Boyle Heights

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Boyle Heights
Situated just east of the Los Angeles River, Boyle Heights has long been a gateway for newcomers to the city. From the 1920s to the 1950s it was Los Angeles' most heterogeneous neighborhood, serving as home to large concentrations of Jews, Mexicans, and Japanese Americans, as well as Russian Molokans, African Americans, and people of Armenian, Italian, and Chinese descent. Today, though the neighborhood is primarily Latino, it continues to serve as a port-of-entry for a number of the city's immigrant groups.

Established in the late-1800s, Boyle Heights is one of the city's oldest areas, the first residential neighborhood outside of the old pueblo center. While it was initially exclusively Anglo American, by early 1900's there were already visible residential concentrations of Jewish, Japanese, Mexican, Molokan, and African Americans. The importance of the neighborhood as a port-of-entry for immigrants from all over the world was affirmed in the varied cultural institutions that were established..

By the 1930's, the neighborhood was 70% Jewish in composition, but its overall diverse composition continued to be noteworthy. In 1939, the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) discouraged loans to home buyers in the neighborhood because its heterogeneity was considered a source of instability: "This is a 'melting pot' area and is literally honeycombed with diverse and subversive racial elements. It is seriously doubted whether there is a single block in the area which does not contain detrimental racial elements and there are very few districts which are not hopelessly heterogeneous." In the early 1940's, the students of the neighborhood's Theodore Roosevelt Senior High School, another of the partnering organizations, had organized over 30 ethnic societies.

The neighborhood's composition was dramatically affected by World War II and its aftermath, with, among other things, the incarceration and resettlement of Japanese Americans, the beginning of the migration of Jews to other neighborhoods, and a series of major construction projects that changed its residential contours. Even so, in 1955, Ralph Friedman, a writer for Frontier magazine, enthusiastically described the area as a "U.N. in Microcosm," a place where "amazing progress in human relations has been made. Working against great obstacles, the rank-and-file leadership has led a successful long-range battle for ethnic harmony which has impressed reformers grown cynical by endless defeats."

By the 1960s, Latinos constituted the majority in the neighborhood. While the neighborhood is still primarily Latino, it also continues to be marked by diversity. Recent immigrants form Mexico and Central America are affecting the social dynamics once dominated by American-born Latinos. A number of cultural institutions in the area continue to engage Russians, Armenians, Japanese, and Jews, including many who live outside the Boyle Heights community.

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