Cerritos

Address 18125 Bloomfield Avenue P.O. Box 3130 Cerritos, CA 90703
Phone (562) 860-0311
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Cerritos is a planned suburb of Los Angeles County, California, United States on the American west coast, and is one of several cities that constitute the Gateway Cities of southeast Los Angeles County. The current OMB metropolitan designation for Cerritos is “Los Angeles-Long Beach, CA" but is also adjacent to the Santa Ana-Anaheim-Irvine OMB designated metropolitan area. According to the California Department of Finance, as of 2005, the City population was 55,074.

The area around what is known today as the City of Cerritos was originally inhabited by Native Americans belonging to the Tongva (or "People of the Earth") tribe. Later, the Tongva would be renamed the "Gabrielenos" by the Spanish settlers after the nearby Mission San Gabriel Arcangel. The Gabrielenos were the largest group of Southern California Indians as well as the most developed in the region. The Gabrielenos lived off the land, deriving food from the animals or plants that could be gathered, snared, or hunted, and grinding acorns as a staple (Eftychiou 12).

Beginning in the late 1400s, Spanish explorers arrived in the New World and worked their way to the American west coast with an intent to set up colonies and commercial trade routes to Asia. The colonization process included "civilizing" the native populations in California by means of establishing various missions. On September 8, 1771, Mission San Gabriel Arcangel was established as the fourth mission in California and the one with the most direct effect in the region. Shortly afterwards, a town called El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles de Porciúncula (Los Angeles today) would be found and prosper with the aid of Mexican and Native American labor.

Spanish soldiers later petitioned the Spanish crown for additional land to be used for cattle grazing. One soldier, Jose Manuel Perez Nieto, was granted a large plot of land which he named Rancho Los Nietos. It covered 300,000 acres of what are today the cities of Cerritos, Long Beach, Lakewood, Downey, Norwalk, Santa Fe Springs, part of Whittier, Huntington Beach, Buena Park, and Garden Grove.

California would eventually be under Mexican rule in 1822 and the Nieto family would come to own the rancho exclusively. Trade flourished under the new ranchos and families living on them eventually began living an increasingly comfortable life. The ranchos were eventually divided five ways among Nieto's heirs during the nationalization of church property by the Mexican government, with Juan Jose Nieto retaining the largest plot called Rancho Los Coyotes. Nieto called the area of Rancho Los Coyotes where Cerritos is located today "Sierritos" or "little hills" although no natural hills exist in modern-day Cerritos.

The rancho would change hands several times before and after the United States annexed California, and would eventually wind up in the hands of the Los Angeles and San Bernardino Land Company which encouraged development and rail lines to be built by Henry E. Huntington and his Pacific Electric Railway company. It is through rapid development combined with improved transportation systems that formed the modern-day city of Artesia in Rancho Los Coyotes in 1875, and from it, the city of Dairy Valley.

The city known today as Cerritos was incorporated on April 24, 1956 originally as the City of Dairy Valley, its name symbolizing the more than 400 dairies, 100,000 cows and 106,300 chickens found within its limits. The cows outnumbered the City's 3,439 residents by 29 to one. At its peak, the City produced more dairy than any other place in the nation, surpassing even the entire state of Wisconsin.

Two years later, Dairy Valley voted to become a chartered California city. As land values and property taxes in California rose in the early 1960s, agriculture became increasingly unprofitable in southern Los Angeles County, and development pressures increased dramatically. In a special election held on July 16, 1963, residents voted to permit large-scale residential development. As a reflection of its newly suburban orientation, the City's name formally changed to "Cerritos" on January 10, 1967, after the nearby Spanish land grant Rancho Los Cerritos, which figured prominently in the region before California became a state. The name "Cerritos" is Spanish for "Little Hills."

Cerritos is a prime example of the "fiscalization" of California politics after the tax revolt of the 1970s and the passage of Proposition 13. With property tax increases effectively banned by Prop. 13, and most citizens already
feeling that their income taxes and payroll taxes were too high, the only way for California cities to raise long-term tax revenue was to create as many commercial zones as possible to take advantage of the percentage of county sales tax allocated back to municipalities. This means that one cent of every taxable dollar exchanged in Cerritos (taxed at a rate of 8.25%) would go back to the City in the form of sales tax revenue. Cerritos was one of the first cities in Los Angeles County to develop large-scale retail zones and achieved stunning success. Crucial to this strategy was the
development of the Cerritos Auto Square, the world's largest auto mall, which generates more than $10 million in annual sales tax revenue today. The sudden large influx of tax revenue fundamentally changed the mentality of the local leaders and many of its residents. Sales tax revenue is the lifeblood of the City and thus guides strict policies that protect against any compromise to this vital source of income.

Since emerging as an agricultural community in the first half of the 20th century, the current progressive nature of the Cerritos government and the unusually strong tax-base is best reflected in its facilities. In 1978, Cerritos dedicated the nation's first solar-heated City Hall complex. In 1993, the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts opened its doors, attracting patrons throughout the state. In 1994, the City unveiled the Cerritos Towne Center project that combines office, retail, lodging, fine arts and dining in an open-air location. In 1997, the City opened the Cerritos Sheriff's Station/Community Safety Center to provide public safety services. In 2002, the City rededicated its public library. The assessed valuation of the City of Cerritos is nearing the $6 billion ($6,000,000,000) mark.

Between 1970 and 1972, Cerritos was the fastest growing city in California. The population exploded from 16,000 to 38,000. Since the 1980s, Cerritos has attracted a large number of middle- and upper-middle-class Filipino, Korean and Chinese immigrant families, making it the city with the second largest Asian/Asian-American population in the nation (after Monterey Park, California). The "A-B-C" (Artesia-Bellflower-Cerritos) region, as well as the neighboring cities
of Hawaiian Gardens, La Mirada, Lakewood, Long Beach, Norwalk and Signal Hill, are considered one of the most ethnically diverse and rapidly growing areas in the world. According to a study by CSU Northridge, Cerritos was named the most ethnically diverse city of its size.

On August 31, 1986, Aeromexico Flight 498 on approach to Los Angeles International Airport collided with a small Piper aircraft over Cerritos. Eighty-two people died, including 15 people on the ground. Four houses were initially flattened when the DC-9 fell backwards out of the sky, and then eight more were destroyed by the subsequent fire before firefighters could bring it under control. The incident is memorialized in a new sculpture installed in the City's Sculpture Garden. With large capital projects, memorials, and art programs, the theme of the Cerritos Millennium Library, "Honoring The Past - Imagining The Future," aptly describes the philosophy of the Cerritos experience of today.

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