Census 1970

Before mail-in census forms, there were census takers who went door to door, asking questions about marriage, family, children and ethnicity. Thirty years ago, I was one of them. Just before the end of my final training period, in 1970, our instructor gave out assignments. We were to cover territories nearest our homes, and I drew the Twin Lakes section of Chatsworth.

Before mail-in census forms, there were census takers who went door to door, asking questions about marriage, family, children and ethnicity. Thirty years ago, I was one of them. Just before the end of my final training period, in 1970, our instructor gave out assignments. We were to cover territories nearest our homes, and I drew the Twin Lakes section of Chatsworth.

South Orange County residents are a bit older, wealthier, come from slightly smaller households and are considerably fewer in number than their neighbors in North County, according to estimates by National Planning Data Corp., a Los Angeles-based research firm. South County--generally that area south of the Costa Mesa Freeway--has 554,585 residents, less than a third of North County's 1,671,814 people.

When George Cole moved to southeast Los Angeles County looking for factory work in the early 1970s, the mostly white and working-class area was being transformed by waves of Latino immigration. Cole applied for an apartment and the landlady bestowed her approval. "It will be nice to rent to a good white boy," he recalled her saying. "We've been doing a good job of keeping the blacks out, but the Mexicans are like cockroaches. They're hard to keep out."

In the rural hamlet of San Nicolas, there are people who use a bulldozer and a backhoe as instruments of God. Angry Catholics used the backhoe to cut off Nicolasa Vargas' water after she and her farmworker husband were conspicuously absent from the fiesta honoring the village's patron saint, St. Nicolas of Tolentino, whose cherubic statue smiles down from a perch in the town's whitewashed chapel. Guillermo Cano, a mild-mannered municipal employee, wouldn't help pay for music at the fiesta.

ON A WARM afternoon in Long Beach, at Pei Lin, a Cambodian restaurant on Anaheim Street, In dochinese teen-agers, dressed like Valley girls, clutch their schoolbooks and cluster around the the big-screen Mitsubishi in the corner, lip-synching along with MTV. Across the room, middle-aged refugees stare blankly as they drink their tea.