Los Chinos Discover El Barrio

There’s a colorful mural on the asphalt playground of Hillside Elementary School, in the neighborhood called Lincoln Heights. Painted on the beige handball wall, the mural is of life-sized youngsters holding hands. Depicted are Asian and Latino kids with bright faces and ear-to-ear smiles.

The mural is a mirror of the makeup of the neighborhood today: Latinos living side-by-side with Asians. But it’s not all smiles and happy faces in this Northeast Los Angeles community, located just a couple of miles up Broadway from City Hall. On the surface there’s harmony between Latinos and Asians. But there are indications of simmering ethnic-based tensions.

That became clear to me recently when I took a walk through the old neighborhood--the one where I grew up. As I walked along North Broadway, I thought of a joke that comic Paul Rodriguez often tells on stage. He paints the picture of a young Chicano walking down a street on L.A.’s Eastside. He comes upon two Asians having an animated conversation in what sounds like babble. “Hey, you guys,” he says, “knock off that foreign talk. This is America--speak Spanish!”

When I was growing up in Lincoln Heights 30 years ago most of us spoke Spanish--and English. There was a sometimes uneasy coexistence in the neighborhood between brown and white. Back then we Latinos were moving in and essentially displacing the working-class Italians (to us, they were just los gringos) who had moved there and thrived after World War II.

Because I was an extremely fair-skinned Latino kid I would often overhear remarks by gringos in Lincoln Heights that were not intended for Latino ears, disparaging comments about “smelly wetbacks,” and worse. The transition was,for the most part, a gradual process. And as I recall--except for the slurs that sometimes stung me directly--a process marked only occasionally by outright hostility.

A trend that began about 10 years ago in Lincoln Heights seems to have hit a critical point now. It’s similar to the ethnic tug-of-war of yesteryear, but different colors, different words are involved. Today Chinese and Vietnamese are displacing the Latinos who, by choice or circumstance, had Lincoln Heights virtually to themselves for two solid generations.

Evidence of the transition is clear.

The bank where I opened my first meager savings account in the late 1950s has changed hands. It’s now the East-West Federal Bank, an Asian-owned enterprise.

The public library on Workman Street, where I checked out “Charlotte’s Web” with my first library card, abounds with signs of the new times: It’s called “La Biblioteca del Pueblo Heights,” and on the door there’s a notice advising that the building is closed because of the Oct. 1 earthquake; it’s written in Chinese.

The white, wood-frame house on Griffin Avenue that I once lived in is now owned by a Chinese family.

What used to be a Latino-run mortuary at the corner of Sichel Street and North Broadway is now the Chung Wah Funeral Home.

A block down the street from the funeral home is a panaderia, a bakery. As I would listen to radio reports of the U.S. war in faraway Indochina while walking from class at Lincoln High School, I often used to drop in the panaderia for a snack. The word panaderia , now faded and chipped, is still painted on the shop window that fronts North Broadway. But another sign, a gleaming plastic one, hangs above the window. The sign proclaims that it is a Vietnamese-Chinese bakery. The proprietor, Sam Lee, bought the business less than a year ago. With a wave of his arm, he indicates that La Opinion, the Spanish-language daily newspaper, is still for sale on the counter. Two signs hang side-by-side behind the counter announcing in Spanish and in Chinese that cakes are made to order for all occasions.

Out on North Broadway, Fidel Farrillas sells raspadas (snowcones) from his pushcart. He has lived and worked in Lincoln Heights “for 30 years and a pinch more,” he says, his voice nearly whistling through two gold-framed teeth. He has seen the neighborhood change. Twice.

Like many older Latinos he remembers the tension felt between los gringos y la raza years ago--even though most people went about their business ostensibly coexisting politely. And others who have been around as long will tell an inquiring reporter scratching away in his notebook, “We’re going out of our way to treat the chinos nice--better than the gringos sometimes treated us back then.” But when the notebook is closed, they’re likely to whisper, “But you know, the thing is, they smell funny, and they talk behind your back, and they are so arrogant--the way they’re buying up everything in our neighborhood.”

Neighborhhod transitions can be tough to reconcile.

It isn’t easy for the blue-collar Latinos of Lincoln Heights. They haven’t possessed much. But they had the barrio, “a little chunk of the world where we belonged,” as one described it. There may be some hard times and hard feelings ahead as los chinos continue to make inroads into what had been an exclusively Latino enclave. But there are hopeful signs as well.

On one recent Saturday afternoon a Latino fifth-grader, wearing the same type of hightop tennis shoes I wore as a 10-year-old on that same street corner, strode up to Senor Farrillas’ snowcone pushcart. The kid pulled out a pocketful of dimes and bought two raspadas . One for himself, and one for his school chum--a Vietnamese kid. He was wearing hightops, too. They both ordered strawberry, as I recall.