Why is Orange County (and Southern California in general) so segregated?

I grew up there, in the shade of the palm trees.  The overwhelming population of Caucasian kids would often be a joke thrown around in the halls between classes.  Well we didn’t actually have halls per se; it’s sunny 300 days a year so we just sort of had buildings with paths between them.  I played soccer in high school, and since my high school was mostly white, the soccer team was mostly white, which didn’t stand out too much, until we played teams that were mostly Hispanic.

Driving around Orange County offers a similar experience.  In my days I have done quite a bit of driving through the county and the divides between Hispanic neighborhoods, white neighborhoods, and Asian neighborhoods was (and still is) often quite stark.  A block passes by inconspicuously enough and then all of a sudden the signs are in Spanish and there are places to buy horchata.    It’s all very strange.

So how has this happened?  Allow me to digress and say that while my high school team was mostly white, my club team was mostly Hispanic. From my experiences here I’ll offer up an optimistic answer: because it’s easier.  For everyone.  As a Mexican immigrant it is easier to move into a neighborhood that speaks Spanish, likewise for a Vietnamese immigrant or a Korean immigrant.  It is no secret that Orange County is the one overwhelmingly conservative part of California.  So not only is it easier for the people immigrating, but it is also easier for the current residents who may have an issue with immigration.  There is of course a more sinister explanation, that the status quo is forced into becoming equilibrium by a hand that sees color all too clearly.  These are delicate topics to move into and I think they exceed the reach of my meager abilities and so I think I will stop here and move on to a peculiar phenomenon in Los Angeles.

Racial lines once drawn are difficult to pick up but it does happen.  In the 90’s Compton, California, in South Central Los Angeles, gained a reputation for spawning many of the popular hip-hop groups of the day.  N.W.A., Dre, Snoop Dogg all call Compton their birthplace.  And in the 90’s it certainly was mostly African-American  (53%) but now, according to the 2010 census, it is only 33% black.  In 1990 it was 42% Hispanic as opposed to 65% now.  So why the switch?  West Hollywood’s lawns.  The affluence of western Los Angeles (Malibu, Beverly Hills) creates a demand for construction and gardening, two occupations often taken by Hispanic immigrants.  South Central is closer to Malibu than east LA so to make the commute shorter many Hispanic immigrants moved there and in so doing displaced a large portion of the African-American community.

Now on to the city of Long Beach, in the 90’s it was a boiling pot for racial tension and often cited as one of the most diverse cities in the nation.  Putting segregation aside for a moment, what makes it so diverse?  A simple explanation could be that it’s an industrial city with an industrial economy set in the middle of an area that bases most of its economy on the service industry.  It is the biggest shipping port in Southern California.  Since it is such a hub of industrial activity, there is a lot of opportunity for work for immigrants, and so immigrants flock.  What made it so segregated?  A much bigger question, that again I think I’ll leave open-ended.

These are simpler (the simplest, crazy oversimplified) cases of how the potential for these lines can get created.  What isn’t as obvious is how and why they get drawn.  More importantly it doesn’t explain how segregation has lead to tension in the past, but perhaps it can point to solutions in the future.