Koreatown: Can Koreans and Latinos get along?
Despite some differences, Korean community leaders are willing to band together with the Latino backbone
Yesenia Galindo will never forget the time she went shopping at a grocery store when a Korean woman approached her while browsing through the aisle, asking if she was there to buy or steal an item. A confrontation erupted between both women, and it ended with Yesenia and her mother, who were talking in Spanish, walking out of the store without buying anything.
Both Yesenia and her daughter Sophia believe that an influx of Koreans moving into their majority-Latino block had simmered tensions among each other, believing what they heard about Koreans’ perceptions of Latinos, despite giving them a warm welcome. But other Latinos and Koreans might tell something different.
Koreatown has become a hip destination in Los Angeles in recent years, with growing development, a rising culinary culture and a booming nightlife. Away from the glitz and glamour, Latinos have made up the majority of its population for decades, living in coexistence with their Korean neighbors in one of the most dense neighborhoods in the city.
After the 1992 riots turned the neighborhood into a battlefield where Korean-owned businesses were looted, it marked a turning point for the dynamics between Koreans and Latinos. Almost 30 years later, while both groups do not have overt tensions with each other, some Latino residents feel as if their Korean neighbors are intimidating them, while seeing such relationships as an on-and-off one.
As of 2019, Latinos make up a majority of Koreatown’s population, with the Korean community coming in second. At the same time, a majority of Koreatown’s population are foreign-born, with many of whom born in South Korea, Mexico and El Salvador.
Katherine Kim, a historian and senior communications director at the Koreatown Youth and Community Center (KYCC), has documented the history of Koreatown for over 10 years. According to Kim, the 1992 riots was the neighborhood’s turning point.
“The community was licking its wounds,” said Kim. “So many of the businesses were damaged or destroyed. It was just embers, right? It’s like a metaphor for where the community was. A lot had to be rebuilt. There was a lot of personal reckoning, a lot of community reckoning. How could this have happened? Why did it happen?”
Ricardo Ortiz was already living in Koreatown in 1992. He still recalls seeing fire and smoke from blocks away with the naked eye and Korean merchants defending their businesses as their calls for police assistance were never answered. Leading up to that boiling point, Korean-Latino relations were at a low point, especially in the workplace.
“There were certain disagreements between Latinos and Koreans,” said Ortiz. “They didn’t trust each other and vice versa. The Korean against the Latino, both didn’t feel comfortable with each other.”
For Sophia Galindo, who grew up in a predominantly Latino block, she was feeling out of place at school despite Koreatown’s diversity.
“In elementary school, it was (mostly) Hispanic students and it wasn’t that hard to fit in,” recalls Galindo. “If we went to a different school, like my middle school where it was predominantly Korean, there was a divide.”
That divide may have reflected that of the workplace back then.
“At that time, because of the working relationships between the Korean and Latinx communities, a lot of Latinx employees worked at Korean restaurants or worked in Korean-owned businesses and they were often not treated properly or paid properly,” Kim said. “And so, some of those tensions have resulted in Korean American nonprofits, for example, advocating on behalf of the Latinx employees.”
Groups such as the Koreatown Immigrant Workers’ Alliance (KIWA) were instrumental in bringing Koreans and Latinos together. According to Kim, KIWA initially faced resistance from the Korean community, alleging that they were being left out. As the years went by, more Koreans stood up for the Latino employees while KYCC, originally called the Korean Youth Center, became more open towards the growing Latino community. Today, Latinos make up a number of KYCC’s staff.
One Latina inside KYCC is Gennesis Jerez, who spent most of her life in Koreatown. Overseeing programs reaching towards Koreatown’s Latino community, she sees outreach towards their Latino neighbors as key to KYCC’s mission.
“Even having somebody like myself on the management team, having now a director who’s also a Latina at KYCC, also speaks volumes to the community,” says Jerez. “The things that KYCC is committed to, which is inclusivity and diversity, (is) really being a bridge with all the different folks that live throughout Koreatown.”
Given that a majority of Koreatown are immigrants, Salvador Abundiz, an immigrant himself, believes that both groups may have had differences on their intent to migrate.
“When a Korean migrates to this country, they stay long-term and may start a business,” Abundiz said in Spanish. “When Latinos migrate to this country, instead of coming with hopes of staying, we think about staying here a year or two, make money and then return home, but in reality, we never return. Instead, we stay in this country for longer.”
Jerez may have been only two years old in 1992, but being at KYCC taught her that Koreans and Latinos came together through a commonality of the immigrant experience.
“I think that’s also more of that oral and historical knowledge that is also important to embed in the younger generation, and really understanding that we do all come from the same struggle and we are not each other’s enemies,” Jerez said. “How are we spending (time) together in solidarity towards different issues and different causes that are arising?”
Jerez, Ortiz and Abundiz recall how many Latino immigrants worked at Korean-owned businesses and restaurants. Today, Latinos are entering the spotlight when they were often relegated to the wings.
“When I was growing up, I used to go to California Market all the time, because I love these melon pops that they had,” said Jerez. “Latinos would always be the ones that were bagging or helping (stack) all the groceries. And in the years that I’ve been there, now we have Latinos who are actually at the cash register, which I feel is like a huge shift from when I was growing up.”
Such bonds between Koreans and Latinos also translated into cuisine. One example is Escala, a Korean-Colombian fusion restaurant. According to Kim, many Koreans lived in South America before migrating to the United States.
Seeing Escala as an example of a “beautiful mesh” of cultures, Jerez would like to see more Korean-Latino collaborations in business, especially in the neighborhood that they share.
“Food is a really great place, because I think food brings people together,” said Jerez. “I would love for it to not be just Korean-owned and a Latino cooking in the kitchen where he’s not a business partner. I would love for them to be business partners, and opening up places like that.”
As Koreans entered the restaurant and textile businesses, Latinos came in as cooks, dishwashers and seamstresses. Kim and Jerez recognize the role Latinos play as the backbone of Koreatown’s rise.
“I’m sure what Latinos are eternally grateful is that they could come to this country, not knowing one dying drop of English, and somebody gave them a dishwashing position,” said Jerez. “That can’t also be denied on behalf of that ally ship, in that partnership, that (Koreans) extendieron la mano (given a hand) to them as they were coming into this country.”
Ortiz, in his three decades living in Koreatown, also sees that promise.
“The Korean and the Latino experiences resemble everyday life,” said Ortiz. “There has been hostility against each other, but not like now. When comparing Asians and Latinos today, in the neighborhood that we live in, Latinos persevered.”
