Watts Is More Than Two-Thirds Latino. So Why Is Hispanic Leadership Virtually Nonexistent?
*Watts Latinos tend to be recent arrivals, young and Spanish dominant. But the issues that face the Watts community today are generations-old, the same issues that black leaders have been working on for decades. VL
By Dennis Romero, LA Weekly
One of the paradoxes of Watts is that the community has been transformed from an African-American enclave to a Latino one — yet its problems have remained the same.
[pullquote]The black community dispersed further south and out to the Inland Empire, and it was overwhelmingly outnumbered by immigrants in the process.[/pullquote]Watts is still a segregated, underserved neighborhood with some of the poorest people — unemployment stands at nearly 13 percent — in L.A. County. More than one in four homes is overcrowded or severely overcrowded, according to the city-run Watts Community Studio project. Household median income, $28,700, is nearly half that of L.A. County, the project says.
It’s just that the households are vastly Latino now.
In 1965, [tweet_dis]Watts was more than 80 percent African-American. By the time of the 1992 riots, the area was almost evenly split between blacks and Latinos. [/tweet_dis]Black family flight from gang violence in the 1990s and 2000s, paired with dramatic immigration, transformed the neighborhood.
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[Photo courtesy of Google Maps]
