Word: mexicanized
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...flavor is hardly surprising in a city that was founded in 1781 as El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de Los Angeles de Porciúncula. At a conservative estimate, some 1.6 million of the metropolitan area's 7 million residents are Hispanics, overwhelmingly of Mexican descent. That makes Los Angeles a magnet for the estimated 7 million legally resident Hispanics scattered across the southwestern...
...from 80.9% in 1950 to a projected 44.4% in 1980. Rapid demographic swings have brought racial edginess back to Los Angeles, where the Watts ghetto riots of 1965 are still remembered with fear. Says retired Los Angeles Police Captain Rudy de Leon: "There is more outward prejudice now against Mexican people than there has ever been." Los Angeles Times Publisher Otis Chandler did not help when he noted in an interview that his paper did not court the city's black and Hispanic readership because "it's not their kind of newspaper...
Activists such as Vilma Martinez, president of the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF), argue that chicanos have "a long way to go before we can use our collective muscle as a middle class." But, even with some 19% of chicano families below the poverty line, Martinez concedes that a middle class is "clearly emerging...
Brown has appointed 27 Mexican' American judges and named MALDEF 's Martinez to the board of regents of the University of California (she replaced Mrs. William Randolph Hearst). A chicano, Mario Obledo, 46, is Brown's secretary of health and welfare, the highest ranking Mexican-American official in the state government. But while Hispanics make up 15.8% of California's population, they hold only 2% of the state's 20,000 elective posts, including only six seats of 120 in the California legislature. With less than 8% of the state's population, blacks boast...
Part of the problem has been chicano political passivity, which includes a hesitancy on the part of many longtime Mexican-American residents to become U.S. citizens, often because, no matter how permanent their ties to the U.S., those to Mexico are even stronger. State Assemblyman Art Torres' own mother could not vote for him in 1974 because she did not become naturalized until the next year. But now, says Ignacio Lozano, publisher of Los Angeles' Spanish-language daily La Opinión, there is "very clearly a political awakening." In 1976 members of Cesar Chavez's United...