Compton, from the Inside

It has been more than 20 years since the rap group N.W.A released Straight Outta Compton. But the album—a sociological milestone in popular culture—made a lasting imprint. Compton remains shorthand for a violent, gang-ridden ghetto.

Stanford professor Albert Camarillo has another perspective on the city, located just south of Los Angeles. He grew up there, and 35 years into his academic career, he's revisiting it as a historian. In a book that's a few years from completion—tentatively titled Going Back to Compton: Reflections of a Native Son on Life in an Infamous American City—he's tracking almost 100 years of family roots as well as the city's evolution. The current Compton, says Camarillo, is beginning to be recognized as a complex and vital place, rather than what by reputation was nothing more than Drive-By, USA.

His hometown, says Camarillo, is a case study of "the most predominant suburban-urban development of the last third of the twentieth century—the emergence of minority-majority cities." Cities and counties in that category, where the percentage of people belonging to minority groups exceeds 50 percent of the population, have become symbols of onrushing change nationally. Looking at Compton through an "autobiographical-historical" lens, Camarillo says, is a logical next step while he also finishes a book on ethnic and racial trends in the United States up to 1960.

For Camarillo, whose father arrived in Compton from Mexico in 1914 at age 12, demographic upheaval has deep personal significance. By the time he was in high school in the mid-1960s, his family had moved to a largely white portion of the city; he became student-body president at Dominguez High. At the time, Latinos had only a small, segregated barrio presence as Compton transformed from a mostly white to mostly African-American population. Today, Latinos are the majority. Camarillo still muses about what school administrators were hoping to achieve by urging him to run for class office during those tense years, when African-American students were being bused to his school. He also vividly remembers his family's reaction when he had an African-American girlfriend. "It did not sit well," he says with a pensive half-smile.

Professor Josh Sides, Whitsett Chair in California History at Cal State-Northridge, says Camarillo's first-person angle on Compton is a cogent approach. "I would argue," asserts Sides, "that all history writing is autobiographical at its core." Sides, author of L.A. City Limits: African American Los Angeles from the Great Depression to the Present, thinks historians select topics where "you're always inherently writing about something that is critical to you or that explains yourself through the research."

Camarillo and some of his students have been gathering oral histories from former and current Compton residents to supplement his own reflections. Some of the history involves faded norms or extinct politics that seem irrelevant today.

"Racial collaboration could not exist then, and it can now," says Camarillo. But as Compton has remained a social polestar—"a burgeoning Latino suburb of immigrant strivers" says Sides—it also has retained a revealing currency. Understanding Compton, says Camarillo, is useful in helping any community that's being buffeted by demographic changes. "Maybe we can help these groups, who find themselves living next door to each other but perhaps ill-equipped to handle it."

Compton also remains a big part of Camarillo's family life. One of his two sons, Jeff, teaches American history to middle schoolers at the Vanguard Learning Center in the Compton Unified School District. His other son, Greg, plays for the NFL's Miami Dolphins and sponsors a fund—Charging Forward for Academic and Athletic Success —that aids student-athletes in Compton.