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Santa Ana city council is all Latino

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Times Staff Writer

Santa Ana has already been anointed the most Spanish-speaking city in the United States. Now, it is the largest U.S. city with an all-Latino city council.

On Tuesday, three Latino candidates won seats on the city’s seven-member council, joining four other Latino incumbents.

According to the National Assn. of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials, no other city with a population over 300,000 holds that distinction. Santa Ana is the 51st-largest city in the nation, and the ninth largest in the state, with a population of nearly 350,000.

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“What’s happening in Santa Ana reflects what’s happening all over the country,” said Rueben Martinez, a longtime Democratic activist and Santa Ana bookstore owner. “There were so many Latino candidates around the country in places like Minnesota, Ohio, Oregon and elsewhere. Here, this is a city that leads the trend.”

Just how long the majority will last remains to be seen, though. Councilman Jose Solorio won an Assembly seat Tuesday, and his seat will be filled either by appointment or special election.

Latinos hold all the seats in city councils in several smaller cities in Southern California, such as Irwindale and Bell Gardens, in border areas in the Southwest and in places such as Hialeah, Fla., where most of the population is Cuban American. But Santa Ana is the largest.

Rodolfo de la Garza, research director of the Tomas Rivera Policy Institute, is not surprised by the election results in Santa Ana.

He said the Latino population had grown and matured politically so the result was nearly inevitable.

Newly elected Councilman Sal Tinajero, who has served on the city’s school board, said an all Latino council “is a wonderful opportunity for people to stop stigmatizing us and saying that a Latino representative only represents Latino people.”

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Solorio said the all-Latino majority came nearly 20 years after Latinos became a majority in the city. Only in 2002 did Latinos become a majority on the council.

Political analyst Steve Sammarco said he was not surprised it took that long.

Only half of the city’s 91,000 registered voters are Latinos, and of those, only 12% voted in four of the last five elections, Sammarco said.

jennifer.delson@latimes.com

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