors
they've ever had. They've become such friends with their Chicano
gardener that they go to Las Vegas with him and his family. And
they admire the brilliant 15-year-old Vietnamese girl who
baby-sits around the corner and plans to attend Harvard or
Stanford. They are persuaded that Californians are, in fact,
more tolerant than most Americans. It's probably because, as
Bruce says, "almost everybody here is new."

    But in a time of such heady change, no single reaction
speaks for the majority. In a sense, the entire state is going
through a process of re-education about just what diversity
means and what the future holds. "People's idea of being
culturally aware is going to a Chinese restaurant," says Marcia
Choo, program director for the Asian Pacific American Dispute
Resolution Center in Los Angeles. Some whites are running away
from neighborhoods that have been rapidly integrated in the past
10 years or so. Typical of their sentiment is the bumper sticker
that used to be common in one formerly all-white community: WILL
THE LAST AMERICAN TO LEAVE MONTEREY PARK PLEASE BRING THE
AMERICAN FLAG? During the past decade, the "Orange Curtain" has
descended south of Santa Ana, as whites migrate to the protected
enclaves of Orange County. "The city won't be abandoned,"
predicts UCLA's Eugene Grigsby. "But if the white corporate
power structure stays as it is, you'd be hard pressed to
distinguish this area from South Africa relative to who
controls, who's employed and who's impoverished."

    California's student population has the advantage of
working through the issues that divide neighborhoods,
institutions and governmental bodies within the protected
framework of the campus. Declares Francisco Hernandez, dean of
student life at Berkeley: "The real story is actually how well
students get along. That's not to say there aren't problems and
issues. But students aren't shooting each other. They aren't
killing each other. They're trying to understand each other in
an academic setting. The picture that's been drawn of Berkeley
is that there is a great deal of racial tension. What there is,
is a great amount of racial awareness on campus. Students are
aware of who they are and what they are, and so are we. Instead
of ignoring it or pretending that students don't have
differences, we acknowledge the differences with the intent of
having students understand them, tolerate them and eventually
enjoy them."

    As an objective for the rest of the state, that is both an
unavoidable choice and a tall order.


________________________________________________________________
SHADES OF DIFFERENCE

    Perceptions of the increasing number of Hispanics and Asians
in California:

                                             HISPANICS    ASIANS
    Possible Positive Effects:

    Increases number of people anxious
    to work hard                                 68%        70%

    Our culture will be enriched
    providing new ideas, customs                 68%        68%

    Provides needed labor for new jobs           65%        63%

    Fosters higher economic growth               48%        61%

    Possible Negative Effects:

    Higher taxes due to more demands
    for public services                          79%        71%

    Increases the amount of unemployment
    in the state                                 77%        71%

    Increases crime                              64%        60%

    Lowers the quality of education in
    the public schools                           57%        43%

    Endangers the place of English as
    our common language                          48%        41%

________________________________________________________________
ONE YEAR'S NEW ARRIVALS

    Where they came from in 1989 -- Total: 836,700

    -- Other states      656,000
    -- Canada              1,000
    -- Ireland               900
    -- Britain             3,000
    -- W. Germany          1,000
    -- Poland                800
    -- Romania             1,000
    -- Soviet Union        5,000
    -- China              10,000
    -- Korea              10,000
    -- Taiwan              5,000
    -- Vietnam            16,000
    -- Philippines        24,000
    -- Laos                5,000
    -- India               5,000
    -- Iran               10,000
    -- Mexico             33,000
    -- Guatemala           2,000
    -- El Salvador         7,000
    -- Peru                1,000
    -- Other countries    40,000

    In addition, an estimated 100,000 illegal immigrants moved
to California in 1989.

    Source: California Department of Finance.