Little Arabia
ethnic enclave in California, United States
Little Arabia is an ethnic enclave in western Anaheim, California, the center for Orange County's Arab Americans, who number more than 24,000 (As of 2000). It has been referred to as "Little Gaza" which was a riff on the nearby Garza Island neighborhoods. Little Arabia grew significantly in the 1990s with the arrival of immigrants from the Middle East, and is the home to thousands of Arab Americans predominantly hailing from Egypt, Syria, Palestine, and Yemen.
The district is centered on Brookhurst Street in Anaheim, near the Santa Ana Freeway (I-5) between La Palma Avenue and Katella Avenue. Businesses include halal butcher shops, beauty salons, jewelry stores, Arabic and Islamic clothing, travel agencies, bakeries, Arab restaurants, and hookah cafes. There are also numerous mosques in the enclave.
History
Along with most of Anaheim, the area in which Little Arabia falls was mostly developed in the 1950s due to its proximity to Disneyland and the economic outgrowth it brought to the region that had long been used for orange groves. The neighborhood lost residents over time and fell into disrepair until the 1980s when the area was revived by the emigration and immigration of Arabs that make up much of the population today.
Reaction to the "Arab Spring"
In 2011, Little Arabia became the center of Arab American activities supporting the wave of Arab revolutions known as the "Arab Spring". On February 4 a demonstration in support of the Egyptian revolution took place on Brookhurst Street followed by a celebration on February 11 after Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak was ousted and another one on February 12.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Little Arabia” is ethnic enclave in California, United States. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Little, Arabia and ethnic, not as a finished interpretation.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 12, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q17034237. Authority coordinates are 33.825, -117.959. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2000 and 2011.
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This entry incorporates text from “Little Arabia” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.