Diversity Is Pot of Gold for O.C.’s Rainbow Census

It’s safe to say that Mary Zamora didn’t see herself as symbolic of anything when she abandoned Los Angeles 41 years ago for Orange County.

She was.

Merely by deciding way back then that she didn’t like the changing racial makeup in her South-Central Los Angeles neighborhood and opting for Tustin, hers was in the vanguard of a wave of families that would establish Orange County as the anti-Los Angeles.

Concerned about possible racial tension? Too much concrete in L.A.? Don’t like city schools? Sick of urban life and longing for something simpler? Something--let’s tell like it is--more white, perhaps?

For thousands of Los Angeles families in the 1960s, that place was Orange County--a mere freeway hop away.

What an irony, then, that the place that came of age as the anti-Los Angeles now resembles it more than ever. They’re taking the “sub” out of suburbia. That’s what new census figures say about Orange County, which probably means that, somewhere, Angelenos are laughing ... as if they care.

I met Mary Zamora on Thursday morning in the drapery shop she helped found in 1961 and still owns. Now two weeks shy of 84, she looks 20 years younger and says she still pulls more than her share of the work at the company, Rose-Marie Draperies.

It struck me as more than appropriate, given the topic of change, that the store still sits on Main Street in the part of Tustin known as Old Town.

“When I opened it, there was nothing here,” Zamora says. “This was a ghost town. All these old buildings, half of them were closed. There were only 3,000 people in Tustin when I came, and it was all white.”

It was anti-Los Angeles in so many ways.

“They had a drugstore on the corner over here, and every morning at 9 they’d ring a big cowbell, and all of us would close our stores for a half-hour and go over there for coffee.”

When she expanded her store to an adjoining building, one of her first tasks was to “dig out an outdoor privy out front. And it cost me money to fill the darn thing up.”

Yes, Orange County was a much different place way back then.

Though it’s true Zamora didn’t like the changing demographics of her Los Angeles neighborhood, let’s not cast stones. Her family was among literally millions of white Americans from coast to coast in the 1960s and 1970s that left increasingly integrated neighborhoods for all-white suburbs.

Besides, Zamora says of Tustin, “a lot of the farmers around here were Basque, and I was Basque.”

What about now? I ask Zamora. Tustin has grown to nearly 70,000. One-third of its residents are foreign-born. Nearly half speak a language other than English at home. Its public schools graduate students from nationalities around the globe.

It sounds like Orange County has, indeed, become Los Angeles.

Zamora doesn’t buy that. She still loves Tustin and its ethnic diversity and disputes that the city and county have become another Los Angeles.

“People who come here want a better living,” she says. “But they also want to keep life normal and be friends with everybody. If you live next door to an Asian, you get to know them, you become friends.”

That small-town feeling--which may be more pronounced in a quaint place like Old Town--still is part of the Orange County identity, Zamora says.

She doesn’t sugar-coat, however, the squabbles that arise when ethnic groups merge. Like many latter-day whites in Orange County, she thinks the emergent Latino population sometimes overreaches in pursuing broad political agendas.

“They’re pushing us, I feel,” she says.

But she goes on to say she’d rather live in this place at this time than in another all-white enclave. She makes a humorous point of saying she doesn’t much care for Newport Beach. “You think one way, you get in a rut,” she says. “You’ve got to think a lot of different ways.”

That’s not to say that she, like most humans, doesn’t occasionally long for simpler, quieter times.

No matter the decade, however, census figures always seem inevitably to take us further and further from those simpler, quieter times.

Still, Zamora says, Orange County isn’t Los Angeles.

“I don’t think it’ll ever be. It’s because of the people who come here. They think differently.”

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Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. Readers may reach Parsons by calling (714) 966-7821 or by writing to him at The Times’ Orange County edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626, or by e-mail to dana.parsons@latimes.com.