Don't Mistake the Parts for the Whole in L.A.

Gone were the breathless news stories announcing the arrival of the "new Los Angeles." No ethnic or ideological movement swept the city. But on Tuesday, Los Angeles moved quietly--and quite naturally--into a new political era as City Atty. Rocky Delgadillo completed his first full day in office and Alex Padilla was elected City Council president. Thus two of the three most powerful positions in Los Angeles city government are now being held by Mexican Americans.

Last month, Newsweek glibly called James K. Hahn's victory over Antonio Villaraigosa in the mayoral race a "brownout." Disappointed partisans implied that L.A.'s "Latino future" had somehow been put on hold.

Yet equating Villaraigosa's candidacy with the culmination of a massive demographic shift not only unduly burdened the former Assembly speaker, it mistook the part for the whole. It also reduced the region's ongoing ethnic transition to a zero-sum game in which, presumably, there are winners and losers.

The long-term process of incorporating immigrants and their children into the Los Angeles mainstream should not be considered in terms of winning and losing. As sociologist Amitai Etzioni recently wrote, to either celebrate or decry the "browning of America" is implicitly racist. It wrongly assumes that the country's new ethnic makeup will fundamentally alter the national ethos and that members of emergent ethnic groups do not share the same basic aspirations and principles with other Americans.

The media's incessant drumbeat about the region's ethnic metamorphosis has fundamentally misunderstood the slow, incremental, evolutionary nature of cultural and ethnic fusion. Perhaps in a search for drama, we've been wasting energy dividing the city between the old and the new and anticipating some dramatic break between the two.

The steady focus on so-called ethnic "communities," those mythical, mutually exclusive entities with their own agendas and leaders, has obscured the more profound, organic process by which Angelenos--particularly the young--live and work together in a complex series of concentric communities that transcend simple ethnic categorization. Only in textbooks do ethnic groups live in vacuums and do cultures change over in cleanly definable shifts.

In reality, both the newcomers and the long established are transforming each other through a combination of mutual cooperation, conflict and competition. In 1950, when Los Angeles was already the second-largest Mexican city in the world, poet Octavio Paz wrote that L.A.'s "Mexicanism ... floats in the air," never mixing with the American world of precision and efficiency.