Summary: Migration Of Latinos

Compton, prior to WWII, slowly began transforming from an all white community to a multiracial community, due to the migration of African Americans. After the war had ended, the black population increased significantly to approximately 100 percent, in Compton. Many of the African Americans who migrated to Compton endured many hardships until the mid-1960s, where things began to slowly change. After the 19960s, the African Americans were governing the city of Compton, along with its school district. As the time passed, the city of Compton began to take on yet another transformation, due to the migration of Latinos. In the 1990’s, the city of Compton had contained approximately 90,000 people, which consisted of 53 percent African American and 44 percent Latinos. As the Latino population continued to steadily increase, friction between the two races also increased in terms of who was entitled to have economic opportunities. “African Americans in Compton used racial ideologies as a means to maintain their economic and political power”, and were very reluctant in sharing this power with the now Latino residents (Straus 508). As a result of the African Americans …show more content…
The “differences in culture and language as well as the scarcity of resources became the defining distinction of who gained access to economic opportunities; [and] race became a proxy for the cultural and language differences” within Compton’s Community (Straus 515). Compton’s public school system illustrated the community’s inability to work together and as a result the school system became the center of Compton’s racial dispute. The Latino residents started to blame African Americans for their sufferings, and as a result they began to organize. The Latino resident’s perseverance led them to fight for equality in employment, education, and power in