![]() I grew up in the Valley next to Laurel Canyon Blvd., which serves as a synecdoche for the top American rock music of 1969. The Soviets focused intently on the Lockheed Skunk Works, navigating spy satellites overhead, stationing an electronic warfare ship disguised as a fishing trawler out by Catalina Island, and targeting nuclear ICBMs on what is now the Empire big box store mall next to the Burbank airport. Burbank was a major arsenal of American military and cultural power. ![]() ![]() When Vladimir Putin’s espionage operation to bribe Ukrainian officials into turning over their country to the Kremlin failed in February 2022, I had to wonder how much of Putin’s budget had been diverted into infinity pools in the Hollywood Hills, both by Russia’s corrupt spymasters and by Ukrainian politicians who’d proved even more unethical than Putin had hoped and simply pocketed his largesse.Ī curious postscript to the Cold War is that ex-Soviets are pouring into places like the east Valley’s Burbank, once home to both Lockheed Aircraft (where my father worked from the 1930s to the 1980s) and studios such as Disney, Warner Brothers, and NBC. But others are here for their beauty or bravery, such as the Slavic blondes on the fringes of the entertainment industry and the Russian flatheads who provide security to ex-Soviet oligarchs in Bel-Air. Many are descended from prosperous mercantile minorities of the old empires and can easily economically outcompete Mexicans for houses in the pricey Valley. The main nationalities are Armenians Persians (many of them Jewish) Russians (many of them partly Jewish) Israelis (many of them less Jewish than you’d expect) Russian-Israelis who were Jewish enough to be invited to Israel by Ariel Sharon to vote for him, but who find Bibi Netanyahu’s Israel increasingly too Jewish for their tastes when they can bounce to the similar climate of California Ukrainians Turks Copts Maronites Tajiks, and so forth. Note that almost none of the strangers are fundamentalist Muslims dressing their womenfolk in chadors: Those obsessed with female modesty know enough to stay away from Los Angeles. In a sour mood, I refer to them as Men with Gold Chains. I call them the Peoples of the Three Defunct Empires: Persian, Ottoman, and Soviet. These newcomers lack any official term with which to conceptually lump them together, but they tend to overlap. Increasingly, Latinos are losing out in the struggle for the Valley’s expensive turf with immigrants who are officially classified as white. After decades of rapid increase, the Hispanic share of the Valley’s 1.8 million residents only grew from 40 percent to 42 percent from 2010 to 2020. It had long seemed inevitable that Los Angeles’ famously white bread suburb, the vast San Fernando Valley, the site of so many Brady Bunch–style sitcoms a half-century ago, would eventually be inundated by Latino immigrants.īut that has slowed. ![]() Of the many unexpected developments of the demographic diversification of America, perhaps the oddest has been one so outside our vocabulary that it’s hard to even notice it happening. Surprisingly, in the suburban San Fernando Valley in the northwest corner of the city of Los Angeles, immigration has largely taken a different turn. But which immigrants? The hordes flooding across the southern border? The answer of course is immigrants, typically from countries where, by comparison to the motherlands they helped construct, Los Angeles still looks like paradise. So if huge numbers of Southern Californians resident for long enough to become Dodger fans are moving out, who is moving in? Californians have fled for reasons such as high home prices, intrusive regulations on business and private life (for example, the ban on plastic straws), sclerotic infrastructure (for instance, since 2007 Los Angeles’ Department of Water and Power has been indolently replicating the water main past my house that was originally built in 15 months by William Mulholland of Chinatown legend using pickaxes and mules), stringent mask rules, an unexpected surge of looting by masked bandits, and weak public education.Īnd yet, the population of Los Angeles County, the city of Los Angeles, and the section I know best, my native San Fernando Valley, have all remained flat since the 2010 Census. Much has been written about the exodus from California during this decade.
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