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But the homogenizing melting pot remains a powerful national ideal. Regardless of whether the foreign-born Angelenos make peace with their extravagant, sometimes alienating new culture, they will likely watch their children turn into Americans. Hun Yum, a prospering South Korean restaurateur, has named his children, ages 7 and 2, Brian and Sandra. The kids insist on being slaked with Big Macs and ginger ale before consenting to attend occasional bulgoki feasts. "They are not Koreans," Yum says. "Their parents are Koreans."
Even before the staggering influx of foreign settlers, L.A. was a big, sprawling, hard-to-fathom place. It was the first great Sunbelt city, stretched and shaped by the automobile into a half urban, half suburban archipelago. Says Mark Pisano, executive director of the Southern California Association of Governments: "There has never been one huge predominant city. There have been conglomerations." Most of what commonly passes for L.A. lies inside the generous boundaries (4,083 sq. mi.) of Los Angeles County. The county, bigger than Rhode Island and Delaware combined, contains lots of undeveloped, unincorporated scrubland as well as 82 towns and cities. The largest, of course, is the City of Los Angeles, which consists of 464 sq. mi. in the center of the county.
As an economic entity, greater Los Angeles is world class: if the area seceded, it would have a G.N.P. larger than that of Mexico or Australia. The movie and TV business is only the hot tip of L.A.'s biggest job sector, its service industries, which together employ 882,000 people. There is a muscular side as well, with 869,000 workers in manufacturing, about a third in aerospace and other clean, high-tech industries. But parts of the city could pass for Buffalo. On the waterfront in Long Beach sit stacks of blue and orange cargo containers. In Lynwood, railroad tracks run past auto salvagers, truck-winch manufacturers, scrap-metal piles.
Just absorbing hundreds of thousands of immigrants, all at once, would be a tough enough task for the overburdened overlapping local governments. (For instance, of L.A.'s 550,000 schoolchildren, 117,000 speak one of 104 languages better than they do English—including 35 kids fluent only in Gujarati, a language of western India.) But another daunting array of urban problems will not wait. L.A. is aging. "Streets are breaking up. Water mains are breaking up. Bridges are crumbling," says Harvey Perloff, dean of U.C.L.A.'s school of architecture and urban planning. "The day of reckoning is going to happen so fast that it's going to make people's heads whirl." L.A. is a product of explosive growth, but now the practical limits to growth are in sight. The local debate over taxes (about to go up to cover nearly $300 million in city and county budget deficits), potholes and police layoffs sounds a lot like the sober municipal agendas of New York City, Cleveland, Pittsburgh. L.A. can no longer pretend to be a surfside boom town with a job for everybody. The metropolis, in short, is maturing. At the