Los Angeles: The New Ellis Island

By 10:30 a.m., the Northwest Orient jumbo jet was in its berth at Los Angeles International Airport, simmering down after the 13-hour flight from Manila. It had disgorged its captain, crew and 284 passengers, including the unbearably excited young Santiagos.

The five siblings, ages 24 to 33, were about to join their parents, whom they had last seen in 1979. They stepped through the passport stamper’s booth and up to the desk of the Immigration and Naturalization Service official, a sympathetic woman, for fingerprinting and more stamps. They carried their things (a portable tape player, a jar of noodles soaked in vinegar, bath slippers) past the Department of Agriculture inspector and out. The young Santiagos had never been to Los Angeles, let alone the U.S. And yet, as of last Thursday afternoon, they were here to stay.

Los Angeles is being invaded. Two hours after the Santiagos arrived a Pan American jet landed with 76 Vietnamese refugees on board. And all those immigrants standing in anxious L.A. airport queues, mainly Asians, are only the western flank. At the INS checkpoints to the south in San Diego, nearly 2,500 Mexicans, Salvadorans and Guatemalans are waved through each month. Many more, perhaps 50 times the legal arrivals, slip quietly over the border.

Each immigrant, whether he crossed the Pacific on a 747 or the Rio Grande on a compatriot’s shoulders, is bristling with old-fashioned ambitions. Each harbors a plan, or at least the rough vision of a better life. More and more head for the new ethnic metropolis. “Los Angeles,” says Rand Corporation Demographer Kevin McCarthy, “has become the natural embarkation point to the U.S. There’s no-question that it is the new Ellis Island.” L.A. has no central processing facility like Ellis Island, or any Pacific Coast Statue of Liberty, no romantic symbol for every country’s immigrants. But during 1982, according to Rand estimates, more than 90,000 foreign immigrants settled there, and since 1970, more than 2 million. The exotic multitudes are altering the collective beat and bop of L.A., the city’s smells and colors. And a deeper transformation is under way.

Immigrants have landed there before, of course, though never in such numbers. “We find ourselves suddenly threatened,” said the last Mexican Governor of California, in 1846, “by hordes of Yankee emigrants … whose progress we cannot arrest.” Southern California in particular has always been full of transplants becoming Americans.

But by 1940, only an eighth of Californians were foreign-born. Mainly other Americans were drifting into Los Angeles. They came seeking respite from the Dust Bowl and Depression, or for a glancing try at Hollywood success. Since World War II, the mass of U.S. migrants has grown larger but less purposeful. Lately they have seemed to hanker not so much for jobs as for a sunny, sexy L.A. way of life, as have the growing number of French (55,000) and British (50,000) émigrés.

The international hordes now streaming in from the west and south have, in contrast, no-nonsense ideas about what they want: a chance to work hard and make money. Laid back they are not. The newcomers seem almost eager to endure adversity in pursuit of their American dreams, not unlike the teeming masses at the turn of the century. Many have left such misery that their dreams are extremely modest. Today in L.A., there are refugees from ugly politics—Soviet Armenians, Lebanese, Iranians—and also entrepreneurs arriving with capital already in hand. But most are not well-off and most came from countries of the “Pacific rim”: Mexico and El Salvador, across the ocean to Samoa, and still farther west to the Philippines, Taiwan, Viet Nam and South Korea. Congress opened the floodgates in 1965 when it replaced racial and national quotas with an overall annual limit of 290,000 immigrants.

The statistical evidence of the immigrant tide is stark. In 1960 one in nine Los Angeles County residents was Hispanic, and a scant one in 100 was Asian. Today one in ten is Asian. Nearly a third of the county is now Hispanic, as are almost two-thirds of L.A. kindergartners. Nor is this ethnic sweep a limited, inner-city affair. Although whites have been a minority in the hemmed-in city of Los Angeles for some time (in 1980, 48% of a population of 3 million), the Anglos are now, suddenly, also shy of a majority throughout the whole county (3.8 million out of 7.9 million). Today everyone in L.A. is a member of a minority group.

Why L.A.? It is closer to Seoul, Mazatlán and Singapore than other big U.S. cities. The immigrants are reassured that the local climate, at least, is not mean. And they seek safety in numbers.

In fact, there are not necessarily any welcoming hugs from ethnic brethren who have made the trip earlier. L.A. has for decades had solid, stable populations of hybrid Angelenos—Japanese Americans, Chinese Americans and so on. They do not always know what to make of the newcomers. And many L.A. Blacks simply feel besieged, resentful.

But at least the blacks are aware of the immigrant surge. Most White locals seem oblivious. It is a city where people drive on freeways, and so see mainly roofs and treetops; it is easy to ignore remarkable changes in the grittier quarters and homelier suburbs. In L.A., all neighborhoods except one’s own are out of the way. Stockbroker Jay Marshall, who lives in the upscale Westwood section, did not know until last week that there was an enclave of 150,000 Koreans downtown. His awareness of L.A. Hispanics is dim. “I know they live in places that are terribly overcrowded,” he says. “But I don’t know where that is.” Stan Rosenfield, a publicist, has lived on the affluent, white west side for 15 years. He recalls seeing “Mexicans” during visits to an amusement park in the San Fernando Valley: “I’m only aware of them when I go to Magic Mountain, and then they’re all around me.”

What does a Taiwanese grocer living in Glendale have in common with a poor Guatemalan living in Boyle Heights? They may both watch the same local television, although the Guatemalan has Channel 34, in Spanish, and the grocer can stick to Chinese-language Channel 18. But they must certainly share the sense of being quasi-Americans: every immigrant has to cope with pressures to assimilate. They are supposed to fit in, but they may never be wholly accepted. “We do not think in American terms of a melting pot,” says Paul Louie, a second-generation Chinese American. “We prefer the metaphor of a rainbow or a salad.”

Indeed, many of the new arrivals cling to their ethnic identity, preserving their customs and language, nurturing old prejudices (the Japanese look down on Koreans), developing new ones (Koreans look down on blacks and chicanos). Whole neighborhoods seem to rub up against each other without mixing.

But the homogenizing melting pot remains a powerful national ideal. Regardless of whether the foreign-born Angelenos make peace with their extravagant, sometimes alienating new culture, they will likely watch their children turn into Americans. Hun Yum, a prospering South Korean restaurateur, has named his children, ages 7 and 2, Brian and Sandra. The kids insist on being slaked with Big Macs and ginger ale before consenting to attend occasional bulgoki feasts. “They are not Koreans,” Yum says. “Their parents are Koreans.”

Even before the staggering influx of foreign settlers, L.A. was a big, sprawling, hard-to-fathom place. It was the first great Sunbelt city, stretched and shaped by the automobile into a half urban, half suburban archipelago. Says Mark Pisano, executive director of the Southern California Association of Governments: “There has never been one huge predominant city. There have been conglomerations.” Most of what commonly passes for L.A. lies inside the generous boundaries (4,083 sq. mi.) of Los Angeles County. The county, bigger than Rhode Island and Delaware combined, contains lots of undeveloped, unincorporated scrubland as well as 82 towns and cities. The largest, of course, is the City of Los Angeles, which consists of 464 sq. mi. in the center of the county.

As an economic entity, greater Los Angeles is world class: if the area seceded, it would have a G.N.P. larger than that of Mexico or Australia. The movie and TV business is only the hot tip of L.A.’s biggest job sector, its service industries, which together employ 882,000 people. There is a muscular side as well, with 869,000 workers in manufacturing, about a third in aerospace and other clean, high-tech industries. But parts of the city could pass for Buffalo. On the waterfront in Long Beach sit stacks of blue and orange cargo containers. In Lynwood, railroad tracks run past auto salvagers, truck-winch manufacturers, scrap-metal piles.

Just absorbing hundreds of thousands of immigrants, all at once, would be a tough enough task for the overburdened overlapping local governments. (For instance, of L.A.’s 550,000 schoolchildren, 117,000 speak one of 104 languages better than they do English—including 35 kids fluent only in Gujarati, a language of western India.) But another daunting array of urban problems will not wait. L.A. is aging. “Streets are breaking up. Water mains are breaking up. Bridges are crumbling,” says Harvey Perloff, dean of U.C.L.A.’s school of architecture and urban planning. “The day of reckoning is going to happen so fast that it’s going to make people’s heads whirl.” L.A. is a product of explosive growth, but now the practical limits to growth are in sight. The local debate over taxes (about to go up to cover nearly $300 million in city and county budget deficits), potholes and police layoffs sounds a lot like the sober municipal agendas of New York City, Cleveland, Pittsburgh. L.A. can no longer pretend to be a surfside boom town with a job for everybody. The metropolis, in short, is maturing. At the same time it must adjust to the quirky, polyglot rhythms of 60,000 Samoans and 30,000 Thais, 200,000 Salvadorans and 175,000 Armenians.

L.A. seems familiar to the rest of the country. Patches of its bright cityscape are on television all the time, and Woody Allen makes cracks about its well-muscled airheads. L.A. is to the rest of the U.S. as the U.S. is to Europe: both the butt of jokes and the object of envy, derided for its fast-buck vulgarity but secretly wished well just the same.

The clichés describe a small part of L.A., but they are apt enough. The place does have eccentric glamour. The enormous HOLLYWOOD sign stuck on one of the Santa Monica Mountains is odd and funny. “Colonics,” a regimen of recreational-cum-therapeutic enemas, is popular among regular people. On Sunset Boulevard nothing seems remarkable about the Professional Waiters School, and on Gloaming Drive in Beverly Hills, the only pedestrians are tanned joggers and dark-skinned servants. Los Angeles has more registered poodles (16,732) than any other city, and plenty of them are dyed the colors of jelly beans.

Even fringe politics seems zanier than elsewhere. At this year’s May Day demonstration in MacArthur Park, 200 members of the Revolutionary Communist Party were like heavyhanded caricatures of Commies, shouting, “We spit on the red, white and blue!”

The L.A. Times report of that anti-American chant must have particularly astonished the paper’s immigrant readers. They, after all, have come to L.A. with everything staked on a belief that American myths are real. Richard Yen-Shih Koo arrived from Taiwan in 1965. “I saw the good life in the United States,” he says without irony, “as heaven.”

Heaven it is not. For the new arrivals, the experience has been unpredictable, intense and usually better than what they left behind. Here, the groups that have established themselves most visibly in L.A.:

MIDDLE EASTERNERS. In 1970, 20,000 Iranians lived in L.A. Today’s colony is close to 200,000, the great majority political refugees who have fled their country’s revolutionary turmoil. Many more are Jews, concentrated in southern Beverly Hills: there, over bins of dates in greengrocers, signs are printed in English, Farsi and Hebrew. In Beverly Hills elementary schools, one in six children is Iranian. Some American parents worry that their children’s education is suffering as teachers slow their lessons to accommodate the Farsi speakers. But one Iranian mother retorts, “When we bought their house and raised the price from $1 million to $3 million, they weren’t complaining.”

Most did not come to forge a better life, exactly, but to avoid death by Islamic firing squad. Ghassem Tehrani, who is editor of an Iranian community newspaper, could not find work in Paris or London. He is unhappy in L.A. “You are too much money-minded here. All of us want to go back,” he declares. If it were not for his two sons of Iranian draft age (14 and 16), he claims the family would return. But Tehrani’s boys would not fare well in Iran in any case. “I don’t think they know enough Farsi to survive.”

The Arab community has tripled to 130,000 in the past decade. Mohammed Hussein Saddick, 45, a U.C.L.A.-trained engineer, arrived from Lebanon 19 years ago, before local Arabs had acquired solidarity. “Their heritage was in their hearts,” he says, munching dates and fiddling with worry beads. “But they kept it in the closet.” The recent immigrants, displaced by the 1975-76 Lebanese civil war and its aftermath, tend to be Moslem rather than Christian. Says Vicki Tamoush of the National Association of Arab Americans: “Among these people, there is a much greater effort to instill a sense of Arabism in their children.”

And finally, as if for international symmetry’s sake, an Israeli community, 90,000 strong, has sprung up since 1970. The new immigrants tend to be young professionals. Many are discouraged by Israel’s erratic economy and mandatory military service, and attracted by L.A.’s mild Mediterranean climate and economic promise.

ASIANS. The “ABCs” (American-born Chinese) tend to be contemptuous of the “FOBs” (“fresh off the boat”). L.A. Filipinos have their own snickering Tagalog-language acronym—”TNTs”—for their new and often illegal arrivals. Nisei, or U.S.-born Japanese, are embarrassed by Japanese nationals who speak no English; newly arrived Japanese, in turn, are wary of L.A.’s native sansei (third generation) and yonsei (fourth). But all the Japanese seem to agree that they are superior to other Asians. And everybody picks on the Koreans. Says U.C.L.A. Sociologist Harry Kitona: “They regard the Koreans as the Mortimer Snerds of America. They cannot learn the language, their food smells and they cannot express themselves.” In a city with half a dozen major “Oriental” communities, national distinctions seem magnified, perhaps because these uneasy ethnic cousins have been thrown together as never before.

To be sure, L.A.’s Japanese Americans have good reason to feel established, if not superior. A neighborhood of Japanese immigrants was thriving downtown in Little Tokyo when Beverly Hills was empty land. The area, which was renamed Bronzeville during World War II when its residents were interned, has been retaken by the Japanese, and is again a main gathering spot for 175,000 Japanese-Americans scattered around the county. A brand new, $12.6 million cultural complex provides reminders of home: a lush, still garden of camphor and golden-rain trees, a sleek theater for Japanese-language productions, a brick plaza for a snack of age tofu (deep-fried soybean curd) and a stroll.

But not all Japanese Angelenos like the ascetic calm. “I feel like a stranger down in Little Tokyo,” says Warren Furutani, 35, a counselor at U.C.L.A. “My life is full of contradictions.” Indeed so. Furutani was born in L.A. He does not speak Japanese, but insists that his house guests take off their shoes. He frets about the ethics of buying a Honda. His son is named Sei Malik Abe Furutani. Says the father: “I want to teach this child to learn Japanese, to learn the customs and yet still be an American.”

Kazuhiko Yamaguchi moved to L.A. from Kaseda, Japan, in 1964 to make money. After 19 years building up his Mitsuru Restaurant in Little Tokyo, he speaks only Japanese. Unlike Warren Furutani, though, Yamaguchi, 51, is untroubled by cultural contradictions. Says he: “I am not worried about the ‘Americanization’ of my two children. They were born here, and their styles are different.” The odds are, in fact, that one of the Yamaguchi kids will have a White spouse. Surveys show that 60% of L.A.’s Japanese marry non-Japanese.

The Yamaguchis live in Montebello, a largely Anglo and Mexican American suburb to the east. By far the greatest concentration of L.A.’s Japanese is in middle-class Gardena, a tiny town of neat stucco houses wedged between a huge black ghetto and a neighborhood of white-collar aerospace workers (Hughes, TRW). About 11,000 of Gardena’s 47,000 residents are Japanese. “Oh, we see them a lot,” says a White Gardenan. “They come out here [to the city hall mall] on one of their holidays with all of these fish and these kites. It’s very nice.”

Chinese came in force to California a century ago from Canton. But until the mid-1970s, Chinese Americans were a small part of L.A.’s ethnic patchwork, outnumbered almost 3 to 1 by Japanese. No longer: thousands have arrived from Taiwan and Hong Kong. To much of the local Chinese Establishment, the newcomers seem vulgar and pushy.

Richard Yen-Shih Koo, 43, stands somewhere in between. He was born in Shanghai, raised in Taipei, and crossed the Pacific at 24 to get his master’s degree in business. For four years, alone in the U.S., he was separated from his wife Rut-Sun and daughter. But getting such a degree, he says, “was a dream for all [Taiwanese]. The psychological effect was to force you to go abroad.”

He arrived in Berkeley, at the University of California, in 1964, during the height of the Free Speech Movement. Koo, however, was not remotely a rebel. He obeyed when an immigration official suggested that he adopt an English name. “I had no particular preference,” he says. “My goal was success and to be rich.” Koo, who became a naturalized citizen in 1977, has achieved his goal. He is a founder of an accounting firm with three Los Angeles offices and lives in a house on two acres. But for all that he has an accountant’s cold clarity about his potential for bigger business success. “Our dreams must be realistic. I will never speak perfect English, and I look different. But everybody,” he adds, “always faces some kind of discrimination.” Koo works 60-hour weeks, so he does not see much of his two daughters. “Jean, my younger daughter,” Koo admits, “at first refused to learn to speak Chinese. But she is O.K. now.”

There are 42 Chinese language schools in the area: the Koos live near Monterey Park (pop. 57,700). The town, with its winding streets of cypress ranch houses set into the lush hillsides, is considered the Chinese enclave in L.A. In fact, the town is very mixed—39% Hispanic, 19% Chinese, the rest other Asians and whites—but the Chinese proportion has tripled in a decade. The new residents, late of Hong Kong and Taiwan, are spendthrifts: along Atlantic Boulevard, the cost of commercial space has gone up 700% since the early 1970s.

The Santiago siblings, who flew in from Manila last Thursday, will live in their parents’ house in the middle-class suburb of Reseda. They will be among a comfortably large group of Filipinos there. But the 150,000 Filipinos (up from 33,500 in 1970) are, in fact, the most scattered of the Asian nationalities in Los Angeles. It is telling that a $5 million Filipino cultural center, designed and funded, has been postponed because the community cannot decide where to build it. The poor do cluster in a shabby downtown area.

But in L.A., the Filipinos are not, typically, poor. Ambrocio Santiago will soon have the $100,000 proceeds from selling his house back in the town of General Trias. A good many of the Filipinos are medical professionals, drawn by U.S. salaries and by the provision of the 1965 immigration law that gives preference to the highly skilled. Dr. Federico Quevedo, founder of L.A.’s Confederation of Philippine-United States Organizations, is an obstetrician. Ophthalmologist Lani Quevedo, his wife, is the daughter of a doctor and a pharmacist. “The new immigration laws,” explains Federico Quevedo, “take connections and credentials and money.”

South Korean immigrants also tend to be middle class, or working slavishly to get there. Their numbers have gone up 16-fold since 1970, with virtually all of the newcomers settling in a 2-sq.-mi. swath along jumbled Olympic Boulevard. They seem eager to become full-fledged American bourgeois, holding golf tournaments and staging beauty contests. According to L.A. Demographer Eui-Young Eu of California State University, 40% of the area’s documented Koreans own their homes. Most are fervent Protestants. Koreatown has some 400 churches. Ironically, younger Koreans are more likely to commit crimes than any other Asian nationality.

Hun Yum, 40, opened his Hoban Restaurant on Western Avenue a decade ago, and profits have increased tenfold. Yet, after 14 years in L.A., he speaks barely passable English. Yum has not refused to become fluent. He is just too busy. “Money is our first priority,” he says. “We have to work first, and then we have time to learn the language. Or our children will.”

The 64,400 Vietnamese in Southern California have come in the past eight years. Cao Duc Thi, 45, an engineer, left Saigon with $40 on April 29,1975, the day before the Viet Cong tanks rolled in. He and a majority of his compatriots live in Westminster (pop. 75,000), a neat desert suburb in Orange County near Camp Pendleton, where many of the refugees spent their first days in the U.S.

“If they had told me they were sending me to Alaska,” Cao says, “I would have gone there. I didn’t know any of these places or where they were. I was grateful for a jungle or a farm or anything.” His first job was in a car wash, and next he worked for a jewelry manufacturer. In 1980 he founded Cao Enterprises, which makes ersatz American Indian baubles, and soon put his former boss out of business. Cao drives a Cadillac Fleetwood.

His friend Tran Minh Cong, 45, works for the Orange County housing authority. “This country has been very gracious to me,” he says. “But remember, I was forced to leave my country. I am hoping to go back there. Home is home.” For now, however, he calls himself Joe Tran.

HISPANICS. Forty years ago this week, L.A.’s zoot-suit race riots reached a peak of violence: white mobs, dominated by servicemen on leave, made unprovoked forays over the Los Angeles River and into the east side, where they savagely beat any flashy young Mexicans (zoot-suiters) they found. The bigotry is not gone. “They can’t hold down jobs,” says Rosenfield, the publicist. “They’re not educated. They’re lazy. They don’t make an effort to be meaningful citizens.”

Until recently in L.A., it was silly to talk of a Hispanic population: Mexicans were it. But now there are 50,000 Guatemalans with their own 18-team Guatemalan soccer league. There are 200,000 Salvadorans, and the political violence there is driving hundreds more to L.A. every week. Further, there are some 100,000 Colombians, Hondurans, Cubans and Puerto Ricans. As with the Asians, invidious distinctions are offered without much prompting. Arturo Price is from Colombia. “We have nothing to do with Mexicans here,” he sneers. “Our culture is different, our Spanish more pure.”

Nevertheless, eight out of ten L.A. “Hispanics” are Mexicans or Mexican Americans, probably 2.1 million in all. And they are different in a critical respect from all the other ethnic arrivals: the immigrant from Mexico comes from near by to what was, until 1848, Mexican national territory. He arrives feeling as much like a migrant as an immigrant, not an illegal alien but a reconquistador.

The influence on metropolitan culture, at least superficially, has been great. There is an air, especially in East Los Angeles, of what Mexican Poet Octavio Paz says are his national essences: “delight in decoration, carelessness and pomp, negligence, passion and reserve.” Shop signs, often pictorial, are painted directly and unprofessionally on stucco façades. The slow promenades of customized cars are nationally famous.

Among Mexican Americans, however, there are class and other divisions that can be as important as the distinctions among Latin nationalities. “There is a huge difference between the kids born here and the kids born in Mexico,” says Jesse Quintero, a teacher whose students are mostly illegals. “It’s a different breed.” And while the waves of illegal Mexican immigrants are exceptionally poor, the barrio’s long-entrenched Mexican Americans inhabit a world more like William Bendix’s TV L.A. in the 1950s show The Life of Riley: working-class comfortable. The middle class, perhaps 30% of L.A.’s latinos, seldom use the vaguely militant term chicano.

The young man in East L.A.’s scruffy old Maravilla barrio calls himself Diablo. He wears a sleeveless T shirt, so his tattoos are plain. Diablo, 23, spends most of his free time hanging out with a few fellow members of the Lopez-Maravilla gang. They look tough. But at a meeting in a tool shed late last month, they were mostly concerned with planning an upcoming rummage sale. There are some 300 Mexican youth gangs in L.A., and many are violent drug users: police say 260 homicides last year were gang related.

There are gangs in José Cardines’ neighborhood. Cardines, 51, arrived in East L.A. when he was 29, the year John Kennedy became President. He speaks no English. But he has become a U.S. citizen, and provides for his wife and six kids with a small auto-body repair shop. Those provisions last month included spending thousands on the traditional coming out, the quinceañera, for his daughter Lucy. “A girl is only 15 once,” Cardines said, as Lucy and her 28 attendants boogied to Superfreak in a hotel ballroom.

Out in West Covina, Raina Padilla would have rolled her eyes in disbelief (Daddy!) if Ernie, her father, had suggested a corny quinceañera for her. Raina, 24, is a University of Southern California graduate who dates Anglos (40% of Mexican Americans marry across ethnic lines) and spent her junior year studying in Madrid: Ernie had wanted her to perfect her Spanish. She did not.

Padilla, 59, was born poor, but now earns enough from his security firm to afford the good life: two Cadillacs, $300,000 house, swimming pool, outdoor barbecue, Scotch and sizzling T-bones on the patio. He is a Republican: he shows a photograph of his wife with Wayne Newton at President Reagan’s Inauguration.

Jesse Quintero, 28, and his wife Rosemary, 27, were born and raised in East L.A., but they met as students at U.S.C. They are teachers in the schools of heavily Mexican Bell Gardens. “I am a latino,” Jesse declares. “I’ll never feel Anglo.” He glances at Rosemary, who is wearing her Camp Beverly Hills T shirt. “Sure,” he says, “we listen to Anglo music, watch Anglo TV, go to Anglo movies. But we do it with other latinos.”

The Quinteros live just east of Bell Gardens. Their town is Montebello (pop. 53,000), a well-tended middle-class suburb that in 20 years has changed from entirely Anglo to 65% Hispanic.

“When I was a kid,” Jesse says, “you had to become Anglo to survive. For the kids today, it’s hip to be latino.” How hip? A New Wave rock band formed by U.S.-born Mexican Americans is called Los Illegals. Avance, a stylish new magazine written in English, has a young, upscale circulation of 35,000. But for every trendy Avance subscriber in L.A. there are at least ten who resist adaptation. Says L.A. Times Columnist Frank del Olmo: “There’s a large segment within the legal population who see themselves as Mexicans. They don’t necessarily want to stay in the U.S. forever.”

Some 160,000 refugees have come to L.A. from El Salvador since 1980, when the crossfire of insurgency and repression escalated. Most are unskilled and terribly poor. In 1981 Narciso Cardoza walked over the Mexican border into Texas, illegally, and then flew to L.A. to join his wife and daughter, now 5, in East L.A. “I thought I would be living with Americans, lots of blonds speaking English and playing baseball,” he says of his arrival, “but it looked just like Mexico to me.” He is disapproving of his Mexican neighbors who, he says, “sit around all day, swearing and drinking beer instead of working.” Cardoza, 28, has a $3.50-per-hr. job as a clerk in an auto-parts store.

He is struck more by the everyday American plenty than by the grander promise. “All these tennis courts,” he exults, “where anybody can play for free! And lying empty most of the day.” His ingenuous pleasure could make a cynic weep. “The apples, the peaches, the strawberries are all so good here, and cheap! The first time my wife and I went to the market together,” he says, “we spent $20 just on fruits and vegetables.” One of his small dreams: “I’d like to go to an American disco some day and dance.”

In the Salvadoran neighborhood in Pico-Union, a Japanese restaurateur has opened a place called El Libertad El Salvador, and serves teriyakiburgers. All over the city and county, in fact, the ethnics have bumped up against each other and produced some vivid, only-in-L.A. mongrels. Gutierrez & Weber, Wah Wing Sang is a mortuary. Billie Williams, a black businessman, and Pharmacist Doug Kosobayashi, who is Japanese, own and run a flourishing Pasadena drugstore called Berry & Sweeney.

More often, it seems, there is conflict and recrimination. The resentment is economic, with blacks mad at Mexicans and Mexicans sore at Asians. “They are all boat people who came into this country behind a war our kids fought,” complains James Ramirez of East L.A. “The Government gives them a 3% loan. If we had it so good, we’d be owners too.”

But anger is increasingly acute among L.A.’s blacks, who make up 12.6% of the county. Frank Haley runs a dry cleaners near Watts. Hispanics now make up one-third of his neighborhood. “It bothers me a lot,” Haley says. “I see these Spanish coming in and buying businesses. They must be getting the money from somewhere.” His theory: “This started after the [Watts] riots. I feel that the Government said, ‘All right, we’ll fix those blacks. We’ll open up the border and move in Mexicans.’ ” The Asians are more roundly blamed. “We all looked up one day,” says Mary Henry, a black activist, “and everybody pumping gas seemed to be Asian.”

Black politicians are less fearful of inroads by the immigrants, and some are smug. Chinese seem wary of elections: last fall, among all of Monterey Park’s Chinese, a mere 1,600 voted. L.A.’s blacks, by contrast, vote in throngs: in 1980, 56% of the black voting-age population went to the polls, compared with 49% of Anglos.

Still, the sheer size of the potential Mexican electorate cannot be ignored, only analyzed away. “The latino majority on the east side [of the black district],” says Maxine Waters, an assemblywoman, “is still mainly undocumented workers who don’t vote.” Del Olmo agrees that his people’s power is all latent: “The numbers indicate potential. Too many latinos fall back on rhetoric and raw numbers to prove their validity.” He thinks that Mexican political muscle may not be flexed until the next century. In the year 2000, according to a study of L.A.’s future just completed by U.S.C., Hispanics will constitute 40% of L.A. County and Anglos, 31%.

By then, construction on the $1.2 billion redevelopment of the downtown Bunker Hill area, scheduled to begin this summer, should be done. (It is as if the city had decided, belatedly, to build a there there.) But will L.A. be a pleasant place? According to the U.S.C. study, the metropolis is heading for housing that is still more expensive, traffic that is slower, and public schools abandoned entirely to the poor. Technicians will be in demand, while jobs for blue-collar workers will be scarce. Crime will spill over into fancy neighborhoods.

“Bringing out these problems now is optimistic,” says Professor Selwyn Enzer, who directed the study, since doomsaying can lead to debate and thus to urban planning. The nutshell solution is in the summary of the exhaustive study. “Unplanned growth in the mature Los Angeles of 2001,” the authors say, “will not be permitted to occur.”

But laissez-faire habits are hard to break. Modern L.A. has known only helter-skelter growth. “There’s a vacuum of leadership,” says Ted Bruinsma, president of the Chamber of Commerce. “All the planning is in think tanks.” And planning, after all, has produced urban results as dreadful as any. The “master plan” for L.A. envisions two more international airports to be built—the first one in the desert of Riverside County—to pull Angelenos out into the boondocks, where there is still room to grow and grow. Enzer is dubious: “How is anybody from Watts going to get to a job in Riverside if it opens up there?” Already, though, up north in an arid nowhere, a new, generic tract has sprung up: the development is called Le House.

While the master planners have L.A. sprawling off obediently to the desert, the metropolitan economy is supposed to be juiced up by more high-tech industry and a new era of trade with Asia and Latin America. “The growth in the Pacific rim has just begun,” says Planner Mark Pisano. “It’s going to take off like an exponential curve in two to four decades.”

Yet right now, it is the foreign residents of the Pacific rim, hundreds every day, who take off—take off and land in L.A. Blithe Angelenos cannot afford to depend on luck and the vague promise of another economic boom, 20 or 40 years hence, to take care of the newcomers and smooth over problems. L.A., nature’s charmed city, must begin to look after itself.

—By Kurt Andersen. Reported by Benjamin W. Cate, with the Los Angeles bureau