Blacks a Minority : Inner-City Schools: A Latin Flavor

Jefferson High School Principal Francis Nakano was strolling across the school yard during lunch one day in 1982 when he came upon a group of black students playing basketball. Nothing unusual about that, he thought.

But as he got closer, Nakano noticed there was something jarringly different about them: They were speaking fluent Spanish.

“Where are you from? “ he asked.

To his surprise, the youngsters turned out to be immigrants from Belize, the tiny Central American country formerly known as British Honduras, whose natives are dark-skinned and speak primarily Spanish.

“It was a shock to me,” recalled the veteran administrator, who had assumed they were American-born blacks. “I didn’t even know where Belize was. “

Now he not only laughs at the story but relishes the chance to repeat it. It illustrates, he said, how drastically Jefferson has changed.

Perceived as Black School

For 40 years, the majority of students who attended Jefferson were U.S.-born blacks. It is still widely perceived as a black school.

But since the early 1980s, large numbers of immigrants from Mexico and Central America have been flocking to the inner city, joining a small but sturdy community of first- and second-generation Latino families. Mainly because of the influx, Jefferson today is nearly 80% Latino.

It is one of a growing number of Southside Los Angeles schools where black students, long the majority, have become the minority, outnumbered by a rapidly expanding Latino population.

“The perception is that the inner city is black, but that perception isn’t true anymore,” said Joseph Caldera, president of the Los Angeles school district’s Council of Mexican-American Administrators, an organization concerned about the need to re-staff schools in the inner city and other parts of the district where Latino enrollment is mushrooming. “The inner city,” he said, “is very brown.”

Number of Latinos Doubles

According to district figures, Latino students make up almost half of the elementary school enrollment in the South-Central region of the district. At four of the eight high schools--Jefferson, Manual Arts, Fremont and Jordan--Latinos make up 49% or more of the student body.

Jefferson has the highest concentration of Latino youngsters, whose number has nearly doubled in the last five years. Between 1981 and 1986, the black enrollment dropped to 21% from 57%, while the proportion of Latino students grew to 78% from 41%, district ethnic surveys show.

Over the next 10 years, 10,000 new Latino students will enter what school officials call the “Jefferson complex”--the high school itself plus the 20 elementary and junior high schools that feed into it--while the number of black students will drop by 1,000, according to recent projections made by Criterion Inc., a San Diego demographic research firm.

Ten years from now, only four predominantly black inner-city high school complexes will remain--Crenshaw, Dorsey, Locke and Washington, the Criterion study predicted. And even for those schools, the pattern of declining black and rising Latino numbers is clear, particularly in the neighborhoods around Dorsey and Locke.

The huge demographic shift has touched nearly every aspect of school life.

These days, for instance, it is common to hear Spanish spoken in the cafeterias and on the playgrounds, particularly among the recent immigrants. Some black elementary school youngsters in bilingual classrooms have managed to pick up a little Spanish, too.

Informal cultural exchanges have produced interesting hybrids. Some Latino youths at Jefferson speak black English as if they were born to it. Other students demonstrate an amazing facility in “Spanglish,” a street language that combines Spanish slang and black English.

Broaden Cultural Awareness

Teachers said that the influx of Latinos has helped broaden the cultural awareness of black students. “I’ve seen black kids who were shocked to find out they are perceived as aggressive by Latino kids,” Jefferson English teacher Cathy Armstrong said, “and Hispanic kids who are shocked to find out they are perceived as nerds because they are so quiet in comparison. . . . That has been a very positive thing, (for students to get a sense of) what it means to be from another culture.”

Even the scope and focus of athletics have changed. In the high schools, for instance, soccer has gained appeal, while more traditional sports, such as football, have waned. At Jefferson, the soccer team--a virtual mini-congress of Latin American nations, with players from Nicaragua, Panama, Guatemala, Mexico and El Salvador--has a faithful following, a new twist for a school where for years the biggest draws were basketball, football and track.

New Challenges

But the dramatic ethnic shift also has created new challenges.

“The growth (in inner-city Latino enrollment) has been phenomenal, and we are ill-prepared,” said Carlos Barron, director of the Mexican-American Education Commission, an advisory body serving the school district. “There is not enough room in the schools. That is just the logistical impact. We also need to sensitize the teachers to the kinds of students who are entering the schools. Are they first-, second- or third-generation Chicanos? Or are they Central American immigrants from war-torn countries who may have psychological damage from the war? All the ‘normal’ problems those schools experience, like dropouts, crowding, drugs, firearms, poverty and the language barrier” need more attention now, he said.

Many of the inner-city schools, including Jefferson, have seen their enrollments swell for the first time in many years. On the positive side, the growth has enabled schools that were chronically under-enrolled to make full use of their facilities, and high schools have been able to offer more electives.

Run Out of Space

But the growth has been so great and occurred so quickly that many schools have run out of space.

Jefferson, with 2,500 students, has “capped” its enrollment and sends excess students 45 minutes by bus to Granada Hills and other high schools with room to spare. Seventeen elementary schools also bus new students to other campuses. Three elementary schools near Jefferson--Ascot, 49th Street and Hooper--operate year-round in order to accommodate surging enrollments of 1,000 or more.

For the first time in decades, the district is planning to build new schools in South-Central and Southeast Los Angeles. But the relief will not come soon enough, district officials said. Classrooms that are needed now will take about five years to build because of a cumbersome school-construction process controlled by the state.

Equally pressing is a need to find more bilingual teachers and more Latino administrators and instructors to serve as role models for the Latino students, school officials said. But they are thinly spread throughout the district and in short supply statewide.

‘I Can’t Find One’

Jefferson, for example, has one bilingual counselor to work with the 500 students who speak primarily Spanish, and nine bilingual teachers.

“I need another bilingual counselor. I can’t find another one in the whole district,” Nakano said. “I could use another bilingual math teacher, but can’t find another one of those either.”

The need tends to be more severe in the elementary schools, which are required to provide bilingual instruction whenever there are 10 or more non-English-speaking students on the same grade level.

At Weigand Avenue School in Watts, for instance, more than half of the 460 students speak little or no English and need bilingual instruction. But only three of 22 teachers are fully credentialed bilingual instructors, Principal Jose Velazquez said. The shortage has forced the administrator to make the best of his limited resources.

For instance, Velazquez had to assign a teacher who speaks only English to a predominantly Spanish-speaking class this year. To satisfy legal requirements for native language instruction, Velazquez teamed the monolingual teacher with one of the bilingual instructors. Every day, the English-speaking teacher sends her Spanish-speaking students across the hall to the other teacher for reading lessons. In exchange, the bilingual teacher sends his English-speaking students, who make up about a third of his class, to her room for math.

‘It Gets Burdensome’

“It works relatively well,” the principal said, “but it gets burdensome on the bilingual teacher. He has twice as many kids for reading” as he normally would.

The three Spanish-bilingual instructors at Weigand were hired only this year, although Latino students have made up more than 50% of the school’s enrollment since 1982. Velazquez said the school’s location a block from the Jordan Downs housing project has made it harder to attract bilingual instructors, who are in such high demand that they almost can pick the school they want to work in. “Teachers come here to interview,” he said, “and then they wind up going to Bryson,” an elementary school in a middle-class South Gate neighborhood about three miles away.

Nakano said--and students and teachers agreed--that Jefferson experienced surprisingly little conflict during the early years when the ethnic balance began to shift toward a Latino majority. Nakano attributed the smooth transition to a conscious effort to integrate the staff and treat students equitably.

Feelings of Resentment

Not far beneath the surface, however, black students harbor feelings of resentment.

Some express irritation about Latino students who speak Spanish to one another in school, while others grumble about disco music being played at school dances. Latino students dominate the student council and tend to win most of the academic honors.

Said Vanessa Crawford, 18, a Jefferson senior who attended elementary and junior high schools in the area: “When I was in 10th grade, the school was half (black) and half (Latino), and it was more fun. Now, none of my classes has more than five blacks; the rest are Mexican, or Hispanic. When it comes down to (student) elections, it seems like a Hispanic always gets it. It just seems like blacks don’t have a say in school anymore. That makes me feel bad.”

Perceived Racial Slights

Latino students often react just as keenly to perceived racial slights, even though they are more numerous than blacks.

“Some of my (Latino) friends watch everything that is done for blacks and complain if it seems (blacks) are getting more,” Jefferson student body President Alex Romero, 17, said. He said he knows black and Latino students who compared the school’s activities for Black History Month in February with the May 5 celebration of Cinco de Mayo and reached opposite conclusions about which event was bigger, better or received more support from teachers and administrators.

“The two races need to be more sensitive to each other,” said Alex, who hopes to return to Jefferson as a teacher after college. “We’re all in the same hole and should be fighting for the same things, not fighting each other.”

Tension Among Staff

The tension, several principals said, has been more apparent among school staff than among students. “It was more difficult for the adults than for the kids to handle the changes. There were no big fights among the kids,” Nakano said. “But the adults felt they were losing their power base.”

Shortly after Nakano arrived at Jefferson, for instance, he suggested replacing an aging mural of black leaders with artwork that Latino students could relate to. But several black teachers fought the idea. “The flak came from black teachers who’d been here awhile,” a black staff member recalled. “They were afraid it was going to strip away black heritage.”

Nakano said resistance to removing the mural eventually subsided and the mural came down. “It’s a delicate situation with kids and with adults,” Nakano said. “The reality of what is occurring is hard for people to deal with.”

Jobs Were Threatened

The increasing need for bilingual services caused hard feelings among many black school employees whose jobs were threatened. At Figueroa Street School in South Los Angeles, where Latino students have made up more than one-third of the enrollment for the last few years, none of the main office clerks was bilingual until this year.

“I had the hardest time getting a Hispanic in the office here,” said Principal Elzie Evans, who hired a Spanish-speaking clerk after he took over last year. “I said, ‘Who the hell is doing the translating?’ There was not much emphasis on getting that service.”

Evans said resentment arose when longtime black school employees were replaced by Spanish-speaking aides and clerks. “The (black) community felt that the jobs belonged to them,” Evans said. At Main Street, where Evans served as principal before coming to Figueroa, “we were rapidly going through changes,” he said, “and we needed people who had facility in the Spanish language. The black employees were not willing to learn Spanish. It was a sad situation.”

Caused Misunderstandings

More recently, misunderstandings were caused by the district’s plans to build new elementary schools in the Jefferson area. The plans affected primarily elderly black homeowners, who received notices from the district that their homes would be demolished to make way for the schools.

“People thought the district wanted to buy our homes and sell them to Hispanic families,” said Gwen Barrett, whose mother-in-law lives in one of the homes that had been targeted for destruction. Because of community opposition, the district has temporarily shelved its plans and is searching for alternate sites for the new facilities.

For some black parents and educators, the changing demographics raise serious concerns and underscore the need to improve relations between inner-city blacks and their new Latino neighbors.

Project Genesis

The conflict was brought out in the open at a recent school board meeting when two black community leaders complained that too few black students would benefit from Project Genesis, a new program scheduled to begin next year that aims to cut the high dropout rate in six minority high schools by guaranteeing jobs to seniors who maintain good grades.

Three of the schools are in South-Central Los Angeles--Jefferson, Manual Arts and Locke--and three are in East Los Angeles. Carrie Haynes, a past president of the Council of Black Administrators and retired Watts elementary school principal, noted that only Locke is predominantly black. The other five schools have substantial Latino majorities. She demanded that the board try to include schools with more black students. The board has not responded to her request.

‘Demographics Are Changing’

“I know there is a preponderance of Hispanic students and that the demographics are changing,” Haynes said. “That is an actuality that we are going to have to accept and live with. . . . But if this trend continues, we are going to lose opportunities for black pupils. Black students have always been neglected, and now the situation is even worse.”

Where are inner-city black students going? Although black enrollment districtwide is decreasing, in certain parts of the district it is rising--chiefly on the Westside and in parts of the San Fernando Valley, according to the Criterion demographic study. It also is increasing in districts in San Bernardino, Ontario and Pomona.

Based on an analysis of school enrollment and 1980 census data, the Criterion researchers have concluded that the rise is due to black families leaving the inner city for these outlying areas. Longtime residents and school officials said that upward mobility accounts for much of the movement; as their income rises, families move to a better neighborhood.

Increasing Latin Flavor

Others, however, have left because they are uncomfortable with the increasingly Latin flavor of the area.

Jefferson senior Felicia Williams, 17, said many of her black friends obtained district permits to attend other schools, such as Crenshaw, where the majority of students are black.

According to Nakano, several hundred black students who live in Jefferson’s attendance area choose to go to other schools, draining Jefferson of many of its most talented pupils. Many of them never attended neighborhood schools, he said, preferring integrated schools in the San Fernando Valley or the Harbor area.

Nakano said he has had some success luring back students by building up the school’s academic programs and strengthening campus security. Ironically, because Jefferson’s classrooms now are full, it would not have the room if those students decided to return.