The Shock of the New : Anti-immigration fever is at a fever pitch, but the real issue is this: When will the old (Anglo) L.A. join the new (Latino) L.A., and learn to dance <i> quebradita</i> ?

“La noche que Chicago se murio... “

The boots. Smooth, black brushed-leather boots. Snakeskin boots. Cheap, white vinyl boots. Sharp-toed boots. Tasseled boots. Hundreds of boots shuffling, kicking, twirling. Kick forward, twirl at the knee, kick back, twirl at the knee. . . fast , across the dance floor. Boots belonging to boys and girls. The boys in jeans and crisp white shirts, or in T-shirts with the names of their dance crews in graffiti-style lettering--”La Herradura,” “Vaqueros Nortenos,” “Indias Carinosas.” The girls in jeans too, or short shorts, silver nylons and blouses sequined and sparkling. The boys with their mustaches, lots of mustaches. The girls made up, some modestly, others chola -heavy. And then the hats, the all-important tejana , the Texas-style Stetson, preferably black, tugged down low over the eyes. A sea of hats across the dance floor, bobbing up and down, along with the shoulders, the chests, the breasts, the hips, the knees and the boots that kick forward, twirl at the knee, kick back, kick fast, kick-twirl-kick-shuffle to the beat: um-pa-bum, um-pa-bum, um-pa-bum.

It’s Friday night at Mi Hacienda in La Puente, and I’m witnessing the resurgence of the American cowboy and cowgirl: the brown-skinned and black-eyed vaqueros y vaqueritas . The new American cowboys and cowgirls are mostly from Mexico and have been here only a few years. But there are Salvadoran vaqueros , too. And second-generation Chicana vaqueritas . Most are in their late teens and early 20s, dancing to the quebradita beat of Banda Toro, a brass-heavy Mexican outfit in matching uniforms of embroidered shirts, boots and, of course, black tejanas .

“La noche que Chicago se murio...”

“The night Chicago died.” The melody brings back memories of the ‘70s: a group called Paper Lace hit it big with this song about gangsters in Chicago. And here it is in 1994, in Spanish, set to the polka-ish, tinny, fast quebradita sound that the vaqueros y vaqueritas live for.

“ Arriba Michoacan! “ cries out Toro’s lead singer between songs, a salutation to the natives of that Mexican state. A cheer sounds, hats are raised. “ Arriba Jalisco! “ More cheers, more hats. “ Arriba Zacatecas! “ Hey, that’s me! Well, sort of. My grandmother was born in a small town of that Mexican state. If I had a hat, I’d wave it.

To say that there is Latino pride in La Puente tonight would be an understatement. It’s more like a cultural revolution. We’re Mexican, speak Spanish, dance quebradita and are damn proud of it.

And therein lies the revolution. The quebradita fad began here, though it’s roots are obviously south of the border. Historians and and ethnomusicologists agree this is the first instance in which a Mexican popular music--in this case from 19th Century Sinaloa--has been revived and commercialized in the United States, then shipped back to the Old Country. In Mexico, quebradita is just starting to catch on, about two years after the scene took off here.

To Steven Loza, a professor of ethnomusicology at UCLA, the quebradita scene is about establishing a sense of Latino independence--in the North. “People are saying that we don’t have to look like Prince or Madonna,” he says. “We can wear our boots and hats. The vaquero style is important as a symbol. When a Mexican puts on that suit, just like when in the old days you put on a zoot suit, you can walk into that club and be proud that you’re a Mexican.”

All of which begs many questions that relate to California’s most volatile and polarizing political topic: immigration. Why is it that Mexicans both recently arrived and American born are proclaiming themselves Mexican on this side of the border? Are Mexicans and other Latino immigrants overturning America’s cherished rites of assimilation, proclaiming themselves an independent cultural Other within the United States? And why now? Is it mere coincidence that the quebradita craze was born roughly at the same time that politicians began staking out positions against the presence of immigrants--especially the illegal immigrants--in our midst?

Most observers think that questions of “why so much pride” and “why now” merit a simple answer: “It’s almost like a response, a backlash, if you want to call it, against the anti-immigrant rhetoric,” says Loza. The question of the creation of a non-assimilated Other is a little more complex.

Quebradita is but one of many signs that the city of Los Angeles is undergoing a radical transformation. Latino Los Angeles hovers at more than 40% of the population--a plurality heading toward a majority. Historians and demographers refer to this percentage, which includes newcomers and several generations of the American-born, as a “critical mass,” an agent of change.

This is not just a matter of numbers. The fact that Mexico and Central America, the immigrants’ Old Countries, are just across the border is equally important. Latin culture, as well as people, travel across that border daily. Unlike other U.S. immigrants, Latinos can touch their roots with ease. And, of course, the city itself shares those roots.

“Latinos are not like the old European immigrants, nor like a racial minority. What we have is something fundamentally different,” says David Hayes-Bautista, director of the Alta California Policy Research Center, an independent think tank studying Latino issues. Latinos in L.A., he adds, are their “own civil society, almost equivalent in size to the state of Minnesota.”

Put it this way, then: While Gov. Pete Wilson, Sens. Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein and many other pols in the state rant about the “immigration problem,” the more pertinent issue might be this: When will they learn to dance the quebradita ?

This transformation has set the city on edge. White suburban dwellers grit their teeth at seeing vendors or day laborers on street corners in the San Fernando Valley. African Americans in South-Central L.A. watch black neighborhoods turn brown, and worry over competition for jobs. The fear, anger and frustration among non-immigrant L.A. transcends racial and class lines.

But transformation and its discontents work both ways. Latino culture, too, is being remade. Indeed, some would argue that the quebradita craze is merely a nostalgic yearning in a culture that will inescapably be changed now that it has crossed the border. Then there’s the feeling on the part of most immigrants that they are being unfairly blamed for California’s economic woes. The “new” L.A.--Mexicans, and Central Americans who’ve arrived in the past decade, Chicanos who’ve been here for generations, working-class teens and doctoral candidates at Caltech, business people and domestic workers, the elite and the welfare recipients, legal and illegal--is as uncertain, and fearful, about this transformation as the old L.A.

But tonight the new L.A. is not fearful or uncertain or contemplating a hostile reconquest of the Southwest. Tonight the new L.A. is dancing up a storm in La Puente, remember?

There is Griselda Mariscal, 20, a native of L.A. whose mother was born in Guadalajara and whose father hails from Tepic. She is here, with her ivory-toned botines (boots); her loose blue jeans held up by a braided piece of leather work called a cinto piteado and her panuelo (bandanna) of green, white and red, the colors of the Mexican flag, that announces “Nayarit,” her father’s home state. Her date, a shy vaquero , tucks his thumbs into the corners of his jeans pockets. His Stetson is pulled down low. Very cool.

“ Quebradita is a way of showing you can be all into your culture,” says Mariscal, who, when she’s not out dancing, crams for midterms and finals at Occidental College, where she is a third-year history major. “To me, it’s a way of holding your head up high. It says that I am in college because of the strength of my culture, because of the sacrifice of mis papas, mis abuelitos .” Mariscal grew up near Belmont High School, where, she says, “there were no white people.” The first Anglo institution she encountered was Occidental College, with a student population of 1,650, of which 60% are Anglo. “I didn’t know anything about being a Chicana until then,” she says. She joined the militant Chicano student organization MEChA (Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan), and promptly declared herself Mexicana: “I hated the gringos.” A trip to Mexico brought her disillusionment, however. “They called me a guerita “--an American-looking girl. And whenever an English word crept into her otherwise flawless Spanish, she’d get more grief: You don’t belong here. You’re from el otro lado , the other side of the border. “It took me a trip to Mexico to realize that I had something in common with the gringo.”

Then she heard about quebradita . Now it was her Chicano friends who questioned her for being so retrograde: “They’d see me in my botines and ask me where my horse was.” But she persisted. Gradually, the quebradita fever spread to more of her Chicano friends. Today, Mariscal doesn’t see herself as a pure Mexicana. But she still doesn’t see herself completely as an American, either.

Onstage, Banda Toro is tearing into a popurri of songs: suddenly, the um-pah-bum gives way to a rock ‘n’ roll backbeat and the thousand pairs of boots are trying out some version of the twist. We are not in Mexico, nor in Aztlan, the mythical Chicano nation separate from white America. But we’re not quite in the United States, either. We’re in Los Angeles.

IN THE 1920S, THE MARTINEZ-DEL RIO DUO WAS AMONG THE MUSICAL ACTSthat played L.A.’s Mexican theaters. They sang corrido tales from the Revolution and other dramas of the day. Juan Martinez and Margarita Del Rio were my grandparents. They came north, riding their generation’s wave of migration, and stayed, settling in the Silver Lake hills along with the Russians, Irish, Asians and Italians of the old L.A. They loved America, even when America deported hundreds of thousands of their compatriots back to Mexico during the Great Depression.

They were spared that fate by landing a job at a popular Anglo nightclub Downtown, where they were paid very well for their talents. They would look at the poor Mexicans in East L.A. and say to themselves: “They just don’t have what it takes.”

Curiously, my grandparents never completely assimilated. They spoke enough English for the essentials--to make a bank deposit, to meet and greet in their gigs at the nightclub. (For the tougher transactions, they relied on their only child, my father, who was born here and had a thorough American education and spoke English without an accent). But they were also as American as could be: Their ambition to succeed led them to close the door on their Mexican past. They returned only for brief visits; they became U.S. citizens; their home was this country. The irony, of course, is that they were only able to declare America their home by playing Mexican folk music to the Anglo elites of their day.

My mother, a native of El Salvador, remembers her arrival to this country in the late ‘50s. It began with a 12-hour flight on a Pan American bimotor. At dawn, the plane set down in San Francisco. She recalls an idyllic sight: the Golden Gate bridge gleaming and the waters of the bay dappled by the silver light bursting over the green hills of Berkeley. America.

America for her was freedom from the constraints of a conservative family in the Old Country. It was also the fulfillment of a dream that her mother had had in the ‘40s. “She used to talk about America as a place where women could wear pants and work,” she says, the words coming out slow and thick with nostalgia. But when she speaks of her years of studying English, getting her first job, meeting her future husband, raising her children, going back to school and, finally, getting her license in family counseling, the voice lightens, quickens. It’s the classic American story, but, of course, there was a price to be paid.

“I ached inside, especially those first few years,” she says. “I missed my family so much.” It was more than family. It was a way of life, a way of seeing the world. It was growing up in one world, abandoning it for another and growing up all over again with a whole new set of values and beliefs.

My father strikes a more ambivalent note. “I can see things from both sides,” he says. On the one hand, he’s famous for referring to the recently arrived immigrants, just as his parents did, as chusma (rabble). But then he’ll talk about the white survivalist types who are arming themselves to the teeth in anticipation of L.A.’s next riot. “Sure, I get angry when they talk about the Mexicans this, Mexicans that,” he says. “I feel like they’re the ones who would have looked at my parents and made fun of them for the way they spoke English.” A visible hurt tightens the muscles of his face.

But my father protests when I mention his parents’ lack of assimilation. “They never learned English well, but they spent all those years with the Americans, paying their bills, living in Silver Lake.” He is saying that assimilation is as much an economic rite of passage as a cultural one. And he is, of course, right.

We were an American family, assimilated, middle class. We spoke English, except for my mother’s terms of endearment like m’hijo (my son). And there was her heavy accent, which my brother, sister and I made fun of. My Mexican grandparents were mysterious figures from far-off lands, their voices even thicker with the accent of another time and place. They could only half understand their grandchildren. Isolated in their world, they waited for death while living in memory, satisfied that they’d done the right thing by ensuring their children and grandchildren a better life in the United States.

But I became the cultural revisionist in my family. I have been obsessed, for the better part of my adult life, with questions of cultural identity and its relation to the history of the city. In my 31 years, I have played the role of an accentless, perfectly assimilated American kid. But I’ve also betrayed my parents’ and grandparents’ ideals of assimilation. I have returned to the Old Countries; I have on occasion proclaimed myself separate from Anglo American culture; I’ve been known to warn Anglos that they just might be the ones who are going to get deported--back to Europe--when I hear them talking about deporting my Latin American brothers and sisters.

I have also dreamed of a California in which a historical wound hundreds of years old might be healed: a reconciliation between North and South, the Catholic and the Protestant, the First and Third worlds. I’ve come to admit that rock ‘n’ roll is as important to my spiritual well-being as la Virgen de Guadalupe . I will always be the outsider in Latin America. I also oftentimes feel like an outcast in the United States. The only place I could be at home is in the new--the almost new--Los Angeles.

THE TRANSFORMATION OF L.A. IS NOT WITHOUT PRECEDENT. AFTER THE Mexican-American War of 1846-48, the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and the U.S. annexation of the Southwest, Anglos overran Los Angeles, displacing the native Mexican “Californio” population. Along with WASPy descendants of the early Americans came more immigrants--Chinese, Italians, French, Irish. Then during the Mexican Revolution that began in 1910, hundreds of thousands of refugees crossed the border and reasserted the Latino identity of Los Angeles.

The years of the first Cultural Revolution here, the mid-1800s, were tumultuous ones. The radically different sensibilities clashed violently, but sometimes they melded seamlessly, too. Many of the Chinese merchants of the Old Plaza, near today’s Olvera Street, were fluent in Spanish (as are many of today’s Korean merchants). Some of the old rancheros intermarried with Italians. At the city’s centennial celebration in 1881, booster speeches were shouted out in English, Spanish and French.

Nevertheless, L.A.’s primitive multicultural experiment was short-lived. Lynchings of Chinese and Mexicans weren’t unheard of. The “Californio” rancheros saw their lands usurped, sometimes legally, sometimes not. By the late 1880s, the new dominant culture had just about wiped out L.A.’s old Mexican downtown. A Catholic Mexican town became yet another modern Protestant town of the American Southwest. Even the Latino influx during the Mexican Revolution couldn’t tip the demographic balance away from the Anglo mainstream. In this century, migrants from the American South and Midwest made the biggest mark on L.A., until recently, when that distinction went to the foreign-born. (Latinos make up the vast majority of newcomers but Asians are also a significant percentage; from 1980 to 1990, their numbers in the city nearly doubled, to 10.6% of the population.)

All over the Southwest, pitched battles between the Anglo and Mexican conceptions of city life were fought after the Mexican-American War and well into this century. Historian William Estrada, who teaches Chicano studies at Cal State Northridge, notes that each city resolved the conflict in different ways. San Antonio, he says, “integrated its Mexican past.” It is still visible in that town’s pueblo -like buildings. In other cities, such as Albuquerque and San Diego, the Americans of the 19th Century were “successful in erasing historical memory.” L.A., Estrada says, falls somewhere in between. “Downtown L.A. has Pershing Square and Bunker Hill, but it also still has the Old Plaza.”

And now, when people talk about immigration problems, they are talking about what kind of city they want L.A. to be. Will it be a city of the North, or the South? Should it have vendors hawking mangoes and papayas on the sidewalk? (The proponents are mostly Latino and the opponents nearly all Anglo. The City Council has sided, narrowly, with the vendors.) Should it speak English only? (Whatever English-only laws remain on the books, the fact remains that L.A. is a city of dozens and dozens of languages. Studies have found that most Latinos in the U.S. are bilingual, and many, especially young Mexican-Americans, prefer to use Spanish.)

Demographers like David Hayes-Bautista don’t see these culture wars as a win-lose proposition. For him, the Latin American concept of mestizaje , the mixing of European and indigenous cultures that gave rise to a third culture, is applicable to L.A. “The real melting pot occurred in Latin America,” he says. “Anglo-Protestantism doesn’t allow for half-breeds; Latino Catholic culture does. (Through immigration) we are continuing the mestizo tradition and fulfilling the promise of a real U.S. melting pot. We’re the rest of the American story. What we’re seeing in L.A. is the emergence of a truly American identity for the 21st Century.”

THE NEWEST OF THE NEW ANGELENOS TRY ON THE CONSONANTS AND vowels of their future in a classroom at Evans Community Adult School in Downtown. “Good morning, how are you?” says ESL teacher Sylvia Martinez, much too bouncy, loud and cheerful for a Monday morning at 7:30.

“Faahine, how are juuuu?” the class responds in unison, 40 or so voices--men and women, teens to middle-aged people, Mexicans, Central Americans and a sprinkling of South Americans.

“The al-pha-bet,” Martinez says. “The ahl-fa-beh,” the class repeats.

“The al-pha-be ttt .”

“The ahl-fa-be hhttt .”

“A, B, C, D . . .”

Martinez prowls up and down between the rows of seats, tapping out a rhythm on the floor with a long wooden pointer.

“Where are you from?” Martinez asks, enunciating every syllable, making a show of tongue, lips and teeth.

“Where ahhre juuuu frohhm?” Loose vowels, soft consonants.

“Ireland,” Martinez says. “Irish,” says the chorus. “Peru.” “Peruvian.” “Vietnam.” “Vietnamese.” “El Salvador.” “Salvadoran,” they say, noticeably louder.

I ask Yolanda Franco, who, in her 30s, is one of the older women in the classroom, what English sounds like to her. “ Fabuloso! “ she says, with all the immigrant hope in the world showing through her smile. English is her ticket to success. She’s come north alone; a daughter waits in Mexico for her to gain a toehold here so that they can be reunited. Right now, Franco works as a housekeeper. But it’s only a matter of time, she says. Just some more consonants, pronouns and practice stand between her and a better life.

Franco may be embracing transformation, but English and the American Way aren’t all that fabuloso for Yesica Remedios, 18. She was born here, but she moved to Guadalajara at the age of 2 and only six months ago came north for the first time. “I have to learn English,” she says, because most of the texts in children’s psychology, her career choice, are in English. “But I don’t like it here,” she insists. “There’s more freedom in Mexico. You can go out at night, stroll through the plazas without giving it a second thought. But here! The gangs! Este no es mi pais. (This is not my country.)”

What does the future hold for the students at Evans, most of whom have been in the United States for less than a year? Will Franco continue to believe life is fabuloso ? Will Remedios be seduced by America?

To find some answers, I visit the South Gate Women’s Clinic, where a dozen or so Latinas who have gathered at random speak of their hopes and fears. They sit before me, many wearing sweat shirts and tennis shoes, the uniform of the Latina working class. Not one wears makeup, and most have deep, dark circles under their eyes. These are the women who sew in garment factories, clean up office buildings late at night, sell fruit or trinkets on the street. Most have been here several years and have done their time in crowded classrooms learning basic English. And many of them have begun to wonder whether they made the right decision in coming north.

“Once you’re here, you become something different,” says Norma, in her 20s and a native of Michoacan (all the women gave their first names only, since most are undocumented). “The family changes. The children don’t have the same respect for their parents.”

Nods of agreement around the table. “You have to work and leave them alone all day,” says Rosario, who is Guatemalan. “It’s the way of life in this country. I’ve never seen gang members in my homeland.”

You can’t discipline your children here, the mothers complain. “Here, the parents fear the children.” Who knows, with all those laws on the books here, maybe a spanking could constitute child abuse, they say. But, Rosario insists, people aren’t going to go back home. “No matter how bad off we are here, it’s worse in one’s own country.”

Others aren’t so sure. Hermila, from Guadalajara, is thinking of saving up some more money and then heading home. She talks about being looked at funny because she’s brown, short and poor, about all the factories where bosses have tried to have their way with her. “I’ll work a little longer and get out of here. Wilson can do whatever he wants,” she says. More nodding of heads.

The mention of Gov. Wilson’s name draws the most passion from the group. “Pete Wilson is a jerk,” Rosario pronounces to much laughter. “We come here to work!” says Idelisa, another Guadalajara native, protesting Wilson’s portrayal of some immigrants as welfare sponges. “Wilson thinks he can solve the problems, but he’s just going to create more,” says Rosario.

Despite her talk of going home, Hermila acknowledges, “You can at least eat here. You can still get ahead. Querer es poder .” (It’s a popular saying in Mexico, and it sounds like it comes straight out of a California motivational seminar: “If you want it, you can get it.”)

And so the conversation goes, back and forth. Half the time, it’s we’ve had it, we’re leaving. But inevitably the dream is resurrected: We’re going to make it here. It’s a well-known Latino trait: to be terco , stubborn, to stake one’s pride on doing what others say can’t be done, especially when the odds are stacked against you.

THE OLD AND THE NEW SEEM TO FACE OFF DAILY IN L.A. THE ANGLOS SAY that bilingual education is bad; Latinos take pride in retaining their Spanish. The Anglos say that immigrants should assimilate; Latinos retaliate with quebradita . The Anglos say the immigrants are a drain on the economy; the undocumented immigrants start marching on City Hall. The gulf widens.

Nowhere is this more apparent than on college campuses, where Latino students are now more militant than at any other time since the Chicano movement of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. That generation started out with an ultranationalist, separatist philosophy, but most of the activists eventually wound up working within the (white) Establishment. Many of today’s young Chicanos look upon the old activists as sellouts, even the region’s most progressive Latino pols, up to and including County Supervisor Gloria Molina. For the new generation, activism and Aztlan, the mythical Chicano land of milk and honey, separate from white America, are viable again.

Today, however, there isn’t just one “movement.” There are several. Where Latino students of the ‘60s were mostly Mexican American and identified with MEChA, today there are also LASA (Latin American Students Assn.) and ALAS (Association of Latin American Students) for foreign-born Latinos who don’t identify themselves as Chicano, and making an even narrower distinction, CASA (Central American Student Assn.).

I sit in on a CASA meeting at Occidental College in the Coons Boardroom, a corporate-style meeting hall for campus organizations. Lining the walls are portraits of gray-haired white men, the college’s founders. In the swivel chairs sit the future powerbrokers of the city, brown-skinned children of Guatemalans, Salvadorans, Nicaraguans, Panamanians--wearing backward baseball caps, checkered flannel shirts, Doc Martens. The look is part grunge, part hip-hop, part university wiz-kid square.

There has been plenty of controversy surrounding CASA. “When we formed (last September), there were a lot of criticisms,” says CASA president Melvin Canas, a 21-year-old premed student majoring in sociology. “People were saying, ‘You’re going to divide the community, make a weaker front.’ But the reason we formed was to learn our culture, not to fight Chicanos for political power on campus. It was to not lose our identity.”

“A lot of gringos think that we’re Mexicans,” says William Vela, a 21-year-old Guatemalan psych major. “CASA formed to let the community know that there are other Latinos as well.”

Such divergence--on many fronts--is apparent throughout L.A.’s Latino community. The issue of immigration itself, especially illegal immigration, divides many Latinos. A Los Angeles Times Poll last September showed that 75% of California Latinos view illegal immigration as either a major or moderate problem, and 43% have the same response to legal immigration. Two-thirds said charging a toll at the border to increase surveillance was a good idea. (Whites agreed on all counts, only more so--92%, 43% and 75%, respectively.)

But for the vanguard of the new L.A.--activists like the students at Occidental and their counterparts at campuses across Southern California--what divides the Latino community is not nearly as important as what unites it. When it comes to the hottest of the hot-button immigration issues, Latinos close ranks. More than 60% reject Gov. Wilson’s proposals to deny citzenship to children born of undocumented parents and to cut off illegal immigrants’ health and education services. And despite evidence of Latino hostility toward illegal immigration, 60% believe that any crackdown on illegal immigration will lead to increased discrimination.

There are other issues that unite the new L.A. as well, issues that CASA, ALAS and LASA might call the “real” immigrant problem. The economy, for instance. The new L.A. may be most successful at redefining cultural assimilation, but as my father pointed out, any assimilation is about decent wages and jobs. Once, immigrant pushcart vendors could open up a store; factory workers were union members with health benefits, pension plans and middle-class wages. Now, most of these economic routes upward are closed, and not only to immigrants.

In Los Angeles, Latino per capita income is only about 45% of the city average; nearly a quarter of Latino families live in poverty. The problem is that the jobs Latinos hold are concentrated in low-wage service and non-union manufacturing sectors. “In the past, people could enter the middle class much quicker,” says Rodolfo Acuna, a professor of Chicano studies at Cal State Northridge. “You were socialized by your work place, and could afford to move out and were assimilated. There’s been an elimination of those steppingstone jobs.”

Another troubling issue is voting. Mexican political scientist Jorge G. Castaneda and others warn of an “electoral apartheid” in California because its Latino immigrant population--a majority of which is legal--has yet to flex much political muscle. This is attributed to its disproportionately young median age, the fact that many legal residents are not yet citizens and, finally, because many are not registered to vote. “In effect, a small, privileged minority is determining the fate of a largely poor, non-voting majority,” writes Castaneda in “The California-Mexico Connection,” a collection of essays published last year.

It must be, then, the broadest possible interpretation of mestizaje , not separatism, that the new L.A. will need to assert in the face of such challenges. Castaneda says that one solution is for the white electorate to exercise enlightened self-interest and join with voting Latinos to increase, rather than decrease, social services to immigrants. The newcomers, after all, are the future of the city and the state.

For every separatist slogan, then, there is countervailing evidence of mestizaje . In the boardroom at Occidental, the CASA students might complain about the “white man,” but they conduct their meetings in English. And who should show up here--because, she says, she thinks she has things in common with her brothers and sisters from throughout Latin America--but Mexicana-Chicana-Americana- vaquerita Griselda Mariscal.

I AM SURROUNDED BY THE OLD L.A.--PASADENA, ACTUALLY, OLD PASADEna, monied Pasadena. The front yard of the house I’ve been invited to speak at is, literally, a 100-yard golf course. The Chardonnay sparkles in the smoggy afternoon sunlight. It is a fund-raiser for an exclusive artists’ colony in Northern California where I had been in residence. I am to speak on--what else?--L.A.’s new immigrant culture. Here we go again.

I sip some Chardonnay and debate silently what tack I’ll take this time. Should I try the sensitive multicultural routine, disarming them by listening sympathetically and replying to the inevitable fear in measured tones? Should I become the cultural guerrilla, threatening a violent takeover if demands of social and economic equal opportunity aren’t met? Or how about the Jesus-at-the-temple variation, throwing each and every bottle of Chardonnay through the mansion’s beautiful wood-framed windows?

I pick the California Idealist approach.

There is a plaque at Olvera Street, I tell them, that lists the names of the 44 pobladores who arrived here in 1781 and founded the city of El Pueblo de la Reina de Los Angeles Sobre el Rio de Porciuncula. Do they know what the ethnic makeup of that group was? The majority were black or mulatto. The next-largest group was mestizo . There were Indians from Mexico. And there were a couple of Spaniards. Los Angeles, I say, has always held out the promise of multiculturalism.

I get polite applause at the end of the talk, and a few liberals--the kind who assume I lived a nightmarish childhood in the barrio and made it out against the odds--ask sympathetic questions. But later, as I’m making my way back to the appetizers, I am cornered by an agitated group, the conservatives who were afraid to voice their un-PC opinions before the larger crowd. They hurl questions at me: Isn’t bilingual education failing to educate Latino children? Don’t you think that there should be more birth control in your community? Don’t you understand that the economy just can’t handle any more immigrants? Doesn’t the United States have a right to regulate its borders?

I try to maintain my composure. And then a tall, white-haired man in white slacks and snappy summer shirt tells me: “You’re just trying to make yourself out to be a victim so I’ll feel guilty. But I’m not guilty of anything. Your problems are not my responsibility.”

The guerrilla in me explodes.

I can’t remember what I said. But what I should have said is this: In a sense, we’re all victims of this crazy time we live in. We are reaping the fruit of hundreds of years of a great and violent history. A history of American optimism and greed. A history of Latin American solidarity and victimization. Racism, and, yes, reverse racism. I would like to meet you as an equal, on the border. Right smack between our two worlds; right here, in Los Angeles.

You must accept that the Latinos of California aren’t going anywhere, I should have told him. We have always been here and we are here to stay. You must stop thinking and acting with the arrogance of a culture that sees itself as the arbiter of life in the city: your culture will become less and less dominant.

And I must accept that you aren’t going anywhere, either. That your culture runs through my veins, that the immigrant that crosses the border leaves behind one world to enter a new one.

You must allow yourself to be transformed, even as we are being and have been transformed. It is a process that is at the heart of America’s democratic identity. Resisting this change is to resist history itself--and the consequences could be disastrous.

TRIQUI-TRIQUI . IT MEANS “trick or treat.” It is Halloween, and I am on Sunset Boulevard in Echo Park. The sidewalks are choked with hundreds of costumed children and their parents, aunts, uncles and grandparents. Nearly all are Mexican and Central American.

I stand in front of a panaderia whose storefront windows display not only all the typical sugary breads, but also blow-up pumpkins, cobwebs and huge black widow spiders dangling over the kids’ heads. Triqui-triqui .

A slightly tipsy father with a blurry pirate’s mustache penciled on his upper lip trains his videocam on the scene. “Isn’t it great?” he says. “It’s so beautiful, Halloween.”

At the counter, Marisela de la Rosa, who’s been here only two years from Mexico City, smiles at a 5-year-old ninja warrior and drops candy into his plastic pumpkin basket. “But it’s not like back home,” she says wistfully, recalling el Dia de los Muertos , the Day of the Dead, which is celebrated in Mexico on Nov. 1 and 2. The holiday isn’t a Mexican Halloween, it’s a mestizo blend of pre-Columbian and Catholic rituals. “We go to the cemetery with flowers and offerings to the dead, their favorite food and drink. All the family gathers together and we clean off the grave. We prepare moles and ponches .” Halloween, she says, is more about “just having fun.”

And fun is what people are having tonight. A sea of costumes on Sunset: Superman, Wonder Woman, ninjas, Ninja Turtles, little devils with red capes and pitchforks, gypsies, little angels with golden wings and magic wands. Looks like the battle between Halloween and the Day of the Dead is over and done. Triqui-triqui .

But this is L.A. I stop by a Mexican restaurant on Sunset Boulevard in Echo Park and watch a parade of kids walk up to Candelaria Reyes, who with her folkloric waitress outfit, her plumpness and her sweet demeanor reminds me of every Latino grandmother I’ve ever met. “Yes, Halloween is fun,” she says, dropping candies in the succession of bags and buckets the kids hold up to her, acknowledging every one of them with a “ m’hijito “ or “ m’hijita .” But, Candelaria says, that doesn’t mean we have to lose our traditions. “In my house, we celebrate the Day of the Dead and Halloween. We have our nacimiento at Christmas. We go to church all Easter Week. We celebrate Mexican Independence. And the Fourth of July. We have to respect this country’s traditions, too, become good citizens.”

The wisdom of a grandmother, I think to myself. After 35 years in this country, Candelaria Reyes has brokered a treaty between the factions that have been at war ever since the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed in 1848.

When I walk back out onto Sunset Boulevard, I see the scene with different eyes. I watch families, the big Latino families participating in a ritual as American as Jason and “Friday the 13th,” but with the communal spirit of a Sunday gathering in a small-town plaza south of the border. It is Halloween and Day of the Dead all at once. It is the new Los Angeles.