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Eastside Los Angeles

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Alternate meaning: East LA, an unincorporated community bordering the East LA region described below.
Intersection of Eagle Rock Boulevard and Colorado Boulevard.

Eastern Los Angeles (also known as East L.A. or the Eastside) is the portion of the City of Los Angeles, California that lies east of the Los Angeles River and Downtown Los Angeles, west of the San Gabriel Valley and the unincorporated area of East Los Angeles, California and City Terrace, California, south of the Crescenta Valley, and north of Vernon, California and City of Commerce, California.

The short form for the region, "East L.A.," is an imprecise term which can mean different things depending on usage and context. As a geographical term, it can either refer to the region described here or the unincorporated community of East Los Angeles. As a cultural term, East L.A., has developed to refer to the predominantly Latino communities lying east of the city of Los Angeles, centered around the unincorporated area of East Los Angeles and City Terrace, but also the Los Angeles district of Boyle Heights. To disambiguate between this area and the broader eastern region of the City of Los Angeles, a collection of neighborhoods and communities lying within Los Angeles city boundaries, locals have come to use the term "Eastside" for the region (to counter with "the Westside") to emphasize its character as a region which may vary in characteristics from those of the unincorportated East L.A. area.

Built environment

In appearance, while northern East Los Angeles may vary in character, much of East Los Angeles is a throwback to Los Angeles' early 20th century heritage. The dusty streets up and down the Monterey Hills, on which much of the region sits, are often winding and narrow. On primary and secondary thoroughfares, at times busy industrial concerns and/or shops sit side-by-side with single-family residences, in contrast to heavily zoned areas like parts of the San Fernando Valley and the Westside, where it is less common. In some areas backyard agriculture is still widely practiced: as was colorfully depicted in the films My Family (aka Mi Familia) and Stand and Deliver (which was set in an East L.A. high school representing James A. Garfield High School). Of these, many families maintained chicken coops and citrus groves in their backyards long after most of Los Angeles had abandoned these vestiges of its rural past. In some areas, however, this is less common or non-existent, such as Montecito Heights and Mt. Washington, among others.

History

Origins (late 18th-early 20th centuries)

Most of what is now considered East Los Angeles was, at the time of Spanish settlement, parceled out among the Pueblo of Los Angeles, the Mission San Gabriel Arcangel, and several ranchos. Large-scale development commenced with the arrival of the Southern Pacific Railroad in 1875, with numerous electric streetcar lines being laid over the following three decades to connect the area to fast-growing Downtown Los Angeles. Areas along the Arroyo Seco such as Montecito Heights and Mt. Washington were once among the wealthiest neighborhoods in the region, their winding streets lined with finely detailed Mediterranean villas and Craftsman frame houses and bungalows that enjoy some of the finest views in Los Angeles. Meanwhile, Spanish Colonial bungalows and duplexes sprouted like mushrooms in working-class areas such as El Sereno and City Terrace.

Latinization

The East Los Angeles region has long had a very high concentration of Latino residents, primarily of Mexican descent. Since the early 20th century, it has been the locus of the Latino population in Los Angeles County. This was not always the case: areas of northeastern Los Angeles had heavy white populations until the 1930s, when the development of whites-only areas in Mid-Wilshire and the West Side drew away most of the area's white population. In the southern portions of the region, there were also large and diverse non-Latino populations; Boyle Heights was heavily Serbian, Jewish, and Japanese, and Lincoln Heights was heavily Italian. However, most of these groups moved to segregated suburbs after World War II, and Latinos who had been forced into squalid slums such as Boyle Heights' infamous "The Flats" (later the site of the infamous Aliso Village housing project) seized the opportunity to move into the region's high-quality housing at low prices. With the exception of a small but distinct Filipino population in areas such as Glassell Park and Atwater Village, the region was overwhelmingly Mexican-American by 1950.

The areas surrounding the unincorporated area of East L.A. formed the political and cultural heart of Latino life in Los Angeles County during a period when the overall population of the county was overwhelmingly white and often quite hostile to Latinos. Much of the violence of the Zoot Suit Riots occurred in the region, and not just downtown. Today East L.A. is populated mostly by immigrants of Mexican descent, and second-generation Mexican-Americans, who are also often referred to as Chicanos.

Population shifts

Many second and third-generation Hispanic or Latino Americans have since moved from East Los Angeles to other parts of Southern California. This movement began soon after World War II, with middle-class families settling in San Gabriel Valley suburbs such as Baldwin Park and Alhambra. From the 1970s onward, Orange County, the San Fernando Valley, the Inland Empire, and the Gateway Cities region of southeast Los Angeles County have also been major destinations for upwardly mobile Latino families. Meanwhile, recent immigrants from Mexico and Central America have settled in the low-income parts of East Los Angeles where the parents of many US-born Hispanics or Latinos once lived. At the same time, there are parts of "greater" East L.A., such as the cities of Montebello, Whittier and Pico Rivera, where many US-born Latinos still live. Since the 1970s, many Latino immigrants have moved into areas that had previously been heavily African-American, in areas such as Compton, Lynwood, and the Watts district of Los Angeles.

Gentrification

Since the late 1990s, gentrification has started to occur in formerly working-class pockets of East Los Angeles, and middle-class pockets in the northwest of the region, although mainly in the region's northern portions. Eagle Rock (which is not considered by some part of the East Side due to its historic independence) has seen a considerable influx of middle- and upper-middle-class white residents drawn by the area's architecture and schools, the latter of which are some of the best in the Los Angeles Unified School District. High housing prices in other parts of Los Angeles are leading whites to settle in pockets of northeastern Los Angeles such as Glassell Park, Atwater Village, and Highland Park, as well as Montecito Heights, Mt. Washington and Elysian Valley, as an affordable alternative to Silver Lake.

Communities of East Los Angeles

See also

Landmarks

Famous natives and residents

See also

Bibliography

Romo, Ricardo (1983). East Los Angeles: History of a Barrio. Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press. ISBN 0-292-72041-6.

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