Southern California Diversity: It's Not New!

Almost forty years ago two CSUN Professors authored two books with 1980 & 1990 Census Data to reveal the incredible diversity of Southern California!

The first book written in 1988, by the pair of CSUN professors, Eugene J. Turner and James P. Allen. "We the People: An Atlas of America's Ethnic Diversity" revealed that Southern California was a diverse community.  "The preparation of the maps began in 1979 when Eugene Turner wrote the first of many computer programs to convert county data from the 1970 census to map form. He later developed other programs to plot symbols for all of the full-page and quarter-page maps as well as for the 4 cartograms and then photographed the plots so that they would be registered with plates derived from the National Atlas of the united States"

An abstract article published online: 15 May 2013 "The places that ranked highest in ethnic diversity are usually part of a metropolitan area, most commonly in the Los Angeles and the San Francisco areas."  THE MOST ETHNICALLY DIVERSE URBAN PLACES IN THE UNITED STATES: Urban Geography: Vol 10, No 6

This led to a second book, published almost ten years later. The Ethnic Quilt: Population Diversity in Southern California - 

"Chapter 1 explains the basic concepts underlying our analyses of ethnic groups. We view Southern California as having a social structure with three primary dimensions—ethnic identity, socioeconomic status, and geographical distribution. The book explores these dimensions and how they intersect and interrelate with each other."

The focus of the book is what the Bureau of the Census identifies as Los Angeles Consolidated Metropolitan Statistical Area (CMSA), which consists of five Southern California counties—Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino, and Ventura. The population of the area in 1990, 14.5 million residents, represented 49 percent of California’s population.

Jumping forward to statistics and analysis from the 2020 census.  There are 181 combined statistical areas (CSAs) of the United States. Los Angeles is second to New York-Newark in population; based on the 2020 census at 18,644,680 and a 1.1% decrease in the 2025 estimate of 18,444,299. According to Wikipedia republication of data from the Office of Management Budget

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