orans who took part in the looting. The 1965 riots were black against white. The 1992 riots involved a multiracial underclass--but with a rhetoric more relentlessly separatist than anything heard in the 1960s.
To begin with, South-Central Los Angeles is no longer even preponderantly black. In the 1970 census it was 74 percent black; in the 1990 census it was 48 percent black and 45 percent Latino. South-Central Los Angeles today is more ethnically integrated and economically isolated than it was at the time of the Watts riots, and the 1992 riots reflected that change.
The 1992 riots, of course, were driven by a racial rage: the Simi Valley verdict was an unmistakable message to black America that old-style Mississippi justice was still prevalent, even in Southern California. However, the riots involved two distinct parts, and only one of which was black. The interracial violence that began the riot and shocked the city came from young black men; so did much of the violence and arson that followed. The looting, by contrast, was an integrated, often recreational activity, and some of the violence and arson came from Latino and white youth.
Some analysts state that the looting in 1992 was done by a cross section of what labor economist Goetz Wolff has termed L.A.'s Third World economy--the long term unemployed, as well people who work below minimum wage in illegal factories and in curbside day labor. More than the Watt's riots in 1965, where only blacks looted, this was an equal opportunity riot.
The Latino and Asian East Side of Los Angeles--a somewhat more prosperous sector than those areas of South-Central where new Latino immigrants and the black live side by side--was very quiet during the 1992 riots. While East Los Angeles is filled with Latino-owned businesses, South Los Angeles is not filled with black-owned ones. Within Latino Los Angeles, riot participation was a function of class and neighborhood.<...