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    Central Americans in Los Angeles
    Central Americans in Los Angeles
    Central Americans in Los Angeles
    Ebook205 pages36 minutes

    Central Americans in Los Angeles

    By Rosamaria Segura

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    About this ebook

    The second-largest Latino-immigrant group in Los Angeles after Mexicans, Central Americans have become a remarkable presence in city neighborhoods, with colorful festivals, flags adorning cars, community organizations, as well as vibrant ethnic businesses. The people from Belize, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama living in Los Angeles share many cultural and historical commonalities, such as language, politics, religion, and perilous migratory paths as well as future challenges. The distinctions are also evident as ethnicities, music, and food create a healthy diversity throughout residential locations in Los Angeles. During the 1980s and 1990s, an unprecedented number of new Central Americans arrived in this cosmopolitan city, many for economic reasons while others were escaping political turmoil in their native countries. Today they are part of the ethnic layers that shape the local population. Central Americans have embraced Los Angeles as home and, in doing so, transported their rich heritage and customs to the streets of this multicultural metropolis.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArcadia Publishing
    Release dateSep 18, 2012
    ISBN9781439623428
    Central Americans in Los Angeles
    Author

    Rosamaria Segura

    Author Rosamaria Segura, a geographer who was born in El Salvador and has lived in Los Angeles since 1979, is a former board member of Clinica Romero and current board member of the Center for Salvadoran Cultural Development. She gathered these evocative photographs from families, businesses, and community groups.

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      Book preview

      Central Americans in Los Angeles - Rosamaria Segura

      her.

      INTRODUCTION

      Central American immigrants are second only to Mexican immigrants in the number of Latinos present in Los Angeles. Without a doubt, Los Angeles is preeminent for Central Americans living outside their respective countries. While Central Americans have been coming to California since the late 1940s, the majority arrived during the late 1970s and 1980s, fundamentally altering the face of Los Angeles. Salvadorans and Guatemalans came in large numbers in the 1980s, escaping political persecutions and devastating civil wars. Today these groups constitute the largest Central American populations in Los Angeles. Their presence is most conspicuous on the streets of the Pico-Union neighborhood in downtown Los Angeles. However, their influence is apparent throughout Los Angeles County.

      The photographs collected in this book are an attempt to offer a glimpse of the lifestyles, growth, and gradual blossoming of Central American cultures within Los Angeles. While Central Americans have immigrated to California during different periods for different reasons, they have often faced many obstacles and hardships after arrival. This book is not intended to portray all of the immigrant experiences but rather to celebrate the resilience of these immigrants who have integrated into Los Angeles’s urban life. The complexities of each Central American nation are numerous, yet these populations share customs and histories. After collecting the images, it seemed as if some of the photographs illustrated moments that required a book of their own. Perhaps this book will inspire others to create a more comprehensive collection and more of the stories that have been lived by each group of Central Americans in Los Angeles.

      This book is given as an homage honoring each immigrant mother and father who found the courage, when faced with no other option, to leave their loved ones behind; it also has been composed for all the children who yearned for the day when they could be reunited with their parents. Lastly, it is to honor all of those who lost their lives on the perilous voyage.

      One

      CENTRAL AMERICAN IN LOS ANGELES

      As early as the 1930s, Central Americans belonging to coffee growers’ elite families traveled to California for vacations and business trips. When the global depression of the 1930s hit the coffee market, it affected the regional economies of these countries. Later, small numbers of upper class and middle-class people immigrated to San Francisco and Los Angeles. By the 1940s and 1950s, another small group of Central Americans came to Los Angeles. This time it was the immigrants from the working class; a number of them came with work permits to fill vacant jobs in a variety of industries. Throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, additional immigrants traveled to Los Angeles. Some came to study or to visit relatives and later returned to their native countries, and others stayed and integrated into the working and social life of Los Angeles. After the late 1970s, most Central American migration was related to the civil wars in some countries and the resulting economic devastation.

      In general, when Central Americans came, many of them ended up living in the Westlake and MacArthur Park neighborhoods, better known as Pico-Union. These neighborhoods are located in the urban core of Los Angeles south of the Hollywood Freeway and north of the Santa Monica Freeway but west of the Harbor Freeway and east of Hoover Street. The area is surrounded by Silverlake and Echo Park to the north, the West-Adams district to the south, Koreatown to the west, and the downtown district to the east. The neighborhood was at its greatest development in the 1930s; it had a predominately white population, and it was a bedroom community for those who worked downtown. With the proliferation of the automobile, whites began to move west to newly developed suburbs. At the same time, Mexicans and Mexican Americans, who were displaced from agricultural land that had been taken for new suburban development, moved to the Pico-Union area. Since then, it has become a transient neighborhood for recent Latino immigrants, starting with many Mexicans who later moved to other areas, such as the already well-established Boyle Heights and East Los Angeles. For the newly arrived Central Americans, the neighborhoods around Pico-Union have always been attractive because of the abundant multifamily residential buildings and the already established Latino community.

      The Central American region is of relatively small size in contrast to the rest of the continent; however, its geographic location plays a significant role because it is like a bridge linking North and South America and therefore its peoples. The total area of Central America is 523,780 square kilometers, as compared to the United States, which has approximately 9,826,675 square kilometers. The region, in spite of its small size, has numerous political, economic, and cultural complexities. The pre-Columbian period coincided with Mesoamerican civilization, which occupied much of the northwestern areas from Guatemala through Honduras, Belize, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama. Mesoamerican and Andean cultures met somewhere between Costa Rica and Panama; however, this unity was mostly cultural rather than political. The post–Christopher Columbus discovery period was dominated by Spain’s influence for nearly 300 centuries until each of these countries won independence from Spain in 1821, with the exception of Belize, which was part of the British Empire and did not become independent until 1981. After the Central American region gained its independence, there were several attempts to unite the region as whole country; however, to this day, each country remains separate, independent entities. (Courtesy of Angie

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