The Globalization of South Los Angeles

[Valin]

NRO:

Tim Stanley
5/19/11

My driving instructor used to be a member of a South L.A. gang, but business dried up in the 1990s, and he was forced to get a job instead. He’s about five feet tall, but everyone calls him “Big.” “It was pretty sweet round here in the Nineties,” Big tells me as we navigate the barren streets between the Westside and South Central. That was what he calls the “golden age” of the Crips and the Bloods. Both African-American gangs are still strong, but they’ve lost a lot of their clout. “They were tough bastards, but they were our bastards,” says Big. “They were born around here, you know? They were real Americans.” And they sang and danced about it, too, turning South L.A. into a site of cultural significance for nearly a decade. It was here that the Rodney King riots started in 1992, turning the ghetto into the Immortal City of black poverty, fetishized in the hip-hop of Snoop Dogg and the movies of Spike Lee.

(Snip)

Put simply, South L.A. used to be majority black; now it is majority Hispanic. In 1980, 71 percent of the population was African-American. According to the 2010 census, that figure has fallen to 31 percent, while the proportion of Hispanic residents is now 62 percent. One fun innovation the Hispanic migrants have brought with them is a culture of raising livestock at home. In contemporary South L.A., it is not unusual to be woken up at 6 a.m. by the sound of a rooster crowing. While turning onto Gage Avenue, I nearly drove my car into a goat.

(Snip)

Yet the liberal establishment remains strangely ignorant of the changing face of crime in South L.A. I spoke with an activist who works with reformed gang members. He takes them to fundraisers thrown at Hollywood mansions, where they testify about the good things the program has done for them. “But whenever I pick who will deliver the speech,” he confesses, “I always pick someone who is black. For two reasons. First, white liberals associate poverty with black people: It’s a Civil Rights thing. Second, if I got a Hispanic person to speak, the donors would feel uncomfortable. All their staff are Mexican: the maid, the cook, the gardener. They don’t want to think about what’s happening to those people’s kids while they’re in their homes working for the minimum wage.”

(Snip)