The New Face of L.A. : Is This City Becoming a Universopolis of a Basin of Babel?

THERE ARE FEW PERIODS IN the day, in many Los Angeles office complexes, more arresting than the one between five and seven in the evening. At five, the white-collar workers can be seen piling out of elevators and striding through air-conditioned lobbies, headed for parking lot, traffic jam and home. For a time, there is silence, with only spasms of desultory banter from the security guards to punctuate the stillness. Then, with a clatter, there is the sound of Spanish and of pails of sloshing water. It is the cleaning staff arriving. The workers call each other mi amor and mi cielo --”my love, my sky”--and talk about children who make them proud, husbands who’ve let them down, their aching feet and their hopes for the future.

Floor by floor, they make their way through the suites of offices, methodically emptying waste baskets full of crumpled faxes, Post-It notes and computer printouts; sluicing down tiled bathroom floors and vacuuming cushiony carpets, the imprint of their sensible shoes marking surfaces where, during the course of the day, only Gucci loafers, Maud Frizon pumps and the other fashionable footwear that can be had at Nordstrom or the Beverly Center shops have gone before. The change the maids effect is more than sartorial. It is only during these hours that a cigarette is smoked in a Los Angeles office building: The practice is officially banned by an L.A. County ordinance, but in the cleaning ladies’ L.A. County, everyone smokes.

Most of the women are from Mexico, and in a sense they represent the most familiar intersection of First World and Third World L.A. What is new is the arrival of people in great numbers from practically all nations and ethnic groups in the world, which has created a much more complex merging of cultures, a fusion unique in the world. What is emerging in Los Angeles, alongside the old historical drama of the Anglo and Mexican Southwest, is a Babel. If the current surveys of U.S. high school students are to be believed, the 82 languages now being spoken in the Los Angeles Unified School District represent many more nations than most American kids have ever heard of.

Californians have always known that Mexicans wanted to come north, even if the southern border was something of an abstraction to Washington policy makers. But, as people have now discovered, it was not only Mexicans who wanted to come to Southern California. During the postwar period, with everyone’s attention seemingly focused on the ever-increasing levels of prosperity the country was experiencing, the Third World seemed hardly relevant. However, in 1965, the Immigration Reform Act, which passed into law virtually unnoticed by most Americans, began to change all that. The bill would not, its supporters repeated over and over again, lead to any profound changes in the racial or ethnic makeup of the United States. True, the new law eliminated restrictive nation-by-nation quotas and removed bars to immigration from Asia, but in doing so, the U.S. Congress was, in the words of sociologist Nathan Glazer, “giving itself the moral satisfaction of passing a non-discriminatory immigration act that it expected would in no substantial way change the sources or volume of American immigration.”

And yet, had Americans been paying attention, they would have noticed that 1965 was just about the time the Third World began to move at a kind of fast-forward pace. In the early 1960s, populations began to increase vertiginously. At the same time, the Green Revolution in agriculture was transforming the way farming was done. As harvests increased, the need for farm laborers decreased, and in Mexico, hundreds of thousands of farm workers suddenly found themselves without jobs. This pattern was repeated all over the Third World. The same period marked the first great postwar expansion of investment into developing countries. New patterns of employment and mobility shattered the traditional order in country after country.

What the 1965 law did was make the United States in general, and Los Angeles and New York in particular, accessible to people who, a few years before, were probably all but unconcerned with America’s existence. Within 25 years, the demographics of immigration to the United States were completely transformed. Instead of nine out of 10 immigrants coming from Europe, nine out of 10 come from Latin America or Asia. Nowhere was the impact of this immigration more profound than in California. The minority status that whites suddenly found themselves confronted with, and which, if the demographers were right, the country as a whole would face sometime in the 21st Century, was only one reflection of this larger global transformation. Even Japan, with its fantasies of racial purity, now has immigrants from Asia’s Third World.

Many native Angelenos still prefer to believe that the new immigration is just a rerun of the European immigration of 1900. And some might agree with Mexican writer Carlos Monsivais, who calls L.A. “the capital of the Mexican dream.” But now, in Los Angeles, every dream crowds in on every other dream, and every claim impinges, sometimes fatally, on every other claim. What is a Korean shopkeeper to make of the myth of Southern California as part of the Aztec homeland of Aztlan, of a term like La Raza ? What is a Salvadoran refugee to think as he washes dishes in an Israeli Jewish-cuisine restaurant in Sherman Oaks (there are said to be at least 100,000 Israeli immigrants, many of them illegal, in the Valley)? What complicated emotions are felt by an American black from South Central as he drives past the cluster of Ethiopian restaurants on one short stretch along Fairfax Avenue? The ethnic noise is deafening, and if the Anglo center is not holding, which of course it isn’t, then neither is the idea of L.A. as the capital of what some exuberant activists call Mexamerica.

NO ONE, NOT EVEN THE MOST DISENCHANTED OBSERVERS OF the Southern California pageant, had predicted the Babel that Los Angeles increasingly resembles. At least the Chamber of Commerce is trying to be inclusive when it pronounces that L.A. is a mosaic. In contrast, many Angelenos have only one group in mind when they embrace the Southland’s new diversity: Latinos. There’s a good reason for this. Los Angeles, founded as a Mexican pueblo, looks to be on the verge of returning to those colonial origins. Each day, as more and more Mexicans move into the city, transforming neighborhoods, even poor neighborhoods like Watts, into barrios of Jalisco, colonias of Sonora, Spanish-speaking and even Nahuatl-speaking cities within cities, more and more Angelenos feel themselves under siege. “Fear and Loathing in the Los Angeles Melting Pot” was the way one article in this magazine summed up the situation, and the headline was more than just an editor’s fancy. It was as if the new immigration signaled far more than an influx of new people. Old ghosts are being reawakened as L.A.’s Mexican past, thought to be dormant for so long, rears up like a monster in a horror film.

This panic about Mexican immigration is often hard to distinguish from the more generalized fear of aliens that’s at play. Depending on where you live in the L.A. Basin, if you are Anglo or black, your particular bete noire might be, variously, the local Korean merchant in Watts, Salvadoran refugees camped out in the brush in the canyons of Beverly Hills, Pakistani men playing cricket in Balboa Park in the Valley or Chinese shopping-mall owners in Alhambra. For all of that, however, it is Mexico that is at the heart of things.

Howard Ezell, former Western regional commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, warned in a speech several years ago that “we can’t take in all the world’s needy,” adding that “if America doesn’t want to do something to protect her borders, we will become a Third World country.” It was perfectly clear that the Third World he was referring to was not that of the Hong Kong Chinese, many of whom were bringing not only their families but their money to Los Angeles, or of Koreans with their professional training--many of the shopkeepers were teachers or pharmacists or even doctors back home--and their access to capital through their system of family-underwritten money-lending called kye. Nor was Ezell talking about the Filipino nurses, so avidly recruited by L.A.-area hospitals, let alone the Iranian Jews who, Angelenos would tell you, are buying up Beverly Hills a square block at a time. A statement such as Ezell’s, like countless others that echo his nativist anxieties, patently concerns a Third World that begins south of the border at San Diego. It seems to many Angelenos, most of whom are not the racist ogres immigration-rights activists like to portray, as if Los Angeles is melting into Mexico, the international border no longer providing the country with even the most nominal integrity. To many people in Southern California, it appears more and more difficult to know just where Mexico now ends and the United States begins.

Under the circumstances, is it any surprise that even more sober Mexican-American politicians in Los Angeles increasingly couch what are entirely conventional ambitions in the giddy rhetoric of return and reconquest? “The legacy of Los Angeles left by its founding fathers and mothers, Spanish, Indian, Mexican,” State Sen. Art Torres declared, “is now being reclaimed by a new generation of leaders. . . . Our modern metropolis is returning to the enduring Pueblo de Los Angeles of years past.” The fact that Torres’ rosy evocations of 18th-Century L.A. are not much closer to historical accuracy than Helen Hunt Jackson’s portrait of a colonial Arcadia in “Ramona” is beside the point. What matters is that, from the Mexican-American point of view, the tables are finally turning.

With the exception of Canada and the Caribbean, so many immigrants to America have never before come from so nearby. It is not just a matter of a Latino immigrant in L.A. being able to live without speaking English. That, after all, is true in Koreatown as well. But L.A. never succeeded in disguising its Latino nature in the first place. In L.A. even the most anodyne sight can awaken the ghosts of Mexican Southern California. For instance, there is the almost never remarked-upon fact that something like half of L.A.’s streets and cities have Spanish names, sometimes even Spanish versions of names, such as Santa Monica or Santa Barbara, that have perfectly serviceable English equivalents. It is impossible, even at the farthest Anglo corners of the Westside or the Valley, to move half a mile before encountering some resonant trace of the Southland’s Latino core.

There is something problematic, after all, about living on a boulevard called La Cienega, Sepulveda or Pico, or shopping on streets called Rodeo, San Vicente and Santa Monica, or even having voted for Ronald Reagan, whose country estate is called Rancho del Cielo and is located in Santa Barbara, while still believing that all this is just a rare of verbal fluff, a holdover from the region’s previous incarnation.

Mexican Southern California may indeed have receded as the Anglo migrants poured in, but it no more disappeared than the shoreline does when the waves wash over it at high tide. Throughout history, whites in Southern California could never ignore for very long that, however much they despised the nonwhite workers beneath them, for cheap labor they would have to turn to Asia or Mexico.

Then, as now, nonwhites were willing to work harder, and at lower rates of pay, than even the small number of their European-immigrant counterparts who had made their way to Los Angeles. And when the Asian work force was cut off by immigration restrictions on first Chinese and then Japanese laborers, California looked to Mexico. The completion, in 1885, of a railroad grid that linked all of Mexico with Los Angeles ensured that workers could be brought north easily and cheaply. By 1916, six trainloads a week were arriving from the border at Laredo, and it is anyone’s guess how many more Mexicans simply walked across the border from Baja California and headed north, just as their descendants do. If, today, Los Angeles would stop functioning were the immigrants from south of the border not on hand to do the dirty work, the same was true in 1919 and 1946. “This town,” said one journalist, “runs on brown wheels.”

Now, even the doomsayers who dream of moving away from Los Angeles toward some racially purer spot like Washington state or northern San Diego minding their own idyllic business and a nanosecond later were confronting the spectacle of vast stretches of their hometown having been taken over by foreigners, either from Mexico, or from other places so exotic that, except in the context of war--the way most Americans learned where Vietnam was--they were all but completely unknown.

The official line is no better. Nowhere in the final “L.A. 2000” report, which came out last year, do the authors attempt to explain why the city is experiencing a new wave of immigration. L.A.’s greatness is stipulated, and that, it seems, is reason enough. It is all very well to use the metaphor of a “magnet city,” but L.A.’s boosters have not been able to avoid being trapped by the image. For them, the city’s appeal is as solid a fact as electromagnetism, and by now that view is so firmly entrenched that it is all but useless to point out that immigration is by no means so neat a phenomenon.

But L.A. wants images, not facts. “Think of Los Angeles as mosaic,” the authors of the “L.A. 2000” report advise, “with every color distinct, vibrant and essential to the whole. Native American, Mexican, African-American, Japanese, Israeli, Chinese, Tongan, Indian, German, Irish, Armenian, Ethiopian, Swedish, Korean, Samoan, Guatemalan, Russian, Arab, Persian, French, Cuban, Italian, Fijian, Australian, Russian, Honduran, Scottish, Hungarian, Danish, Malaysian, Filipino, English, Turkish are just some of the more than 100 cultural and ethnic backgrounds that exist together in Los Angeles. Each of these groups makes its own special contribution to the rich mix that is creating a new heritage for the metropolitan area. Each brings its own ethos, arts, ideas and skills to a community that welcomes and encourages diversity and grows stronger by taking the best from it. They respect each other as mutual partners.”

This is all very well as far as it goes, but it never poses the essential question of how this mosaic came into being. As far as L.A.’s boosters are concerned, the logic is clear enough: L.A. is great, L.A. is now full of newcomers, therefore the newcomers must be great. To suppose otherwise would mean imagining a world in which things in the future were less good than they had been in the past, and this is generally considered the view of racists and malcontents, not fully vested Californians.

What is breathtaking about all this is less the Pollyannaish confidence--that has always been L.A.’s stock in trade, and given the city’s astonishing success, this is hardly surprising--than an adamant elision of all historical processes from whatever image the present throws up. The most the authors of the “L.A. 2000” report are willing to concede is that the new immigrants differ somewhat from their predecessors in that the “melting pot” conception of assimilation no longer works in an era when the new arrivals are bringing with them “profoundly dissimilar languages, religions, folkways and arts, and a deeply ingrained pride in maintaining their cultural identity.”

What is missing, of course, is any acknowledgment that these profound dissimilarities might pose any impediment at all to harmonious relations among all these disparate groups. On the face of things, this appears puzzling. Groups whose ideas are at variance, as the report somewhat quaintly allows, tend to go for one another’s throats when they come into conflict.

It is at least possible that if people in Los Angeles had a clearer idea of who the various groups arriving in their midst really were, they would be more aware of the risk. There are moments when such worries surface--say, at the time of the murder of Palestinian activist Alex Odeh or the controversy over Salman Rushdie’s “Satanic Verses”--but such moments are rare. They run counter to a century of individualizing, anti-historical feeling and thought. Even those who dislike the new immigrants tend to dislike them on racist grounds (“they’re not white”) or on xenophobic ones (“they’re foreigners; they don’t speak English”) without differentiating much among them. They are all newcomers.

As for corporate Los Angeles, it remains persuaded that as long as there is money to be made, people will accommodate one another. All that is really required is that the region’s economic growth continue unperturbed and that people learn to pay a certain lip service to one another’s particular folkways and habits.

“What’s the problem?” a securities analyst asked me querulously as I pressed him about the contradictions that the new immigration seemed to be opening up. “We learned to eat pizza--that used to be foreign--and we’ll learn to eat Thai food, too. People don’t come here to be ethnic forever; they come here to make money. All they need is a little space for a generation or two.” And, pausing, he added, “and a little respect, I guess. That doesn’t seem like too much to ask when you think about it.

“Twenty-first Century Los Angeles,” he continued, “will combine the best of every culture that has come here. It will combine Asian family loyalty, Hispanic industriousness and Anglo-Saxon respect for individual liberty. That’s an entirely new package; no culture like that has ever been created before.”

To create a culture. It is a vertiginous thought. And yet those who are optimistic about L.A.’s future all seem to agree that it is not only possible but will happen fast. The possibility that, if any sort of cultural synthesis were to take place, it might just as easily combine the worst rather than the best of its various constituent parts--say, Confucianism’s fabled indifference to everyone outside a given family group, Latin American political intolerance and Western European nihilism--is not a narrative that convinces anyone. That was my East Coast cynicism talking, my acquaintance told me. In California things are different.

“You mean, in California things work out?” I said.

“That’s right,” my friend replied, “that’s exactly right.”

There are good reasons for many Angelenos--particularly those who live on the Westside or in the Valley--to believe that this is still so, whatever they read in the newspapers or see on the evening news. Space is a big part of the story. It is the norm, after all, for members of most groups in L.A. to successfully ignore the presence of most other groups, the occasional and circumscribed encounters that do occur continue to feel anomalous. A Salvadoran might buy beer from a Pakistani 7-Eleven owner, but usually that is the extent to which the average immigrants from the Isthmus and from the Subcontinent will encounter each other.

Even so, the understanding that things are changing radically has become so inescapable that even the wealth of buffers that L.A. provides no longer really conceals what is taking place. And yet there remains something surreal about the process, something startling and incongruous like the sight in a movie about making movies of a person coming hurtling through a backdrop that, theretofore, had been entirely convincing. Conversations about immigration in L.A. are all slightly unnerving in this way. They seem either too loud or too soft, too optimistic or too grim. It is as if the entire event is both so mysterious and so compelling that, perhaps more than any other subject, there exists no clear line of demarcation between people’s perception of what is taking place and their wonder at the experience.

“When I left here in the late ‘60s,” a prominent local writer told me, “the immigrant presence in town seemed negligible. Sure, everyone knew that more and more Mexicans were coming in, but what you have to remember is that there have always been Mexicans around here. A lot of us went to high school with them. You certainly did if you attended a parochial school, even in the ‘50s. So to many of us local Anglos, they did not really seem like aliens in the sense that the word is thrown around today.”

“What about the Asians?” I asked.

“They were another matter,” he said, “particularly groups like the Koreans and the Thais. There had always been Japanese and Chinese Californians, of course, but, probably for all the wrong reasons, Asian immigration seemed like a settled issue after World War II. The only time it really came up was during the debate over paying reparations to all the Japanese-Americans who were put in internment camps during World War II.”

“And when you came back to L.A.?” I asked.

“I returned in ‘74,” he replied, “and my wife and I found we had come home to a very different city than the one we had left. I suppose that even in the late ‘60s there must have been a certain number of Korean stores, at least on a small stretch around Olympic and Western, but they certainly weren’t a big presence or a very noteworthy one. And then there were the minimalls. It seemed like on practically every major corner one of those had taken root--they’d never existed in L.A. proper; you associated them with the Valley, with Van Nuys Boulevard and all that. Add to that the fact that half the stores in these malls had signs not just in languages but even in alphabets I’d never seen before. I don’t just mean Spanish but Korean, Armenian, Thai, Urdu--you name it.”

The minimalls were the first important visual markers of this new immigrant Los Angeles. In a way, immigrants were the only group in the region likely to be willing to buy franchises in them. After all, most white Angelenos had other ambitions for themselves and their children than to work the minimum 60 hours a week required to make a success of running a shop in a strip mall. Had the legacy of discrimination really been as irrelevant to the American present as conservatives from Washington to the Los Angeles suburbs keep insisting, it might have been expected that black Angelenos would have stepped in to fill the vacuum. But even the most modest franchise required both capital and business experience (the turnover rate in these malls being even higher than average), neither of which were in abundant supply in predominantly black neighborhoods like Compton or Inglewood. By the end of the 1980s, it was clear that as had been the case for them during almost all of L.A.’s booms and boomlets, African-Americans had once again been unable to take advantage of the economic opportunities the minimalls represented. Indeed, even the small stores in black L.A. were increasingly being run by the new immigrants.

Resentment ran high. Blacks spoke grimly of Asian merchants treating them disrespectfully, and for their part, the Asians--who, while they had the advantage of arriving in the United States with some capital from home, were hampered by a limited grasp of English and less understanding of the particular problem of black America--wondered what was going on. They hadn’t come to the United States to be social workers; like the European immigrants before them, they had come to make money. So when an African-American community group barged into a store in Watts to prevent a Korean shopkeeper from stocking blue bandannas, the “colors” of the Crips, the blacks saw themselves as trying to rescue their children, while the Asian merchants simply saw themselves as victims of a not entirely comprehensible shakedown. With each year, such misunderstandings only seemed to deepen, one more fissure in the L.A. mosaic the Chamber of Commerce was describing so ecstatically.

It would, in any case, have been wishful thinking to expect black L.A. to suddenly throw up a generation of entrepreneurs after so many decades of existing on the economic margins. The community is well on its way to losing a second generation of its children to the malign solace of gangs. There are between 70,000 and 90,000 gang members in Greater Los Angeles, and crack cocaine is everywhere. To talk of entrepreneurship in this moment of crisis is like putting a Band-Aid on a third-degree burn. And so, predictably, the task of servicing that better-publicized Los Angeles, that pleasure dome of solitude and gleaming careers, is left to the new immigrants. Along Wilshire Boulevard and Melrose Avenue, in Brentwood and Los Feliz, the faces behind the counters are Han and Dravidian, Korean and Persian, Miztec and Ethiopian--anything, it seems, except American black and white.

Strangely, few people in L.A. seem very startled by this. Perhaps having grown up sharing the city with an all but invisible complement of Latino helpers, many Anglos find buying their groceries from people from half the countries of the nonwhite world to be a logical extension.

LOS ANGELES IS FULL OF NO-FAULT DIVORCES, NO-FAULT therapies, no-fault insurance claims and, it now appears, no-fault citizenship as well. Certainly, no one I met and nothing I read suggests that there are many people who believe themselves personally complicit in this transformation of the city, any more than they hold themselves responsible for the fact that over the past 25 years, literally millions of people from every corner of the poor world have abandoned their homes and families to travel thousands of miles, often at mortal peril, invariably at great risk, to end up working 16 hours a day pressing pants or selling six-packs of Coca-Cola and bags of sour-cream-and-onion potato chips to the gilded residents of a foreign land called Southern California.

For the native population of Greater Los Angeles, the sight of all these Thai grocery stores, Armenian travel agencies and Salvadoran fast-food outlets has gone nearly unanalyzed. The minimalls are Los Angeles’ self-portrait after its utopian moment is over, the intimation that, in the long run, the city will become a place like any other. Neither its wealth nor its will can save it from history after all. One can move farther and farther away from downtown L.A., take refuge at the farthest reaches of northern San Diego County to the south or southern Santa Barbara County to the north, but the handwriting is on the wall. Ready or not, the Third World is coming to Los Angeles, coming for reasons that are as diverse in the true sense of that sadly exploited word as the “L.A. 2000” report’s sunny pablum is testimony to its misuse, coming in numbers that defy the imagination.

If the terms of art for this event in Anglo and black L.A. are invasion , transplantation or visitation , the problem in the end is not that such terms are too metaphoric to account properly for what is actually going on, but rather that no metaphor or artistic conceit can ever encompass the magnitude of the event. Californians who have grown up with Mexicans and tend to explain the new immigration from the south as a return of a native people to Alta California, confess themselves bemused by the Asians. People who divine in the Asians a world of immigrants who will revitalize California entrepreneurship with their business acumen and their capital don’t know what to make of the great Latino barrios expanding across the Los Angeles River, beyond the old downtown. In short, every explanation put forward to account for what Los Angeles is becoming seems to confute every other explanation. The Mexican story doesn’t fit in with the East Asian story, and neither coincides with any of the stories Los Angeles had previously told about itself.

All that is certain is that the city coming into being is more fragmented and various than even the great immigrant Babels of late-19th-Century America had been. New York, Chicago, Detroit, St. Louis--those cities had been anthologies of Europe, and L.A. is an anthology of the world.

WHAT IS SURPRISING ABOUT LOS ANGELES, AND WHAT MAKES IT so different from, so much more hopeful than other cities and other regions in the United States, is that, for all the prevailing myopia, there are so many voices calling for the country’s long racial civil war to end, even if this means, as it were, going over to the nonwhite side. That old Angeleno disdain for the past has conferred a kind of freedom. It permits clearsighted Angelenos to secede from anything, even, it appears, from the deepest cornerstone of their own identities. Observing that the world itself is becoming nonwhite, observing the rise of the Pacific Rim, the demographic explosion in Mexico and believing they are witnessing the decline of Europe, the smartest voices in the Southland have joined together. Instead of resisting change, of following the historic line of anti-Asian and anti-Mexican racial hysteria, the city whose prosperity has derived so crucially from a Cold War for which the Third World had served as a proving ground stands poised to join it.

It is an outcome that had been predicted long before. In the 1920s, Jose Vasconcelos, who was later to become rector of the National University of Mexico, wrote a book called “La Raza Cosmica” (“The Cosmic Race”). In it, he predicted the advent of what he called “the fifth race.” The destiny of the Americas, Vanconcelos argued, was to take all the races of the world and meld them together, as the conquest of Mexico by the Spaniards had mixed together Europeans and Indians. Written in an era when the prestige of racist “purity” theory was at its height, Vasconcelos’ book was the first defense of the idea of a heterogeneous world since the idea of race as a way of dividing people originally seized the European imagination.

“The white, the red, the black and the yellow,” Vasconcelos wrote, “America is home to all of them and needs all of them.” He closed his book with the premonition that “we will succeed in the Americas, before anywhere else in the globe has come near in creating a new race fashioned out of the treasures of all the other races: the final race, the cosmic race.” Of course, when Vasconcelos spoke of the Americas, he did not mean the United States, which he considered too racist a country to accept such a destiny. His hope was for his beloved Mexico to serve the rest of the continent as model and example. Only fired by this unifying vision, he argued, could it possibly stand up either to Europe or to the United States.

His description of the capital of “La Raza Cosmica,” the city he dubbed “Universopolis,” is prescient in its evocation of a place that would be an anthology of the world. But Vasconcelos was off in his map reading by about a thousand miles. As a good Mexican nationalist of his time, Vasconcelos clearly imagined Universopolis as a spruced-up, glorified stand-in for Mexico City. That was not to be. With 20 million people, unspeakable pollution, poverty and hopelessness, Mexico City is not the future of anything, except, perhaps, dystopia. But what about Los Angeles? That is quite a different matter.

For the moment, of course, even in Greater Universopolis, the races are not blending nearly so rapidly as the cuisines. A few eccentric Anglos, like the local painter Ed Ruscha, might predict confidently that a hundred years from now “there will be some gorgeous mono-ethnic race living here . . . everyone is gradually mixing,” but such voices are rare. Indeed, much of the fashionable talk on college campuses and among radicals is of group rights rather than of individual rights, and of the obligation of members of a particular ethnic or racial group to jealously guard their own culture from outside influences and threats.

But if separation prevails among intellectuals (a recently fashionable T-shirt among militant blacks reads: “It’s a black thing, you wouldn’t understand”--a type of feeling shared by many groups in L.A.), on the streets of L.A., from downtown to Compton, Boyle Heights to Malibu, Vasconcelos’ vision is proving far more like the shape of things to come.

Food is the first sign, the harbinger of other cultural fusions. Not only are Anglo kids wolfing down fajitas , but that paradigmatic Mexican dish itself has mutated. I learned of this from Nathan Gardels, editor of New Perspectives Quarterly. In a fast-food restaurant in the Valley, Gardels stumbled across the Fajita Pita, a dish made of the meat of a fajita , usually chicken or beef, but instead of being wrapped in a tortilla, it was scooped into a piece of Middle Eastern pita bread. A small thing, but, as Gardels pointed out to me, such transformations, meldings and re-creations are taking place everywhere in L.A. “There was the real future of the city,” he told me, “staring up at me from the plastic tray in the form of that Fajita Pita.”

And if culinary miscegenation is roaring along, its corporeal variant is moving along rather more briskly, though it is more advanced among immigrants than between whites and nonwhites, than many Angelenos had supposed. It stands to reason. People from the various new immigrant groups now have the schools virtually to themselves, and however much their parents might disapprove, it is a foregone conclusion that they are not going to stick entirely to their own kind.

Just as the Irish, Poles, Jews and Italians, who had rubbed shoulders and more in the wake of the European immigration of 1900, had, by the 1950s and ‘60s, begun to intermarry en masse, so the process is beginning to take place among the recent arrivals in L.A. One can find every sort of nonwhite combination in the city now: Hmong and Salvadoran, Ethiopian and Taiwanese, Mexican and Filipino.

The mind boggles, but then, so do the relatives. For when, say, a Thai marries a Persian, it is a safe bet that, among other impediments, neither set of relations has intimate knowledge of the other family’s country. A familiarity with the Buddhist scriptures is really not essential to life in Chihuahua, nor is a familiarity with the Islamic practices of Pakistan one of the things one most associates with Hong Kong Chinese.

And yet they are learning. Vietnamese nuoc nam fish paste is coming to co-exist in the larder with strings of Sonoran chilies, and a refrigerator might well be found to contain leftovers of Iranian chelo kebab and also homemade guacamole. La Raza Cosmica : It can be spotted almost any evening, from Western Avenue in Koreatown to Mexican-American Huntington Park, from Temple-Beaudry to Chinese Alhambra, sneaking in through the intestinal tract.

“THERE ARE TWO FUTURES,” the great English scientist J.D. Bernal once wrote. “The future of desire and the future of fate, and man’s reason has never learned to separate them.” By the look of things, man’s reason has, if anything, been doing an even worse job than usual in Los Angeles lately. For, despite the mounting evidence to the contrary, almost everyone in a position to voice an opinion about the city’s destiny, from downtown boosters to radical academics, from home owners to newly arrived immigrants, seems determined to keep faith with the view that in L.A. at least, it is still desire that determines fate rather than the other way around. No information, no matter how disturbing, appears capable of altering this entrenched state of mind.

To maintain an illusion of being able to control their fate or, failing that, to somehow strip the unwelcome prospect of its force, Angelenos are increasingly indulging in a kind of linguistic damage control. This is a startling phenomenon in a region where verbal precision has never been a quality that many people prize, and that some actively dislike for being what they think of as a prime example of “Eastern” pedantry and elitism.

A more normal reaction is the one I once encountered at a fireworks display one Fourth of July in Pacific Palisades, when I asked the man standing next to me whether he knew the name of the particularly showy and beautiful display bursting in the sky above us. “No, I don’t,” he said in mild annoyance, “but you know, I find that I appreciate an experience more when I don’t try to pigeonhole it by giving it a name.”

For him, not naming had been an essential part of the idyll he called his life, and he had moved away huffily when I remarked to him that had he been a writer he might have felt somewhat differently. But now, it seems, it is necessary to pay enormous attention to how things will be named. In the debates, for example, about whether immigrants are “illegal aliens” or “undocumented workers,” whether people of Mexican ancestry should call themselves Hispanics or Latinos, or whether L.A. is the leading city of the United States or of the Pacific Rim, the undercurrent of wanting to manage the future as well as understand it is rarely absent. Angelenos seem to assume that if only they can find the right, that is, the most optimistic, name for what is going on, then they will inevitably get the right, that is, the most optimistic, outcome.

The benefits of this way of thinking, in the short term, at least, are obvious. If, say, you insist on repeating that L.A. is being overwhelmed by illegal aliens, then you are in fact conceding that the laws of the United States are being defied, that order is breaking down, and that society is impotent to stop it. But if you describe these new arrivals as undocumented workers, then their advent, if still not entirely welcome, can appear far less threatening--just the story of a lot of newcomers whose papers are not entirely in order looking for work . It isn’t that important.

Certainly, it doesn’t change your life or the future of your community. Similarly, if an Angeleno identifies the Southland with the United States exclusively, then at least some gloomy presentiments of decline become all but impossible to stave off, at least for anyone who reads the business pages. How much more reassuring to speak of the Pacific Rim, to assign to Los Angeles, verbally anyway, that region’s indisputably bright future. It is a magical practice, but then this reliance on the incantatory has always been the oldest of Los Angeles conceits, and the idea that the words you speak about the future are themselves a way of making the future come true is hard to abandon, whatever the evidence.

Still, a few Angelenos, like scriptwriter and novelist Josh Greenfield, have always found a comparison of Los Angeles with the Third World irresistible. “It always struck me that way,” Greenfield once said. “Just look at the walls, at every house on the Westside surrounded by walls as if it were in Lima or Cairo.”

When Greenfield told me this, I took the remark to be fanciful, and I doubt that it is an opinion that would find many takers, even today.

But what many Angelenos are coming to believe, whether happily or fearfully, is that at a certain moment during the 20th Century, the United States stopped being an extension of Europe and, for better or worse, struck out on its own, an increasingly nonwhite country adrift, however majestically and powerfully, in an increasingly nonwhite world.

One afternoon, I sat with Nathan Gardels in the lobby of the Mondrian Hotel on Sunset Boulevard, arguing amiably about the future of Los Angeles. He had been extolling the new world city, and I, as much for the sake of provoking him as anything else, launched into a litany of denunciation.

Obviously, Gardels had heard it all before, but the answer he gave when, at last, I let my little jeremiad trail off into silence, was anything but the one I had expected. “You may be right,” he said, “but what you have to remember is that people here live a lot better than they do in the Philippines or South Korea or Taiwan, let alone Mexico or Salvador.”

I was astonished. “Since when,” I asked, “did the best way of thinking about the United States become to compare it to countries in the Third World?”

Gardels’ face stiffened, and he fell silent. For a long moment, I thought he wouldn’t answer, or that if he did, he would either brush off our exchange or else turn it into a joke. But then, musingly, he did reply. “I don’t really know,” he said. “Maybe it was after the defeat in Vietnam, or earlier, after the immigration reform. It’s hard to say. But what I do know is that every time I go to Europe nowadays, there is a moment when I think to myself: Very little of what I’m seeing here has all that much to do with the future of Southern California.”

“And in Mexico City or Seoul?” I inquired.

“Exactly,” he said, smiling. “There, I might as well be in some version of home. I don’t mean the one we’ve made here in L.A., of course; if that were true, you wouldn’t see people lined up in front of the U.S. Embassy all day and all night trying to get a visa to come here. But something familiar, just the same.”

All he was sure of, he told me as we parted, was that, whatever else would happen in Southern California, L.A.’s European period--assuming, that is, it had ever really had one--was ending along with its dream time.

Unlike the boosters, Gardels placed no value on what was happening, or so he insisted. As for me, as I watched him get into his car and drive cheerfully off, I found that I agreed with him. I also found, though it was a dry, hot day, that the thought made me shiver.

The following morning I drove to the airport, my journey through Los Angeles at an end. Traffic all the way out was light. Not having to wrestle with it gave me time to look for one final, intense moment at all those signs in Hangul and Spanish, Mandarin and Tagalog, Thai and Farsi that had been my companions during my time in L.A.

There they were, those emblems of the new California, of the new America as well, at once the clearest of markers toward the future and a confused jumble whose meaning I could not make out. Then the airport rose up in the distance, and my attention began to flag.

It was only later, on the plane, as Los Angeles, enveloped in its usual smog, began to recede from view and I could see nothing down below but the high desert, that I began to try to sort out what I thought about L.A., trying to fix this last impression of space and emptiness, the skull beneath the city’s skin, in my mind for good. But, of course, I could not, and as we landed in New York the whole period of time seemed almost ungraspable.

A month later, a friend who lives in L.A. called me. “What do you think of Los Angeles now?” she asked.

Not quite knowing what I was saying, I found myself reciting a line of poetry that had been in my mind a lot when I first went to Los Angeles but which I had not thought about for some time:

“We must love one another or die,” I said.

There was a silence on the other end of the line. She recognized the quote and, almost automatically, corrected me:

“We must love one another and die,” she said.

We must love one another or die.