The experiences of Downey’s first middle-class Mexican Americans were shaped by the white demographic majority. Ethnic differences might have been irreconcilable in Downey if not for the Mexican Americans’ public emphasis on “Americanness” in language, business, and politics. It was this way that Mexican Americans secured their place in the middle-class suburb—and the capital that came with it.

Part 4 of a 7-part series. Read parts 1, 2 and 3.

This is not to suggest, though, that all Mexican Americans expressed their “Americanness” the same way. Mexican Americans did not necessarily become suburban by becoming pocho. Rather, it required careful attention to their public image. As I briefly mentioned last week, some Mexican Americans retained ties to their Mexican heritage by practicing the culturally important language, purchasing, and entrepreneurship practices in spaces outside of Downey. I will analyze that phenomenon, what I call “metropolitan Mexicanness,” in this installment. Through metropolitan Mexicanness, some of Downey’s Mexican Americans could express their ethnic identity without compromising their civic identity. This continued throughout the beginnings of demographic change in Downey, which I narrate at the end of this essay.

The Los Angeles area is, and has always been, home to a profound array of diverse communities. Diversity in metropolitan Los Angeles goes beyond ethnic diversity, too. Consider the economic diversity of metropolitan Los Angeles: the bastion of wealth in Beverly Hills, the working-class and working-poor communities of south-central Los Angeles, and every shade in between. But these communities exhibit remarkable levels of figurative and literal mobility. Some families in working-class communities find upward economic mobility and move to middle-class neighborhoods; many of the Mexicans Americans moving to Downey in the 1970s and 1980s did just that. Meanwhile, the freeway system (more so than public transportation) connects and enables connections between the same exact communities; an (admittedly congested) drive along the 405 freeway is all that separates a Long Beach family from spending a day of recreation in Santa Monica. Both of these forms of mobility have had significant implications for Los Angeles—and indeed, American—history. These are the factors that enabled metropolitan Mexicanness.

Consider the case of thrifty shoppers in neighboring South Gate during the 1940s and 1950s. One historian showed the conflicts that arose between the merchants and working-class consumers over shopping practices. Merchants wished for South Gate shoppers to remain loyal to South Gate businesses. They waged advertisement campaigns that underscored how retail dollars spent in South Gate funded civic infrastructures. But working-class South Gate shoppers were painfully aware of their precarious hold on homeownership and looked to economize in any way they could. This included travelling to other cities for groceries, clothes, or other goods if the prices were cheaper. While this may have upset South Gate merchants, the shoppers took advantage of the diverse and eminently accessible communities throughout metropolitan Los Angeles to accomplish their goals of prudent spending.

Metropolitan Mexicanness operated on the same principle of frequenting the relevant spaces throughout Los Angeles. In this case, Downey’s middle-class Mexican Americans visited culturally important spaces throughout metropolitan Los Angeles. Some of these were private spaces in Downey. In an earlier essay, I mentioned the case of Pete Martin, a local entrepreneur. Though he owned a “race-neutral” business, Martin did not privately shy away from his Mexican heritage. He taught his children Spanish at home and decorated their house interior with Mexican art. Ed Estrella and his family spoke Spanish, cooked Mexican foods, and practiced other customs privately at home. Other families made similar decisions at home. But metropolitan Mexicanness also happened in public spaces in neighborhoods like East Los Angeles with established Mexican American communities. Through metropolitan Mexicanness, Downey’s middle-class Mexican Americans shopped at grocery stores and other ethnic-themed businesses in nearby cities. Markets like El Mercadito, built in East Los Angeles in 1968, attracted Mexicans and Mexican Americans throughout the region to its food stands and stores stocked with goods from Mexico. Throughout Los Angeles—and especially on the eastern side of metropolitan Los Angeles—established communities served as important cultural anchors where Mexican Americans expressed, refashioned, and strengthened ethnic identities through contact with co-ethnics who differed along class, legal status, and immigration lines. Restaurants like El Nayarit and “place markers,” as one historian has called them, generated a sense of community for Mexican Americans from Downey without jeopardizing their place in the middle-class suburb.

Metropolitan Mexicanness also served a more practical purpose for some of Downey’s middle-class Mexican Americans. Rito Calderón and the Arcello family, who I mentioned before, operated their ethnic-themed businesses in line with the assimilated civic identity: invariably outside of Downey. Certainly not all Mexican American entrepreneurs ran ethnic-themed businesses; for many their businesses did not cater only to a Mexican clientele. But metropolitan Mexicanness let some Mexican Americans profit from selling products and services that were familiar to the Mexican diaspora throughout Los Angeles. Calderón, for example, owned a chain of licorerías, liquor stores with Mexican products, in Huntington Park and nearby cities with Mexican American communities. The Arcello family headquartered their spice-packaging business in East Los Angeles. Indeed, ethnic-based entrepreneurship offered a pathway into the middle class for recent immigrants and Mexican Americans who may not have had a college degree. But few Mexican Americans opened restaurants, supermercados, tortillerías, or panaderías in Downey, as was common at the time in cities like South Gate, Norwalk, and Compton (as well as in present-day Downey). In sum, metropolitan Mexicanness allowed some middle-class Mexican Americans to practice (and profit from) the customs that were important to their ethnic identity in spaces throughout Los Angeles. Doing so allowed middle-class Mexican Americans to exist as the overwhelming demographic minority without sacrificing their assimilated civic identity in Downey.

But metropolitan Mexicanness did not end in the 1990s, when Mexican Americans became the demographic plurality (and eventually majority). In fact, metropolitan Mexicanness endured throughout the 1990s precisely because of the rapidity of demographic change. Many families moved into Downey after 1988 but, because of their tenure in nearby cities, maintained contact with coethnics throughout southeast Los Angeles. Consumers spoke of Downey as devoid of ethnic businesses throughout the 1990s. For those accustomed to patronizing ethnic businesses, many were merely a few streets away. Margot Coronado, for example, lived in South Gate before moving to Downey in the late 1980s. Her parents, both Mexican immigrants, responded to the absence of Mexican grocers in Downey by shopping in the same South Gate stores as before they moved. My parents ate at the same Mexican restaurants in Bell, where they met, after they moved to Downey.

In fact, metropolitan Mexicanness of the 1990s demonstrated the rarity of achieving upward mobility. Some middle-class Mexican Americans made the “move up” to Downey while siblings, parents, and extended family remained in nearby minority-majority working-class neighborhoods. Metropolitan Mexicanness allowed those with upward mobility to retain ties to working-class relatives and explains how some families retained their Mexican heritage while portraying an assimilated civic identity in Downey. This happened even when Mexican Americans became the demographic plurality, and eventually majority. For the rest of this installment, though, I will explain why 1988 became the pivotal year for demographic change in Downey.

The late 1980s were high times for residential property owners throughout the United States, years when selling was profitable and buying was possible. National housing debt and wealth conditions in the mid-1980s became especially advantageous for many homeowners who had nearly paid their entire mortgage. Bouts of inflation during the early-to-mid 1980s reduced the real value of outstanding mortgage debt considerably. Nominal interest rates fell, incomes rose, and the Reagan Administration’s 1986 tax reforms removed tax relief from all personal loans except those related to housing. These factors encouraged homeowners to engage in housing-related borrowing. Households shifted toward partially tax-exempt mortgage borrowing, which induced greater activity in the housing market and put upward pressure on home prices.

In California, voters passed two propositions that equally incentivized older homeowners to buy new property. Proposition 60 (1986) amended the California Constitution by allowing homeowners over the age of 55 to transfer the assessed value of current homes to new home purchases within the same county (for tax purposes). This was significant because Proposition 13, passed in 1978, limited property taxes to one percent of a home’s assessed value. Prop 60 allowed older homeowners to purchase newer (and often more expensive) homes without incurring a significant increase in their property tax bills. Two years later, Proposition 90 extended the same rule to inter-county purchases, meaning a Downeyite could transfer their property valuation to new homes in Orange County.

Propositions 60 and 90 were especially relevant to Downey homeowners. In 1980, Downey had the highest rates of homeowners over 55 in southeast Los Angeles; fully 25% of the city’s residents—and up to 33% of some north Downey neighborhoods—were over 55. This was not only higher than the other southeast Los Angeles suburbs, but was higher than the county average on the whole. In 1990, 22.3% of Downey residents were over 55 years old, again higher than both the county and nearby suburbs’ averages. The two maps below show the makeup of Downey.

Figures 1 and 2: Concentrations of residents over 55 years old in southeast Los Angeles. Map on left shows 1980 and map on right shows 1990. Darker shades of orange indicate higher percentages of residents over 55. Maps created on Social Explorer using census data.

This created an optimal sellers’ market for the Anglo residents who had stayed after the Watts Riots. Many white families sold their home at a profit and moved to Orange County. One resident recalled that the booming property values meant that residents could either refinance their mortgage and take out large amounts of equity or sell and “move on to something bigger,” which the resident clarified meant “let’s go move to Orange County and we can buy something bigger and newer.”

By the late 1980s, white homeowners looking for geographic distance from minority-majority suburbs moved en masse to Orange County, whose population boomed in the 1960s and 1980s, developing the county’s identity as a “haven” for whites concerned about states-rights, property-rights, and “traditional” values, as one historian has observed.

Indeed, cities like Yorba Linda, Newport Beach, and Irvine offered Downey homeowners similar middle-class autonomous suburban lives without Downey’s geographic proximity to southeast Los Angeles’s minority-majority cities.

But the booming sellers’ market also benefited home-owning Mexican Americans in southeast Los Angeles. This is partly because homeownership was common among Latino/a/x residents in southeast Los Angeles, as the tables below show. Every suburb but Downey—which was in the early stages of demographic change—had more than twice the percentage of Latino/a/x homeowners than the county average. Just as white homeowners sold their homes and moved to Orange County, middle-class Mexican Americans in southeast Los Angeles sold their homes and moved to Downey. “Hispanic-origin” homeowners decreased in other cities and increased in Downey.

Five-year-tenure rates in Downey showed that 84 percent of families who moved to Downey between 1985 and 1990 came from within Los Angeles County. Most were not first-time homebuyers, either. Though not perfect calculations, this census data suggests that Mexican American homeowners from elsewhere in southeast Los Angeles sold their homes around 1988 and moved to Downey.

Anecdotal evidence lends credence to this idea. Each Mexican American respondent I interviewed, whether they moved in before or after the housing boom of the late 1980s, spoke of Downey as having a reputation as a move-up community. The independent school district, stable property values, and perception of lower crime rates allured prospective Mexican American homeowners. One resident recalled her parents saying that Downey, compared to South Gate, was “an overall better area to raise your family.” Another resident recalled that even though Downey was “mostly white people,” his parents thought “it was ideal to live in Downey.” These respondents also came from nearby suburbs. For example, my parents and Margot Coronado moved from South Gate, Ed Estrella from Culver City, and Rito Calderón from Pico Rivera.

Regardless of where they moved from, middle-class Mexican Americans began to dramatically remake the demographics of Downey after 1988. This should ostensibly have changed the trajectory of “Mexicanness” in Downey. Before 1988, Mexican Americans were the overwhelming demographic minority and needed to downplay “Mexicanness” in favor of “Americanness” to secure their access to suburban resources. In the first essays of this series, I portrayed the ways middle-class Mexican Americans did just that. The assimilated civic identity factored into Spanish-speaking realtors’ efforts at integrating the city. Later, business owners, politicians, and the general public avoided speaking Spanish in public or otherwise portraying themselves as “Mexican.” Metropolitan Mexicanness, as I discussed earlier in this essay, offered one means of doing just that.

Many of these actions, though survived past 1988. Through demographic change, middle-class Mexican Americans became the plurality and eventually majority of residents. Once white homeowners left, middle-class Mexican Americans no longer needed to prove themselves as worthy of a spot in the suburb. They did not need to convince white homeowners that they comported themselves differently from what racial ideology predicted. In that sense, it might have been expected to see a weakening of the assimilated civic identity. One might have expected the 1990s to usher in a period of “public Mexicanness” or a weakening of metropolitan Mexicanness. In fact, neither happened. Throughout the 1990s, residents perpetuated key components of the assimilated civic identity—not because they needed to prove themselves as homeowners, but because they thought that doing so would steward their community through novel problems of the 1990s. My last essays will discuss how Mexican Americans saw their civic identity as the solution to these challenges.

One such problem was intimately tied to the events of 1988. A booming housing market accelerated demographic change and destabilized the harmony between the growing population of assimilated middle-class Mexican Americans and their white neighbors. The increased presence of Mexican Americans made some of the remaining white residents panic and overestimate the cultural differences and un-assimilability of the middle-class Mexican Americans. The race-based tensions Mexican Americans worked meticulously to avoid surfaced in the 1990s; I narrate them in next week’s installment.

G. Aron Ramirez can be reached at aron dot ramirez at yale dot edu.

Demographic Change: “Metropolitan Mexicanness” and Demographic Shifts