Cerritos Finds Tolerance Amid Its Ethnic Diversity

By ASHLEY DUNN

April 10, 1990 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

It first came to Alex Beanum during his campaign for the Cerritos City Council 12 years ago, when he figured he knocked on at least half the doors in this quiet enclave of stucco tract homes.

As he trudged through neighborhoods that looked like a bland, cookie-cutter version of middle-class suburbia, it suddenly hit him: whoosh . . . the smell of curry. Next house: the sizzling aroma of soy sauce and peanut oil. A few doors down: a pungent cloud of spices whose origin completely stumped him.

“I’d be standing at the door and then, bang!” said Beanum, who won the election and served eight years as a councilman. “You could smell the cultures.”

What Beanum detected with his nose were the first whiffs of a striking ethnic migration that even today is difficult to perceive with eyes alone in this sedate bedroom community.

Cerritos, according to a 1988 study by two Cal State Northridge geography professors, is the most “ethnically diverse” city in the nation, beating such gateways of immigration as Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York City. San Francisco finished fourth; Los Angeles and New York didn’t even make the top 30.

The study by James P. Allen and Eugene Turner was based on 1980 census information on 13 ethnic groups in more than 2,900 communities around the nation.

“I think, like most people, we expected the larger cities like Chicago, New York and Los Angeles to come out on top,” Allen said. “I was quite amazed because I didn’t know anything about Cerritos.”

While much has changed in the decade since the last census, Cerritos has only solidified its claim to be on the exclusive list of diverse communities.

According to data collected by the USC Population Research Laboratory, non-Hispanic whites had become a minority in Cerritos by 1986. Since then, their numbers have dwindled even further. They now constitute just a third of the population, followed by Latinos at 16%, Filipinos 15%, Koreans 13%, blacks 12% and Chinese 7%, according to an estimate based on the USC study.

For all its diversity, the city has largely managed to achieve what has been elusive for many Southern California communities: a tolerant coexistence of cultures.

Beanum, a black, and Daniel K. Wong, a Chinese-American, have both served as mayor. Perry N. Barit, an architect who came to the United States from the Philippines 20 years ago, is now head of the city’s Planning Commission.

The ABC School District Board of Education, which serves Cerritos, currently has one Asian and one Latino among its seven members. In the last 10 years, two blacks and two Latinos also have served on the board.

The real test of the city’s diversity lies in its neighborhoods. On Beanum’s small cul-de-sac, he counts whites, Filipinos, blacks, East Indians, Chinese and Koreans as neighbors.

Many churches now have services in two or three languages and in the schools it is not interracial strife, but interracial dating that has become a vexing problem for parents and administrators.

Cerritos Mayor Diana Needham said one reason she believes the city has remained peaceful is the rigid land-use plan the City Council drafted nearly 25 years ago. The council envisioned an affluent, progressive and tightly zoned community. That vision remains intact today.

Its development into a suburban community in the late 1960s coincided with the enactment of federal anti-discrimination laws, a burgeoning ethnic middle class, and a booming demand for affordable housing.

The city, which is still best remembered for the disastrous 1986 Aeromexico airliner crash that killed 82 people, is now known as an expensive pocket of suburban living in the sprawling urban stew of Los Angeles County.

“While we are one of the most diverse ethnically, we are one of the most homogenous economically,” Needham said. “We have no poor areas, no extremely rich areas. That’s the key.”

Wong, the former mayor and now city councilman, said the pursuit of the good life in Cerritos has a well-scrubbed uniformity to it, driven by the upper-middle-class mentality that attracted people to the city in the first place. “It’s a peaceful, harmonious bedroom community,” he said. “That’s what everyone came here for and that’s how they want it to stay.”

Life in America’s most diverse city, however, is still a far cry from the dream of the melting pot. It is more like a mosaic, residents say, of separate parts laid next to each other, divided by the city’s very diversity of languages and cultures.

One resident said she has never spoken with her Korean neighbors. “I don’t know them,” she said. “I don’t even know if they speak English.”

At St. John’s Lutheran Church, Pastor Donald Koepke tells of how six white families left the church after a Chinese-language service was started four years ago. “They said: ‘This is no longer my community and now they’re taking away my church,’ ” Koepke recalled. “I agonize over that.”

Even Beanum, a hulking, jovial man who grew up in a black community near Detroit and remembers the days of segregation well, said life in Cerritos can be as socially separate as when he was growing up.

“Is it peaceful? Yes. Is it tolerant? Yes. But it is no paradise,” he said.

Drive down the four-lane thoroughfare of 195th Street, past the acres of soft beige tract homes and neighborhoods surrounded by cinder block walls. The city looks like any master-planned community where people wave to each other occasionally, but spend most of their time at work or inside with their families.

Turn onto Gridley Road and head for the city’s main commercial center, where instead of bustling ethnic shops as in Koreatown or Chinatown, flat tracts of homes are dwarfed by the Los Cerritos Mall and the rows of car dealers at the Cerritos Auto Square.

In 30 years, the city has gone through a whirlwind transformation, from a quiet backwater dairy town with more cows than people to a modern suburban community where nearly every piece of land has been covered with homes or shopping centers.

As late as the mid-1960s, there was nothing here but thousands of acres of pastureland. The city was called Dairy Valley--home to one of the greatest milk-producing industries in the world with more than 100,000 cows and just 3,500 people spread over the broad, open flood plain.

The city incorporated in 1956 in an effort to protect itself from the spreading urbanization of Los Angeles. The dairymen feared expansion by the neighboring city of Artesia, which they believed was poised to zone the dairies out of existence in favor of suburban development.

In a hastily arranged meeting, the dairymen gathered in the tiny offices of the Central Milk Producers and began their push for cityhood. The incorporation was approved in 1956 by a vote of 441 to 391.

By 1967, the city had become ringed by suburbs and the dairymen eventually agreed to sell their land to developers hungry for one of the last major tracts of land in the metropolitan area. The city of Dairy Valley took the upscale name of Cerritos, or Little Hills in Spanish.

It changed in the space of just a few years from an enclave of no growth to one of the fastest growing cities in the state.

The first residents to move in were mostly white, but Beanum said a smattering of minorities were attracted to this new city rising out of the open fields.

The homes were new, the prices reasonable and the place itself was so new that he figured there would be no rules, no ghetto boundaries, no tradition of bigotry. “It was like a clean slate,” said Beanum, who bought a six-bedroom home for $34,000. “A breath of fresh air that smelled like a cow.”

Beanum said the first waves of people to move in all seemed to be the same: They were young, family oriented and uniformly middle class in their aspirations.

He said that when he moved in there was an automatic bond as families talked about their children’s schooling or the latest fads in home improvement. “It was great to come out here. We were all in the same boat together,” he recalled. “You didn’t care what color your neighbors were. The only thing you worried about was whether they were getting their lawn in fast.”

Beanum, whose wife is white, said that as their children grew older and graduated from high school, the bond between people began to loosen. With the average home price pushing $300,000 now, more and more of the old-timers are leaving.

The largest influx of minorities has come in just the last decade, boosted by the migration of Asians, whose population has nearly doubled.

Karim Mulji, a dapper, soft-spoken jeweler from Pakistan, moved to Cerritos three years ago, like many other Asians, because of its highly reputed school system and lack of crime. The migration of Asians to Cerritos, however, has not been nearly as smooth as the first movement of minorities into the city.

The numbers have been far larger and the barriers of language and customs more difficult to overcome.

It is a frustrating phenomenon that Koepke of St. John’s has been grappling with for the last four years.

Koepke, an energetic, gray-haired pastor who marched with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma, Ala., started a Chinese-language service in 1986 because of his belief that the church should reflect its community. His goal was to forge a single religious family from two disparate cultures.

The task, however, has been more daunting than he imagined. “The challenge is to develop bridges, but we are not always creative enough to bridge the cultural gap,” he said. “We have two languages, but not one congregation.”

In the parking lot on Sunday mornings, churchgoers at the early morning English-language service file out to their cars as the 40 or so people who attend the Chinese-language service arrive for their turn in the chapel with Koepke’s co-pastor, Donald Wu.

The Chinese and English groups meet several times a year for summer picnics and joint services, but Koepke said the dream of one religious family remains distant.

Language is only part of the problem. Even Koepke is unsure if two groups that meet separately, pray separately and may even have different visions of God, can be forged into a single family.

Others share Koepke’s frustration in trying to bridge the gap between cultures.

Planning Commission Chairman Barit said he is constantly trying to get Asian and white friends to mix at city or Chamber of Commerce function. But inevitably, he sees the different groups of people gravitate toward their own.

“If you’re talking about voluntary interaction, there isn’t much,” he said. “There is still the feeling that white is white and Asian is Asian.”

Barit said breaking down barriers has only become harder because of the large influx of Asians. When everyone was a newcomer 20 years ago, there were few conflicts. Today, Barit said, many of those who moved to Cerritos years ago feel the city is being overwhelmed.

“I’m feeling the resentment,” he said. “We are not trying to establish an Asian community, we are trying to establish an all-American community. It’s just becoming Asian because we can’t help it.”

In this year’s City Council election, Korean candidate Charles J. Kim raised almost twice as much money as the other 12 contenders combined. Much of the funding for his campaign came from supporters outside of Cerritos.

If there is one spot in the city where at least part of the dream of a melting pot has been achieved, it is in the schools.

Mako Nagasawa, a senior at Whitney High School, said one reason for the lack of conflict is that no one group has become dominant, unlike Monterey Park, where the conflict between longtime residents and the large population of Chinese newcomers has been a constant sore point.

Although Asians make up more than a third of Cerritos’ population, the number of Chinese, Filipinos, Koreans, East Indians, Japanese and Vietnamese are small by themselves.

“I don’t feel like part of the majority,” Nagasawa said. “At most schools, Asians are Asians. But here there are so many different Asians.”

His best friend is Chinese and his girlfriend is Korean, he said. “People expect you to mix here,” he said. “That’s the tradition.”

Loc Ta, a senior at Cerritos High School, said it’s hard not to meet students from other cultures because there are so many different ones on campus. “There are no boundaries . . . for students, that is. You have to keep your mind open because you have no choice here,” said Ta, who came to the United States from Vietnam when he was 3.

Ironically, a vexing problem that school administrators have had to deal with is interracial dating. “I just spent three hours on that today,” said Norman Y. Fujimoto, assistant principal at Cerritos High School, after a grueling counseling session.

The students get along fine; it’s the parents that are the problem, he said. “It all goes back to the parents, who are very much Korean, Vietnamese or whatever,” he said.

Ta said most of his friends have learned to adapt to their parents’ prejudices. “I was going out with an Irish girl last year,” he said. “I just didn’t tell my mom.”

Eddy Luh, who graduated from Whitney High School, said it was a rude awakening when he left four years ago to attend Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y.

Luh, now a senior at Cornell, said it was the first time he felt the sting of being different. There was nothing dramatic, just small things, like feeling unwelcome in a bar or uncomfortable at not seeing other Asians on the street.

After four years in college, Luh said, he has two groups of friends: one mainly white and another mainly Chinese. He has come to accept it as a fact of life that the two groups rarely mix.

“When I left Whitney, I had a false idea of how the world is,” he said. “When you see that it isn’t that way, you steer off your line a little bit this way and then a little bit that way.

“The idea that Whitney gave of racial mixing is the idea I’ve been trying to stay on,” he said. “But that is the ideal you will never achieve again.”

CERRITOS: A STATISTICAL PROFILE ETHNIC DISTRIBUTION OF POPULATION

A breakdown in percentages of the population mix over the years in Cerritos illustrates the city’s movement toward ethnic diversity.

GROUP % 1980 % 1986 % 1990* Non-Hispanic Whites 55.2 42.0 32.8 Filipino 8.8 12.8 15.7 Korean 4.1 9.4 13.1 Black 8.0 10.4 12.1 Mexican 7.8 8.4 8.9 Other Sp. Origin 5.2 6.1 6.7 Chinese 3.5 5.3 6.5 Other Asian 2.7 2.5 2.4 Vietnamese 0.3 0.7 1.0 Japanese 3.8 2.0 .6 Amer. Indian 0.6 0.4 .3 All Other .7 NA NA

Sources: USC Population Research Laboratory data

*Projected figures: From a linear extrapolation of 1986 USC population estimates.

An analysis by the Cal State Northridge Geography Department of 1980 census information on 13 ethnic groups in 2,900 places with populations larger than 10,000 found Cerritos to be the most ethnically diverse urban place in the United States. Below, the top fifteen areas in this study , all California locations:

1) Cerritos

2) Milpitas

3) Daly City

4) San Francisco

5) Hawthorne

6) So. San Francisco

7) Marina

8) Culver City

9) West Carson

10) Alondra Park

11) Newark

12) Union City

13) Albany

14) Walnut

15) Hayward

The Cal State Northridge study also named the 10 most ethnically diverse counties in the United States, based on an analysis of 1980 census information on 14 ethnic groups in 3,137 counties with populations larger than 10,000:

1) San Francisco, CA

2) San Mateo, CA

3) Alameda, CA

4) Santa Clara, CA

5) Honolulu, HI

6) Los Angeles, CA

7) Hudson, NJ

8) Manhattan, NY

9) Solano, CA

10) Contra Costa, CA

CERRITOS FACTS AND FIGURES

Area: 8.9 square miles.