Nation: LOS ANGELES

On weekends, downtown Los Angeles' Broadway is a teeming mass of Hispanic shoppers. Record-store loudspeakers blare Mexican hits: Juro que Nunca Volveré (I Swear I'll Never Return), Mi Fracaso (My Downfall). The Orpheum Theater, where Al Jolson once sang in blackface, screens Spanish-language dubbings of anglo hits. An archipelago of taco and burrito carts dots the street. Stores and merchandise stands tout their wares: vestidos, tocadiscos, muebles (clothing, phonographs, furniture). Farther east, on Whittier Boulevard, young Hispanics express themselves with a unique form of Saturday night fever known as "low riding"—cruising in ornately decorated autos equipped with hydraulic pumps that lower the chassis to within inches of the roadway so as to produce showers of sparks as the car bounces along the street.

The Spanish-speaking presence in sections of downtown Los Angeles is so pervasive that other Angelenos sometimes refer to the area, with an edge in their voices, as "Baja Hollywood." Yet a strong Hispanic flavor is hardly surprising in a city that was founded in 1781 as El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de Los Angeles de Porciúncula. At a conservative estimate, some 1.6 million of the metropolitan area's 7 million residents are Hispanics, overwhelmingly of Mexican descent. That makes Los Angeles a magnet for the estimated 7 million legally resident Hispanics scattered across the southwestern U.S.

In 1970 Hispanics replaced blacks as the largest minority in Los Angeles. They are now overhauling whites, whose share of the city population has declined from 80.9% in 1950 to a projected 44.4% in 1980. Rapid demographic swings have brought racial edginess back to Los Angeles, where the Watts ghetto riots of 1965 are still remembered with fear. Says retired Los Angeles Police Captain Rudy de Leon: "There is more outward prejudice now against Mexican people than there has ever been." Los Angeles Times Publisher Otis Chandler did not help when he noted in an interview that his paper did not court the city's black and Hispanic readership because "it's not their kind of newspaper. It's too big. It's too stuffy, if you will. It's too complicated."

Activists such as Vilma Martinez, president of the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF), argue that chicanos have "a long way to go before we can use our collective muscle as a middle class." But, even with some 19% of chicano families below the poverty line, Martinez concedes that a middle class is "clearly emerging."

In the militant chicano rhetoric of the '60s, middle-class Hispanics were often criticized as "Tio Tacos" or "Tio Tomases"—the equivalent of the blacks' "Uncle Toms." Today businessmen like Gilbert Vasquez, 39, head of the largest Hispanic certified public accounting firm in the U.S. (five offices, 65 employees), feel that individual successes will be "stepping-stones" to lasting change. Vasquez, who has moved out of the barrio to suburban Alhambra, remains involved in ghetto issues and tries to get other Hispanic professionals to take part in politics. At one chicano fund-raising cocktail party, guests anted up $20,000 for Jerry Brown's re-election campaign.