Pasadena’s Armenians : Immigrants, New and Old, Gain Political Clout and Recognition as Their Population in City Soars

On a warm afternoon in April, Pasadena City Director Rick Cole stood before 10,000 Armenians gathered to commemorate the 1915 Armenian genocide and took a position that surprised many in attendance.

Under the shadow of an imposing monument in Montebello built to Armenian martyrs, Cole told the crowd that Armenian extremists who had assassinated a number of Turkish diplomats since 1975 were not “terrorists” but “freedom fighters” rightfully seeking vengeance for a 70-year-old wrong.

It was a bold statement for an elected official, and although it was met with spirited applause, its passion dismayed many Armenians who had gathered there April 24 on Armenian Martyrs Day to pay quiet tribute to the estimated 1.5 million victims of the genocide.

Many later said Cole had misread Armenian sentiments on the issue, ignoring a majority of Armenians who condemn political violence as a means of forcing Turkey to admit to genocide and to return lands that constitute the ancient Armenian homeland.

Cole’s speech, in which he also made public a Pasadena city proclamation that denounced an unrepentant Turkey and strongly backed Armenian political aspirations, illustrates the emerging political strength of Armenians in Pasadena and the lengths to which city officials are willing to go to court this growing constituency.

In the past six months, city officials have taken extraordinary steps to ingratiate themselves with the Armenian community, which has nearly doubled in size since 1980 and now numbers an estimated 17,000 people.

In March, after months of lobbying by Armenian community leaders, Pasadena became the first city in the country to enact legislation recognizing Armenians as a protected class for purposes of affirmative action. The new law means that Armenians, like blacks and Latinos, are officially classified as a minority and must be recruited for city jobs and city-awarded contracts.

Then last month, the city capitulated to a list of demands by Armenians concerning the relocation of the Pasadena Armenian Center, which sits amid a $5.4-million city redevelopment project at Lake Avenue and Washington Boulevard.

The Armenians threatened to entangle the project in legal proceedings if the city did not reassess the value of the community center and help them search for a new building. In a matter of days, a new assessment valued the center at $600,000--double the old assessment. With the assistance of the city, Armenian community leaders have now located a prospective center and are in the final stages of negotiation.

Last week, Pasadena Armenians were given further cause for celebration. City Manager Donald F. McIntyre confirmed that Edward K. Aghjayan, a Palo Alto public utilities consultant and a second-generation Armenian-American, had been offered the job as deputy city manager. At week’s end, Aghjayan had not decided whether he would take the post, considered the second most powerful in Pasadena.

“I don’t think Pasadena has ever seen one of its ethnic communities act so decisively on so many fronts,” said Bill Paparian, a Pasadena attorney who has pushed for a greater Armenian presence in city government. “We’ve served notice that the Armenian community has finally come into its own here.”

The recent actions, not coincidentally, have come at a time when Pasadena ranks second only to Hollywood as the area with the fastest growing Armenian community in the nation. About 50% of Pasadena’s Armenian population, roughly 8,000 people, has arrived in the last five years, chiefly from Beirut.

City officials agree that the Armenian community, working hard to translate these numbers into votes, has played an increasing role in city elections.

Last year, the Pasadena branch of the Armenian National Committee (ANC), a political lobbying group headed locally by Paparian, interviewed every candidate for city office. The group then followed up an announcement of its choices with contributions totaling $3,000 to the candidates.

City Director Jess Hughston, who won by fewer than 200 votes in District 5, credited Armenian support for his victory. During the last week of Hughston’s campaign, Armenian youth canvassed the district passing out political literature, while Armenian volunteers telephoned friends and relatives urging them to vote for Hughston.

“They are taking all the necessary steps to ensure their political clout in this city,” Hughston said. “They’re a nice group to work with. I don’t consider any of their requests excessive. They just want to be treated like all others.”

But if the recent actions taken by Pasadena signal the arrival of Armenians as a political force, they have not been greeted with universal acclaim in the Armenian community.

No one in the Armenian community is disputing the importance of the job offer to Aghjayan or the city’s yielding to Armenian demands in the community center controversy.

But Cole’s speech--and the knowledge that it was written with the help of the ANC--concerns some Armenians who worry that strident voices in the community are misrepresenting Armenians on political issues.

Likewise, many Armenians question the wisdom of including Armenians in the city’s affirmative action ordinance. They say their criticism of the new law stems from a proud tradition in the Armenian community of spurning government aid in solving problems.

Both issues reflect a deeper tension between newcomers from Beirut and second- and third-generation Armenian-Americans. The tension grows out of a perception that the newcomers, who are more likely to express support for Armenian terrorism and take government aid, are sullying a positive image burnished by years of hard work and modest behavior.

In an attempt to bring the two communities closer together, Armenian leaders have sponsored presentations by Armenian-Americans to groups of newcomers on topics ranging from job training to the American political process.

Dickran Tevrizian, a retired Los Angeles County Superior Court judge, recalled a talk he gave recently to a group of newcomers in Pasadena.

“I was explaining that they had to be law-abiding citizens when some guy in the back, who was very nationalistic, told me I didn’t understand their problems, that I was an Armenian only by virtue of eating shish kebab,” Tevrizian said.

“So I proceeded to take out my wallet and offer him money so he could return to the Middle East,” Tevrizian said. “To my surprise, 300 newcomers stood up and applauded. I knew then that the differences between us were surmountable.”

Those differences are underscored by a persistent debate over Armenian terrorism and whether it advances goals shared by Armenians everywhere. The goals, which have become known as the Three Rs, are recognition by Turkey that it massacred nearly two-thirds of the Armenian people from 1915 to 1918, reparations by Turkey to Armenian survivors, and return of historic Armenian lands in eastern Turkey.

In the past 10 years, Armenian extremists have assassinated 22 Turkish diplomats and/or their family members in cities around the world. Last June, Harry Sassounian, 21, a Pasadena Armenian who emigrated from Beirut, was sentenced to life in prison for the January, 1982, assassination of Turkish Consul General Kemal Arikan in Los Angeles.

Turkey and Turkish-American lobbying groups have responded to the violence by conducting a wide-scale campaign denying that Armenians were systematically massacred in a forced exile from their homeland and contending instead that Christian Armenians massacred Muslim Turks during a civil war.

The issue of genocide arouses extreme passion by all Armenians. Virtually every Armenian can name a close relative who died in the genocide. But more than that, Armenians say, the genocide lies at the core of their identity because it still lacks a final hearing. It remains a stepchild of history awaiting the legitimacy that can only come through Turkish admission.

Determining how to bring about such a confession is where Armenians part. In Pasadena, where many newcomers regard Sassounian as a hero, the issue is discussed with particular passion.

“What terrorism has done is cloud the real issue of genocide and allowed the Turkish government to avoid meeting it head on,” Tevrizian said, echoing the sentiments of most Armenian-Americans.

“The guy in Des Moines, Iowa, or Omaha, Neb., doesn’t know the nuances of the Armenian question,” he said. “All he knows is that Armenians are terrorists.”

Like many newcomers, Koko Mesrobian, a Syrian-born Armenian who owns La Mediterranee restaurant in Pasadena, rejects the “terrorism” label. “My liberation fighter is your terrorist,” he said. “The Turks have forced us into political violence. It’s the last option.”

Armenians critical of Cole’s April 24 speech said the city director failed to grasp the complexities of the terrorism issue and the passionate politics that have divided Armenians for decades.

Pasadena’s Armenian National Committee, affiliated with the most nationalistic of Armenian political movements, criticizes terrorism in somewhat muted tones, agreeing that the violence has forced Turkey to address the Armenian question.

Because the ANC has built a stronghold in Pasadena and maintains extensive ties to City Hall, elected officials have naturally echoed the ANC’s harder line.

“Rick Cole is like a lot of politicians reaching out to ethnic communities. Too often they say things they think we want to hear,” said one Armenian-American. “I don’t think he did his homework. I don’t think he realizes that a lot of us don’t consider these guys ‘freedom fighters.’ ”

Cole, taking pains to distance himself from the murderers of Turkish diplomats, said he stands by his April 24 speech.

“There is a worldwide Armenian movement to accomplish independence for their homeland,” Cole said. “In that sense, people who fight for their freedom--whether they be Armenians or Zionists before 1949 or oppressed blacks in South Africa--have a right to resort to arms to achieve independence for their people.”

“But I never meant to imply that Armenians who blow up buildings or murder diplomats are freedom fighters.”

It was Cole who late last year conceived the idea of amending the city’s affirmative action ordinance to include Armenians. When the city rejected--for no stated reason--a towing contract bid from an Armenian businessman, Cole introduced a resolution asking the city’s Human Relations Committee to examine whether Armenians should be designated as an official minority.

The Human Relations Committee, whose members included Bill Paparian, came back with a recommendation that Armenians warranted the special status. The Board of City Directors then unanimously approved the measure.

“We’re not looking for a handout. We’re trying to accelerate the natural process of Armenians integrating into the larger community,” Paparian said. “If Armenians are 10% of the city’s population, that figure should be reflected in the Fire Department and Police Department. Right now, there are only three Armenians on the city payroll.”

Because so many immigrants from Beirut have arrived in such a short time and cannot speak English, Pasadena has had trouble absorbing some of these newcomers in a tight job market.

While Armenian merchants who have opened shops and stores along Pasadena’s Washington Boulevard are prospering, their businesses are too small to employ fellow immigrants from Beirut who have come upon hard times. Paparian said the ordinance could mean dozens of new jobs and opportunities for those left behind.

One such immigrant, Hagop, a 32-year-old industrial mechanic who asked that his last name not be used, said he had no choice but to apply for welfare.

“I feel very bad to go on welfare, but I need money to pay the rent. What else can I do?” said Hagop, who lives with his wife and two children in a small apartment in a poor neighborhood.

“I am not an old man. I am not a sick man. I have a car, a green card. I can speak English. I went to the Caterpillar company. They say, ‘Do you have 15 years’ experience?’ I say, ‘No.’ They say, ‘Sorry.’ I go for a plumbing job. They say, ‘Do you have a license?’ I say, ‘No.’ They say, ‘Sorry.’

“We come from the war. Now I am in another war.”

Despite acknowledging that many Pasadena Armenians such as Hagop cannot find permanent jobs, critics of the affirmative action ordinance regard it as a dangerous precedent. They say the new law suggests a willingness to depend on government, something regarded as an anathema to their culture.

“We’ve always been industrious enough not to need a crutch,” said Bob Nigsarian, a former Pasadena City police officer and acting commissioner for the city’s Parks and Recreation Department. “Armenians are hard-working, enterprising people. We’ve never needed that help in the past and it bothers me that we need it now.”

Beyond its economic implications, Paparian views the ordinance as a positive force against the tendency by recent arrivals to band together and form ethnic enclaves apart from and ignorant of the larger community. He is bothered by signs of an incipient “Armenian ghetto.”

But even Paparian concedes that it will take more than the ordinance to make the newcomers part of the larger community. He is aware that many of them regard America with a certain wariness, believing it to be the only country in the world that can fully absorb the Armenian culture and language.

These same newcomers argue that longtime Armenian-Americans have adopted American culture as their own, forgetting what it is like to be an Armenian. They promise to avoid a similar fate by sending their children to Armenian schools, even if it means a generation of youth acquiring English as a second or third language.

“We’re trying to convince them that becoming American citizens and learning English will not detract from the Armenian culture,” said Shahe Jierian, a Hollywood travel agent who oversees citizenship classes at the Pasadena Armenian Center. “It doesn’t necessarily have to be the first step to complete assimilation.”

But persuasion is often ineffective when the choice to remain apart is a conscious one, motivated not only by fear of being absorbed but by the belief that to accept the United States as a permanent home would be a betrayal of the dream of an Armenian nation.

Hovig Saliba, who heads the Armenian citizenship drive in Pasadena, has decided against petitioning for citizenship even though he has lived in Pasadena eight years and his 10-month-old son, who was born here, is an American citizen.

“I live in this world as a person who has been denied my first choice in life: to be a citizen of Armenia,” Saliba said. “If Armenia was free and independent, I would return there tomorrow, and then I could make a choice where I wanted to spend my life, in the United States or Armenia. I’m not sure which one I would choose. But I want to have that choice.”

Thursday: The Merchants of Washington Boulevard.