A city grows in East L.A.?

Drawing upon a rich history of activism and a nagging sense of neglect, residents and leaders of East Los Angeles have launched a campaign for incorporation, a move that would create a new city in a historic center of Mexican American culture.

The drive for East L.A. cityhood has grown from nascent to palpable in recent months, and advocates believe their goal, which many have nurtured for a generation, at last could be within reach.

Over the last few months, cityhood has been the subject of spirited community meetings -- more than 300 people turned out for one session late last year -- and increasingly active political talks. Just last week, leaders of the effort met with county officials to analyze the tax consequences of incorporation. Petitions could begin to circulate this spring, and it’s possible that voters could consider the question later this year.

If they are successful, East L.A. would become a city of roughly 140,000 people, one of the 10 largest in Los Angeles County and one of the most overwhelmingly Mexican American cities in the United States. More important for many of those who believe in cityhood, its success would validate East L.A.’s long-standing place in the neighborhood culture of Los Angeles rather than continue its existence as a scrap of unincorporated land left behind as cities around it took shape.

State Sen. Gloria Romero (D-Los Angeles), a leading proponent of the idea, says she has been struck by the intensity of the emotional response to it.

“This has engaged the community,” Romero said last week. “The demographics are there. The history is there. The reason is there.”

For many in East L.A., the promise of cityhood is long overdue. Indeed, for such a small slice of Greater Los Angeles -- the community covers less than 10 square miles bordered by Boyle Heights and Monterey Park, Commerce and Montebello -- East L.A. has made a sizable name for itself.

It is a thriving source of cultural life, a community as identifiable and coherent as the many others that make up modern Los Angeles: Hollywood or Bel-Air, say, or Van Nuys, Watts, Boyle Heights, Leimert Park or Mount Washington.

Given its demographics, East L.A. is politically significant as a laboratory for the growing electoral clout of Latinos, particularly Mexican Americans.

As such, its halls and public spaces are mandatory stops for aspiring politicians eager to demonstrate their support among Latinos. Last fall, Democrat Phil Angelides, whose gubernatorial campaign by then already was sputtering, attended an East L.A. Chamber of Commerce luncheon and tried vainly to elicit enthusiasm for his cause from a plainly skeptical audience.

Culturally, it has a different cachet. It has produced muralists and musicians, writers and chroniclers of Mexican American life for generations. One enduring contributor has been the band Los Lobos, whose members come from East L.A. and whose original name was “Los Lobos del Este Los Angeles.”

Louie Perez, a founding member of Los Lobos, vividly recalls growing up on the edge of East L.A. -- the smell of his mother’s coffee blending with the scents from the tortilleria next door in the morning, the sounds of radio personality Elenita Salinas rousing him from bed. At night, he and his sister and friends would hear the backyard parties with mariachi bands as they made their way to the parking lot of the Johnson Market, where Thee Midnighters would be mobbed by young fans.

In those days, he said, “East L.A. was our entire universe.... Leaving it was like leaving the edge of the Earth.”

As he grew older, Perez was immersed in the ferment that overtook his neighborhood. One afternoon in August 1970 he was riding his blue Stingray bicycle near Whittier Boulevard when he spotted smoke. A peaceful demonstration had escalated into a clash with L.A. County sheriff’s deputies, and riots tore through East L.A. that day.

A few blocks away, a man shooed Perez from the Silver Dollar cantina, warning him that a man was dead inside. That man, journalist Ruben Salazar, had been killed by a deputy; 27 years later, Salazar remains a political martyr in East L.A.

Los Lobos formed in 1973, and the band’s absorption of Mexican music into its American idiom immediately placed it in the cultural and political turbulence of the community. As the band developed, its members captured and amplified East L.A. culture, supplying a soundtrack to Chicano activism not unlike what Jimi Hendrix gave the Black Panthers. Through the years, Los Lobos has helped to extend that East L.A. culture around the world.

“I’ll be looking for my old neighborhood my whole life,” Perez said last week. “It was an incredible place to grow up.”

*

Among the hallmark moments of East L.A. activism were the student walkouts of 1968, and many who live in the area today participated. Indeed, one young protester was none other than Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who cites that episode as a formative one in his young life.

Sal Castro led the walkout movement that year and remains a beloved figure in East LA. Last week, he was among the hundreds of people who turned out for the dedication of a new East L.A. “City Hall,” the work of County Supervisor Gloria Molina, another veteran of the area.

Now 73, Castro can recall the days before freeways carved up East L.A., an era when the community felt more tight-knit. And he remembers the previous attempts at cityhood, including the promise that East L.A. would become part of Commerce, an idea bandied about but withdrawn when, Castro believes, the leaders of Commerce shrank from the idea of taking on such a large population of Mexican Americans.

Today, Castro believes that the community is ready to become its own city, not merely a part of one of its neighbors.

“Hell, yes,” he said one day last week, surveying the crowd at the new City Hall. “Let’s go for it.”

*

Albert Palacios teaches government at Garfield High School, East L.A.’s high school, where he tutors his students on the history and potential of East L.A.’s incorporation efforts. Palacios took to the idea of cityhood some time ago and has become one of its most ardent advocates.

Palacios has been in East L.A. for decades. He witnessed the emergence of the Brown Berets in the mid-1960s, when that organization formed to agitate for the rights of Mexican Americans. He was there for the student walkouts and the protests over abuse at the hands of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department -- and for the evolving atmosphere of demonstration that turned on the war in Vietnam.

Today, Palacios looks back on those years as a “very contentious time” but also one of solidifying community sentiment.

Molina agrees. East L.A., she notes with fondness, is an area forged in activism and protest, the same currents that have shaped her own life. As a young woman, she attended East Los Angeles College -- which, curiously, is just outside East L.A. Molina is hardly blind to East L.A.’s difficulties: It has long suffered more than its share of gang violence and other crimes. As a young woman, she tutored gang youths nearby and witnessed the community’s sense of neglect as well as its stubborn pride.

As a supervisor, Molina has taken special interest in the county’s unincorporated areas, including East L.A. She presided over a long and concerted effort to bring a civic complex to the area, one for which ground was broken just last week. Among advocates of cityhood, many hasten to emphasize that they are happy with her representation of their area, though some worry about her ability to stay close to community issues when she represents roughly 2 million constituents across a wide swath of Los Angeles County.

Molina is uncommitted regarding cityhood for East L.A. She applauds the community spirit behind the idea but wonders whether the largely residential neighborhoods can supply enough tax revenue to support a city government, whether the retail areas clustered along Atlantic Boulevard can be beefed up enough to float a city where none has existed for so long.

“I’m not opposed to the community wanting to have its own mayor and city council members,” Molina said last week. “I’m just concerned about the ability to pay for itself.”

Where Molina has questions, however, Romero expresses confidence.

“I have no doubt that this is a self-sustaining community,” she said. “This is prime property.”

Whatever one thinks about East L.A.’s tax base, there is no denying the sense among its residents that a moment is at hand, that politics and population trends and culture have all coalesced in a surge of neighborhood pride.

When Molina opened the new government center last week, hundreds of residents turned out, many dressed up for the occasion. They cheered loudly as speakers hailed the coming of age of East L.A. and beamed with pride as speaker after speaker touted the facility as evidence of the community’s growth and worth.

Standing off to the side, Palacios surveyed the crowd that cloudy morning and reflected on the decades of protest that had brought the community to where it is.

“People have mellowed,” he said of East L.A. and its quest for cityhood. “People have matured. We’re ready.”

jim.newton@latimes.com