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The rambling metropolis of LOS ANGELESsprawls across the thousand square miles of a great desert basin,
knitted together by an intricate network of congested freeways between
the ocean and the snowcapped mountains. Its colorful melange of
shopping malls, palm trees and swimming pools is both mildly surreal
and startlingly familiar, thanks to the celluloid self-image that it
has spread all over the world.
Los Angeles is a new city; in the
mid 1850's, it was a society of white American immigrants, poor Chinese
workers and rich Mexican ranchers, with a population of less than
50,000 thousand. Only on completion of the railroad in the 1880s did
it really begin to expand, as a national mecca for good health, clean
living, sunshine and acres of citrus crops. The biggest group of
transplants were refugees from the Midwest, who created a new political
ruling class to replace the old Mexican elite. The old ranchos were
soon divided, the population grew, and the enduring symbol of the city
became the family-sized suburban house. The biggest boom came after
World War II with the massive growth of the aeronautics industry which,
until post-Cold War military cutbacks, accounted for one in four jobs.
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