Six Neighborhoods Help Tell Story of Ethnic Shifts

The numbers that flowed from Census 2000 last week were breathtaking in their description of how Latinos and Asians had displaced whites and African Americans in Southern California.

But put the five-county region under a microscope and narrow your focus. Go below the county level, below the city level, down to the census-tract level, where a few thousand people live, where change was experienced subtly, slowly, sometimes imperceptibly, over 3,652 days. There--in Anaheim, Buena Park, San Marino, Watts, Fontana and Whittier--reporters took these snapshots of six census tracts where race and ethnicity changed dramatically in the 1990s.

Tract 867.02

In the beginning, Adolph Macias was just another guy in Anaheim who looked white. That was when the blue-eyed Mexican American opened his barbershop in 1966.

In each decade since, Macias has found more reason to use the Spanish he once reserved for his family. About eight years ago, Macias finally put up a sign that read, “Se habla espanol.”

This tract of 6,646 people had the steepest white population drop in Orange County in the ‘90s: a 52% decline. Meanwhile, the tract’s Latino population rose 95%, and the number of Asians grew by 45%.

The change has left many longtime residents--whites and Mexican Americans alike--apprehensive about living among increasing numbers of Spanish-speaking immigrants who often share housing to save money and prefer Spanish over English.

Old-timers hold tight to their central Anaheim neighbors and to longtime customers. Adolph’s Crown Styling Shop relies on customers who continue visiting even after they’ve moved out.

“The ol’ faithful keep coming; the new Latinos are looking for ‘El Cheapo,’ ” says Macias, who charges $10 for a haircut at his tiny shop in a gritty strip mall on North Euclid Street.

Macias, 75, often gives poor people free haircuts and coffee. Spanish-speaking passersby often seek his advice on where to go for insurance or work.

He and his regulars say the changes began when the aerospace industry slumped in the mid-1990s. They remember the neighborhood before the elegant Water Wheel Restaurant was replaced by a Kaiser medical building, before the taquerias opened and before the Korean signage popped up. They remember when the bus stop in front of the shop was filled with white people and most cyclists were children, not grown men going to work.

Across North Euclid Street, Antge Hasselbarth, owner of the Chicken Pie Shop, a diner that has kept the same decor and mostly white clientele since it opened in 1955, says of the changed neighborhood: “It’s mix-and-match around here now. It’s all right as long as they don’t take over.”

Marta Escobar sits on a bench watching her three preschool children play ball in her new neighborhood. Her husband works in construction, and the couple share the home with his parents.

“We wanted them to be safe, to be away from gangs and problems,” said Escobar, who moved from Santa Ana last year and shares a house with five relatives to keep costs down. “I know the Americans don’t like the Latino way. But the Americans don’t pay enough for us to rent this by ourselves.”

Even so, local entrepreneurs say their businesses are thriving. Walgreen’s is moving to a new 14,400-square-foot store across the street, Anaheim senior planner Greg McCafferty said. But Macias’ barbershop and other established stores will be demolished and replaced to make way for a new complex. That means the barber will probably rent a chair in someone else’s shop.

“The neighborhood’s changing; I’m changing,” Macias says. “It’s a good thing I can still speak the language to say goodbye.”

Tract 4642

Brent Eaves would understand Adolph Macias.

Three years ago, Eaves bought a haberdashery called the Andover Shop on a stretch of Huntington Drive in San Marino. He says most of his customers are older men who once lived here but have moved away, replaced by Asians. It’s a consequence of doing business in one of six Los Angeles County census tracts that switched during the 1990s from majority white to majority Asian. Four of the six, including this one, are located in the west San Gabriel Valley.

Almost everyone who lives in this tract, divided between San Marino and the city of San Gabriel, is either Asian or white. In 10 years, their proportions flipped almost precisely, from 57% white to 58% Asian. The number of whites fell from 3,297 to 2,121.

Eaves wants to appeal to his Asian neighbors, but hasn’t found the right sales formula.

“We have them come in occasionally,” he said. “They look around and leave.”

Down the street at the Huntington Pharmacy, new owner P.K. Lim is searching for a practical way to open a channel to Asian customers. He’s planning to introduce products from Japanese cosmetics giant Shiseido Co.

But he doesn’t want to move too fast, because he knows he could easily lose the brisk business of middle-aged and elderly whites who know his longtime staff by name.

“They know each other quite well,” he said.

This stretch of Huntington Drive, which passes San Marino High School, San Marino City Hall and several blocks of shops with names like the London Hair Experience and Euro Classics, is Main Street of a community that has long been the epitome of quiet wealth.

That it is also one of the cutting edges of Los Angeles County’s racial blender is no surprise to those who inhabit the tract.

With a quick trip through a collection of high school yearbooks, assistant principal Marilyn Colyar shows the transformation taking off in the early decade. The school is now 70% Asian.

To cruise this stunningly wide drag and take in the patrician atmosphere of the storefronts is to remain completely clueless to the rapid change taking place all around. Virtually none of the shops has Chinese characters on their facades like businesses in other heavily Chinese cities to the east and south.

“Rules,” explains a real estate agent, who didn’t want to be quoted by name.

“You have to get a zoning permit to turn around,” said the third-generation San Marino matron sitting in the London Hair Experience for a perm and a manicure.

She and her hairdresser had lots to say about the changes they’ve seen.

“They live here, but they don’t shop here,” the hairdresser said of the wealthy immigrants whose procession to San Marino seemed heightened just before Hong Kong was turned over to China in 1997.

“It doesn’t bother me,” the matron said. “I have a neighbor. They’ve lived there a good 15 years. They keep very much to themselves.”

No names, please. Race is a topic white San Marinoans seem to talk about without rancor, but not for attribution.

Students leaving the high school Friday afternoon spoke much more openly about a topic that is before them every day.

Like most, 11th-grader Katy Kao said the Chinese and white students tend to hang out by race, especially among the social elites such as athletes and cheerleaders. But she said there is no particular racial tension on campus, and the two groups intermix socially with ease.

“My best friend is white,” Kao said. “We all get along.”

Academic stress, not race, is the hot topic here. Yet, it too has a racial edge. Asians and whites alike say that Asian parents, who have chosen this community in part for its school, push their children to excel.

Dating, of course, is more delicate in an interracial setting.

Twelfth-grader Denise Grab finds that social mores--and possibly parental judgment--are more tolerant of white boys dating Asian girls than the other way around.

“It’s hard to find dates if you’re a white girl at this school,” she said.

Tract 2426

This poor, tough Watts neighborhood looks much the same as it has for decades: iron bars on most windows; small yards, some tidy, some scruffy, filled with playful toddlers and adults lounging on lawn chairs; hand-painted signs advertising local carwashes, community centers and hair salons.

But look closely at the signs. It’s not merely that most are in English and Spanish. It’s that some are now only in Spanish.

The composition is a reflection of how the movement of Latinos into once-primarily black South-Central Los Angeles continued to mushroom during the ‘90s. At the beginning of the decade, this tract, which includes the Nickerson Gardens housing project and Verbum Dei High School, was 69% black and 27% Latino. The 2000 census found Latinos with a 47% to 45% edge.

Nickerson Gardens--with about 3,412 residents--makes up two-thirds of the tract, and drove the area’s demographic changes, says Ed Griffin, director of planning and economic development for the city of Los Angeles. In 1983, residents of the 1,066-unit complex were 99% black. Now they are 54% Latino and 44% black. More than two-thirds of those on waiting lists for public housing in Watts are Latino, Griffin says.

“This is like a port for new immigrants,” says Arturro Ybarro, director of the nearby Watts Century Latino Organization, which tries to strengthen black-Latino relations. Latinos “come because they want to buy or rent property for affordable prices.”

More than a few nearby homes have “For Sale” signs out front; mostly, it’s African Americans moving out and Latinos moving in, residents say. At an open house for a spotless peach-colored home on Hooper Avenue, all who stopped by Friday were Latino, a real estate agent said.

Not far away, at Edwin Markham Middle School, some black students have been taking Spanish language classes since elementary school, says Principal Elizabeth Norris. The staff is racially mixed, but a majority is black.

But with the changes have come some clashes, said Ybarro. “If schools, community organizations and churches don’t try to create a coherent network of support, this can get explosive.”

He sees the future in the car safety seat program his organization runs. When Latino families come to get the free devices, some ask for as many as six seats for one growing family.

“Latinos are coming out of the closet. . . . while many African American senior citizens are either moving out, dying or selling their property,” Ybarro said. “Those buying these houses are mainly Latino.”

“It’s black flight,” said another staff member of Ybarro’s group, Angel Zapate. “They’re moving to Vegas.”

Tract 20.10

It is unlikely that the black residents who departed Nickerson Gardens during the ‘90s went directly to this new development of stucco-and-tile houses in Fontana. It is more likely that the hundreds of African Americans who settled here came from once primarily black suburbs of central Los Angeles, parlaying their equity for a lifestyle that sprang up on range land by the mountains of San Bernardino County.

There were 55 people in Tract 20.10 in 1990. In 2000, there were 4,546. They have made this spot near the nexus of Interstates 10 and 15 a significant new twist in California’s never-ending diversity experiment.

Nearly all the residents live in the 600-acre planned development called Hunter’s Ridge, a hilly neighborhood of 1,500 beige- and salmon-colored houses with two-car or three-car garages to the west of I-15. Located on the site of a onetime hunting club, the development got underway in 1995, and many of the homes along the tidy landscaped streets are just two years old.

In California’s post-World War II housing boom, this was the kind of development that used deed restrictions to keep out aspiring middle-class minorities. But here, homeowners say, the area was a blank slate--no segregation to overcome, no old guard to overthrow.

Which is why Tract 20.10 is a microcosm of California: a place with no racial or ethnic majority. Its residents are 47% white, 23% Latino, 15% black and 9% Asian, all of them drawn by local schools with a good reputation, big houses at relatively low prices and the natural setting.

“Anyone who comes here comes for the mountains,” said Flauzell Calhoun, 55, a mortgage lender who works in Riverside. He and his wife, Carol, 45, lived in Alta Loma before moving to Hunter’s Ridge. The African American couple waited two years for just the right lot--high on the mountain’s shoulder with dead-on alpine views from the front door.

“Is it diverse?” he remembers asking the real estate agent.

Oh, yes, she said.

Jaimy Tickenoff, who is white, picked out her large home two years ago when it was little more than a frame of two-by-fours. A sandy-haired mother of two, she works as a proctor at a local elementary school.

A lot of house for the money, among other lures, drew her family out of their townhouse in Montclair, and she has since come to appreciate the neighborhood’s multicultural makeup. That was perhaps most evident when the community banded together to fight a proposed apartment complex nearby, she said. “I’m a minority up here,” she said.

The Inland Empire’s burgeoning Latino population also is reflected in this hillside enclave. But resident Liz Reynoso, for one, doesn’t give the neighborhood’s diversity much thought--and maybe, in the end, that was the most interesting thing about this particular patch in the California quilt: She was hardly aware of it.

“It’s not an issue,” she said. “It’s just life.”

Tract 5033.01

A look at the nearby Faith Lutheran Church tells you what happened in this working-class section of Whittier. The church lost half of its 800 mostly white, mostly older congregants.

But recently, the church, established by young Midwestern families after World War II, has begun to rebound, thanks in part to a Spanish-language ministry begun four years ago. Of 75 new Lutheran converts in the last two years, nearly all are Latinos, says Pastor Thomas St. Jean.

“This is probably the most diverse Lutheran church I’ve ever seen,” he said. “We hope that in the next four or five years we’ll have the largest Latino population in California.”

Ten years changed this tract of shade trees and modest homes from two-thirds white to one where whites barely outnumber Latinos, 47% to 45%. As early as 1994, the public school system in Whittier was 80% Latino.

Bounded by railroad tracks to the south and Whittier Boulevard to the north, Mills Avenue cuts through the residential area like a spine. Middle-aged trees crowd over the streets, which team with Razor scooters, BMX bikes and parents walking along curbs without sidewalks or street lamps.

Vince Hernandez, 37, and his wife, Wendy, 32, bought their home here over a year ago. He is Latino and she is white, and they grew up in Whittier.

“It was mostly white when I went to high school,” Wendy said.

First-time home buyers, many of them young Latino families, have flocked to this area. Warehouse worker Ernie Pineda, 29, moved his family here from Norwalk about a year ago to take advantage of affordable real estate and the shady streets.

But there are also plenty of older whites who have lived in the neighborhood for decades. Avid Kelley, 77, moved in with his wife 35 years ago, when the neighborhood was a community of schoolteachers, truck drivers and sheriff’s deputies.

“Not too many professional people,” said Kelley, nodding at a Latino woman driving past in a rusty van. “We went walking every day and all our kids played together.”

Two years ago, the previous tenant, who happened to be white, was a suspected drug dealer. Eventually he moved away. Kelley’s new neighbors happen to be Latino.

“They have a place on the river, and we have a place in the desert,” Kelley said. “We look after each other, we pick up each others’ papers. We consider them neighbors and close friends.”

Tract 1106.04

When Teresa Park and her husband were ready to leave their cramped condominium in Pasadena last year, they looked for homes up and down Los Angeles County and then settled on a four-bedroom house on a street with luscious lawns and wide driveways--in Buena Park.

“We looked in Pasadena and Glendale and even Diamond Bar,” the Korean native said Friday in the driveway of her new home in census tract 1106.04, which has seen one the greatest influxes of ethnic minorities in Orange County over the last decade.

“This is an older house, but I like it here,” she said. “I don’t like the newer homes built all close to each other.”

Buena Park has seen its Asian population grow by 76%--one of the highest rates of any Orange County city since 1990. Asians now comprise almost a quarter of the total population of 78,282. Latinos too have discovered the city, their ranks growing by 44% to at least 23,000 or about 30% of the total population. Whites, 71% of the population in 1990, now are 40% of the total.

Although Asian Americans still make up a minority of the major ethnic groups in the city, their rapid influx has profoundly changed the city’s face. A mini-Koreatown has emerged in the northern part of town at Beach Boulevard and Malvern Avenue.

Isidro Flores has noticed the changes too in the 18 years he has been cutting the grass and trimming the bushes in Park’s neighborhood. Ten years ago, Flores said as he prepared to fire up his leaf blower, there were one or two Asian families among the 18 or so homes he visits each day. “Now they are about a third.”

Amy Park said her family first settled near Los Angeles’ Koreatown when they moved from Seattle two years ago to be close to her in-laws. That lasted six months.

“We still go up once a week to visit them,” she said while picking up her daughter Amber, 5, and son Justin, 3, at the nearby elementary school. “That’s enough for me.”

At Emery Elementary, the surge of Asian students has grown significantly, said principal Nancy Rios. In just five years, Asian students have gone from 12% to 20% of the total.

“My children feel comfortable because they are not the only Asians,” Amy Park said.

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Times staff writers Terence Monmaney, Solomon Moore, Doug Smith and Erin Texeira contributed to this story.