Returning to Compton

"Going Back to Compton" by history professor Albert Camarillo
A recent article entitled “Straight Into Compton” on Newsweek.com rekindled memories of the city of my youth, a place I now regularly visit as an academic. I grew up in Compton, the city where my family’s roots extend back nearly a century. Like so many other children of immigrants, I yearned to fulfill my family’s aspirations through educational achievement. I left the city in 1970. When I returned in 2000 as an academic, a history professor from Stanford University, what I found was a city striking in its familiarity to my memories of the past, and yet altogether different. Compton is a “city of color” (a term I use to refer to urban and suburban areas that have majority populations of minorities) that is often misrepresented by media as a dangerous and violent community of drugs and gangs. Although there are in fact gangs in Compton, it is still fundamentally the community I remember, a city populated by hard working people reaching for a modern day version of what we commonly refer to as the American dream. The Compton I knew as a small child was predominantly white except for the Mexican American barrio where I was born. However, by the time I finished middle school in 1963, the city was divided into the West side, overwhelmingly black, and the East side, predominantly white. The small barrio was located on the boundary between these segregated sections of the city. The three faces of Compton – white, brown, and black- that I came to know during the 1960s, are no more. Now there are two – black and brown.

http://humanexperience.stanford.edu/camarillocompton