Week 4

Week 4: Little Ethiopia 

This week I decided to visit somewhere I have never been before. After reading this article, http://discoverlosangeles.com/guides/neighborhoods/boutique-communities/little-ethiopia.html. I went to an area called Little Ethiopia. This neighborhood is really only about a block or two long and it's on Fairfax and Olympic. It's a small area, officially marked only by the street sign pictured above. It's clearly recognizable though as you can notice the street is dominated by Ethiopian restaurants and markets. We walked around Fairfax for a while, but soon there was nothing left to explore but the cuisine itself. So we decided to pop our Ethiopian cherry and try out Messob's.

 

I can honestly say that Ethiopian food is unlike any that I've had before. We sat around  a basket-like table and shared a huge platter of many different dishes and genuinely had no idea what exactly we were eating. The most remarkable thing was that there were no utensils. Instead you used a flat spongy bread called injera to pick up and eat all the different dishes.

Social difference is a highly relevant topic to this location becuase it is an ethnoburb. Wikipedia defines it as: "An ethnoburb is a suburban residential and business area in North America with a notable cluster of a particular ethnic minority population." Little Ethiopia was an area where many Ethiopians came to live in starting in the 1970s, but it wasn't until 2002 that the city of Los Angeles officially recognized this area as an ethnoburb. After learning about it's history I was interested to see if the Ethiopian population was still higher in this area than in the surrounding ones. I used simply maps to find this information unfortunately I was only able to find the black population and could not find specific information about Ethiopians. I first did a ring study and got the following information. 

According to this data, the zip code in which the small neighborhood of Little Ethiopia is found does have a slightly higher population of black residents. I also made this map to more clearly show the distribution of black residents within the zip code where Little Ethiopia is located. 

However I do not consider that this is a large difference so I would say that this area is more for attracting those are interested in cosmopolitan consumerism as Olin, Kling and Postner describe in “The Emergence of Postsuburbia”. This refers to people who are typically of white decent having the desire to expereince other cultures by dining in ethnic restaurants. Visiting Little Ethiopia provided another look at a segment in which social difference is prominent in Los Angeles.