- 55% of residents in South L.A. were Latino
- 40% African-American, and
- Large % of small stores & shops owned by Asian-American immigrants
Black and Brown’s communities are subject to structural forces that lead to displacement from their neighborhoods and their countries and South LA residents continue to bear the brunt of the lack of public and private sector investment and employment security. For African Americans, the War on Drugs and criminalization policies push thousands from homes and into prisons. Thousands of Black middle-class residents are priced out of the neighborhoods of South Los Angeles through a housing bubble while the failure to address addiction, crime, and the under-investment and quality of public schools pushes many Black families out of South LA and to far-flung parts of the region and other Counties. Meanwhile, structural adjustment policies and free trade agreements push residents from Mexico and Central America out of their neighborhoods and into forced migration streams, including thousands of indigenous migrants who speak no English or Spanish and are victims of labor exploitation and discrimination from lighter skinned, Spanish speaking immigrants. Without legal status in the US, and inserted into the low-wage labor market, many of the new waves of immigrants settle in the City’s poorest and densest neighborhoods in South Los Angeles. Together, these forces accelerate the changing demographics of South Los Angeles.