I saw this firsthand in 1992, when I lived in South-Central on assignment, with my Times colleague Charisse Jones to profile a community in transition from black to brown. We met African Americans who had learned a few words of Spanish and who remembered how whites tried to keep them out of the neighborhood in the 1950s.
"I was once in the same boat they are," a 70-year-old black resident said of his Latino neighbors. "I don't mistreat them because I didn't want to be mistreated."
I benefited from African American hospitality even before I was born. Which brings me to what may be the real reason I've written this column.
If anyone out there knows a black man named Booker Wade who lived in Hollywood in the early 1960s, let me know. He was a neighbor of my mother and father, newly arrived Guatemalan immigrants.
They spoke a language he didn't understand, but when my mother went into labor, he drove her to the hospital.
I've never met Mr. Wade, who was my godfather. But I owe him about a thousand thank-yous.
And maybe in a way all of us in Latino L.A. have black godparents we need to make the effort to acknowledge.
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hector.tobar@latimes.com
