Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis

by Jonathan Blitzer

The riots in April 1992 changed everything in and around Los Angeles. By the time Eddie returned from El Salvador, there was a new mayor and a new police chief. The anti-gang units of the LAPD were in ascendance, and racial recriminations were all-consuming. Sixty-one percent of the “arrested looters” were Latino, according to the police. The areas hit hardest by the rioting in South Central Los Angeles were Black neighborhoods filled with Latinos. But the destruction also spread to other parts of the city with large populations of newly arrived immigrants from Central America and Mexico: Pico Union, Koreatown, East Hollywood. The more established Latino communities—in East Los Angeles, for instance—had tried to keep their distance from the mayhem, giving rise to other anxieties and resentments. In the Los Angeles Times, a Chicano journalist wrote, “Yes, Central American immigrants and Chicanos might both be termed ‘Latino.’ But the ethnic link between the two groups is thin.” The article ran with the headline, “Should Latinos Support Curbs on Immigrants? A Question Left by the Riots Is Whether New Arrivals Threaten Second- and Third-Generation Mexican-Americans.” Elana Zilberg, a professor at the University of California, San Diego, later wrote, “Whites pointed at Blacks, who pointed at Latinos, who in turn pointed at Central American immigrants.”