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Epilogue In the three decades since the 1960s, Southern California has experienced demographic changes that have contributed to the transformation of the citrus belt. Both Asian and Latino populations have expanded largely due to the signi ficant increases in immigration as a result of alterations in U.S. immigration laws and severe economic and political crises abroad. The Immigration Act of 1965 eliminated race as a consideration in immigration and dispensed with an old system of quotas favoring Western European countries. By establishing a single limit of 20,000 immigrants a year for each country in the Eastern Hemisphere , Congress intended to eliminate the low quotas set for Italy and other southern and eastern European countries, but its actions had the unintended consequence of opening up immigration from Asian countries. In the case of immigration from Mexico and other Latin American countries, numbers increased in spite of changes in the U.S. immigration law. Although Congress extended the annual 20,000 quota to the Western Hemisphere in 1976, thereby reducing the number of eligible Latino immigrants previously allowed into the United States, those totals have risen. Latinos increased at a rate far greater than any other minority group, increasing from just below 7 million persons in 1960 to approximately 10.5 million in 1970, 14.6 million in 1980, and an estimated 20 million in 1990.1 Displaced by civil wars precipitated by U.S. counterinsurgency operations in Central America and neoliberal economic policies in Mexico, many people no longer feel ‘‘at home’’ in their homelands and have crossed the border as undocumented immigrants despite the passage of antiimmigrant legislation like California’s Proposition 187 and the intensification of immigrant scapegoating by desperate politicians like the former governor of California, Pete Wilson. No one knows exactly how many people are living ‘‘illegally’’ in the United States, but a recent study by geographers James P. Allen and Eugene Turner estimate that during the 1980s at least 1.3 million resided in Southern California alone. Among these immigrants, Mexicans by far constituted the largest group, but Salvadorans, Guatemalans, Iranians, Chinese, and Filipinos also figured prominently.2 Many of these immigrants have made the San Gabriel, Pomona, and San Bernardino Valleys their home and have changed the face of the communities 258 • EPILOGUE I knew as a child. During the 1960s and 1970s, it was novel for my father, a second-generation Mexican American, to marry my Anglo mother and to purchase a home in neighborhoods not dominated by Mexican Americans. Today, my parents’ neighbors are first-generation Colombian immigrants, while the businesses in downtown Ontario and Pomona are just as likely to advertise in Spanish as they are in English. In the citrus belt city of Azusa where my father owned a carniceria (meat market), changes in the ethnic and racial makeup of the clientele reflected the demographic changes going on in Southern California. When my father purchased ‘‘Frontier Meats’’ during the late 1980s, most of the customers and employees came from the white, African American, and Chicano working-class communities surrounding the market. By the mid1990s , recent Latino and Asian immigrants constituted at least half our clientele , precipitating changes in our marketing strategies, products, and staff. To her surprise, my grandmother’s homemade salsas, tacos, and menudo became customer favorites, while from the meat counter we sold more pounds of ‘‘flap’’ meat and skirt steak ‘‘para carne asada’’ than t-bone or porterhouse steaks. My father who had been socialized not to speak Spanish in public by Claremont and Upland schoolteachers, now found himself speaking his first language on a daily basis to customers hailing from places such as Tegulcigalpa, Honduras, Oaxaca, Mexico, and Managua, Nicaragua. While we at the market adjusted to and even profited from these changes, others have reacted with hostility. The passage of Proposition 187, the California initiative that denies public services such as medical care and education to undocumented immigrants, and the successful 1994 reelection campaign of Governor Pete Wilson revealed the considerable white voter resentment toward immigrants in California. Motivated by the fear that all Mexicans wanted to take advantage of state welfare, proponents of Proposition 187 conducted a media campaign that characterized Latino immigrants as sexually unrestrained deviants intent on reaping benefits for their growing families.3 Drawing on the groundswell of support among white voters for the initiative, Pete Wilson linked his 1994 bid for reelection to the pro-187 forces and erased the seemingly insurmountable lead of his...

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