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Los Angeles: A Window on the Future of the Nation Los Angeles is one of the most racially, ethnically, and culturally diverse cities in the world. The public schools offer instruction in 92 of the 224 identified languages spoken in the county. Restaurants span the cuisines of the world, including Thai, Vietnamese, Indian, Pakistani, Russian, Moroccan , Ethiopian, Caribbean, Argentinean, Cuban, and Guatemalan, not to mention the ubiquitous Mexican, Chinese, Italian, French, and Japanese venues, classic “American” soul food restaurants, and Jewish deli spots. The political landscape is equally diverse, with local officeholders and prominent public figures whose surnames run from Molina to Woo, Edelman, Ito, Yaroslavsky, Antonovich, Waters, Abramson, Burke, and Villaraigosa. Both residents and visitors to the city can partake in annual African marketplace festivals, Cinco de Mayo and Dia de los Muertos celebrations , Chinese New Year, the Israeli Festival, and Chosuk, a Korean Thanksgiving celebration. If there was ever a metropolis that holds forth the promise of a heady social melting pot, it would be La Ciudad de Los Angeles—the City of the Angels. Behind this surface patina of rich diversity lies a vast array of racial and ethnic communities and social structures. To the rest of the world, the African American community in Los Angeles may be associated with the 1965 uprising in Watts, the more recent (and more destructive) uprisings of 1992, and South Central, made famous by rappers like Ice Cube, Dr. Dre, and TuPac. This well-established community also includes, however, strong and vibrant black institutions, such as Founders Bank and Trust and Broadway Federal Savings and Loan, both venerable, black-owned financial institutions. The Degnan Street area in Liemert Park features art galleries like Museum in Black—where the front is dedicated to the display and sale of African art and the back holds a permanent exhibit of art and memorabilia relevant to the African American experience—as well as 6 Chapter One black bookstores, import-export shops specializing in African art, textiles, and clothing, and the World Stage, a place where up-and-coming jazz musicians show their wares. Los Angeles supports two black newspapers , including the Los Angeles Sentinel, a weekly that has served the black community for more than sixty years. And not far from South Central is the “new West Side,” where upwardly mobile blacks live in the hilltop communities of Ladera Heights and Baldwin Hills (fondly referred to by blacks as “Black Beverly Hills”) and in the “tidy tractlands of suburban Inglewood and Carson” (Davis 1992, 304). There is also a vast and growing Latino community in Los Angeles. In absolute terms, the city is home to the largest Latino population in the country. Spanish-speaking television and radio stations rival mainstream electronic media in viewers and listeners, and La Opinión is a thriving Spanish-speaking daily newspaper. Pico-Union and East L.A. have long histories as thriving Latino communities where businesses cater to the needs of Mexican and Central American residents: posters, billboards, and store signs are all in Spanish; Latin music blares from loudspeakers out into the streets; at parish fiestas, lottery jackpots are advertised in pesos ; and in the bars and restaurants of Boyle Heights, children go from table to table selling novelties like those found in the stalls of Tijuana (Skerry 1993). Los Angeles is also home to the largest Korean settlement in the United States and supports the most thriving and profitable Korean economy. Koreatown is a thriving business community for Korean merchants and small businesses. Korean commercial signs on this one-mile strip near downtown L.A. advertise “English spoken here” (Portes and Rumbaut 1996). In addition to the plethora of Korean restaurants and grocery stores, Koreatown includes Korean banks, import-export houses, garment factories, real estate offices, and a wide variety of retail stores, and the Korea Times is the newspaper of choice (Bobo et al. 1994; Portes and Rumbaut 1996). About eight miles east of downtown Los Angeles is Monterey Park, a middle-class, majority-Chinese suburb that is also home to a sizable number of Japanese residents. Finally, there are the predominantly white areas that in many people’s minds define Los Angeles: Brentwood, Bel Air, Beverly Hills, Hollywood, Malibu, and Burbank—the land of the rich and famous and beautiful, with sparkling beaches and big money. As the center of the entertainment industry, a Pacific Rim hub for business and finance, and the place that entertainers, industry executives and...

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