The L.A. Riots of 1992

The 1965 Watts riots may have signaled the eclipse of an old order, WASP and conservative, personified by then-Mayor Sam Yorty and Police Chief William Parker. By the mid-1960s, a new governing coalition was already emerging, linking the black and Jewish communities, liberal on social issues, friendly to corporate priorities, and soon to be presided over by Tom Bradley. The Watts riots pointed out that black people needed a voice in government and with this new, liberal coalition it seemed likely that they would get it. There would be money and effort put into rebuilding the black community.

In contrast, the 1992 riots left only casualties. It ended Police Chief Daryl Gates's tenure as leader of California's law and order right. It has dramatized the self-subverting essence of Gateism: the creation of a police force so committed to the military repression of the inner city that merely to deploy it is to risk inciting total riot. It also revealed the limits of Bradley's administration, forever expanding to include the elites of one new group after another, but powerless to stop the growth of poverty and an alienated underclass.

Unlike the 1965 riots, there is no new order on the horizon. Bradley's appointment of Peter

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ienting ordeal. More than the 1965 riots, the 1992 riots were a war of each against all. The destruction of stores and apartments within the largely Salvadoran Pico-Union neighborhood was particularly devastating; if there was one group in L.A.'s social order that was lower on the economic scale than that of the black gang members, it was the Salvadorans. Most of its immigrant members work in the informal sector of the economy and live in the city's most overcrowded tenements. The aftermath of the riots, unlike in 1965, did not bring people closer together in an effort to understand the problems and needs of the minorities involved. The Chicano organization NEWS From America blamed Central American immigrants for joining the riots; certain black leaders, jealous of the economic success of the Asian community and the coming political success of the Latinos (by sheer weight of numbers), lashed out at both; and many Koreans concealed an anti-black sentiment with polite words. Neither multiracial rioting nor multiracial riot defense seems to have changed the hold that separatism exerts within the city's communities of color. Some people believe this has happened because many L.A. unions are weakened to the point of virtu
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Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page)

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