Cudahy, California

Lugo park renovation AFTER BEFORE Cudahy, California proved particularly attractive to the Southern- ers and Midwesterners who were leaving their struggling farms in droves in the 1910s and 1920s to start new lives in Southern California. By the end of World War II, Cudahy had be- come largely a blue collar, industrial town with a white population that worked at the local General Motors, Chrysler, Firestone, and Beth- lehem Steel plants. The city incorporated in 1960 but by the late 1970s, the factories had closed down and the white residents left for jobs and housing in the San Gabriel and San Fernando Valleys. Stucco apartment complexes were built on the former tracts of land, and the population began to increase with an influx of Hispanic and Latino residents who, today, make up over 90 percent of the city’s population. Michael Allen is Cudahy’s Community De-