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Mexican Americans have lived in Los Angeles since the original Pobladores, the 44 original settlers and 4 soldiers who founded the city in 1781. People of Mexican descent make up 31.9% of Los Angeles residents, and 32% of Los Angeles County residents.
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History
Nuestra Señora Reina de los Angeles Asistencia was founded in early 1784 within the burgeoning Pueblo de Los Ángeles as an asistencia (or "sub-mission") to the nearby Mission San Gabriel Arcángel. The assistant mission fell into disuse over time and a Catholic chapel, La Iglesia de Nuestra Señora Reina de los Ángeles, was constructed in its place a mere thirty years later.
The city has witnessed a development of a Hispanic (mainly Mexican) cultural presence since its settlement as a city in 1769. Mexican-Americans have been one of the largest ethnic groups in Los Angeles since the 1910 census, as Mexican immigrants and US-born Mexicans from the Southwest states came to the booming industrial economy of the LA area between 1915 and 1960. This migration peaked in the 1920s and again in the World War II era (1941–45).
The city's original barrios were located in the eastern half of the city and the unincorporated community of East Los Angeles. The trend of Hispanization began in 1970, then accelerated in the 1980s and 1990s with immigration from Mexico and Central America (especially El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala). These immigrants settled in the city's eastern and southern neighborhoods. By 2000, South Los Angeles was a majority Latino area, displacing most previous African-American and Asian-American residents. The city is often said to have the largest Mexican population outside Mexico and has the largest Spanish-speaking population outside Latin America or Spain. As of 2007, estimates of the number of residents originally from the Mexican state of Oaxaca ranged from 50,000 to 250,000.
Today
As of 2010, about 2.5 million residents of Greater Los Angeles are of Mexican American origins/heritage.
As of 1996 Mexican-Americans are about 80% of the Latino population in the Los Angeles area. As of 1996 the Los Angeles region had around 3,736,000 people of Mexican origins.
There's a shift of second and third generation Mexican-Americans out of Los Angeles into nearby suburbs, such as Ventura County, Orange County, San Diego and the Inland Empire, California region. Mexican and other Hispanic immigrants moved in East and South sections of L.A. and sometimes, Asian immigrants moved into historic barrios to become mostly Asian-American areas. Starting in the late 1980s, Downey has become a renowned Latino majority community in Southern California, and the majority of residents moved in were middle or upper-middle class, and second and third generation Mexican-Americans.
Culture
Area Mexicans, along with other Spanish-speaking peoples, celebrate the Day of the Three Wise Kings as a gift giving holiday.
In the 1990s the quebradita dancing style was popular among Mexican-Americans in Greater Los Angeles.
The El Centro Cultural de Mexico is located in Santa Ana.
Two films, Tortilla Soup and Real Women Have Curves, portrays Mexican-American families in the Los Angeles area.