Shades of Difference

Immigrants are building an ethnic mosaic, but the pieces don't quite fit together

To travel the streets of Los Angeles is to glimpse America's ethnic future. At the bustling playground at McDonald's in Koreatown, a dozen shades of kids squirt down the slides and burrow through tunnels and race down the catwalks, not much minding that no two of them speak the same language. Parents of grade-school children say they rarely know the color of their youngsters' best friends until they meet them; it never seems to occur to the children to say, since they have not yet been taught to care.

By high school, ethnic diversity has become an issue, but it still...

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