Jewish Histories in Multiethnic Boyle Heights

1930 Census Visualization

In 1924, the California Commission on Immigration and Housing commissioned a survey of Los Angeles’ various social service agencies to better understand the city’s rapidly growing population. Four of the districts surveyed were in Boyle Heights. Of these, two in the westernmost portion of the neighborhood—District 4, between Mission Road, Wabash Avenue and Brooklyn Avenue, and District 5 between Brooklyn Avenue and 4th Street and St. Louis—were identified as being the most diverse. The survey described the residents in these districts as including “a dozen or more nationalities” and “outstanding” numbers of “Russian Jews.”
 
To create this digital visualization, Caroline Luce identified the enumeration districts in the 1930 Federal Census that correspond to districts 4 and 5 in the survey, compiled the data from those census records, and mapped it to explore the demographics of this particular portion of the neighborhood. The points on the map represent individual Heads of Household and the color of the point indicates that individual’s Country of Origin as identified by the census takers. Importantly, the 1930 Federal Census did not explicitly identify Jews, but it did include a category for “Mother Tongue (Native Language),” the listing of Yiddish, Hebrew, or “Jewish” providing an important indicator of Jewish identity, although not an exclusive one. The data reveals not only the neighborhood’s outstanding diversity—with 43 different countries of origins represented in just these two districts—but also the diversity of the Jewish population itself.

This page has paths:

This page references: