COLUMN ONE : Changing the Face of South L.A. : As housing prices rise and gang violence persists, blacks are moving out. Latino immigrants are taking their place.

The transformation of South Los Angeles from a segregated black community to a Latino barrio can be both seen and heard at the intersection of Central Avenue and Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, two streets long synonymous with African-American Los Angeles.

Here, dance halls, theaters and shops catered in the 1940s and 1950s to a growing population of black migrants from the rural South and the overcrowded cities of the North. At the nearby Dunbar Hotel, jazz greats Billie Holiday and Duke Ellington held court, occasionally filling the Art Deco lobby with the sounds of an impromptu jam session.

Today, however, the glory days of Central Avenue are only a memory and the community moves to a distinctly Latin beat.

Instead of jazz, passers-by at Central and Martin Luther King Jr. hear the slow-tempo melodies of Mexican ranchera music drifting from the El Paraiso grocery. And in a sea of Latino-run appliance and furniture stores, only a handful of black-owned businesses survive.

One of those businesses is the two-chair barber shop of Andrew Brembry, 75, a Central Avenue entrepreneur since 1952. With each passing year, Brembry is doing business in an increasingly Spanish-speaking environment.

“The neighborhood’s completely changed,” Brembry said as he prepared a customer for a shave. “Of course, it’s time, you know. . . . Time moves on. Nothing stands still.”

Indeed, so many Latinos have settled in the neighborhood that in 1988 it set a nationwide record for the greatest number of successfully completed applications for the immigration amnesty program.

Perhaps nowhere in Southern California did Latino immigration in the 1980s have a greater impact than in black enclaves of South-Central Los Angeles, its neighboring communities of Athens and Willowbrook and the cities of Compton and Lynwood.

The 45-square-mile area has long been the heart and soul of the largest black community in the Western United States. Scarcely two generations ago large portions of the city were racially segregated either through property deeds or social barriers that kept blacks out of other neighborhoods. South Los Angeles was then one of the few places in the city where blacks could buy homes and operate businesses.

Now, rising property values and gang violence are leading many black families to abandon the neighborhoods where they were born and raised. In the process, South Los Angeles has become one of California’s fastest-growing Latino communities.

The change has been especially dramatic in South-Central Los Angeles, the area of the city bounded roughly by downtown, Crenshaw Boulevard, Imperial Highway and Alameda Street.

According to a recent study by a USC social scientist, the black population in South-Central Los Angeles declined an estimated 30% in the last decade.

By contrast, the Latino population in that area has increased an estimated 200% since 1980 and demographers predict the 1990 Census will show that Latinos have become the community’s majority ethnic group.

The Latino population is expected to grow another 214% by the year 2005, according to Focus 2000, a black political research organization. The black population, meanwhile, is expected to decline 23%.

Behind this transformation has been the arrival of 1 million Latino immigrants--the exact figure is uncertain--as the result of political conflict and economic instability in El Salvador, Guatemala and Mexico during the last decade.

In years past, many of these immigrants would have settled in established barrios such as East Los Angeles, Pico-Union and Pacoima. Rather than crowd into these neighborhoods and pay the increasingly high rents, some of the immigrants have become urban pioneers. They have moved into South Los Angeles, breaking the informal barriers that have divided the city ethnically for decades.

Often, they move to the black communities despite the racial prejudices of their friends and relatives.

Denis Anaya, a Salvadoran notary who opened an office next to Andrew Brembry’s barber shop last year, said his Latino friends couldn’t understand why he was moving to a black neighborhood which they associated with “gang banging” and drive-by shootings.

“My friends told me, ‘You’re crazy. How can you live there? They’ll kill you,” recalled Anaya, 31. Even now, he said, “a lot of my friends won’t visit me here.”

Ironically, Anaya said he moved to South-Central Los Angeles to escape the violent drug trade that operated just outside his office in the Central American neighborhood near MacArthur Park. His new neighborhood, he said, is more peaceful.

All along Central Avenue, and in communities like Green Meadows, Athens and Watts, the influx of thousands of Latino immigrants like Anaya has created racially mixed neighborhoods. Sometimes, the grandchildren of Southern sharecroppers live side by side with peasant and working-class families from Mexico and Central America.

On South Main Street and other major thoroughfares, storefront Latino evangelical churches have formed next to black Baptist churches. Soccer now rivals basketball and football as the sport of choice at South Park and other neighborhood playing fields.

Four South Los Angeles high schools that had overwhelmingly black student populations in 1980--Fremont, Jefferson, Jordan and Manual Arts--now have Latino majorities. The change is most dramatic at Fremont, where Latinos now constitute 70.4% of the student body, in contrast with only 3.9% in 1980.

In Watts, most Latinos left after the 1965 riots, a six-day upheaval that made the community an international symbol of black anger. Today, immigrant families have reestablished the Latino colony that Mexican railroad workers founded there at the turn of the century.

And, across the street from Brembry’s barber shop, Mexican salesmen now barter with customers at Cesar’s Place No. 2, a used-car lot. Next door, Anaya, the Salvadoran notary public, advertises assistance with “seguros de auto”-- car insurance.

Even some of Brembry’s customers are now Latinos.

“They sometimes come in and get a haircut,” Brembry said. “But the conversation is limited because they don’t speak much English. I should buy me a book so I can be able to speak Spanish.”

The arrival of the immigrants is only half of the demographic equation that is slowly transforming South Los Angeles. While the thousands of Guatemalans, Mexicans and Salvadorans settle in the community, middle- and working-class black families are moving to the Antelope Valley and suburban communities in Riverside and San Bernardino counties.

So many families are leaving, in fact, that workers at the South Central U-Haul Truck Rental are almost always short of vehicles. Each day, employees drive as far away as Las Vegas to retrieve enough trucks to meet the demand.

“I’ve been asking all these people, ‘Why are you moving?’ ” said assistant general manager Derrick Johnson. “And the most popular answer is, ‘It’s too crowded and it’s too crazy.’ ”

As the list of destinations at the truck rental office reveals, some blacks have returned to the Southern towns they left two generations ago: Sherman, Tex., Atlanta, Monroe, La.

Dr. James H. Johnson, a UCLA geographer who has studied “black flight” from South Los Angeles, said he believes the area has passed a historic turning point in its transition from a black enclave to a predominantly Latino community.

“I think parts of South-Central are already a (Latino) barrio,” Johnson said. “As the remaining older blacks die off, I don’t see younger blacks buying their houses and grabbing hold of these communities.”

Johnson and others point out that when the houses vacated by blacks are put up for sale, they are often filled by Latinos. Maceo Bunn Jr., a South-Central Los Angeles real-estate agent for 10 years, regularly takes out ads in La Opinion to promote property sales.

“There’s a lot of Spanish clientele buying homes now, more than I’ve ever seen,” Bunn said as he placed yellow banners on the porch of a home for sale on 51st Place. “The family that might be buying this house is Hispanic.”

Some Latinos have bought and refurbished properties on 107th Street, in the shadow of South-Central Los Angeles’ world-famous landmark--the Watts Towers.

Maria Garcia, 37, and her husband, a plastics-factory worker, bought two homes on the street in 1980. They paid $41,000 for the houses which, like the towers, were then dilapidated and in need of repair. Garcia said she watched helplessly as a gang of local thugs routinely assaulted the camera-toting tourists who visited the landmark.

Ten years later, the neighborhood has made a comeback--the towers are being refurbished and the thugs appear to have gone elsewhere. More Latino families have joined the Garcias on 107th Street and their homes are now worth about $100,000 apiece.

“We bought the houses with the idea of staying one year and then selling them so we could move someplace else,” Garcia said. “But now we’re already used to Watts.”

According to local real estate agents, the average price of a home in South-Central Los Angeles is about $150,000, more expensive than in suburban communities where many black families are resettling--but still below prices in East Los Angeles and Pico-Union.

With a loan from the Federal Housing Administration, a family can buy a home for as little as $5,000 down. To qualify, an immigrant family must show that at least one member is a legal resident. If two or three families pool their resources--as Latino immigrants in Los Angeles often do--a home can be within the reach of even the most humble Salvadoran garment worker or Guatemalan housekeeper.

The cultural transformation of South Los Angeles to a barrio has inevitably led to some tensions and created resentments among those who have lived there for generations.

Typically, older black residents will complain about their new neighbors crowding too many people into a single-family home, running car repair businesses in their driveways, and playing “that Mexican cowboy music” too loud on the weekends.

Teryl Watkins, 42, an organizer with the Watts Labor Community Action Committee, said she has heard complaints from her black neighbors about the Latino residents on her Willowbrook street, just a few blocks from Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center.

“Sometimes I have to close my window because when they have birthday parties, the mariachis get real loud,” Watkins said. “But if you think about it, it’s no louder than a boom box.”

Other black residents have a more ominous view of the Latino influx into their communities.

For the Rev. Charles Floyd, pastor of the Second Mt. Moriah Missionary Baptist Church in Lynwood, the influx of Latino homeowners into traditionally black communities is part of a plot to undermine the community’s political power.

Despite the Republican Party’s support for strict immigration laws, Floyd said he believes the Republicans have manipulated immigration into South-Central Los Angeles to dilute the area’s black voting strength, which traditionally is Democratic.

“When blacks lose out on home ownership in South-Central L.A., 99% of the time a Hispanic replaces them,” Floyd said. “This is definitely by design. You have to ask yourself, how is it that people can come across the border with a green card and in six months or so buy a house?”

There is also a growing belief in South Los Angeles that the influx of Latino immigrant workers contributes to unemployment among blacks, which now ranges from about 11% for adults to as high as 20% for youths in Los Angeles County.

South Los Angeles’ employment picture has changed dramatically since the 1940s and 1950s, when San Pedro shipyards and large industrial plants in southeast Los Angeles County attracted thousands of black workers. Many of the factories that once ringed South Los Angeles--including the Firestone Tire and the General Motors plants in South Gate--have closed over the last two decades.

Many blacks now compete against Latinos for jobs in the service sector and in the area’s many small industries where the pay is often at or near minimum wage.

The economic differences between blacks and Latino immigrant workers are clear at 83rd Street and Vermont Avenue, a curbside hiring site where about 25 Latinos compete with about 25 blacks for work.

The blacks are mostly journeymen painters, while the Latinos are day laborers who will also accept work in just about any field, including construction and gardening. The black painters say they will only accept wages of $80 to $125 per day. For the Latinos, however, $40 per day is an acceptable daily wage.

“The Spanish people are out there and they’re willing to go for less and less money,” said one 36-year-old black worker. “There’s two totally different cultures. That’s where the problems start.”

Doreen Clark, a 31-year-old worker at a South-Central Los Angeles park, encountered mild resentment of Latinos among black parents when she organized both groups to form a child-care and recreation program. The trouble began shortly after she invited Latino parents to a “pizza party” to raise funds.

“The blacks were upset with me,” Clark recalled. “They said, ‘You care more about the white people.’ I said, ‘What white people? There’s no white people around here.’ And they said, ‘Well . . . the Mexicans.’ ”

Some Latino residents also have apprehensions about their black neighbors. Many fear they could become targets of crime.

This fear seems strongest among Latinos who have settled into what were once the most segregated black neighborhoods. The newest residents of the Jordan Downs housing project, which was 98% black in 1980, include a small group of Kanjobal Indian families from Guatemala.

Maria and Tomas, the parents of one Kanjobal family of nine who asked that their last names not be published, said they rarely set foot outside of their apartment, especially at night.

“We’re afraid to go outside because there’s a lot of bad people out there,” Tomas said in halting Spanish. His native tongue is Kanjobal, a Guatemalan Indian language.

Sometimes, Maria ventures outside her apartment to take in the sun on the front lawn. She casts an almost surreal image among the stark rectangular buildings as she wraps a multicolored shawl, or reboso, across her back to carry her infant son in the style of Guatemalan peasants.

Tomas’ fears of gang violence apparently have some foundation. At the Los Angeles Police Department’s 77th Street station, in the heart of South-Central Los Angeles, officers have reported an alarming increase in robberies in recent months. They said the robberies are often carried out by black gang members against Spanish-speaking immigrants.

“Because they don’t speak the language, the gangs mark them for street robberies,” said Sgt. Terri Tatreau of 77th Street’s anti-gang unit. “They’re easy victims for the black gang members. A lot of times they’re fearful to come forward and report crimes.”

Police emphasize that the crimes do not appear to be racially motivated. In fact, gang outreach workers say that Latinos have begun to join black gangs in recent years.

According to Charles Norman of Community Youth Gang Services, about 1,000 of the 35,000 members of the Crips and Bloods gangs are now Latinos.

The integrated street gangs appear to be the exception, rather than the rule, in South Los Angeles. Although blacks and Latinos share the same streets, parks and bus stops, language and cultural differences usually keep the two groups in separate worlds.

This is clear at South Park, in the heart of South-Central Los Angeles on 51st Street, a neighborhood split almost evenly between blacks and Latinos.

South Park’s preschool is integrated, as are most activities involving young children. The partial lineup of one Little League baseball team at the park reveals the ethnic mix: Salcedo, Jones, Williams, Corona, McCovey and Chavez.

On the other hand, most black and Latino teen-agers and adults at South Park participate in separate activities.

Every afternoon, while Latino immigrant men energetically play soccer outside, about 30 black men--the Senior Men’s Club--gather in a smoke-filled room to play dominoes, with players shouting and slamming game pieces on the tables.

“It really isn’t a serious problem, but there is a little separation,” acknowledged Roger E. King, the park’s director. “The Mexican people come out and play soccer, the blacks play football. When there’s basketball, the Mexicans play inside the gym and the blacks play outside. It’s no written law or agreement, it just happens that way.”

Still, there are days when, to hear King describe it, something magical occurs and the two groups decide to play together.

“It depends on the weather, the kind of day it is, a lot of things,” he said. “Sometimes there will be five or six blacks and five or six Mexicans and they’ll say, ‘Hey, let’s pick teams.’ ”

South Park is also “neutral ground” between the turf of several gangs. According to gang outreach workers and neighbors, Latino gangs claim some of the streets to the north and west of the park, while blacks claim streets to the south and east.

Although the gangs claim overlapping territories, gang confrontations at South Park and other South Los Angeles gathering spots are rarely between blacks and Latinos.

“There could be a thousand Hispanics out there,” said one worker as he stood at the edge of South Park’s baseball field, “and the black gang members wouldn’t care.”

In recent years, some South Los Angeles community groups have succeeded in bridging at least some of the gaps between blacks and Latinos.

Alice Harris, 55, a community activist known to all of Watts as “Sweet Alice,” said she and other parents, both black and Latino, founded Parents of Watts in 1983, with the goal of bringing together the two groups.

Mexican immigrants founded Watts at the turn of the century, and a few decades later it became an ethnically mixed community with the entry of Southern whites and European immigrants. The Mexicans, mostly railroad workers, called their slice of Watts, “La Colonia.” When blacks arrived in the 1940s, most of the whites left. The Latino population began to leave in large numbers after the 1965 riot.

With the riot, which left 34 people dead, Watts claimed an important page in black history. Called an “insurrection” by many local residents, the riot brought the harsh conditions in Watts and other black ghettos to the attention of local and national political leaders.

A decade later, the Latinos began to return to Watts, sparking tensions between black and Latino youths, Harris said. Although Watts still has its share of problems with drug and gang-related violence, Harris said the racial tensions between the two groups have diminished.

The first order of business for Parents of Watts was to organize Spanish classes for the black residents, English classes for the Latino residents, and workshops where both groups could learn about each other’s cultures.

“I wanted to help people but I couldn’t communicate with both races,” Harris, an Alabama native, said in a lilting Southern accent. “You can’t help one without the other. We have to learn to speak to one another.”

Harris said she and other parents learned how even the most subtle cultural differences can contribute to misunderstanding between the two groups.

“A Hispanic child is taught to look away from an adult, as a sign of respect,” Harris said. “But if a black child looks away from you it’s a sign of disrespect. A black child is taught to look you in the eye. If a Hispanic child looks you in the eye, it means he’s getting ready to hit you.”

At the intersection of Central Avenue and Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, Latino and black merchants are also learning to live with one another.

For the time being, they have no other choice--even though the demographic trends clearly favor the Latinos, both blacks and Latinos agree the neighborhood will be racially mixed for years to come.

The new Latino merchants have every reason to stay. On Central Avenue, they have found a budding entrepreneur’s paradise. Rents are relatively low, the constant influx of Latinos makes for an expanding market, and, for now at least, there is less competition than in East Los Angeles and other Latino barrios.

Modesto Milan, a 19-year-old graduate of Jefferson High School, bought his business, the El Paraiso grocery, with $6,500 he saved last year from after-school and summer jobs.

As he stood in front of his store, Milan picked out other Latino merchants who have recently joined him on Central Avenue: a carpet manufacturer, a man hawking used appliances and a Guatemalan couple selling hand-made furniture.

“We’re practically expropriating this place from the blacks,” he concluded.

But the blacks don’t plan on just calling it quits either. A block away from Milan’s grocery store, members of the Masjid Felix Bilal, an African-American mosque, are making plans to expand their facility.

Abdul Karim Hasan, the imam, or prayer leader of the mosque, unveiled plans for a new mosque building, an impressive structure with two slender minarets and a large dome. On clear days, the imam said, the minarets will be visible for miles along Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard.

Hasan said he expects the new mosque to contribute to a renaissance of the area. “When we put this structure here, the whole community is going to go up,” he said.

The imam said he is aware of the demographic trends in the neighborhood around the mosque. But, he said, “We’re not going to leave. This is our home, this is our community and with the help of God, we’re going to stay.

“People are always moving,” he continued. “It’s just a perpetual thing. We can live with Mexican-Americans. We can live with anybody.”

A GROWING LATINO COMMUNITY A 45-square-mile area of South Los Angeles has long been the heart and soul of the largest black community in the Western United States. But rising property values and gang violence are leading many black families to abandon the neighborhoods where they were born and raised. In the process, South Los Angeles has become one of California’s fastest-growing Latino communities.

BLACK AND LATINO SCHOOL ENROLLMENT The enrollment at four South Los Angeles high schools dramatically illustrates the population shift. The schools--Fremont, Jefferson, Jordan and Manual Arts--had overwhelmingly black student populations in 1980, but now have Latino majorities.

% BLACKS % LATINOS SCHOOL Fall 1980 / 1988 Fall 1980 / 1988 1. Manual Arts 72.3 to 43.8 27.0 to 55.3 2. Jefferson 68.3 to 13.8 31.4 to 85.3 3. Fremont 96.0 to 29.2 3.9 to 70.4 4. Jordan 93.6 to 37.0 6.3 to 62.1