My Los Angeles by Edward W. Soja

Author:Edward W. Soja
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780520281721
Publisher: University of California Press

THE GLOBALIZATION OF PRACTICALLY EVERYTHING

Globalization has been a vital component in the restructuring of every major urban region and a definitive exogenous force in the postmetropolitan transition. Looking at Los Angeles, globalization has been a primary influence in creating arguably the most economically and culturally heterogeneous urban region the world has ever seen. Los Angeles, as well as New York, London, and Paris, are giant crucibles for the development and expression of multicultural diversity and reconstituted urban identity.

As mentioned earlier, Los Angeles has experienced a net growth of nearly eight million people since the 1965 Watts Riots, more if one includes what some estimate to be more than a million undocumented workers. Migrants from Mexico have been by far the largest component of this migration, swelling the population of the East Los Angeles barrio, replacing poor whites and blacks in the southeast quadrant of LA County to the point of reaching 95 percent of the population in some areas, and spreading into almost every census tract in the region. Add to this a million or so immigrants from Central America—El Salvador and Guatemala in particular—and one can understand why Spanish has again become a dominant everyday language in LA, as it was before the post-1848 “Americanization” process.

Percentagewise, the expansion of the Asian and Pacific Islander population has been even greater than Latinos, as they have replaced African Americans as the second-largest minority. There are today at least one hundred thousand of each of the following ethnic groups: Chinese, Pilipino, Koreans, Vietnamese, Thais, Iranians, Armenians, and Indians, along with substantial numbers of Samoans, Cambodians, Hmong, various Pacific Island groups, Pakistanis, and Bangladeshis. African American numbers have decreased in LA County, as has their degree of residential segregation. Watts, for example, has become predominantly Latino, while the center of Black Los Angeles has shifted significantly to the west, toward the predominantly African American city of Inglewood.

Nearly all immigrant groups have defined ethnic enclaves, although there are also large areas of ethnic mixture and diversity and high rates of ethnic intermarriage. Most segregation indexes have been declining in Los Angeles, once one of the most racially segregated cities in the country. Even with the formation of ethnic enclaves and the extraordinary transformation of southeast LA County from 80 percent Anglo to more than 90 percent Latino, the number of census tracts where more than 70 percent of the population consists of one ethnic group has declined significantly. The older segregation of white, wealthy, suburban populations has been diluted practically everywhere by the admixture of wealthy Asian residents; many Asian enclaves, such as Koreatown, actually have Latino majorities; and ethno-racial diversity has been spreading throughout the region.11

Studying this globalized ethnic geography has led to some interesting research questions and discoveries. Enclave formation, for example, has been shown to have both positive and negative consequences, occasionally isolating some groups from the mainstream economy but perhaps more often providing a welcoming base for newcomers and in some cases acting as a generative source, like other agglomerations, for new economic and cultural ideas and innovations.

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