It’s more about class and less about color

It couldn’t have been more than a few months after the 1992 riots. I was seated in the office in the back of the Son Shine Missionary Baptist Church on Nadeau Street in South L.A. talking with the Rev. Leroy Shephard about how Mexicans and blacks in his neighborhood did and did not get along.

“We all know about the tensions,” he said in his preacher’s cadence. “But there are also plenty of budding friendships. You see, when blacks moved into South L.A., white folks didn’t even stay around long enough for us to become friends. Most of them won’t even drive through these neighborhoods.”

But plenty of black and immigrant families do live together. The relationship is not always easy. Some Mexicans and Central Americans who moved into previously all-black neighborhoods in L.A. brought their own biases about blacks with them from their homeland; others acquired them here. And, like so many poor immigrants before them, there were Latinos who seized on their neighbors’ low social status as a way to convince themselves that they did not occupy society’s very lowest rung. They blamed blacks for the local crime.

But whatever their biases, they still moved into the neighborhood, and given a choice, most well-intentioned people chose to get along with their neighbors. Life is just easier that way. Homeowners -- those most vested in their neighborhoods -- were more eager to get along than renters. Young men who felt they had nothing to lose didn’t waste too much time trying to get along with anyone.

Beneath the obvious layers of race and class was an aspiration gap that was the great source of tension. The 1980s saw a huge out-migration of upwardly mobile African Americans from South L.A. Those blacks who remained in the old neighborhood tended to be either elderly or the younger generations who didn’t have the skills or the good fortune to move up. They were frustrated.

Into these neighborhoods came thousands of Latin American immigrants who harbored higher hopes and lower expectations and who were willing to work more for less pay.

Black trepidation about immigrant competition is nothing new. And it has always been intertwined with a resentment that, however rough newcomers had it, they were still treated better than native-born blacks. In the 1850s, Frederick Douglass wrote: “Every hour sees us elbowed out of some employment to make room perhaps for some newly arrived emigrants, whose hunger and color are thought to give them a title to especial favor.” In 1882, Booker T. Washington warned that the stream of “European laborers that is continually flowing into the West leaves [blacks] no foothold there.”

Politically correct news accounts of black-Latino tensions point to a supposed “competition over scarce resources.” But every local employer knows that Mexicans benefit from the widely held preconception that they are hard workers. They’re not losing out to blacks in the job market.

Indeed, the real tension -- and violence -- generally occurs between socioeconomically frustrated African Americans and U.S.-born Latinos, the children of immigrants who have slipped through the cracks and not completed the difficult transition from their parents’ homeland into the American mainstream. I found this to be true when I visited Harbor Gateway after Cheryl Green, a 14-year-old African American girl, was killed in January, allegedly by a member of the predominantly Latino 204th Street gang. Among Latinos, the deepest racial resentment was not among immigrants but among U.S.-born Mexican American gang members who were fighting with black gangs over turf.

I don’t know why we insist on seeing this issue as one that involves all blacks and all Latinos. It doesn’t. The lion’s share of the fighting still occurs among the most marginalized of each group, those who do not feel themselves integrated into society. In other words, the phenomenon of black-Latino conflict has as much to do with social and economic alienation as it does with race. In fact, Jonathan Fajardo, the 18-year-old gang member accused of killing Green, is himself half black, with four half siblings who are as dark as she was.

The truth is that people who fall through the cracks find all sorts of reasons to get angry, and people to get angry with.