On and off Central Ave.

TRAVELING THROUGH South Los Angeles last week, I was struck with new clarity by a thought that has been constant but abstract in my mind for the last dozen years: The Latino revolution is almost complete.

By “revolution” I don’t mean anything radical or politically daring, though the show of Latino protesters in the last several weeks in response to proposed federal immigration legislation has been that. I mean revolution more literally -- the turning of one thing to another, the inexorable movement of a body around a fixed point.

Driving north along Central Avenue from Slauson, I realized just how powerful are the forces that have remade this street. Once the center of the black L.A. universe, a thoroughfare dense with financial, cultural and social activity that rooted and shaped black life in the Southland and beyond, Central Avenue is now becoming the same thing for a different population. Crowded-together storefronts feature signs in Spanish. Music blaring from sidewalk speakers is reggaeton and ranchera. Throngs of pedestrians are all Latino.

At 42nd Street I come upon the Dunbar, the hotel/jazz club that was once the boulevard’s crown jewel, and it’s startling. This is partly because the Dunbar is refurbished among so many buildings that aren’t. But mostly it’s because it doesn’t belong. It’s a lovely period piece, a museum. In the new Latino reality, and in this advanced age of multiculturalism, the Dunbar can be seen as either a symbol of diversity or of defiance (or both). Today, with my new, uncompromised vision, the glass is looking decidedly half empty.

I turn east on 40th Place and go a couple of short blocks to the Ralph Bunche house. This is the childhood home of one of the neighborhood’s most famous sons and one of L.A.’s finest, the United Nations diplomat and winner of the 1950 Nobel Peace Prize. (He was the first African American awarded the prize.) His home is a jaunty yellow California bungalow that looks like many other well-kept places on the block, minus the iron window bars standard almost everywhere else. Inside, the Bunche house is brilliant, with sunlight streaming through modified bay windows, scrubbed wood floors and an airy parlor/den/dining room.

I have come to observe a group of students in the local Ralph Bunche Youth Leadership Academy, a program run by the Dunbar Economic Development Corp. They are to have an audience with Ralph Bunche Jr., who has returned here from London on one of his regular visits. This one has a special urgency: Bunche has heard about the black-brown tension roiling L.A. the last few years, and he wants to address it.

The students are mostly from Jefferson High down the street -- Bunche the elder’s alma mater -- and are assembled on the front lawn, ready and eager. All of them are Latino. I am assured that African Americans have been members of past classes, just not this one.

Reginald Chapple, who runs the academy, admits that it’s getting tougher to recruit black students. Part of the problem, he says, is shrinking numbers; part of it is declining commitment. Black students have other things to do, or they don’t quite see the point. Or they’re not impelled by the same hope of better fortunes that Bunche and his generation were 60 years ago, even in the midst of segregation, and that seems to characterize these Latino students today. It touches and distresses me that the deejay, playing a medley of classic jazz ranging from Dixie to Duke Ellington, is also Latino. Black people are present here mostly as guests.

This includes my father, who grew up in this neighborhood in the 1940s and ‘50s. He doesn’t live here anymore, but Central Avenue is still his emotional sphere, his scene, as it is for several others who’ve come today and who greet each other casually but warmly in a kind of spontaneous reunion. They seem not so much unsettled by the event as proud. After all, it is the legacy of their community that has allowed this newer community to flourish against the odds and to inherit dreams of success much bigger than the little houses they live in.

It is the American way, and the most American of revolutions.