A brick wall separated Julio Perez's childhood home from Disneyland, where his father worked in the laundry room.
On that side was the Anaheim that America knew, the quintessential Orange County suburb where expanses of orange groves gave way to rows of 1950s tract homes and a signature theme park.
On his side was the neighborhood where Perez, 30, spent his 1980s childhood: a dense, vibrant, heavily Latino island where parks filled with soccer players and families grilled carne asada. Today, his side of the wall has become the new face of Anaheim.
Anaheim's Latino population has more than tripled since 1980 and now stands at 186,000, making Orange County's second-largest city the latest to become majority Latino -- at 54.5% -- according to new census estimates.
But unlike Southern California's impoverished gateways for Latino immigration -- such as Los Angeles' Pico-Union neighborhood or Santa Ana, one of the nation's most heavily Latino large cities, whose proportion of foreign-born residents has been ranked second only to Miami's -- Anaheim is pointed toward a future as a middle-class Latino community like Whittier and Downey, demographers say.
Some, like Perez, point to the emergence of a new social order, one in which a full spectrum of Latinos can find a place, from the recent immigrant to the newly minted middle-class family.
"So maybe there's been an exodus of middle-class people from other backgrounds," said Perez, a political director for a union. "But now there's larger diversity for Latinos . . . there's more access socially."
The population shift puts Anaheim, a city of 342,000, ahead of Los Angeles and Riverside in percentage of Latino residents.
Anaheim today is a sprawling community that stretches from the upscale neighborhoods of Anaheim Hills on the east side to the cramped apartments and aging 1950s-era houses on the west. It's a place where the manicured resort district and bustling sports arenas are for tourists and the bustling flea markets and Sunday afternoon lucha libre wrestling matches are increasingly for the locals.
Jesus Cortez, 28, a Cal State Fullerton student and landscaper who has lived in west Anaheim since he was 9, recalled the neighborhood's transition as white families moved out and Latinos settled in, buying up even the nicest houses.
"It tended to be half and half, then it became the majority," he said. "Now you see more carnicerias, more taquerias."
