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• 1 2013-11-29T12:11:16-08:00 Race-Ethnic Majority Map Series, Los Angeles County, 1940-2000. 30 Cartographic Narrative image_header 2017-07-25T15:47:54-07:00
  This cartographic narrative provides an overview of the major demographic changes in Los Angeles County from 1940-2000. Sorting all ethnic groups into just four "race-ethnic" categories definitely oversimplifies the lived experience of people on the street.  But these four are widely used categories and should help to make the overall patterns clear.  (Other essays in Ghost Metropolis examine more specific national-origin groups: Koreans, Salvadoreños, Vietnamese, etc). First before looking at maps, consider the changing overall population proportions in LA County as a whole, in the stacked-bar chart.
   
  From 1940, before U.S. entry into World War II, to the year 2000, the population of Los Angeles County grew from 2.8 million to almost 10 million persons.  In 1940, at 93%, the "white" population had reached an all-time high--since Spanish Europeans, calling themselves "white" first settled in 1769.  That proportion declined steadily after 1940, but due to growing populations overall, the highest number of "white" (excluding Latino) persons was reached in 1960 when there totaled 4.9 million "Non-Hispanic Whites," as the U.S. Census Bureau defines race-ethnicity.  In 1950 just under a quarter-million Angelenos were African American, and a quarter-million were Latino.  The Asian population in that year was about 125,000.  By 2000, Asians numbered 1.3 million, Whites were down to 32% of the County, with 3 million.  African Americans held constant numbers of almost a million from 1980, 1990, and 2000.  
   
  The Latino population shot up, more than doubling every ten years from 1940 to 1970, then almost doubling again to 2 million in 1980, then adding a million, to 3 million in 1990, and another million, to 4.2 million in 2000.  Comparatively thinking: the Latino population added more Spanish-speaking immigrants to LA every ten years as the entire population of African Americans, in every year from 1940 to 2000.
   
  As Los Angeles County got more and more diverse, it also provided a home to more and more Asians and Latinos and fewer and to fewer Whites and African Americans.  The White population shrank and geographically retreated to the edges, while the new immigrants from Latin America and the Asia Pacific grew more intensively and extensively.  Both Latinos and Asians, the new immigrants, faced Eastward to the San Gabriel Valley, in their territorial expansion in the last quarter of the 20th century.
   
  |  1940  |   LA County Population:  2,809,946.  The Majority Map for 1940 shows the harshness of the segregation regime, as Whites openly attempted to contain non-whites to downtown and a few outlying enclaves.  These boundaries were strictly enforced by the LAPD and the municipal police departments of LA City's adjacent municipal neighbors, like South Gate, Whittier, Beverly Hills, and Santa Monica.  The key boundary, visible in the 1940-1970 maps, is the North-South artery,  Alameda Blvd, which has always been the corridor from the LA  and Long Beach Harbors, to the Warehouses and circulation points in Downtown Los Angeles.  A phalanx of white, working-class suburban cities, with boundaries along Alameda, openly prevented non-whites from crossing that border.
   
  |  1950  |   LA County Population:  4,317,984.   The 1950 census year reflected the massive growth of Los Angeles during the Second World War military build-up in Los Angeles and the sunbelt more generally.  War-worker migrants from Texas and Louisiana swelled the African-American population, while the Bracero program brought brought almost 200,000 Mexicans to East LA, re-building the Mexican Barrio to majorities for the first time since the Anglo influx of the 1880s.   East LA re-emerged as the heartland of Latino Los Angeles, but long-standing enclaves in San Fernando and elsewhere sprouted new majorities during this wave of Mexican immigration.
   
  Also striking is the visible patterns of White resistance to the territorial expansion of the Black neighborhoods.  A Goodyear Rubber plant employed thousands on a parcel just south of Slauson, extending a half-mile south of its northern boundary on Slauson.  White workers jealously prevented Blacks from moving across Slauson, and even harassed them if they tried to walk through to the Watts neighborhoods to the south.  African Americans preferred to ride street cars or automobiles through this white zone of South LA.  
   
  |  1960  |   LA County Population:  6,063,364.  By 1960s the Black population had grown a great deal, very much of that grown from the addition of children to the war-time migrant's families, not only banding together along the Central AVe axis, surrounded by determined White segregation.  They also found ex-urban enclaves, reaching into the foothills at the periphery of the metropolis, from the Eastern San Fernando Valley to North Pasadena, all the way east to the north of Fontana.  The whites south of Slauson retreated to make way for a Black majority, which now united the Vernon-Central and Watts enclaves, and beginning to absorb the westward "Sugar Hill" in West Adams into one very large African American district, and also seeing the grown of the San Fernando and Pasadena Black communities.  East LA also boomed with the war babies, the Chicano generation arriving as High School and college students. 
   
  |  1970  |   LA County Population:  7,041,362.  A war-torn decade of international and urban conflict brought many changes, but the Black population remained segregated  and the conservative Republican backlash had just begun under Nixon.  The westward march of Black LA had reached Crenshaw by 1970, at the foot of the Baldwin HIlls, which would gradually become the new center of a still-isolated community in 2000.
   
  |  1980  |   LA County Population:  7,510,424.  By 1980 the Latino population, augmented by Salvadoreans, Guatemalans, and many new Mexicanos, East LA, now encompassed much of the San Gabriel Valley. 
   
  |  1990  |   LA County Population:  8,902,172.   By 1990 Latinos nearly equalled Whites in numbers, 3.3 million Latinos and 3.6 million Whites, or "Anglos" as non-Spanish speaking Europeans are known regionally. This was a moment of major frustration for the Black community, having been the target of a ghetto image by the Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush Administrations.  This was the first census year in which Blacks were outnumbered by Asians.  Already overwhelmed by Latinos--who had transformed hundreds of neighborhoods almost overnight with millions arriving in less than one generation--African Americans found themselves in newly multiracial re-makings of their neighborhoods.  It was a working-class version of "gentrification."  Entrepreneurial Central Americans, Koreans, and others began small shop-owner size businesses in formerly all-black neighborhoods, and generated sharply different visual and linguistic streetscapes.  Notice the continuously growing areas, kilometers wide, that had no majorities, as in 1980.  These were diverse places, but not evenly or peacefully so.
   
  |  2000  |   LA County Population:  9,519,338.  After the Rodney King Uprising of 1992, the metropolis kept getting more diverse, with hundreds of kilometers of territory lacking any majorities.  At the same time, veyr high densities of Latino, White, Asian, and African American majorities characterized many more hundreds of square kilometers.  These two trends were simultaneous, generating "Segregated Diversity."