Drive the wide, palm-lined boulevards of Cerritos on a Saturday morning and the choreography of the place reveals itself: a 99 Ranch cart pushed toward a German sedan, a teenager hauling a violin case past a bubble-tea queue, a grandmother in a sun hat walking the Sculpture Garden before the heat sets in. The Chinese in Cerritos did not inherit an old enclave. They helped invent a new one, on land that fifty years earlier held more cows than people.
The Place
Cerritos sits in the flat southeastern corner of Los Angeles County, hard against the Orange County line, about twenty miles from downtown LA. It is roughly nine square miles of cul-de-sacs, manicured medians and low-slung shopping centres, home to just under 50,000 people.
What sets it apart is the arithmetic of its diversity. At the 2020 census more than 62 per cent of residents identified as Asian, among the highest shares of any city its size in the country. Within that figure the community is layered: Korean, Filipino, Chinese, Taiwanese and Indian families living door to door, with no single group dominant. It is one of the most affluent and most thoroughly multi-ethnic suburbs in America.
How It Became Chinese
The story begins, improbably, with dairies. In the 1950s the dairymen of southeastern LA County, hemmed in by encroaching subdivisions, fought to protect their pastures by drawing a municipal boundary around them.
Dairy Valley, 1956
On 24 April 1956 they incorporated the city of Dairy Valley. The new town counted more than 400 dairies, some 100,000 cows and over 100,000 chickens against barely 3,400 human residents. Zoning at first allowed only one house per five acres, a deliberate wall against suburban sprawl.
The wall did not hold. Rising land values and property taxes made grazing land far more valuable as housing, and in March 1965 voters approved a zoning change that opened the floodgates. The cows began to leave.
From Dairy Valley to Cerritos, 1967
On 10 January 1967 the city shed its rural name and became Cerritos, a nod to the local college and to the original Spanish land grant, Rancho Los Cerritos. City leaders chose to develop in careful phases rather than let builders run wild, producing the master-planned grid of parks, schools and shopping centres that still defines the place.
Between 1970 and 1972 Cerritos was the fastest-growing city in California, its population leaping from roughly 16,000 to 38,000 in two years. The new houses were large, modern and reasonably priced, and the schools, run by the ABC Unified School District, were already gaining a reputation for excellence. That last point mattered more than anything. For the immigrant families who would soon arrive, a top school district was not a bonus but the entire point of the move.
The Asian turn, 1970s and 1980s
Two forces converged. The 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act had reopened the United States to large-scale immigration from Asia, and a generation of professionals from Taiwan, Hong Kong and later mainland China was arriving with degrees, savings and school-aged children.
They wanted what every arriving family wants: safe streets, big houses and good schools. Cerritos, brand new and built around its classrooms, offered all three within commuting distance of the aerospace and engineering jobs of the South Bay and Orange County.
The earliest waves often came from Taiwan, drawn to nearby Monterey Park and Rowland Heights and then spilling south and east. The more affluent among them, looking for newer homes and quieter streets, settled in places like Cerritos, Walnut and Diamond Bar. Mainland Chinese families followed in greater numbers from the 1990s onward as immigration from the People’s Republic accelerated.
A diverse suburb takes shape
By 1980 the Asian share of Cerritos had already reached nearly 22 per cent. Two decades later it was a majority, with Korean and Chinese listed among the most common ancestries and Korea and the Philippines among the top countries of birth.
What made Cerritos unusual was that no group ever fully eclipsed the others. Korean, Chinese, Taiwanese, Filipino and Indian families arrived in overlapping waves, so the city became genuinely plural rather than a single-ethnicity enclave. In 1990 the Census Bureau named it one of the most ethnically diverse cities in the nation. The Chinese community grew inside that mosaic, not apart from it.
The Landmarks
99 Ranch Market, Cerritos, near South Street and Pioneer Boulevard. Founded by Roger Chen in 1984, 99 Ranch grew into the largest Asian American supermarket chain in the country. For Chinese families across Cerritos and neighbouring Artesia it is the everyday anchor: live fish tanks, frozen dumplings, herbal teas and a noticeboard of community life.
Whitney High School, 16800 Shoemaker Avenue. Gretchen A. Whitney High, a public magnet serving grades seven through twelve, is regularly ranked the top public high school in California and among the best in the country. Its student body is roughly three-quarters Asian, and for many Chinese parents in Cerritos the chance to send a child here is reason enough to buy a house in the district.
Cerritos Library, 18025 Bloomfield Avenue. First opened in 1973 and rededicated in 2002 as the first titanium-clad building in North America, the library is the city’s gleaming civic showpiece. On weekends its reading rooms fill with multilingual families, and its shelves carry Chinese-language collections alongside the English ones.
Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts, 12700 Center Court Drive. Opened in January 1993 with a four-night run by Frank Sinatra, the theatre sits inside the Cerritos Towne Center. It has long programmed Lunar New Year concerts and touring acts from Asia, drawing audiences from across the San Gabriel and Orange County suburbs.
Los Cerritos Center, 239 Los Cerritos Center. Open since September 1971, the regional mall predates the city’s Asian majority and grew up alongside it. Its food court and shops have quietly tracked the demographic shift, and for a generation of local Chinese teenagers it has been the default place to gather.
Cerritos Sculpture Garden, beside the Civic Center on Bloomfield Avenue. Dedicated in 2006, the garden of life-sized bronze figures is a favourite spot for the after-dinner walks and graduation photographs that mark the rhythm of family life in this part of the city.
Cerritos Auto Square, off the 91 Freeway at Studebaker Road. One of the country’s first auto malls, it concentrated dozens of dealerships into a few blocks and became a regional shopping habit. Its prosperity mirrored that of the surrounding households, many of them the dual-income immigrant families who powered the city’s rise.
Where They Came From
The Chinese of Cerritos trace their origins to several distinct points of departure. The first significant wave came from Taiwan, part of the post-1965 migration of students and professionals who studied at American universities and stayed to work in engineering, medicine and business.
Hong Kong families followed, some hedging against the uncertainty surrounding the 1997 handover to China. From the 1990s onward the largest growth came from the Chinese mainland, particularly as study-abroad and skilled-worker channels widened.
What unites them is less a single home region than a shared strategy. These were largely middle-class and professional households for whom a good school district was the central goal of migration. They bypassed the older urban Chinatowns entirely and went straight to the suburbs, joining communities like those in Monterey Park and Arcadia to the north before many moved south to Cerritos.
Cerritos Today
Cerritos remains one of the most prosperous and orderly suburbs in Los Angeles County, its tidy streets and top-ranked schools doing exactly what the first immigrant buyers hoped they would. The Chinese community here is established, not arriving: second and third generations have grown up, gone to Whitney or Cerritos High, and either stayed close or scattered to other coasts.
The everyday texture of Chinese life is woven into the commercial fabric. The 99 Ranch and the Asian plazas along South Street, the restaurants serving dim sum and regional Sichuan and Taiwanese beef noodle, the cram schools and music studios tucked into strip malls: all of it sits comfortably beside Korean barbecue, Filipino bakeries and Indian sweet shops. The Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts programmes Lunar New Year concerts, and the public library keeps Chinese-language shelves. None of it is set apart in a single district. It is simply part of how the city eats, shops and spends its weekends.
It is worth being honest about the present. Home prices have climbed steeply, and some younger Chinese Cerritos natives have moved to Irvine or out of California entirely. Some have followed the well-worn path south to the planned suburbs of Orange County, joining the Chinese and Taiwanese communities of Irvine. Yet the city keeps drawing new families for the same reason it always did, and the multi-ethnic balance that made it famous in 1990 still largely holds. The cows are long gone. What replaced them is a suburb that several Asian communities, the Chinese prominent among them, built together.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many Chinese people live in Cerritos?
Recent estimates put the Chinese population of Cerritos at roughly 7,000 to 7,500 people, around 15 per cent of the city’s residents. They are one of several large Asian groups in a city where Asians make up more than 60 per cent of the population.
Why did Chinese families settle in Cerritos rather than an older Chinatown?
The Chinese in Cerritos were largely middle-class and professional immigrants from Taiwan, Hong Kong and mainland China who prioritised newer homes and top-rated schools. Cerritos, a master-planned suburb built around the highly regarded ABC Unified School District, offered exactly that, so families bypassed the urban Chinatowns and bought in the suburbs directly.
When did the Asian community in Cerritos grow?
Growth began in the 1970s and accelerated through the 1980s and 1990s. The Asian share rose from under 22 per cent in 1980 to a majority by 2000, with Taiwanese arrivals leading early on and mainland Chinese families growing fastest from the 1990s.
What was Cerritos before it became a suburb?
It was farmland. The city was incorporated as Dairy Valley in 1956 to protect its dairies, then renamed Cerritos in 1967 as the cows gave way to housing. Between 1970 and 1972 it was the fastest-growing city in California.
Where do Chinese residents of Cerritos shop and eat?
The 99 Ranch Market near South Street and Pioneer Boulevard is the everyday grocery anchor, and the surrounding plazas in Cerritos and neighbouring Artesia hold Chinese bakeries, restaurants and tea shops. Regional Chinese cuisine, from dim sum to Taiwanese beef noodle, is easy to find across the city.
Are Cerritos schools really that good?
Yes. Whitney High School is consistently ranked the number one public high school in California and among the top in the nation, with maths and reading proficiency in the top one per cent statewide. The quality of the ABC Unified schools is a major reason Chinese families settled in Cerritos.
If your family’s story passed through Cerritos, or any of the places Chinese families have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From the dairies of Dairy Valley to the report cards of Whitney High, to wherever you are now.