Drive down South Street on a Saturday morning and the evidence is everywhere: a Taiwanese cafe got up like a schoolroom, with desks for tables, queues for breakfast soy milk and beef noodle soup, and a parade of families heading to the Asian grocer next door. The story of the Taiwanese in Cerritos begins not with a Chinatown but with a dairy farm, and it is one of the earliest chapters of suburban Taiwanese America.
The Place
Cerritos sits in the south-east corner of Los Angeles County, a tidy grid of cul-de-sacs and shopping centres roughly twenty miles from downtown LA. It is a master-planned suburb, deliberately so, with wide setbacks, manicured medians and a civic centre built to look like a small city ought to look.
Today it is one of the most Asian cities in America. The 2020 census recorded the population as more than 62 per cent Asian, a figure that includes large Korean, Filipino, Chinese, Indian and Taiwanese communities living side by side. For a place that once counted more cows than people, the transformation has been total.
How It Became Taiwanese
To understand the Taiwanese in Cerritos you have to start with the milk.
From Dairy Valley to a planned city
The town incorporated in April 1956 as Dairy Valley, a defensive move by local dairy farmers who wanted to protect their land from the housing tracts spreading across the basin. At incorporation it held more than 400 dairies, roughly 100,000 cows and over 100,000 chickens, against just 3,439 human residents. The cows outnumbered the people many times over.
That arrangement could not hold. As land values and property taxes climbed through the early 1960s, dairying stopped paying. In a special election in July 1963 residents voted to allow large-scale residential development, and the bulldozers followed. In 1967 the city dropped its barnyard name and rechristened itself Cerritos, after the old Rancho Los Cerritos land grant. Between 1970 and 1972 it was the fastest-growing city in California, its population leaping from 16,000 to 38,000.
Why Taiwanese families chose the suburb
The timing was everything. Just as Cerritos was filling its new tracts with brand-new houses, a wave of educated, professional immigrants was arriving from Taiwan. The 1965 Hart-Celler Act had reopened the United States to Asian immigration, favouring those with degrees and skills, and Taiwan in the 1970s and 1980s sent engineers, doctors, accountants and small-business owners in large numbers.
Many of these families wanted exactly what Cerritos offered: a safe, brand-new, low-density suburb with excellent public schools, and crucially one without the older ethnic baggage of the inner city. Where the first big suburban Taiwanese and Chinese wave reshaped the Chinese community in Monterey Park in the San Gabriel Valley, a parallel current flowed south-east into Cerritos and the adjacent cities of Artesia and beyond.
The draw was practical. Houses were new and the lots were generous. The schools, run by the ABC Unified School District, were strong and getting stronger. And unlike a downtown enclave, Cerritos felt like the American suburb that many Taiwanese parents had imagined for their children. In time some of those children, and their own children, would carry the pattern onward to newer Orange County suburbs, settling among the Taiwanese in Irvine.
A community that built its own institutions
What turned a cluster of homeowners into a community were the institutions Taiwanese families founded for themselves. Churches came first. The Evangelical Formosan Church movement, begun among Taiwanese Christians in Southern California in the 1970s, planted a Cerritos-area congregation in 1988, holding services in Taiwanese and Mandarin for families who wanted to worship in their mother tongue.
Senior groups followed as the first immigrants aged. The Cerritos Formosa Association, a Taiwanese seniors’ club, became a fixture of local life, gathering members weekly and performing at city cultural events. Weekend Chinese-language schools opened so that the second generation, raised entirely in English, would not lose the characters their grandparents read.
By the 1980s the share of Asian residents in Cerritos had reached roughly 22 per cent, up from almost nothing a generation earlier. The figure has only climbed since, and Taiwanese families were among the earliest and most established threads in that growth. Their professional standing showed up in civic life too: Grace Hu, who emigrated from Taiwan and went into Cerritos real estate in 1979, was later elected to the city council and served four terms as mayor.
The Landmarks
Class 302, 11446 South Street. A Taiwanese cafe named for a classroom, fitted out with school desks for tables and a blackboard menu. It is a pilgrimage spot for beef noodle soup, crispy pork chop over rice, stinky tofu and towering bowls of Taiwanese shaved snow, and a reliable index of how deep the community runs along South Street.
Cerritos Library, 18025 Bloomfield Avenue. The city’s most famous building, rebuilt and rededicated in 2002 as the first titanium-clad structure in North America. On weekends its reading rooms fill with Cerritos families and the schoolchildren, many of them second-generation Taiwanese, for whom the public library is a second home.
Whitney High School, 16800 Shoemaker Avenue. A public magnet school that admits by exam and routinely ranks among the very best in California and the nation. Its student body is overwhelmingly Asian American, and a place at Whitney is a quiet point of pride in many Taiwanese households across the ABC Unified district.
Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts, 18000 Park Plaza Drive. Opened in 1993, the city’s grand theatre hosts the annual Festival of Friendship, where the Formosa Seniors Association and other groups perform alongside Hawaiian, Scottish, Filipino and Chinese dancers. It is the civic stage on which the city’s many communities present themselves to one another.
Los Cerritos Center, 239 Los Cerritos Center. The regional shopping mall around which much of the city’s commercial life revolves. Generations of Cerritos teenagers, Taiwanese American among them, grew up wandering its corridors, and its anchor stores and food court are part of the shared suburban memory.
The Cerritos Civic Center, 18125 Bloomfield Avenue. City hall, the sheriff’s station and the library cluster together as the symbolic heart of the master-planned city. It was here, in the council chamber, that a Taiwanese immigrant who had started selling Cerritos houses in 1979 was sworn in as mayor.
South Street corridor. The strip of plazas running through southern Cerritos and into neighbouring Artesia, anchored by Asian supermarkets and lined with Taiwanese, Chinese, Korean and South Asian restaurants and bakeries. It is the everyday landscape of the community, the place a Taiwanese family in Cerritos does its weekly shop.
Where They Came From
The Taiwanese who settled Cerritos came overwhelmingly from the cities of Taiwan, Taipei above all, and arrived as a self-selected professional class. They were the graduates, the engineers and the entrepreneurs who qualified for skilled-worker and family-reunification visas after 1965, and who could afford a new suburban house on arrival or soon after.
Many had studied at American universities first and stayed, sponsoring relatives once they had a foothold. That chain pulled siblings, parents and in-laws into the same few square miles, which is why a single extended Taiwanese family can often be traced across several Cerritos streets.
Their backgrounds were urban and educated rather than rural. The dairy hamlet they were buying into could not have been less like the cities they left, but the trade was a deliberate one: a quiet, brand-new suburb in exchange for the density and uncertainty of home. The professional credentials they carried, in engineering, medicine, accountancy and business, translated quickly into the white-collar economy of greater Los Angeles, and into the mortgages that built the community.
It is worth drawing one distinction the community itself draws. Taiwanese Americans are counted in many official statistics under the broad Chinese heading, but the Taiwanese identity in Cerritos is its own thing, with its own churches, dialect, food and associations. A separate, larger and partly mainland-rooted Chinese community lives in the same city, and the two overlap without being the same. The same distinction echoes across the San Gabriel Valley, from the Chinese in Arcadia to the older enclaves nearer downtown.
Cerritos Today
Cerritos in the 2020s is a mature Asian American suburb rather than a frontier. The first Taiwanese arrivals are now grandparents, their weekly senior-club meetings a reminder of how long the community has been here. Their children grew up at Whitney and Cerritos High, went to college, and in many cases moved on to Irvine and farther afield, even as new arrivals keep the South Street plazas busy.
The city has changed around them. Korean, Filipino, Indian and Chinese families now share the schools and shopping centres, and the all-Asian city councils of recent years reflect a population that long ago stopped being a novelty. The Taiwanese thread is no longer the dominant one, but it is among the oldest, woven into the founding fabric of the suburb.
What remains is a particular kind of inheritance: a cafe done up like a classroom, a titanium library, a magnet high school, a senior club still dancing at the Festival of Friendship. It is not a Chinatown and never was. It is something newer and, to the families who built it, more comfortable: a suburb that turned out to be home.
Frequently Asked Questions
When did the Taiwanese community in Cerritos begin?
The Taiwanese in Cerritos arrived chiefly in the 1970s and 1980s, just as the former dairy town was filling its new housing tracts. Professional immigrants from Taiwan, drawn by new homes and strong schools, made Cerritos one of the earliest suburban Taiwanese American communities in the country.
Why did Taiwanese families choose Cerritos specifically?
Cerritos was a brand-new, master-planned suburb with generous lots, low crime and the highly regarded ABC Unified schools, including the magnet Whitney High School. For educated, middle-class Taiwanese families it offered the suburban life they wanted without the older inner-city associations of a traditional Chinatown.
How is the Taiwanese community different from the Chinese community in Cerritos?
Although Taiwanese Americans are often grouped under the Chinese heading in official data, the Taiwanese in Cerritos maintain their own churches, associations, food traditions and identity. A separate and larger Chinese community lives in the same city; the two overlap but are not the same.
What are the best-known Taiwanese landmarks in Cerritos?
Class 302 on South Street is a famous Taiwanese cafe, while institutions such as the Evangelical Formosan Church and the Cerritos Formosa Association serve the community directly. The South Street corridor of Asian supermarkets and restaurants is the everyday hub of Taiwanese life in the city.
How Asian is Cerritos today?
The 2020 census recorded Cerritos as more than 62 per cent Asian, one of the highest shares of any US city, with large Korean, Filipino, Chinese, Indian and Taiwanese populations. The Taiwanese community is among the oldest and most established of these.
Has Cerritos had Taiwanese American civic leaders?
Yes. Grace Hu, who emigrated from Taiwan and entered Cerritos real estate in 1979, was elected to the city council and served four terms as mayor, one example of the Taiwanese in Cerritos rising into the suburb’s civic leadership.
If your family’s story passed through Cerritos, or any of the places Taiwanese have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From the cities of Taiwan to a dairy town turned master-planned suburb, to wherever you are now.