16 May 2011, 11:32 am
Cities of Color: The New Racial Frontier in California’s Minority- Majority Cities ALBERT M. CAMARILLO The author is a member of the history department at Stanford University. This was his presidential address at the annual meeting of the Pacifi c Coast Branch, AHA, in Stanford, California, in Au gust 2006. Demographic changes of enormous magnitude have altered the ethnic and racial composition of large cities and metropolitan suburbs across the nation over the past thirty years, especially in California. Many cities and suburbs that were once home to large majorities of whites are now places where ethnic and racial minorities form the majority. “Minority-majority” cities in California have emerged as a new frontier in ethnic and race relations, where African Americans, Latinos, and other non-white groups now fi nd themselves, many for the fi rst time, living together and struggling to coexist. Although confl ict, tension, and misunderstanding characterize this new racial frontier, historians and other scholars must look deeper to fi nd examples of cooperation and collaboration in these new “cities of color.” This article considers three cities in California—Compton, East Palo Alto, and Seaside—as examples of the historical and contemporary forces that have shaped “minority-majority” cities and the relations between African Americans and Latinos in particular. In the past decade or so, the national and local print and visual media have made much of African American-Latino confl ict at many levels—in politics, in education, in gangs, and in other youth violence. For example, in a recent article titled “Black versus Brown,” Newsweek focused on the contentious political climate in the City of Lynwood, a municipality located between downtown Los Angeles and Long Beach that over the past forty years went from a white- to a black- to a Latino-majority community. The article opened with a focus on Leticia Vásquez, the current mayor of Lynwood, who recalled the racially charged politics in 1997, when the new Latino majority in the city was mobilizing to gain control of the black-run city council. Vásquez remembered “people knocking on the door saying we needed to get rid of black city-council Pacific Historical Review, Vol. 76, No. 1, pages 1–28. ISSN 0030-8684 ©2007 by the Pacific Coast Branch, American Historical Association. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website, at http://www.ucpress.edu/ journals/rights.htm.... Read More »
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