From the Los Angeles Times:
How Los Angeles County became home to the biggest AAPI communities in the country
By Aida Ylanan and Sandhya Kambhampati
May 15, 2024 3:03 PM PT
Los Angeles County is home to more Asian Americans than any other county in the United States. California is home to roughly 6 million Asians and Pacific Islanders, the most in the country, with the seven Southern California counties accounting for half of the state’s AAPI population. And Asian Americans are the fastest growing population in the nation. To understand the Asian and Pacific Islander diaspora in Southern California, the Los Angeles Times analyzed 40 years of data from the Census Bureau.
For decades, census forms treated Asians as a monolith and did not include categories for each race group. Coming from dozens of communities, most of them associated with the largest continent in the world, nearly a million Asians and Pacific Islanders in Los Angeles County in 1980 were recorded only as “Other.” More than a quarter of the Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander population in Los Angeles still report belonging to a group not listed on the latest census forms. The allocation of federal resources and funding depends on a complete enumeration of AAPI communities. There are more than 25 Asian countries and five countries in the Pacific Islander community acknowledged by federal statistics.
First imagined as a political identity, the term “Asian American” was coined in the late 1960s by Chinese, Japanese and Filipino American activists in California. Today it refers to ethnic groups who trace their origins to East, Southeast, South and Central Asia. Asian & Pacific American Heritage Month, celebrated in May, also commemorates Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islanders from Polynesia, Melanesia and Micronesia.
AAPI communities have existed in Southern California since the 1800s, with ethnic enclaves such as Old Chinatown and Little Tokyo established by some of the region’s first Asian settlers. Neighborhoods such as Koreatown, Historic Filipinotown and Thai Town formed from a later influx of immigration after the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 opened the door to widespread migration from Asia. The AAPI population in Los Angeles grew from 198,000 in 1970 to almost a million in 1990, according to researchers at UCLA.
There are 14 Asian-majority suburbs in Los Angeles County, and all but one, Cerritos, are in the San Gabriel Valley. L.A. County has gained 2 million people since 1980, with the Asian population more than tripling from 417,000 to over 1.4 million today. Areas such as Monterey Park, Koreatown, Long Beach, Torrance and Cerritos each became home to between 10,000 and 18,000 Asians in the 1980s. Forty years later, these communities have tripled in size. Santa Clarita is home to the fastest-growing Asian population, from less than 600 to nearly 19,000 today.
The data on immigration to Los Angeles from Asia and the Pacific tell a story older than the city itself: Antonio Miranda Rodriguez, a Filipino recorded in the census in 1783, was part of a group of settlers credited with founding the pueblo that became Los Angeles.
Other groups trace similarly long lineages. Chinese workers were recorded in the census in 1850, the first year it included California, which became a state that year. Japanese immigrants first appeared in the census for the state in 1870, when two Japanese-born men were recorded as servants to a judge in San Marino.
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It's a long article, but I thought it had very interesting information.
Link:
How Los Angeles County became home to the biggest AAPI communities in the country
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Seriously though, I was glad to have lived IN FRONT OF the Orange Curtain, not behind it. Back in the 1980s, the demographics totally changed once you crossed the county line and went into La Palma and Buena Park. 
Linear Mode
