COLUMN ONE : Latinos Transform South L.A. : A massive shift in population has altered the area’s urban landscape, with the new residents bringing their own mix of culture and traditions.

The Latino barrio between Vernon and Slauson avenues in South Los Angeles is less than a decade old, but already the ancient myths and beliefs of Mexican and Central American culture have taken root.

Just four years ago, parishioners of the Nativity Catholic Church on 57th Street placed a shrine to la Virgen de Guadalupe in the old brick church, built by an all-white congregation in 1925.

Already, the Virgin Mary of Nativity Church is credited with miracles. The parishioners say she has cured the sickly, reformed wayward husbands and inspired Mexicanos to travel from as far away as Pacoima, in the far-off San Fernando Valley, to place votive candles before her image, painted on a wall inside the chapel.

“Ever since we put up her picture, there are so many Latinos coming we can’t fit all of them in,” said Cristina Diaz, the church secretary. “It’s like la Virgen is pulling them in.”

Much like the spiritual power of la Virgen de Guadalupe , the Latino population of South Los Angeles has exploded with almost magical speed--in less than a generation, a community of thousands has emerged where once there was none. By the time the next century dawns, less than eight years from now, one of the nation’s largest black enclaves will have become predominantly Latino.

The South Los Angeles that is being born is filled with people who, like their African-American predecessors who immigrated from the South, have come to escape poverty and persecution. They are factory workers, cooks, day laborers, seamstresses and housekeepers.

As the area’s black population slowly disappears, there is a feeling among many of the newly arrived Latinos of being pioneers and of creating something new, something of their own. Today, South Los Angeles has become as much a Latino neighborhood as East Los Angeles, San Fernando or Santa Ana.

So swiftly has the barrio in South Los Angeles emerged that many Latinos elsewhere in Southern California are not aware of its existence.

“My sister’s family lives in La Puente and they won’t come here because supposedly we live in a black neighborhood,” said Josefina Hernandez, a mother of seven who has lived on 53rd Street for a few months. “They don’t know that on this block, there are more Latinos than blacks.”

Within walking distance of Hernandez’s home, there are a growing number of taquerias (taco stands) and furniture stores that cater to Latino immigrants. Dozens of new storefront evangelical churches are led by Mexican, Salvadoran and Guatemalan pastors who make little or no effort to win converts among blacks.

Even the sounds are reminders of the growing Latino culture.

The constant ringing of a small bell announces the arrival of the paleteros , perpetually sad-faced young men who push ice cream carts for hours along the neighborhood sidewalks. The long, wailing blast of a high-pitched horn marks the arrival of “Santiago’s Donas,” a van that sells doughnuts and Mexican sweetbread.

A fast-paced Spanish dialogue accompanies the truck of Rafael Cuevas, a produce vendor who engages customers in friendly haggling over prices. Cuevas sells, among other things, fresh fruit, vegetables, eggs, platanos maduros (ripe plantains) and tortillas--in short, most of the ingredients for a good Mexican or Central American meal.

“Mostly, I just go around South Los Angeles, because that’s where the business is,” Cuevas says as he weighs some tomatoes. “People know me, they wait for me. Even if I get here a little late, they’ll still wait.”

The ripe plantains go quickly, bought by Guatemalans and Salvadorans who deep-fry them a few hours later, making a sweet dish served with beans and cream. The aroma wafts out their kitchen windows, a reminder to their black neighbors of the presence of a new and different culture next door.

In some respects, the urban landscape of South Los Angeles, with its heavily traveled boulevards and rows of tract homes, has been transformed into something more akin to the Latin American countryside.

Mexicanos, still close to their rural roots, sometimes raise chickens in their back yards. They grows herbs such as cilantro in small gardens and plant corn in the front until the tall stalks create an image that could be from the Mexican ejido , or collective farm, they left as young adults.

The Latinization of the neighborhood has come to make many longtime black residents feel like visitors to a foreign country, forcing them to adapt to unfamiliar ways.

At the 52nd Street Elementary School, where Latino children now form the school’s majority ethnic group, Principal Kattie Prejean Gaspard learned quickly that if you do not speak Spanish, you will not understand half of what people are saying in the neighborhood.

Gaspard, an African-American, has completed one year of Spanish classes, addressing teachers, school staff and parents with an occasional Como estas? or Hola!

“Sometimes you think about the words, but they just don’t come out,” she said. “I have translators but I want to be able to communicate with (the Latino parents) directly. And besides, they’re grateful when you speak their language.”

Even the black crossing guard on Hoover Street, Bob Walker, has acquired a few phrases in Spanish. He uses them each day just after 2:30 p.m., when the children come filtering down Hoover Avenue.

“ Esperate . . . Esperate ,” Walker calls out, holding out the palm of his hand for emphasis. And then, when the street is clear: “OK. We got it. Let’s go . . . Let’s go!” He repeats this rhythmically, and with such joy, that it becomes a song.

On a recent day, after the last child had crossed, Walker explained how he learned the Spanish phrases.

“I just watched the parents. They would say vente ; that means go,” he said. (Actually, vente means “come here,” but the effect is the same). “Then they would say esperate ; that means stop. And when I didn’t know, I asked the parents.

“We can get you across the street in two languages,” he said. “With a smile.”

While most black families in the community of Craftsman-style homes are older, their Latino neighbors are mostly younger couples with school-age children. Many are first-time home buyers, having pooled their modest incomes to buy houses priced about $120,000 and up.

In fact, so many Guatemalan and Salvadoran families have bought houses in this corner of South Los Angeles that it has become something of an affluent suburb of Pico-Union, the tenement-filled Central American neighborhood about two miles to the north.

The Maldonado family, natives of southern Guatemala, got their first taste of home ownership on the 900 block of 53rd Street in the heart of a traditionally black neighborhood.

Reina Maldonado is a housekeeper for a Westside family. Her husband, Gumercindo Maldonado, labors in a water-heater factory. For years, they lived with three children in a crowded Pico-Union apartment. In 1983, they moved a few miles south into what was then a mostly black neighborhood, buying a yellow stucco house on 53rd Street for $110,000.

The rosebushes that Reina planted in the front lawn now bloom in half a dozen shades of red, violet and yellow, while a minivan occupies the driveway, the very picture of middle-class achievement.

“More than anything else, I came to this country to satisfy economic needs,” said Gumercindo, 52. “And for the education of the children. . . . In this country, with a little bit of ambition, you can accomplish something.”

The Maldonados were among the first Latinos to move to 53rd Street in the wave of migration that swept the neighborhood in the 1980s.

“When we first came here, it was almost all black people,” Reina Maldonado said as she stood on her porch, surveying the block. “Pretty soon it will be all Latino. And then you wonder who will be next to replace us . The Asians?”

Perhaps some other ethnic group will come in a future influx when the Latinos become older and move to new suburbs. But for now, the barrio is young--and suffering growing pains. Many newcomers have invested their last dollar in homes that they hope to hand down to their children.

The Marquez family’s spacious new home still has vast expanses of empty carpet. Moving from a cramped bachelor apartment in Huntington Park, they spent all their money on the down payment, leaving nothing for furniture.

“A Salvadoran lady sold this house to me,” said Pablo Marquez, a worker at a plating factory and father of two. “She told me I could pay $300,000 to live in another neighborhood or I could pay $140,000 for this place. She talked me into it. It was all I could afford. So here I am.”

A handful of Latino residents can remember how it was before the barrio came, when there were one or two Spanish-speaking families living on each neighborhood block.

They are the forerunners, mostly Mexican-American working-class families who had no qualms about living in an all-black neighborhood. Nor were they scared off when the huge clouds of billowing smoke from the Watts riot drifted over the neighborhood on a hot summer day in 1965.

By all accounts, Alejandra Fregosa and her husband were the first Latinos on the 900 block of 53rd Street, moving there in the mid-1950s before blacks predominated, when the neighborhood was primarily white. Buying a house there was a step up into the middle class.

“The whites left during the time of the quemazones (the big fires of the riots),” Fregosa, a 74-year-old Mexican-American widow, said in Spanish. “They would leave and the blacks would take their places. . . . My white neighbors told me: ‘C’mon, let’s go, let’s get out of here.’ But I’ve stayed because of the love I have for this place. My children were born here. From here they left to get married.”

Their corner of South Los Angeles seemed destined to remain forever a black neighborhood, isolated from the outside world by walls of fear and discrimination. But in the 1980s, the neighborhood changed again. In a flurry of moving vans, pickup trucks and station wagons, more than 5,000 Latinos arrived on 53rd Street and the surrounding blocks to unload their humble belongings.

When revolution and counter-revolution swept through Central America in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Latino barrios throughout Southern California became overcrowded with immigrants and war refugees. Adjacent to South-Central Los Angeles were two of the region’s most densely populated Latino communities--Pico-Union and southeast Los Angeles County cities such as Huntington Park and Maywood.

The Latino population also moved south from Pico-Union, a migration noted by Spanish-speaking realtors who reaped rewards by following the Latino community’s expanding frontier.

“It started back on 20th Street (in Pico-Union),” said Rose Pinkus, who recently sold a house to a Latino family on 53rd Street. “It’s like a wave, it just keeps coming (south). Five years ago, if you had told a Latino customer about a house on 50th Street, they would have been scared (of crime). Now, you can even tell them about 110th Street and they’ll consider it.”

As Latino families move into homes on South Los Angeles’ palm tree-lined residential streets, a similar process is under way on the community’s long commercial strips. Throughout South Los Angeles, immigrant entrepreneurs have filled hundreds of buildings abandoned by African-American merchants.

There are several immigrant enterprises at the corner of 53rd Street and South Vermont Avenue, including a furniture store run by a Guatemalan, two competing ornamental ironworks run by Salvadorans, and an immigration consultant firm run by a man from the Central American nation of Belize.

Benjamin Palacio, the Belizean immigration consultant, says doing business in the neighborhood is something of an adventure, a test of patience and perseverance. He remembers the gun-toting youths who fired 13 rounds into his plate-glass storefront windows “just for fun” at midnight on a bullet-crazed New Year’s Eve in 1988.

“I decided I’m not going to run,” Palacio said. “If I were to move anywhere else, I would be out of the area where I am exposed to new (Belizean) clients.”

Interspersed among all the new immigrant businesses are a host of equally new Latino churches, mostly evangelical congregations that occupy office space once filled by African-American businesses. There are a dozen such churches on the 13-block stretch of Vermont between Slauson and Vernon avenues.

In an old African-American beauty parlor on Vermont and 49th Street, the Iglesia de Dios/Monte Sinai recently set up shop. For Pastor Delfino O. Valiente, moving to South Los Angeles was not just a question of faith, it was also a matter of economics.

With the recession deepening, several parishioners in the 50-member congregation had lost their jobs. Their donations to the church collection plate had dwindled to the point that Valiente could no longer afford to pay the $1,600 rent on a storefront at 23rd Street and Union Avenue.

The church seemed doomed until “God gave us this place,” Valiente said. At first, the African-American owner of the building had asked for $900 monthly rent. “We prayed to the Lord and he lowered it to $700,” Valiente said. “We prayed more, and he lowered it to $550.”

The former beauty parlor--barely 30 feet across--is now the site of fervent evangelical ceremonies. Six nights a week, the tile floor reverberates to amplified sermons, accompanied by accordion and tambourines. During one Thursday evening service, the Holy Spirit is said to have occupied the body of one young parishioner, sending her writhing in convulsions.

Established churches in the community have also undergone dramatic changes. In the mid-1970s at the Nativity Catholic Church, there were no Masses in Spanish, no shrine to the Virgin of Guadalupe and only a few Mexican parishioners among the mostly African-American congregation. Today, the congregation is overwhelmingly Latino. The change is reflected in the food served at church fund-raisers.

“Before, there was just one Mexicana in the corner selling tamales and they didn’t sell because there weren’t any Latinos to buy them,” said church secretary Cristina Diaz. “We are like a family. . . . If I stay home on Sunday, I feel sad, I feel like I am missing something.”

With that, Diaz returned to a booth in the church parking lot to sell enchiladas. She watched with anticipation as the morning Spanish-language Mass ended and a crowd spilled onto the sunbaked sidewalk outside the church.

While a hundred or so Latino families milled about the parking lot, a subdued English-language Mass got under way inside the church sanctuary. Only 20 or so black families attended and half the pews stood empty.

About This Series

In little more than a decade, what was once the largest black community in the western United States has become one of the nation’s fastest-growing Latino communities. By the turn of the century, experts say, Latinos will outnumber African-Americans in South Los Angeles, marking a milestone in the city’s ethnic history. Behind the statistics are thousands upon thousands of people coping with the change, forced to confront and overcome feelings of intolerance.

To chronicle these difficult days of transition in South Los Angeles, Times staff writers Charisse Jones and Hector Tobar lived next door to each other for a month on the 900 block of West 53rd Street, where the changes are in full swing. Jones reported on the experiences of blacks while Tobar explored life for the neighborhood’s Latinos.

* Today: The birth of a community.

Community in Transition

The neighborhood around West 53rd Street illustrates the ethnic changes sweeping through South Los Angeles. According to census figures, Latino population has soared in the once black neighborhood, now accounting for nearly half of the neighborhood’s residents. A similar transition occured in the 1950s, when blacks first began moving into the neighborhood, which was then white.

The Numbers

1960 1970 1980 1990 Latino 1,087 9.3% 605 5.1% 1,606 14.2% 6,881 47.6% Black 8,254 70.6% 11,095 93.0% 9,398 83.2% 7,348 50.8% Anglo 2,131 18.2% 225 1.9% 181 1.6% 129 0.9% Other 225 1.9% 0 0.0% 117 1.0% 104 0.7% TOTAL 11,697 11,925 11,302 14,462

Source: U.S. Census and Los Angeles County Planning Department

Note: Census definition of Latino and Anglo varied during the time period reported.