LA VIDA LATINA; 'EL NUEVO MUNDO' PUTS CHANGING L.A. IN FOCUS.

Byline: Reed Johnson Staff Writer

When Camilo Jose Vergara visited Los Angeles a few weeks after the city's 1992 riots, he expected to find a depressing urban wasteland similar to those he'd photographed in Detroit, Newark, N.J., and the Bronx.

As a longtime visual chronicler of inner-city decline, the Chilean-born artist and sociologist figured that L.A.'s South Central and Watts neighborhoods would present a textbook case of hopes consumed by despair and dreams angrily deferred.

``Because you saw all that fire and all those flames, you figure you're going to see a city that's tremendously scarred, a Detroit-like landscape,'' Vergara recalls. ``But it wasn't there.''

Instead of only burned-out storefronts and abandoned lots, Vergara also found a teeming, ethnically diverse community where first-generation Latino-Americans and other recently arrived minorities were rapidly displacing the African-Americans who'd once dominated the area.

``South Central was to (my mind) like Harlem and the South Side of Chicago, one of the largest black ghettos in this country, particularly the streets that define the black ghettos, like Central Avenue,'' Vergara says. ``I remember going to Compton and to Watts looking for the rappers and the homeboys and just hearing'' Spanish-language music instead.

What Vergara found, in short, was ``el nuevo mundo,'' a new world, in which incoming waves of Latino immigrants were busily remaking one of L.A.'s most distinctive ethnic enclaves in their own image.

That controversial process, as politically loaded as it is culturally complex, is one of the primary leitmotifs of ``El Nuevo Mundo: The Landscape of Latino Los Angeles,'' an exhibition of Vergara's photographs that opened Saturday at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County in Exposition Park. Comprising more than 100 color prints, the show offers an intimate look at Southern California's ever-evolving human topography.

Divided into four sections - Homes, Neighborhoods, Communities and Borders - the photos reward multiple viewings by zeroing in on telling details: a small patch of corn planted along a city sidewalk; the incongruously Anglocized facial features of male and female caricatures adorning a Latino barbershop; a mural outside an East L.A. tienda depicting the head of Christ, and a small parish church from Puebla, Mexico, juxtaposed with the logos for Coca-Cola, Gerber baby foods and Dove soap.

Angelenos, used to driving by such things every day, may find themselves lingering over Vergara's carefully cropped and framed pictures of vistas normally taken for granted.

``They're like any kind of a good picture: The more you look, the more you see,'' says Janet Fireman, the museum's curator and chief of history.

To provoke comparisons between L.A.'s ethnic past and its present, ``El Nuevo Mundo'' is being presented in conjunction with ``Pride and Honor,'' a smaller exhibition of historic photographs from the collections of the museum's Seaver Center for Western History Research.

These 30 black-and-white images, taken between the mid-1800s and about 1930, depict a somewhat deceptively genteel-looking Victorian city already in the throes of ethnic and social upheaval. Among its most arresting images are a portrait of the Sepulveda family, one of L.A.'s oldest and most prominent Latino clans, and another of the Fujiokas, a handsome, middle-class Japanese-American family, posed beside their house as uprightly as the adjacent deodar trees.

While ``Pride and Honor'' casts a backward glance at a vanished era, ``El Nuevo,'' with its bright mustard- and watermelon-colored partitions, standing shoulder-to-shoulder like crowded bungalows, pulls viewers directly into L.A.'s dynamic here-and-now.

It was just such a jumble of rainbow-hued signifiers that greeted Vergara when he began visiting the city regularly in the early 1990s.

Originally, he had come to Los Angeles intending to document South Central's African-American community, whose roots there extend back several generations.

But beginning in the 1980s, large numbers of immigrants from Mexico and, to varying degrees, Central and South American countries began settling in these traditionally African-American areas.

Over time, this influx produced a hybrid culture in which the sometimes uneasy co-existence of different ethnicities can be glimpsed in the physical textures of everyday life.

Some of Vergara's photos, for example, reveal how Latino merchants have attempted to attract African-American customers by displaying images of Martin Luther King Jr. - with sometimes amusing results. One photo of a Latino barbershop shows how a Mexican sign-painter, perhaps unaccustomed to drawing African-Americans, renders the martyred Civil Rights leader with distinctively Indian features. (One of Vergara's friends described it as ``a Tolteca Martin Luther King.'')

``Another permutation with Martin Luther King is to put Martin Luther King next to Pancho Villa in a fish store,'' Vergara says. ``So you talk to a (Latino) guy in a fish store (who says), 'Well, black folks like fish, but they may not think that we cook fish very well. So by putting them (King and Villa) together, they may try our fish.''

Born 55 years ago to a prosperous farming family in central Chile, Vergara came to the United States in 1965 to study at the University of Notre Dame. Around the same time that he received his master's degree in sociology from Columbia University, he began taking photos of ordinary New Yorkers and their environments.

Always, he says, his interest was in ``the poorest of the poor'' and in the contrasts in material comfort levels that existed in the land of opportunity. Vergara's dogged pursuit of that perspective has landed his writing and imagery in the pages of such publications as The New York Times, the Atlantic Monthly, Architectural Record and the Nation. He also is the author of several books, including ``The New American Ghetto'' and ``American Ruins.''

It also undoubtedly helped his investigations that Vergara keeps his lens as neutral as possible, refraining from making obvious editorial judgments about his subjects.

But it's possible that ``El Nuevo Mundo'' will spark controversy. Curator Fireman says some Latino museum staffers who've seen the exhibition felt it presented a limited, if not misleading view of L.A.'s economically diverse Latino population.

Fireman says that's ``another good reason for us having the exhibition, as far as I'm concerned, to stimulate peoples' thinking about the complications in our society.''

Vergara knows there are thousands of Latino professionals in Los Angeles, ``but that's not what I like to do, I don't like to take pictures of brain surgeons or stockbrokers or where they live.''

``El Nuevo Mundo,'' Vergara stresses, ``is a picture of struggle and it's a picture of hope, and you know lots of people lose, but many of them don't. And I think that's partly what's recognized in the pictures. I don't want to minimize that, to say there's no pain, no struggle.''

THE FACTS

--What: ``El Nuevo Mundo: The Landscape of Latino Los Angeles'' and ``Pride and Honor.''

--Where: Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, 900 Exposition Blvd., Exposition Park, Los Angeles.

--When: Through July 16. Museum hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily.

--Admission: $8 adults; $5.50 students and seniors; $2 children. Children under 5 are free. Call [phone].

CAPTION(S):

6 photos, box

Photo: (1) Part of the Sepulveda family posed symbolically in front of their in-laws' home at the base of the Mott family tree in this image from ``Pride and Honor.''

(2 -- color) The Lupe y Jose Ramos Barbershop.

(3) The I.G.A. Store at 245 N. Larchmont Blvd. in 1932.

(4 -- color) A storefront on Alvarado Street inthe Pico-Union area of Los Angeles.

(5 -- 6 -- color) At left, an appliance repair shop. Below, a house-proud Vincente, who paved his yard so his grandchildren would have a place to play. While Los Angeles has always had a large number of Latinos, their numbers have become even greater since an influx that began in the 1980s.

Camilo Jose Vergara

Box: THE FACTS (see text)