by Elise Nakhnikian
The woman sitting next to me on the plane to L.A. was one of the "California girls" the Beach Boys eulogized in song two decades ago. Now in her mid-30s, her hair streaked blond and her skin crisscrossed with fine lines from years of sun, she still fits the stereotype many people think of in connection with L.A. Friendly and fit, self-assured and upbeat, she makes conversation easily-until the talk turns to her hometown. She hates to be "negative," she says, her blue eyes darkening, but she can hardly wait to get out. The city just isn't what it used to be: too many people with too many problems are fighting for too few resources.
The California girls and boys are leaving L.A. as fast as they can these days. Pouring in to take their place are close to 200,000 immigrants a year: the Los Angeles International Airport is the second-busiest port of entry for immigrants in the United States. Non-Hispanic whites are no longer a majority in L.A., which is home to more Koreans than any other city outside Seoul and more Mexicans than any other city but Mexico City.
It is also home to more Armenians than anywhere else outside Yerevan. For the most part, this means more to Armenians than it does to the city, which is too busy trying to accommodate much larger minority groups to take much notice of Armenians. But in a few of the 28 contiguous cities that make up Los Angeles County-primarily Hollywood, Glendale, and, to a lesser extent, Pasadena and Montebello-Armenians are a large and very visible minority. A series of strip malls in Hollywood, including one called Hye [Armenian] Plaza, house almost nothing but Armenian restaurants, law offices, opticians, music stores, and other small businesses. On any sunny afternoon, Glendale's Maple Park looks like a scene from the old country: every bench holds groups of Armenian men playing cards or backgammon or silver-haired Armenian women engrossed in conversation, while in the sandbox black-eyed children play under their mothers' wary supervision. On any Saturday Armenian weddings and dinner-dance fund-raisers for Armenian causes draw thousands of people. Half of the Rose Bowl was reserved last August to accommodate all the people expected for L.A.'s first Ashoun Voski, or Golden Autumn festival.
Like Beirut 20 years ago, "L.A. is the heartbeat of the Diaspora right now," says Raffi Shoubookian, managing editor of the L.A.-based Armenian International Magazine. "Most of the money is based here, and most of the organizations." That includes 20 churches, 11 schools, and 11 newspapers, according to the Uniarts Armenian Directory Yellow Pages. Itself an astonishing document, the directory lists Armenian businesses and residences throughout California, but publisher Bernard Berberian estimates that about 80% of the listings on its 484 pages are for L.A.
That influx didn't happen overnight. From the American-born second or even third-generation Armenians whose ancestors came to California after the 1915 massacre to the Displaced Persons who settled there after World War II, there have been Armenians in California for decades. But they didn't constitute a sizable community in L.A. until the 1970s. That's when Armenians from the U.S.S.R. began to gravitate toward Hollywood, Armenians fleeing Turkey and the ayatollah's Iran congregated in Glendale and Pasadena, and Armenians leaving war-torn Lebanon and other Middle Eastern countries spread throughout several neighborhoods.
Most of the newcomers came as immigrants. Others-between 40 and 50 thousand of them over the last ten years, according to Joan Pinchuk, Refugee Coordinator of the City of Los Angeles-came as refugees. The immigrants nearly always had a sponsor when they landed in L.A. That sponsor, usually a family member or a church, helped them adjust to the new world and find jobs. Many became successful businesspeople (Southern California's jewelry and trash collection businesses are largely run by Armenians, as are a host of small stores, like the ones in Hollywood's strip malls), and those who did not seemed to get by without much help from the government. But the refugees, people from troubled parts of the world who were allowed into the U.S. without sponsors, often landed with nothing in a land where they knew no one.
If the refugees were the most handicapped group, they were also the smallest-except in 1988. During that watershed year, the usual stream of six to seven thousand refugees resettling each year in L.A. widened to a flood of 20,000. More than half of those, making up the largest ethnic group to emigrate legally to L.A. in one year since the Vietnamese boat people, were Soviet Armenians who slipped through a fortuitous juncture in history: Gorbachev had just eased emigration laws under glasnost, but America, in the grip of cold war paranoia, still welcomed anyone from the U.S.S.R. as a refugee, waiving the usual requirement that refugees prove they had a "well-founded fear of persecution" in their homelands. Washington closed the floodgates the next year, applying the same persecution standard to Soviet immigrants as to any others. This effectively denied refugee status, as of 1989, to all Armenians except those from Baku.
Since then, many Armenians have come to L.A. under a new status called "parolee" (parolees may legally work and stay in the U.S. indefinitely, but may not become citizens). Others come as immigrants. Still others, about a third of those her agency serves, Pinchu estimates, are refugees who were initially resettled by the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) in another state but have since come to L.A. on their own. A few emigrate on temporary visitor or student visas and then stay on illegally, usually in a relative's already overcrowded apartment. And a handful of assimilated Armenian Americans slip in among the half-million Americans who move to California every year from other states.
No wonder it's impossible to keep track of how many Armenians there are in the city. While refugees who are officially resettled in L.A. are logged into government computers, there's no record of how many immigrants, parolees, visitors or refugees from other states come in each year, let alone what ethnic group they belong to. Even the number of Armenians among the refugees is undercounted, since the government usually records only a refugee's country of origin, not his ethnic group (Pinchuk estimates, for instance, that 40 to 50 percent of the refugees initially resettled in L.A. from Iran are Armenian). And Armenians are too small a group nationwide to be tracked by the U.S. Census.
The city of Pasadena did its own census in 1989, according to associate planner Patrick Clarke. It found that Armenians numbered 6,500, or about 5.6% of the population, but Clarke says city officials believe that represents "an undercount of that minority." Sylva Manoogian, manager of the International Languages Department at the central library of the Los Angeles Public Library and the city's unofficial expert on Armenian affairs, agrees. When government officials came to their doors asking questions, she says, Pasadena's Armenians "were not very cooperative, because some of them were afraid."
Although Manoogian's librarian soul yearns for hard numbers on L.A.'s Armenians she usually has to settle for estimates. "They say there are about 60 to 80 thousand Armenians in Hollywood, but it's a real soft figure," she admits. "There are probably another 30 to 40 thousand in Glendale and there are more than 50,000 in East Hollywood, " Manoogian says, quoting from a 1990 book called Ethnic L.A. The book, she says, put the total Armenian population of L.A. County at 250,000.
One thing, at least, is certain: the L.A. most Armenians know, a city where a person could easily spend a lifetime without speaking a word of English, is anything but the Beach Boys' mythic land of golden boys and girls.
"When I was in Armenia recently, I heard what some people call L.A. It cracked me up," Manoogian says. They call it 'Los Armenios.' "
