About Monterey Park
A small suburban community in the heart of San Gabriel Valley, Monterey Park is 81% non-white and 54% foreign- born. Seventy-six percent of the city’s population speaks a language other than English at home. When the 1965 National Origins Act ended a century of immigration restrictions targeting Asians, immigration transformed Monterey Park. In the late 1970s and 1980s, Monterey Park shifted from a predominately white to majority Latina/o and Asian population. Indeed, today, Monterey Park is 66% Asian, 27% Latin@, and only 5% white. The dramatic changes in the residential and business cityscape resulted in a volatile English-only campaign, as noted by Horton and Calderon (1995).