In 1776 on the East Coast of North America, colonists launched a war for independence. That same year, on the West Coast, Spanish colonists and missionaries founded Los Angeles.

The fact that LA was originally part of Spain, then Mexico, and founded in part by Catholic missionaries…

… created the deep roots that the Spanish language, Mexican culture and identity as well as the impact Christianity, and specifically the Catholic faith, have all had in shaping who and what LA and Southern California are today.

While much of the rest of the United States is just now awakening to the presence of their Latin(x) neighbors and what that means for their local cultures, Los Angeles has always been a cross-roads of culture and a place for the faithful to worship in their own way. Nowhere else in Los Angeles do you see this diversity played out as much as you do in and around the downtown area.

The Los Angeles metropolitan area is the 5th largest Spanish-speaking region in the world and the largest in the United States.

It’s not a recent phenomenon either. The linguistic and cultural borders of humanity are fluid, as each wave of immigration to the US has proven. The roots of a place however, have a lot to say about how we speak.

Spanish was spoken here before English. People often forget that. That does not diminish the importance of English to the culture of California or the US. It’s just a fact and an important reality that Spanish has a founding place in Californian culture. That place carries through to today.

In some industries, if you don’t speak at least some Spanish, you can’t be effective at your job to the same degree that not speaking English limits your potential. Both languages coexist here. In some areas English is dominant and in other areas Spanish is.

While some will say “This is America, we should speak English here.” if one knows the history of this country, one knows that there was a time when German was spoken so widely that it almost became the official language of Congress. English won by only one vote.

There is no question that English is a foundational language world-wide and speaking English when living in the US gives one a distinct advantage. It is our national language and that will not change in our lifetimes. Yet there’s something to be said for being open to speaking more than one language because in doing so you are opening your brain to ways of thinking and problem-solving.

I’m speaking from experience in having studied six languages in my life. Each one attacks logic and communication differently. So imagine what happens in your brain if you speak more than one language. It means that you have trained your brain how to solve the same problem in a different way. That in turn teaches the brain how to get creative when solving other problems.

So in thinking about the presence of so many languages and knowing that there are at least 5 languages spoken in Southern California by more than 500,000 people each, does this multi-lingual society create innovation? Does the presence of so many people interacting with so many cultures at one time open minds and program brain pathways that provide for new ideas?

Is this multi-cultural / multi-lingual environment contributing to scientific and economic innovation? Does it create more artists and musicians? Is it a coincidence that the film industry is headquartered here? Or that so many innovative industries got their start here?

This carries over to spirituality and religion as well.

Following this one street in both directions out of downtown you come across numerous churches of all denominations including Catholics, Presbyterians, Russian Orthodox, Armenian Orthodox, as well as Buddhist monasteries, Jewish synagogues, places like the Self Realization Fellowship and the headquarters of the Church of Scientology - and those are the religions that I was able to see just along Sunset and Cesar Chavez.

All of this diversity is Los Angeles. Yet, when celebrating the European, Persian, Chinese or Vietnamese New Year (all in the same region within three months of each other) one cannot escape that this city, as well as the state of California, is as rooted in a unique brand of plural-cultural society found in only a handful of other places on the planet.

Los Angeles is over 100 miles north of the Mexican border - a border line that moved in 1848 - while the heart and soul of this great world city has remained rooted in the same physical place.

Wave after wave of immigration has brought people together from places as diverse as Armenia, Korea, Ethiopia and El Salvador. As walls are built along political borders, Sunset Boulevard and Avenida Cesar Chavez are a real-world bridge between cultures and belief systems that span well beyond the borders of the United States.