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1. 1 2013-11-09T12:18:24-08:00 Phil Ethington e37d40405599cccc3b6330e6c4be064cc03ef7a5 The Migration of Diversity in Los Angeles, 1940-2000 Phil Ethington 7 Cartographic Narrative gallery 2015-05-26T22:59:02-07:00 Phil Ethington e37d40405599cccc3b6330e6c4be064cc03ef7a5
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1. 1 2018-08-15T16:21:51-07:00 Phil Ethington e37d40405599cccc3b6330e6c4be064cc03ef7a5 Topos: Spatial Views of Los Angeles Phil Ethington 2 structured_gallery 2018-08-15T16:22:27-07:00 Phil Ethington e37d40405599cccc3b6330e6c4be064cc03ef7a5

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• 1 2013-07-14T16:55:48-07:00 Segregated Diversity: Los Angeles County, 1940-2000 28 Analytic Essay image_header 2017-09-25T14:06:48-07:00 Animated 1940-2000 Map  Race-Ethnic Majorities by 2,052 census tracts (Data from 1940-1990 fitted to 2000 boundaries). 
  Indexed Map for Place References in this Essay
  
  [1] Segregated Diversity sounds contradictory.  “Segregation” has long spelled racial inequality and injustice in the United States, and “diversity” has emerged in the 1990s as a positive term connoting interracial/interethnic exchange, multiculturalism, and fairness. The United States is full of contradictions, however, and no less so its second-largest metropolis. Los Angeles has two parallel traditions: the earliest being diversity and the dominant being segregation. These contradictory traditions begin, respectively, with the multiracial and mostly nonwhite founders of the city in 1781, and with the self–consciously racist dreams of a white metropolis voiced by many Anglo leaders from the 1890s through the 1920s, seeking to make Los Angeles a “white spot” on the U.S. social landscape.
  
  [2] Race-ethnic groups are not evenly settled across the metropolis, of course, and those 3,750 square miles do not form a smooth, featureless and frictionless plain. They are riven by tall mountain ranges, mighty freeway barriers, and, perhaps most importantly, by municipal boundaries. Cities within the metropolis are the most ready-to-hand place-identifiers. People automatically name the cities, areas, and neighborhoods of their residence and workplace when talking of their lives in a metropolis. It is much more reasonable to take these local places as the functional spatial units of people’s daily lives, than it is to imagine the entire metropolis of ten or sixteen million persons as an empty container in which to study “segregation.”
  
  [3] Residential segregation is first and foremost a geographic condition. Spatially examining how people are and have been spatially separated should be a normal part of our analyses, so this narrative is told also cartographically. 
   
  [4] Every North American metropolis is populated the way it is for historical reasons. Geo-demographic processes begin when certain population groups settle in certain places of the metropolis, inscribing those places with institutions, within the larger institutions of power governing the metropolis. Because each group’s territory evolves, by shifting across the landscape, so we must remember that groups are never “settled” in a larger, historical sense. All populations are dynamic, both in terms of life-cycle and in the territorial footprint of that group. Indeed, one entire subfield of segregation studies has been dedicated to the question of whether integrated neighborhoods have ever been “stable,” or merely in a transitional state from one kind of homogeneity to another.[1]
  
  [5] All these phenomena are enacted on the ground, in neighborhoods, by families and by individuals. Tracking these changes and movements historically and geographically reveals a great deal that is papered-over by metropolitan-wide statistical abstractions. In order to study the choreographic motions of four major race-ethnic groups across the spaces of the county and within and across the myriad municipal boundaries, a series of shaded thematic maps of census data in the form of variables derived from the data representing the landscape).
  
  [6] Whites formed a super-majority of Los Angeles in 1940. Proportionally, at that time, metropolitan Los Angeles had fewer Hispanic, Asian, and black residents than any other U.S. metropolis of its size class. Hispanics (almost entirely Mexican and Mexican American at that time) were scattered so lightly across the metropolis (for historical reasons of prior settlements) that they formed a majority of no census tract in that year.
  
  [7] Asians (primarily Chinese and Japanese, with some Koreans) were also mostly scattered, but two important Japanese settlements are visible: A fishing village on Terminal Island in the Port of Los Angeles (coordinates M-40), and another settlement had evolved among then-agricultural fields near the present-day Los Angeles International Airport (LAX, K-28). Both of these communities were forcibly removed in 1942 and imprisoned in concentration camps (“relocation centers”) by President Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066. (The Japanese-American commercial center, called Little Tokyo, however, while temporarily evacuated during the war years, has always remained in the heart of Downtown).
  
  [8] Besides a sea of white majorities, the other significant feature of 1940 is the heavily segregated, mostly African-American “East Side,” along South Central Ave (after which the much larger region of “South Central” would eventually gain its name). The kernel of this highly segregated region was the southward movement of the black community from its 19th-century origins in Downtown. Secondary nodes were also established in Watts (N-30,), and Pasadena (Q-18), the latter the home of baseball pioneer, Jackie Robinson. These would grow to sizable majority settlements in later decades (see maps for 1960 and 1980). By 1960, ethnic Mexicans had attained majorities throughout “East LA,” (O-23 to P-24) stretching across the L.A. River from “La Placita” (The Little Plaza), the historic center of the Spanish-Mexican eras. The massive new immigration of Latin Americans more generally grew around the Spanish-speaking neighborhoods established prior to the 1965 Immigration Reform Act, so that the great Latino landscapes of the 1980s through today are distinctly oriented eastwardly, into the vast urban sprawl of the San Gabriel Valley, away from high housing costs along the coasts. Very large areas of Asian majority settlement appeared (often around historical, pre-internment nodes), most visibly in the “first Chinese suburb” of Monterey Park (Q-24). Central Los Angeles’s majority-ethnic Koreatown, Little Tokyo, and Chinatown are all visible in Figure 8. UCLA’s campus (J-23) is an island of Asian-majority students and faculty at in the otherwise white-majority and no-majority “West Side”. Another large area of Asian and especially Japanese immigrant settlement is the blue-collar municipal spaces of the “Shoestring Strip” area north of the twin harbors of Los Angeles/Long Beach, and affluent Asians have established majorities in the exclusive Palos Verdes salient (K-38) and in San Marino (Q-20).
  
  [9] The African American communities of Los Angeles completed a major territorial shift during the Civil Rights Movement decades of the 1950s through the 1980s, establishing majority population around Crenshaw Boulevard (L-26), about five miles to the west of Central Avenue (N-25), which by 2000 had become overwhelmingly Hispanic. But a comparison of the black majorities in 1980 and 2000 clearly shows a shrinking population as well. Actually, African Americans have resided in a vast borderland of diversity, which we shall visit in the next set of maps. For the time being, it is very important to note the growing non-majority landscapes represented by unshaded spaces. Overall, the shrinkage of the white population, and its residual concentration along the coastlines and mountains, is just as obvious as the shrinking of the black population.
  
  [10] Diversity, exposure, and isolation are all a function of the geographic availability of neighbors. Whether any two or more groups are living apart or together in neighborhoods or municipal spaces is highly conditioned by the spread and recession of territories that have been occupied and produced as neighborhoods by specific members of each group. The operation of semi-official segregation policies and practices in Los Angeles is clearly visible in 1940 and 1960. The sharp segregation boundaries between group majorities, often along municipal boundaries (especially visible along the Alameda Blvd boundary between LA City and its eastward Huntington Park (O-28), South Gate (O-29), Lynwood (O-30)—mostly white working class residents who actively advocated and violently enforced segregation.[2] But the spaces between whites and nonwhites by 2000 are mostly buffered by a wide circle of non-majority “borderland” tracts.
  
  [11] The growth of diversity, which we have seen in the overall county-wide Diversity (H) index, is unevenly distributed geographically. The next set of maps reveal a great deal that is invisible to a non-cartographic statistical approach. Because the Diversity (H) index has no fixed ceiling, ranging as high as 1.3. The map series:" The Migration of Diversity in Los Angeles, 1940-2000, shows the spatial distribution of diversity at 20-year intervals: 1940, 1960, 1980, and 2000.[3]
  
  [12] The 1960 map shows diversity was largely a central-city phenomenon prior to the Civil Rights and mass immigration era that began after 1965. Segregation before the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, actually meant the sequestering of whites in exclusive zones outside of already diverse areas. The sharp edges delineating those areas of exclusion are largely along municipal boundaries and persisted for much of early half of the 20th century. However, this segregation regime began to collapse as time went on, and the most diverse tracts formed a rough circle, between the majority non-white central areas, and the majority-white peripheral areas. By 2000, massive areas of the metropolis had become highly diverse, excepting the East Side, with its homogeneous Hispanic population, and some parts of the coastal and peripheral areas (much of it not visible in these maps), housing homogenous white neighborhoods such as Pacific Palisades.
  
  [13] Frequency histograms of these mapped data help to expand our interpretation of the spatial patterns in diversity. Observe the frequency histograms as classified into four intervals by the Jenks-Caspall Natural Breaks algorithm. In 1940, the vast majority of tracts, being homogeneously white, had very low Diversity indices. By 1980, this distribution looked like a normal Bell Curve, and by 2000 it was heavily skewed toward high levels of diversity. These frequency histograms seem to tell the opposite story of the persistently high levels of isolation we have reported, from statistical and cartographic analyses.
  
  [14] This section presents the metropolitan-level indices of Dissimilarity (D) and Exposure (xP*y) using the Los Angeles County Union Census Tract Data Series, 1940-2000 (Ethington et al. 2006).
  
  [15] The Index of Dissimilarity (D) is still widely used, despite its known drawbacks. We report it here because of its familiarity and prevalence in many studies. It tells us what proportion of a group would have to move (change locations) into other census tracts in order to even-out the distribution across all census tracts. The metro-wide indices for Los Angeles County are reported in Figure 3.
  
  [Figure 3]
  
  [16] According to the Index of Dissimilarity, almost 90% of blacks would have had to move their residential locations in 1960 and 1970 in order to even-out the geographic distribution of African Americans. That figure dropped to 57% in 2000. Whites reached their peak level of dissimilarity (.71) in 1950, falling until 1970, when the D index leveled-out at a remarkably stable rate of .57 for the rest of the century, almost identical to that for African Americans in 2000. The D index value for Hispanics also peaked in 1950, at .85, then fell sharply until 1980 to .36, and then rose again modestly to .43 by 2000. The D index for Asians, also peaking in 1950, fell until 1970, and like that for Whites, leveled-out at a remarkably stable figure (.5) for the years 1980-2000.
  
  [17] A far more robust and interesting segregation index is the Exposure Index (xP*y), which tells us the probability that members of one group (x) will have members of each of the other race groups (y) as neighbors in their census tracts. Figure 4 displays the results of these calculations for each of the major race-ethnic group.
  
  [Figure 4]
  
  [18] Because the Exposure Index is asymmetric, it is sensitive to the relative sizes of the groups included in the equations, allowing us to see the differential rates that each group is “exposed” to the other as census tract neighbors. Thus, while Hispanics had less than a 10% probability of having blacks as neighbors in 2000, blacks in that year had a 40% probability of having Hispanics as neighbors. And while whites have been increasingly likely to have Hispanics as neighbors (from nearly zero in 1940 to about 23% in 2000), Hispanics have been steadily less likely to have whites as neighbors (declining from 81% in 1940 to about 18% in 2000).
  
  [19] The overall patterns in the county-wide Exposure index do not speak well for integration, even since the Civil Rights victories of the 1960s. First, Hispanics experienced little change in likelihood of having Asian or black neighbors (always 10% or less since 1940), and a steep decrease in having white neighbors, declining from greater than 80% in 1940 to 18% in 2000. Second, while the probability of whites having non-white neighbors increased steadily as they lost majority status by 2000, whites still had a low likelihood in 2000 of having Hispanic (25%) and Asian (15%) neighbors, and an extremely low probability of having black neighbors (4%) at this metropolitan scale of analysis. Third, the most discouraging result of the metro-wide analysis is the likelihood of blacks and whites to share neighborhoods. Blacks in 2000 had almost the same likelihood of having white neighbors as they had in 1970 (16% compared with 18%). The emblematic goal of the Civil Rights movement to integrate whites and blacks has, by these measures, not advanced at all in Los Angeles County. Blacks were certainly more likely to have Latino neighbors (40% in 2000), but only slightly more likely to have Asian neighbors over the long period (rising from 3% to 9%). Lastly, Asians have been less and less likely to have white neighbors since 1940, a probability declining from 78% to 23% in 2000. Asians’ probability of having a black neighbor has been in decline since 1960, from 18% to only 4% in 2000. Their probability of having Hispanic neighbors increased steadily to just over 30% by 1990 but declined again by 2000. This possibly reflects the larger concentrations of majority-Asian places, with fewer people living at the “edges” between groups and more living internally to the clustered settlements.
  
  [20] The overall results of this metro-wide analysis of Los Angeles County reflect the overall state of scholarship on other North American metropolitan areas. There are certainly some signs that the grip of segregation has lessened since the Second World War, but several key spatial relations, such as those between blacks and whites, have not changed at all since the Civil Rights victories of the 1960s. These figures consider the entire county as one continuous space of probable encounters. We turn next to a place-specific look at the metropolis.
  
  ENDNOTES
  
  [1] (Smith (1998); Ellen (1998), (2000).
  
  [2] (Nicolaides (2002); Sides (2004).
  
  [3] I used the Jenks-Caspall Natural Breaks algorithm, which minimizes within-category variance and maximizes between-category variance. This algorithm is widely tested and esteemed by cartographers, because it minimizes misleading visual bias due to shading that might exaggerate or under-represent phenomena of interest (Jenks and Caspall 1971).
• 1 2013-11-09T12:18:24-08:00 The Migration of Diversity in Los Angeles, 1940-2000 7 Cartographic Narrative gallery 2015-05-26T22:59:02-07:00 This is a paragraph about the diversity index and migration ....
   
  |  1940  |
   
   
  |  1960  |
   
   
  |  1980  |
   
   
  |  2000  |