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Until recently in L.A., it was silly to talk of a Hispanic population: Mexicans were it. But now there are 50,000 Guatemalans with their own 18-team Guatemalan soccer league. There are 200,000 Salvadorans, and the political violence there is driving hundreds more to L.A. every week. Further, there are some 100,000 Colombians, Hondurans, Cubans and Puerto Ricans. As with the Asians, invidious distinctions are offered without much prompting. Arturo Price is from Colombia. "We have nothing to do with Mexicans here," he sneers. "Our culture is different, our Spanish more pure."
Nevertheless, eight out of ten L.A. "Hispanics" are Mexicans or Mexican Americans, probably 2.1 million in all. And they are different in a critical respect from all the other ethnic arrivals: the immigrant from Mexico comes from near by to what was, until 1848, Mexican national territory. He arrives feeling as much like a migrant as an immigrant, not an illegal alien but a reconquistador.
The influence on metropolitan culture, at least superficially, has been great. There is an air, especially in East Los Angeles, of what Mexican Poet Octavio Paz says are his national essences: "delight in decoration, carelessness and pomp, negligence, passion and reserve." Shop signs, often pictorial, are painted directly and unprofessionally on stucco façades. The slow promenades of customized cars are nationally famous.
Among Mexican Americans, however, there are class and other divisions that can be as important as the distinctions among Latin nationalities. "There is a huge difference between the kids born here and the kids born in Mexico," says Jesse Quintero, a teacher whose students are mostly illegals. "It's a different breed." And while the waves of illegal Mexican immigrants are exceptionally poor, the barrio's long-entrenched Mexican Americans inhabit a world more like William Bendix's TV L.A. in the 1950s show The Life of Riley: working-class comfortable. The middle class, perhaps 30% of L.A.'s latinos, seldom use the vaguely militant term chicano.
The young man in East L.A.'s scruffy old Maravilla barrio calls himself Diablo. He wears a sleeveless T shirt, so his tattoos are plain. Diablo, 23, spends most of his free time hanging out with a few fellow members of the Lopez-Maravilla gang. They look tough. But at a meeting in a tool shed late last month, they were mostly concerned with planning an upcoming rummage sale. There are some 300 Mexican youth gangs in L.A., and many are violent drug users: police say 260 homicides last year were gang related.
There are gangs in José Cardines' neighborhood. Cardines, 51, arrived in East L.A. when he was 29, the year John Kennedy became President. He speaks no English. But he has become a U.S. citizen, and provides for his wife and six kids with a small auto-body repair shop. Those provisions last month included spending thousands on the traditional coming out, the quinceañera, for his daughter Lucy. "A girl is only 15 once," Cardines said, as Lucy and her 28 attendants boogied to Superfreak in a hotel ballroom.
Out in West Covina, Raina Padilla would have rolled her eyes in disbelief (Daddy!) if Ernie, her father, had suggested a corny quinceañera for her.