Blacks, Latinos Coexist in a Peace Tempered by Fear : South L.A.: Undercurrent of suspicion has little basis in reality. Language differences hinder understanding.

Fernando Hernandez watches through the windshield of his rickety ice cream truck as half a dozen Latino and black children emerge from the front porches and sidewalks of 53rd Street with coins in hand, the new racial mix of South Los Angeles unfolding before him.

With the taped barrel-organ music announcing his arrival to yet another city block, he offers his own observations about race relations in the community where thousands of blacks and Latinos live side by side.

The Latino customers don’t get angry if you cheat them by accident, he says, but the blacks do. The blacks buy more ice cream, but they’re more “demanding.”

“They are very delicado ,” Hernandez says in Spanish of his black customers--very touchy. “I’m afraid of these black kids. They’ll stone your truck if they don’t like you.”

So it goes in the sociological caldron know as South Los Angeles, where thousands of Mexican and Central American immigrants live and work in a neighborhood that blacks once called their own.

Although most of the new Latino residents coexist peacefully with their African-American neighbors--even Latino and black gangs tolerate one another with few flare-ups--there remains an undercurrent of fear and mistrust.

For some Latino immigrants, black Los Angeles is synonymous with drive-by shootings and other acts of random terror. Obliged to live in South Los Angeles because of its low rents and home prices, the Latinos often resent their new neighbors.

Rarely are their fears grounded in reality. Even Hernandez, the ice cream vendor, admitted that his truck had never been stoned by black youths, nor had he even had a serious argument or confrontation with a black customer. In fact, it was his first day on the job.

“The guy who rented me the truck told me those things,” he acknowledged. “So I’m going to be careful.”

The prejudices and stereotypes swirling through South Los Angeles’ immigrant community may have their roots in a single cultural fact: The Latinos come from regions like the highlands of Guatemala and the deserts of northern Mexico, places with only minuscule black populations. Often, their only prior knowledge of black America comes from the movies and television programs that Hollywood exports to Latin America.

Josefina Hernandez, a native of Mexico and longtime resident of South Los Angeles, confesses that she, too, once feared her black neighbors.

“When I first came to this country, I was afraid of them,” said Hernandez, a 44-year-old housekeeper who has in lived in various South L.A. neighborhoods since 1968. “Now I see that they’re just like we are. They have a good heart. I’ve never had a problem with them. I’ve never been robbed by a black person. Never.”

She concluded: “People look down on them just because they’re a little darker than we are.”

More than anything, even skin color, it is language that keeps black and Latino residents of South Los Angeles apart, making it impossible for the two groups to resolve differences and erase misconceptions by talking to each other.

“The black people on this block seem very nice,” Hernandez said in Spanish of her neighbors on 53rd Street. “And it seems like they like us too. They say hi, we wave back and say hi too. . . . But since we don’t speak the language, that’s about it.”

While failure to master English keeps Latinos from communicating with their black neighbors, Spanish allows them to communicate secretly, to say things they might not want others to hear. In effect, two parallel worlds exist, one English-speaking, the other Spanish-speaking.

One warm evening at the Iglesia Camino a Santidad, a brightly lit Evangelical church on South Vermont, a group of black men joked in front of a liquor store next door, unaware that inside the church they were the subject of a few less-than-tolerant remarks by the Latino pastor.

Pastor David Tejada adjusted the microphone and, after a few introductory remarks to the 40 or so assembled parishioners, he announced in Spanish: “Brothers and sisters, I ask that you please not park your cars on the street. Use the new parking lot, because if you don’t, these little black people ( morenitos) will steal your batteries in a flash. So, use the parking lot. . . . Gloria a Dios! “

Among younger residents, however, the linguistic barriers have fallen. Born in California to immigrant parents and educated in local public schools, most of the Latino youth of South Los Angeles speak fluent English, opening the door to creating a new, common culture with their black counterparts.

These days, Latino and black teen-agers find themselves listening to the same music and speaking the same street lingo. A few are even beginning to break taboos against interracial dating.

Fourteen-year-old Andres Rivas dated a black girl for a few weeks last summer. They met at the swimming pool at Harvard Playground on 61st Street.

“I hang around most with black friends,” Andres said. “Some of the Hispanics called me a traitor. It doesn’t really bother me because I know it’s not true. I’m proud to be Hispanic.”

At John Muir Junior High School, about two dozen bright Latino and black students work together in a “leadership class” aimed, in part, at bridging cultural differences between the two ethnic groups.

Compromise often is the order of the day, as was clear last year when two 14-year-olds--Paul Anderson, who is black, and Ingrid Grande, the daughter of Salvadoran immigrants--tied in the campus election for student body president.

On a second ballot, Ingrid was elected by one vote, becoming the school’s first Latina president. But in the interest of cultural harmony, Paul was named to the newly created position of “co-president.”

Ingrid says she won because she campaigned on a platform of racial unity, of uniting Latinos and African-Americans.

“I want blacks and Hispanics to work together and not be separate,” she said.

Paul has a slightly different analysis of the election: “I’m more popular than she is,” he said. “But the way she won is that there are more Hispanics here. They all know each other. . . . I’m not holding that against her.”

For adults in the community, however, the process of unlearning racial prejudices is slower and more difficult.

Pablo Marquez seemed to be slowly learning a little about himself and his own attitudes as he complained about some of his neighbors on 53rd Street.

“I still don’t feel comfortable here,” Marquez said as he stood on his front lawn, looking toward the home of a black family living nearby.

Marquez suspects that the neighbor is dealing drugs. His fears of the community were compounded recently when he saw a group of hostile-looking African-American teen-agers clad in black caps and jackets strolling down nearby Hoover Avenue. They looked like gang members, he said.

Now he is afraid to leave the safety of the home he bought last spring. This neighborhood, he said, does not compare favorably with the predominantly Latino community of Huntington Park where he lived until recently.

“When I lived in Huntington Park, I used to take walks around the neighborhood all the time, I used to be active,” the 45-year-old Mexican immigrant observed in Spanish. “Now, I am becoming sedentary.”

Standing behind a picket fence, Marquez took a look around the neighborhood and then added, almost casually: “You know, there were also gang members in Huntington Park.” And drug dealing? Yes, that too. In fact, it was even worse sometimes than what he had seen here in South Los Angeles.

Why was it then, he asked himself, that he felt safe in the Eastside but not in his new neighborhood? The answer was obvious: On the Eastside most of the drug dealers and gangsters were Latino. Here on 53rd Street, many of them are black.

“I guess it’s the culture,’ Marquez confessed.

Many of Marquez’s black neighbors share his concerns about crime and drug-dealing, although he doesn’t know it because he understands little English. Only days after he made his observations, a few of his black neighbors held a meeting of the 53rd Street Block Club to discuss the very same issues.

While many residents, like Marquez, remain distant from their black neighbors, the community’s new Latino entrepreneurs must do their best to reach out and endear themselves to black customers.

On his first day as an independent businessman in South Los Angeles, ice cream vendor Hernandez was having problems building a following for his Popsicles. He couldn’t understand what his black customers were saying.

A group of kids lined up before his van at the corner of Hoover Avenue. Inside, Hernandez struggled to decipher their orders. The African-American kids shouted at him “Fudgsicle!” and “Corn Nuts!” Wrinkling his brow, he concentrated on the words, shrugged his shoulders and asked in English: “What?”

Frustrated with Hernandez’s poor grasp of English, a black teen-ager walked away in a huff. “That fool acted like I was talking to him in Chinese,” Hernandez grumbled to himself in Spanish.

Blocks and hours later, the ice cream truck was again surrounded by black and Latino children. An African-American boy of about 4 placed two quarters in Hernandez’s palm and said “please” so politely that Hernandez broke into a warm smile.

Hernandez gave the youngster a red Popsicle. And, just for the heck of it, he handed him a couple pieces of bubble gum--no charge.

“ Es buen muchacho ,” Hernandez said. “A nice kid.”

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. 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 lives of the neighborhood’s Latinos.

Today: Latinos encounter a new ethnic group.