From the very first nights, the residents of Los Angeles smelled the fear, billowing in with the summer mist. Lacking a substantial troop presence in the south of California, the state’s new Anglo-American rulers were concerned that Mexicans would rebel and reunite with their homeland. Late at night, drunken young Hispanic men would gallop through the streets, proclaiming rebellion. Elderly Hispanic men would tell stories of how they conspired to overthrow unpopular governors. The new Anglo-American rulers were—nervous.
Last weekend, the world watched the global economic and cultural powerhouse Los Angeles burning in response to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency’s raids targeting “illegal” immigrant workers. Trump’s incendiary language against immigrants has won him support in swathes of his White American base, but it has also pushed many other communities to the edge.
For all societies and nations, some conversations are excruciating: Who can truly claim to belong, and who is consigned to the margins? Whose values and beliefs ought to prevail? Each city, each community, and each nation has deeply internalised scripts to which it turns in moments of crisis. Flying the flags of their homelands—Mexico, Uruguay, Paraguay, and America—the protesters are laying claim to the right to make decisions about their future.
To understand what’s going on requires engagement with the fact that the riot is not a new phenomenon in Los Angeles or other American cities. Each riot poses discomfiting questions about the place of communities in the social order. The riot almost always establishes new rules, new accommodations, and new resentments. Each riot is a painful engagement in testing who can claim to be a citizen, a full participant in its culture, and with a voice in shaping its destiny.
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Neighbours, not friends
The names of the streets tell us an important story about Los Angeles: To the north of the concrete detention centre where hundreds of illegal immigrants are being held, there is the El Pueblo monument, where 44 families from the Gulf of Mexico first settled in 1781 on the orders of their king, Charles III of Spain—founding Los Angeles. To the south of the prison, there’s Little Tokyo, and a short walk away, Skid Row, home to the desperately poor. The buildings bear the names of radical Hispanic civil rights leaders and the great Anglo families who built Los Angeles.
A little under two million of the city’s population are Hispanic, according to census figures, some with ties of kinship and culture to communities across the border. There are 1,126,052 Whites. Additionally, there are 462,643 Asians and 336,096 Black or African American residents. This is one of America’s many racial crucibles.
Following the coerced sale of California to the United States in 1847, Sonora Town began to develop as a Hispanic ghetto made up of miners kicked off gold mines by Anglo-American prospectors. Lawless bandits from the region also started to congregate in the El Calle de los Negros neighbourhood. “Filled with saloons and brothels, this street catered to the less reputable members of all races,” historian Lawrence Guillow records. To most residents, it was evident some kind of violent showdown was inevitable.
Then, on 19 July 1856, marshals attempted to confiscate a guitar and other personal property from Antonio Ruiz and Señora María Candelaria Pollorena to recover an unpaid loan. A fight followed, and Ruiz ended up being shot dead in the chest. A trial followed, in which an all-White jury acquitted the killer.
For several days, gangs of Hispanic vigilantes clashed with the local police—though to little effect. The rioting soon died out, with influential Hispanic leaders seeing that the chaos was undermining their status in Los Angeles.
Even as the crisis of 1856 began to subside, a new one was starting to emerge. Thousands of ethnic-Chinese migrant workers began to make their way into the city, congregating seven to a room in the Calle de Los Negros. The New York Times reported: “Murderers, horse-thieves, highwaymen, burglars, etc., from all parts of Southern California and Arizona, make this their rendezvous. It is their brothels monopolising about two-thirds of an entire block.”
Late in 1871, members of two Chinese crime gangs—the Howg Chow and Nin Yung—began exchanging gunfire in the Calle de Los Negros. Furious retaliation followed from Hispanic and White residents. Five hundred Chinese people, historian Scott Zesch records, were dragged through the streets and shot, hanged, and beaten to death as the crowd fancied. Eighteen were killed.
“A delighted hangman, dancing a quick step on a balcony, called out, ‘Bring me more Chinamen boys, patronise the home trade,’” Zesch writes.
Through the period, American legal institutions struggled to establish themselves: Vigilantism held up some degree of order, if not law. “The Americans of the Angel City were in the habit of amusing themselves by hanging some luckless Mexican, and the Mexicans wished to show that they could play the same game and so seized on poor Dave as a fit subject for demonstration.”
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From war to civil war
The summer of 1943 brought large numbers of soldiers—recruited from across the United States’ conservative rural heartland—into contact with Los Angeles’ complex culture. That June, hundreds of soldiers went on the rampage in East Los Angeles and downtown, beating up any young men they could find in fashionable zoot suits, part of the local counterculture.
“Streetcars were halted while Mexicans, and some Filipinos and Negroes, were jerked out of their seats, pushed into the streets and beaten with a sadistic frenzy,” a witness recorded. The police backed the attackers, historian Richard Griswold del Castillo writes.
Even more violence lay ahead. The arrival of a new underclass—Black Americans—saw the community squeezed into overcrowded, substandard,
and overpriced dwellings in south-central Los Angeles. The real estate market was rigged, scholar Robert Fogelson writes, to exclude Blacks from the wider property market for fear of lowering prices in exclusive White neighbourhoods. For Blacks, this meant their ghettos were places of confinement and subordination.
The tinder soon caught light. In August 1965, a white California highway patrolman arrested a young Blackman for drunk driving in the Watts neighbourhood. His mother attempted to intervene, leading to a scuffle. Large crowds gathered and began stoning police vehicles. Fifteen people were killed in the Watts riots; over 1,000 were injured, and 4,000 were sent to jail. A study by political scientist Anthony Oberschall of arrested protesters showed their median educational achievements were above the norm.”
Watts, Oberschall argues, was “a large-scale collective action with a broad, representative base in the lower class Negro communities”. Their frustrations included constant encounters with police brutality, as well as the lack of economic and educational opportunities built into their ghettos.
The worst race riots came in 1992 when the acquittal of four white police officers for the murder of motorist Rodney King set off six days of intense violence. The context, scholars Judson Jeffries and Jerrell Beckham write, was again framed by large-scale police violence against Blacks. From 1962 to 1965, the Los Angeles Police Department shot dead 65 African-Americans, with just one case leading to the prosecution of an officer. There were large numbers of demonstrations that were simply ignored.
Like now, the riots in south-central Los Angeles drew in not just Blacks but also groups of Hispanics and a smattering of whites. Though there was large-scale looting of Asian-owned businesses, interestingly, there was no Korean-on-Black communal violence. For the most part, the police withdrew its resources to protect more affluent parts of the city, leaving the Asian businesses to fend for themselves, historian King-Kok Cheung writes.
Lessons in diversity
Learning diversity is difficult for all societies—all the more so where communities are divided by economic status, cultural or religious beliefs, and geographical ghettoisation. Trump has reviled immigrants—infamously and falsely, claiming they were eating pet animals or suggesting Mexican illegal immigrants were rapists—in acid terms. Each of the communities he has reviled in the United States, though, makes up a significant percentage of the population. Like all American communities, they include criminals—but are also proud workers seeking to build an honourable future without losing a heritage they are proud of.
That’s why immigrant protesters in Los Angeles have flown the flags of their homelands—asserting this identity is as much part of the country’s culture as the Italian flags routinely flown from restaurants or the Irish flags taken out in procession in Boston.
Although Trump’s incendiary political impulses have sparked off a crisis, it would be a mistake to assume that these tensions will fracture America. The most recent data available shows that one in six American newlyweds is of a different race, a remarkable change in a country where miscegenation was only ruled legal in 1967. Los Angeles’ own story demonstrates that it is a city capable of accommodating great cultural diversity.
Likely, cultural assimilation is America’s future, not the white-chauvinist hatred Trump is attempting to sow. Hispanics played a significant role in Trump’s rise, but their support is already waning, according to opinion polls. A long and painful period lies ahead, though, until a racially-transformed nation learns to live with its changed character.
Praveen Swami is contributing editor at ThePrint. His X handle is @praveenswami. Views are personal.
(Edited by Prashant)