The middle is what holds Los Angeles together.
Not too rich, not too poor. Right in the middle of the curve -- a place that doesn't inspire much passion.
But without the middle class, what is Los Angeles?
Imagine a metropolis where all the homes have either iron bars on the windows or walls and guards to keep away the riffraff. A city of castes. Gated communities and gangland, with nothing in between.
In other words, a Third World city.
With our economy in the dumps and public services and the education system in crisis, it's easier to imagine Los Angeles becoming such a place.
I started thinking about the middle class after three reports came across the transom about Latinos, that very loosely defined ethnic group whose members make up a plurality of both Los Angeles County and Greater Los Angeles.
Two of the reports contain troubling information.
The Pew Hispanic Center's "Between Two Worlds" finds Latino youths are having children at an earlier age than those in other ethnic groups and dropping out of high school at nearly triple the rate of non-Latino whites.
The UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center's "The State of Latino Los Angeles" finds a correlation between ethnicity and the gap between rich and poor. The researchers created an "equality index" that measures educational attainment, income, civic participation and other indicators of social well-being.
"A hierarchy of inequality exists," the UCLA report concludes, "with Asians and whites at the top and Latinos and blacks at the bottom."
With this year's census likely to show a Latino majority in both the city and county of Los Angeles, it's obvious that our collective future is linked to the social health of that group of people. And if you think of Latinos only in the dysfunctional terms described in so many media reports, then a Third World L.A. seems like an inevitability.
But of course that's not the full picture.
Which brings me to the third report, a USC study released last month about Southern California's "Mexican-origin middle class." READ FULL STORY
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