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Always Changing, Always Contested

This chapter provides a brief history of South L.A., emphasizing that it has always been a place with changing demographics. Before it became the heart of Black Los Angeles, African Americans were largely shut out of most of what is now South L.A. due to racially restrictive real estate practices, with a tipping point coming in the wake of the 1965 Watts Rebellion. The authors historicize the entry of Latino immigrants in the 1980s and 1990s and lay the groundwork for understanding the ongoing shift in urbanization and civic life, particularly the emergence of Black–Brown place-identified organizing groups as the major motive force in local politics. They then offer a detailed statistical profile of South L.A. (with most data ranging from 1980 to 2016) to provide a backdrop for the qualitative work of the next four substantive chapters.