Fear and Reality in the Los Angeles Melting Pot

ON A WARM afternoon in Long Beach, at Pei Lin, a Cambodian restaurant on Anaheim Street, In dochinese teen-agers, dressed like Valley girls, clutch their schoolbooks and cluster around the the big-screen Mitsubishi in the corner, lip-synching along with MTV. Across the room, middle-aged refugees stare blankly as they drink their tea.

Marc Wilder, an urban planner and a former Long Beach City Council member, sits at one of the tables, eating a fish and rice lunch and considering the impact of immigration on Southern California.

“Anything will be possible here in the future,” he says. “These people who are coming here can succeed or they can fail. They can be our hope or our downfall.”

Immigration has become the irresistible force in the life of Southern California. In 1970, only 11% of the Los Angeles area population was foreign-born; a decade later, 22% was foreign-born, and predictions by the Southern California Assn. of Governments puts the figure at close to a third by the turn of the century. Last year, the Immigration and Naturalization Service issued 122,268 new green cards in the seven-county Southern California region. The immigrants came from Mexico and El Salvador and China and Vietnam and Ireland, some 30 countries in all, with a majority fitting under the headings Latino and Asian. Next year, 40% of Southern California’s population, by birth or ancestry, will be either Latino or Asian. In another 20 years, according to projections from SCAG, those groups will make up an absolute majority in the region.

Already, in the Mid-Wilshire district, in Monterey Park, in Orange County’s Westminster or along Anaheim Street in Long Beach, a stranger to Southern California would think the region’s predominant language was Korean, Chinese, Vietnamese or Cambodian. And in the Los Angeles Basin, in a huge arc stretching from San Fernando to Santa Ana, Latinos, a majority of them immigrants, form the second-largest concentration of Spanish speakers in North America (the first is Mexico City).

For Marc Wilder, this is a geography of hope--a unique opportunity to build a bracing, multiracial, multicultural urban civilization. “We are going to be different than anywhere,” he says, “and we are going to do things differently because a Cambodian, a Hispanic and a Jew share the same space. . . . We will see new kinds of institutions made by new kinds of people.”

Wilder’s hopeful vision of a future built on immigration is evidently not shared by most Southern Californians. A Los Angeles Times Poll conducted in January found that 57% of the residents polled agreed that there are “too many” immigrants here. The result echoed a 1986 poll in Los Angeles and Orange counties that found 55% agreement with the statement “immigration is a change for the worse.” And throughout the region, there are widespread concerns that massive immigration is threatening our economic future, our social cohesion and our quality of life.

The anti-immigration mood shows up in blatant ways. Last year, for instance, then-Monterey Park Mayor Barry Hatch dispatched a letter--on city stationery--to the leading presidential candidates calling the immigrants “a horde of invaders,” linking undocumented foreigners with “drug runners, terrorists and criminals” and suggesting a five-year ban on all immigration.

This year, in Westminster, the commercial hub for Orange County’s estimated 85,000 Vietnamese, vandals have attacked at least eight signs that direct motorists to the “Little Saigon” shopping district. In April, the City Council there rejected a request for a parade of Vietnamese veterans groups honoring those who died fighting alongside American soldiers in the Vietnam War.

“It’s my opinion that you’re all Americans and you’d better be Americans. If you want to be Vietnamese, go back to South Vietnam,” City Councilman Frank Fry told the organizers of the South Vietnam Armed Forces Day. “That may be unfair,” he added, “but that’s my opinion, and I’m sure that it is the opinion of a lot of people around here.”

The Federation for American Immigration Reform, an anti-immigration lobby, links newcomers to such issues as crowded freeways, soaring housing costs and overcrowded schools. “The immigrants are resented strongly because of their impact on livability,” says Los Angeles City Councilman Ernani Bernardi, a member of FAIR’s national board of advisers. “We just can’t accommodate the population. They can’t all come here.”

Among many of the region’s blacks and some native Latinos, there is fear that the new immigrants will usurp both their homes and jobs, leaving their communities even poorer and less empowered. And even among the liberal and academic elites of the Westside, long the self-styled supporters of minority rights, there is mounting concern. “One leading liberal told me the other day that immigrants were eating up the resources and that they are not like their parents or grandparents,” relates Antonia Hernandez, executive director of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund.

The anti-immigration mood can be summarized in three basic fears: the fear that natives will be displaced from jobs and neighborhoods, the fear that immigrants will be caught in a growing underclass and the fear that this extraordinary wave of newcomers will not or cannot fit in--and become Americans. These fears can be attributed to simple racism or nativism; they can be explained by tightening economic realities; they can be traced to the demonstrable changes that add up to a lost Southern California “paradise.”

They can also be challenged. There is evidence--in the barrios , along Anaheim Street, in Westwood’s “Little Tehran,” in Monterey Park, in Koreatown and throughout the new Los Angeles--that the pessimism is unfounded, that the future can be cast in positive terms, that immigration can help revive dying communities, strengthen the changing economy and, with an interplay of cultures and values, become a source of innovation in the region.

“Maybe,” says Marc Wilder as he finishes his tea in the Pei Lin restaurant, “we are already evolving into something new and exciting. And, maybe we don’t even know it.”

DEBUNKING THE DISPLACEMENT THEORY

SOME SOUTHERN CALIFORNIANS would have it that if high-paying jobs are scarce, traffic is a nightmare and property values in their neighborhoods have escalated beyond reach, the new immigrants are to blame. For instance, nearly 60% of all blacks in Southern California and almost half of the whites, according to a 1983 Urban Institute poll, were convinced that immigrants are taking jobs from native-born Americans. And that feeling often broadens to sweeping generalizations. “The jobs that used to go to blacks are now going to Latinos,” complains Fritizer Hopkins, a community leader with the Southern California Organizing Committee, which represents 83,000 families in the south Los Angeles area.

In fact, the jobs that immigrants take are new jobs: low-wage, low-benefit positions in the burgeoning manufacturing and service industries responsible for the rapid expansion--at nearly three times the national rate--of the Southern California economy. To a large extent, these additional jobs helped the region recover from the loss of thousands of unionized blue-collar positions, which disappeared when employers such as GM and Firestone closed down their Southern California operations during the 1970s and early 1980s. The jobs are part of a new economy--and they are jobs that natives do not want.

“Young blacks don’t want to start at the bottom,” says George Givens, chief organizer for the Southern California Organizing Committee, as we drove through the industrial districts in the grim eastern reaches of South-Central Los Angeles, where the vast majority of workers appear to be Latinos. “If a job doesn’t pay $15 an hour, you don’t want to do it.”

Such anecdotal evidence against the displacement theory is also supported by the bulk of economic research. A 1988 report issued by the highly respected National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, Mass., concluded that immigrants do not cause unemployment among native-born Americans. The bureau and other researchers found that cities with large-scale immigration, such as Los Angeles or Miami, actually created more high-paying jobs for natives, including blacks, than areas with fewer newcomers. According to a report from UCLA, from 1979 to 1987, Los Angeles experienced an increase of 11.3% in high-paying jobs, compared with 8.5% nationwide.

That’s partly because having a large pool of low-wage immigrant workers allows small subcontractor firms to cut the price of parts and components they sell to larger companies. Those lower prices help keep production costs in bigger American companies close to those in overseas factories, maintains Wayne Cornelius, director of the Center for U.S.-Mexico Studies at UC San Diego, and thousands of high-paying industrial jobs are preserved for native-born Americans. Without the contributions of the immigrants, Cornelius and other economists suggest, these better-paying jobs would have long ago migrated “offshore.”

Another major charge against immigrants is that they depress wage rates for native-born workers. But recent studies by both the Urban Institute and NBER have concluded that the influx of low-cost Hispanic labor has had no appreciable negative effect on wage rates for native-born workers. “There’s absolutely no evidence that immigration hurts wage rates,” sums up NBER’s Richard Freeman, who is also a professor of economics at Harvard University. “The average American benefits from immigration--and there’s not a major economist who disagrees with that. (Immigrants) produce more than they consume--everybody benefits.”

There is a softer side to the displacement theory, a sense among longtime residents that the successes of immigrants somehow threaten the quality of life for natives.

Some have seen their communities transformed as revitalization sparked by immigrants has been accompanied by congestion, increased inconvenience and the possibility of displacement. “A way of life is disappearing, and it’s brought out the worst in people,” says Antonio Bitonti, an 80-year-old retired deputy L.A. County assessor who lives in Westminster. “Many of these people have been here 20 or 30 years and haven’t caught up with the changes in Southern California.” Immigrants are an easy target for their resentments.

Seventeen years ago, when Bitonti first moved to Westminster from Long Beach, it was a sleepy, almost-bucolic place. “Right around the street here I picked tomatoes,” Bitonti recalls. “I picked strawberries down at the corner of Magnolia and Bolsa.”

Today, the strawberry fields are gone, replaced by bustling dim-sum restaurants, noodle houses and ginseng parlors, all part of a $100-million thriving commercial center with more than 700 businesses owned by Southeast Asians. Los Angeles leads the nation in both Latino- and Asian-owned business, including more than 7,000 enterprises run by Koreans alone. And Orange County, according to a recent U.S. Department of Commerce study, has the country’s third-largest number of Asian-owned businesses, after Los Angeles and Honolulu.

For Bitonti and his neighbors at the Mission Del Amo trailer park, the immigrants’ success has brought distress. As Vietnamese-driven development has lifted commercial property values along Bolsa Avenue from $7 to $70 a square foot since the early 1980s, the pressure on owners of trailer parks to sell has mounted. Caught between capitalist economics and the demographic tidal wave, the retirees in the mobile home parks feel threatened, and hostility toward the Vietnamese has mounted.

“At least 50% are prejudiced, even members of my own family,” Bitonti says. “People call them ‘gooks.’ It’s wrong, but there’s a lot of prejudice here.”

Sally Ringbloom, one of Bitonti’s neighbors, says she thinks of the Vietnamese every time she turns left onto Bolsa. “The traffic has become terrible. It takes forever to make that turn, and they (the Vietnamese) are the worst drivers in the world.”

Ringbloom says she once hoped “to die here” but now plans to move. So does her daughter, who lives with her family on the other side of the 405 Freeway in Huntington Beach. “My grandkids don’t like it anymore. There’s too much traffic, too many immigrants. They’ve made life difficult for Americans.”

As unpleasant as Ringbloom’s assertions might be, they do reflect an undeniable fact that immigration increases population pressures. For Ringbloom or for the average commuter fuming in morning traffic on the San Bernardino or Ventura freeways, immigrants became the focal point for the ever-growing complaints about getting there from here.

But in reality, notes David Diaz, a city planner from the heavily Latino El Sereno district of Los Angeles, immigrants generally are not the ones spending hours clogging the roadways. Most cluster closer to downtown and the industrial areas of the city, and they are likely to commute by RTD or drive only a short distance.

“If people are so concerned about smog and traffic, maybe they should look at the people who are coming from the Northeast or Midwest,” suggests Diaz, sitting on the porch of his close-in home. “Those are the guys who are commuting from out in the suburbs, not the Mexicanos who are riding the bus from East L.A. The real problem is our political infrastructure won’t move. It won’t get the job done to blame the powerless first.”

BEYOND THE UNDERCLASS

IF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIANS feel threatened by the successes of newcomers, they’re equally disturbed by the specter of the immigrants’ failure. One vision of many who fear immigration is that Southern California’s newest residents and the generations that follow will be trapped at the bottom of society and never find an upward path. They see these groups as likely prisoners of a welfare-dependent, crime-ridden underclass, unable to find jobs and soon not even trying.

These fears were bolstered earlier this year by a report from UCLA’s Graduate School of Architecture and Urban Planning. “The Widening Divide” analyzed income inequality and poverty in Los Angeles, and its findings concerning Latinos and some Asian groups, many of whom are recent immigrants, were most troublesome. The report showed a growing gap between the haves and these have-not groups and predicted that the latter were potentially destined to remain stuck at the bottom of an emerging “two-tier” society. In short, according to the report, many immigrants may never acquire the skills or be offered the opportunities necessary for upward mobility.

The key word is may . The UCLA study only indicated a trend, not a current reality. The report repeatedly stresses that government and industry can intervene and provide better educational and occupational opportunities in order to avert such a two-tier society.

The effect of such opportunities is demonstrable. At Windline / Amanet, a small manufacturing company typical of the industries that are fueling L.A.’s booming economy, one positive scenario for the future is unfolding.

Mario Toledo came to Los Angeles illegally from Guatemala in 1981, when he was 16. He spoke no English, had no industrial or trade skills and had only a 10th-grade education. Toledo worked at a series of menial jobs, then found work on the assembly line at Windline, putting together marine-safety products for close to the minimum wage.

After three years on the job, he has applied for citizenship in the amnesty process and moved up the ladder at the company. He is making close to $7 an hour building prototypes for new equipment. His wife, Rosa, 19, a Mexican immigrant whom he met at Windline, also started there at about the minimum wage and also has advanced quickly. She now makes $6.50 an hour inspecting aerospace components. Together, their earnings, boosted by overtime, add up to nearly $30,000 a year. The Toledos are bona fide American dreamers.

For Rosa and Mario, life in Los Angeles has been tough, but not the Dickensian hell portrayed in the UCLA study. They live with two other immigrant couples in a $650-a-month apartment in Culver City near Rosa’s mother, who occasionally cares for the Toledos’ 18-month old son, Mario Jr. And encouraged by Windline’s president, Robert Barbour, both are learning English. About a quarter of the company’s 40 employees, like the Toledos, are new immigrants, and the company pairs non-English-speaking employees with natives to teach them the language on the job. Windline also offers Spanish-language job training and videos, and those who learn English are eligible for promotions and training for higher-paying jobs. Rosa takes classes at night to finish her high school education and plans someday to attend college.

“It was hard to be here at first, but now we feel we’re going up in the world,” she says, during a break at the Marina del Rey factory. “You know, when we started, we had nothing. We were very low. But now I have many dreams, particularly for little Mario running around. Things are going in a positive direction.”

Significant research underlines that “positive direction.” In 1982, University of Illinois researcher Barry Chiswick found that the longer immigrants stay in the United States, the less likely they are to be in poverty.

And a key study completed in 1985 by the RAND Corp. also challenged the notion that immigrants are doomed to poverty. The study focused on Mexican immigrants (the largest segment of Latino newcomers), and it assessed the achievements of members of three generations. The report’s author, demographer Kevin McCarthy, summarized the results as consistent with the traditional American immigrant pattern: “The process is . . . three-generational, . . . with poorly educated immigrants coming in and filling the lowest-level jobs, their children getting more education and then moving into skilled blue-collar jobs, and then the next generation, if they get the additional education, moving into the white-collar jobs.”

But at the end of the report, McCarthy injected a warning: Shrinking numbers of mid-level, steppingstone jobs, along with other economic factors, might halt the traditional pattern of upward mobility. And although McCarthy found evidence that educational levels had improved over the generations, he stressed that that process must continue if immigrants were to make it in America.

The UCLA study, four years later, found that the situation in Los Angeles came closer to McCarthy’s warnings than to his positive assessment of the progress so far. The study showed that in areas such as income level, occupational attainment, education and households in poverty, the overall situation for Latino immigrants, in particular, had worsened over a 20-year period. More full-time workers lived in poverty; more jobs paid low wages, and more Latinos held them than any other group; more native-born and immigrant Latinos were dropping out of school (at rates of almost 70% for the foreign-born, 40% for native-born). Latino immigrants might still be improving their lot from generation to generation, but they were falling further and further behind Anglo society.

“There was good opportunity in the past,” says Paul M. Ong, the study director. “You could end up in a middle-income job with just a ninth-grade education. There were enough blue-collar jobs around to propel you. But the economy is not producing the jobs it used to; the opportunities aren’t as plentiful. And if you are a minority, studies show you will end up in a school district that performs badly.”

There is some information, however, that recent studies did not consider. For example, the education data used by UCLA come from public-school sources and do not include the thousands of Latino students who attend Catholic schools. In the Catholic School System of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, which includes schools in Los Angeles, Ventura and Santa Barbara, 44,135 Latino children--46% of the Catholic school system’s enrollment--attend classes. According to recent surveys, they possess reading skills equal to those of their Anglo peers in the parochial system and superior to those of whites attending public schools. And the dropout rate is similar to the Anglo dropout rate for Catholic schools: less than 1%.

But even Latinos who fail to finish school should not be cast too quickly into the underclass mold of crime, hopelessness, broken families and disenfranchisement from the working world. Latino immigrants in Southern California are for the most part actively and notably involved in the job market. The UCLA report emphasizes this: Latino immigrants constitute the vast majority of Los Angeles’ working poor. And perceptions bear out its statistics: “You just don’t have the sort of long-term unemployment (among Latinos) that you have in South-Central,” says El Sereno planner Diaz. “These people are making ends meet. You simply don’t have the sort of urban defeatism you associate with some of the big cities back East.”

Despite polls showing that some believe Latinos are welfare-dependent and violent, the RAND study indicates that Latinos are half as likely as the average Californian to be on welfare. And prison records and arrest rates show that Latinos commit crimes at rates slightly lower than those for the Anglo and black populations.

Latino immigrants’ family structure, too, defies the underclass stereotype. Somewhat more than 60% of all Latino households, for instance, are headed by married couples, a figure that is likely to be much higher in immigrant families. That number is significantly higher than the rates for either whites or blacks. Only the households of Asians, as a group, are close to this percentage. Family cohesion may explain how Latino and Asian immigrants succeed despite a lack of education and employment in low-wage jobs.

“It’s the little factory jobs, the service jobs that they have that let (Latinos) pool their money and buy into South-Central,” observes Hopkins of the Southern California Organizing Committee. And, despite the undeniable poverty in such heavily immigrant areas as East Los Angeles, those communities seem to be improving rather than declining. Underclass neighborhoods traditionally contain storefronts and homes that are deserted or in ill repair. In East Los Angeles, however, homes are usually well-maintained.

And the area’s commercial strips, such as the one along Whittier Boulevard, also are flourishing. During the past five years alone, according to Luis Valenzuela, a 34-year-old developer born in Mexico and brought up in East Los Angeles, the price of prime land on Whittier Boulevard has risen from $20 to $50 a square foot. He scoffs at those who see his old neighborhood as little more than a slum for Latinos.

“I find it pretty amusing,” Valenzuela says in his well-appointed Mid-Wilshire office. “People on the Westside think they are entering a different city once they cross Western Avenue. “They are not talking about the same East L.A. I’m doing projects in right now. It’s probably because they don’t work the streets and don’t know what’s really going on.”

Anglo businesses are seeing some of the positive signs that Valenzuela trumpets. Vons grocery chain, in the form of the new Tianguis markets, is targeting Latinos--a vote of confidence in their potential buying power and an acknowledgment of a growing consumer market. Rather than viewing the immigrants as an emerging underclass, top Anglo executives such as Jim Miscoll, executive vice president of the Bank of America, see them as a crucial resource for anyone interested in doing business in Southern California.

Miscoll, in fact, has high hopes for the long-term prospects of the new market he hopes to serve. “B of A was built on the San Francisco immigrant community,” Miscoll says. “It’s only a lack of firsthand knowledge that makes people fear the immigrants. We tend to forget what our own grandparents went through when they first got here. People are coming here today for the same thing my family came from Ireland and Luxembourg (for), and in time they will contribute just as much to the economy.”

Ong, director of the UCLA study, is less sanguine. “There is a problem--there is no easy solution,” he says. “We need policies that force corporations to think in the long term. We need incentives so that people look beyond today’s profits. In the school system, we can’t just target the best and the brightest; we need to train and educate everyone equally.

“Tackling it all is a big venture, but if you break it out into small chunks, solutions are achievable. If we have the will.”

SEPARATE NATIONS?

JONATHAN LA escaped from Vietnam in 1978, eventually making his way along with his parents and six brothers and sisters, to Westminster’s Little Saigon. A slight, highly articulate young man, La became an American citizen and worked his way up from dishwasher to waiter and eventually to maitre d’ at a restaurant in Los Angeles’ Chinatown. Other family members also took low-paying jobs in local businesses. They managed to save close to 50% of their combined incomes.

Four years ago, La’s family opened a tea and ginseng shop in Little Saigon. But to La, now 28, the success hasn’t been complete.

“You can feel and sense the tension,” he says. “We get hardly any business from Caucasians. We have isolated ourselves here. We want to reach and interact, but we don’t know how. We can’t just rely on ourselves alone forever. We feel so alone.”

Such separations between immigrants and natives have exacerbated fears that the many new immigrant enclaves may never be incorporated into the broader fabric of the community. Former Colorado Gov. Richard Lamm, a vociferous opponent of immigration, sees Latinos as already living in “linguistic ghettoes” that by the year 2000 could create an American version of apartheid, with Spanish-speakers inhabiting a permanently separate and unequal nation.

Similar views, albeit less drastic, are increasingly commonplace in Southern California. Richard Weinstein, dean of the UCLA School of Architecture and Urban Planning, believes that many of the region’s predominantly Latino newcomers have little motivation for assimilating into American life. “The problem you have now is a large number of people with an ethnic tradition or another culture, without the inclination to be part of American culture,” Weinstein maintains. “If you can do all your shopping and movies, (and) work in Spanish, there’s not the incentive to learn English and fit into the prevailing culture.”

Substitute Polish or Yiddish for Spanish and Weinstein could have been talking about earlier immigrants from Europe to the East Coast. Those waves of immigration were accompanied by identical concerns.

Traditionally, every incoming group has dreamed of returning “home.” Los Angeles City Councilman Michael Woo’s grandfather, for example, kept a packed camphor chest at his Los Angeles home, filled with clothes, shoes and other necessities for his eventual return to China. “He always thought about going back to China,” Woo recalled, with a slight smile, “but like most every other immigrant, he never went back.”

What’s different in the case of Southern California Latinos is the proximity of “home.” Many immigrants from Mexico can and do build lives on both sides of the border. But this pattern, believes Sergio Munoz, editor of La Opinion, the city’s dominant Spanish-language newspaper, is breaking down. Munoz traces this to both deteriorating economic conditions in Central America and, ironically, the increasing Latinization of regions such as Southern California.

“There’s a shift of attitudes even among the older people,” the Mexico-born-and-educated Munoz explains. “We know we will have numbers here so we are more comfortable. But we must make compromises to live here. We give up a relaxed life style we love in Mexico for better jobs here. The key for us is to make the transition to a better life, and that better life is here.”

Recent surveys reinforce Munoz’s assertion. A poll of foreign-born Latinos conducted earlier this year by the Tomas Rivera Center found that about 85% want to stay in the United States permanently.

And, researchers say, they are highly unlikely to remain in permanent “linguistic ghettos.” After 15 years in the United States, according to a report from the nonprofit Hispanic Policy Development Project, three out of four Latino immigrants speak English daily. Among their native-born offspring, adds the RAND report, more than 90% are fluent in English--and nearly 25% speak no Spanish. “Immigrants have a great incentive to learn English because of the huge economic advantages of doing so,” says Lewis H. Butler, president of California Tomorrow, a nonprofit research and public-policy advocacy group. Indeed, so great is the demand for English instruction that the Los Angeles Unified School District’s Evans adult school downtown offers classes until 2 a.m. twice a week.

The desire to integrate is clear even among the the most disenfranchised of immigrants. Jose Guadalupe Martinez Diaz came to California first in 1952 as a migrant worker and stayed on illegally. Now, under the amnesty program, he works walking horses at Santa Anita Race Track. As he learns English and reaches toward citizenship, Martinez also seeks to begin making his mark on the larger Los Angeles society as an active member of United Neighborhoods Organization, a community action group.

“My inspiration is to see the Hispanic community move ahead. I want to be a part of it,” says Martinez, a slight, leather-faced immigrant whose five children are all fluent English speakers. “I believe this is our time, our time to learn English, our time to gain power. I want to be a part of this city.”

To some, such talk might seem every bit as frightening as predictions of a burgeoning underclass or Lamm’s apartheid scenario. For in their rush to become a part of Southern California, the immigrants will also seek to change what we ourselves are. In organizations such as UNO and LA Action, a Latin-Asian coalition fighting the proposed county jail, they are fighting for their neighborhoods, their concept of Los Angeles. Unlike the model immigrants imagined by some, they will not simply “melt” into Los Angeles; they will transform it.

“I think Los Angeles will be moving toward something very different,” says Monterey Park City Councilwoman Judy Chu. “You accentuate your similarities and celebrate your differences and out of this comes something that works, that creates understanding, a unique culture. This is what a pluralistic society is all about.”

Amid the current Angst over immigration--and the tensions at the surface--Chu’s notion might seem somewhat overly optimistic, even fanciful. Yet one can see this new multicultural vision of Southern California, forged by immigration, coming into being. It is even happening in Monterey Park, one of the most racially divided cities in the region.

Certainly that’s the way it looks to Gene Thayer. As he has for more than three decades, Thayer attends the regular Kiwanis meeting in Monterey Park. But today, most of his fellow Kiwanians are Chinese, members of a previously all-Asian chapter that merged with Thayer’s old Monterey Park chapter in 1984. The merger, Thayer recalls, was a result of necessity, of adjusting to new realities.

“The Asians came but didn’t feel comfortable with our chapter,” the trim, white-haired Thayer says. “But slowly our members moved away. We were down to such small membership we could have lost our charter. We were on a downhill skid. It was merge or die.”

At first, things didn’t exactly go smoothly. Many Asians, he recalls, didn’t know the words to either the Pledge of Allegiance, which opens the Kiwanis meetings, or to “America the Beautiful.” They had to sing along by following sheets of the lyrics written out phonetically. But today, Thayer believes that the Monterey Park chapter is as strong as ever, although with a slight change in emphasis. In addition to its customary charitable activities, for instance, the group now sponsors a multicultural festival and an Asian youth project.

“In the beginning, let’s face it, it was awkward. They didn’t know the ropes; we didn’t know what to make of them,” Thayer admits. “But now this club is better than ever before. Our activities increase every year. We horseplay with each other like it’s totally natural. We are no longer strangers. We are neighbors.”

Southern California Immigration Origins/Numbers, 1988 (By Green Cards) CAMBODIA: 1,728 CANADA: 1,327 CHINA: 4,782 COLOMBIA: 573 CUBA: 441 DOM. REP.: 38 EL SALVADOR: 5,605 GUATEMALA: 2,391 GUYANA:103 HAITI: 73 HONG KONG: 1,398 INDIA: 2,123 IRAN: 6,298 IRELAND: 250 JAMAICA: 361 KOREA: 7,351 LAOS: 1,186 LEBANON: 993 MEXICO: 42,709 PAKISTAN: 500 PERU: 786 PHILIPPINES: 13,496 POLAND: 536 TAIWAN: 2,833 U.K.: 1,458 VIETNAM: 7,005 W. GERMANY: 549 OTHER: 15,375 Source: INS 1988 Statistical Yearbook. (The INS defines the Southern California region as Los Angeles, Long Beach, Anaheim, Santa Ana, San Diego, Riverside, San Bernardino, Oxnard, Ventura.) Increases, 1970-2000 1970: 984,549 1980: 2,164,673 1985: 2,764,000 1990: 3,364,000 1995: 3,914,000 2000: 4,464,000 Source: U.S. Census Bureau 1970, 1980; projections based on Southern California Assn. of Governments estimates. (The Census Bureau defines the Southern California region as Los Angeles, Orange, San Bernardino, Riverside, Imperial, and Ventura counties.)