Accusations of Bigotry, Racism Tear Monterey Park

The next municipal election here is nearly five months away, but the campaign is already charged with accusations of racism, bigotry and hatred.

“I don’t know if I want to live in a community with this much hate,” said Councilman David Almada after listening to more than three hours of emotional argument Tuesday night over an issue that is headed for a vote at the April 8 election. The controversy surrounds efforts to declare English the official language of the city, a measure that Almada and three of the other four council members oppose as a slap at Asian and Latino immigrants.

“Racist,” “bigot” and “scumbag” were some of the epithets shouted from the audience at Tuesday’s council meeting as people on both sides of the English-language issue traded insults. Mayor Rudy Peralta several times threatened to stop the meeting and clear the council chamber of the 200 spectators.

“It was the most difficult meeting I’ve ever had,” Peralta said afterward. “It pushed me right to the brink.”

The mayor said he thought that some members of the audience were trying to provoke an incident, the mayor said. “I think they wanted to have someone thrown out or arrested.”

Central Issue

Peralta said he expects the English-language proposal to be a central issue when he and two other council incumbents seek reelection in April. Both Peralta and Councilwoman Lily Lee Chen said they will seek new four-year terms and Almada said he too will probably run. One of their opponents probably will be Frank J. Arcuri, a leader of the English-language initiative campaign. Others behind the initiative are also talking about running, Arcuri said.

The incumbents have accused Arcuri of using the initiative to advance himself politically. Arcuri’s response is that the council is desperate.

“They’re fighting for their political lives,” Arcuri said. “They’re the ones who are introducing feelings of racism and bigotry.”

At Tuesday’s council meeting, Arcuri and Barry Hatch filed petitions with the city clerk calling for a ballot measure in the April election that would declare English the official language of Monterey Park. The initiative will qualify for the April 8 ballot if 2,266 of the nearly 3,500 signers are verified as registered voters in Monterey Park.

The council could have voted to adopt the measure without putting it on the ballot. Instead, the council voted 4 to 1 to put an opposing measure on the ballot saying that making English the official language would lead to violations of constitutional rights.

Arcuri said the fact that the council voted to put the English-language issue on the ballot in the form of a statement of opposition to his proposal indicates that council members want the issue there so they can claim to be fighting racism and bigotry.

All three council members up for reelection voted for the measure opposing Arcuri’s proposed initiative. Councilman G. Monty Manibog voted for the measure and Cam Briglio was against.

Francis Hong, a member of the city’s Community Relations/Neighborhood Improvement Commission, said he regards the English-language initiative as a “direct attack on the new immigrants, especially the Asians.” He told the council that the issue is going to produce a long, bitter campaign. “The battle is just beginning,” he said. “It will be a painful, nasty process.”

Arcuri denied that the initiative is racially motivated, but in his speech to the council he railed against the changes that have occurred in Monterey Park with the arrival of Asian immigrants and the proliferation of Chinese signs on businesses. He said Monterey Park has become “the new West Coast Chinatown” and accused the council members of being the “puppets” of developers in allowing businesses to post signs predominantly in Chinese.

In response, council members accused initiative leaders of encouraging bigotry.

“I am not going to say that the 3,500 people who signed the petition (for the English-language initiative) are racists, bigots and so on,” Almada said. “I don’t believe that. However, I cannot say this all across the board on the leadership.”

Almada called the initiative leaders “extremists” and said they are willing to divide the community to seize control of the council.

The only council supporter of the English-language initiative is Briglio, whose term does not expire until 1988. Briglio said it is not Arcuri and his allies who are exploiting the English-language issue for political gain, but the council majority.

“We’ve got a few idiots up there (on the council) who want to make this a political issue, so it’s going to become a political issue,” he said. Briglio said that he sees no harm in declaring English the official language of the city and that the council could have diffused the issue quietly, but chose instead to heighten the controversy.

The proposed initiative says: “English is the language that we use in Monterey Park when we want everyone to understand our ideas. This is what unites us as Americans, even though some of our citizens speak other languages. Let us make English our official language as a symbol of this unity.”

The rival measure, which the council instructed the city attorney to prepare for the April ballot, was proposed by the Coalition for Harmony in Monterey Park and says that making English the official language “would lead to violations of our constitutional rights.”

Michael Eng, one of the coalition leaders, said that declaring English the official language could infringe on free speech and pit “immigrant against citizen and race against race.”

Briglio said it was unfair for the council to use its power to put the rival measure on the ballot without requiring its supporters to gather signatures. But Eng said there was not enough time to collect signatures before the deadline for placing issues on the April ballot, and that putting both measures on the same ballot will give voters a choice. Even though the two measures are contradictory, there is a chance that both could pass, in which case the one with the highest number of votes would prevail.

Neither measure would compel the city to do anything. But Arcuri said that by declaring English the official language, voters would be telling the City Council that they should curb the use of foreign languages in business signs and telling immigrants that it is important to learn English.

Councilwoman Chen said the initiative is based on an incorrect assumption--”that people aren’t willing to learn English.” In reality, she said, most immigrants are anxious to learn English.

“I think Mr. Arcuri is stirring up problems unnecessarily,” she said. “He’s making an issue out of a non-issue.”

But, she said, the initiative campaign shows that there are serious human relations problems in the city.

Councilman Almada said: “We have a feeling of alienation in our community and we have to find out what it is and what we can do about it.”

Almada said some of the concern stems from the signs on Asian-owned businesses. He said 90% of the signs are in both Chinese and English, but people still complain about foreign-language signs.

The council attempted to deal with the issue earlier this year by adopting an ordinance requiring businesses to use the Roman alphabet and Arabic numerals to either post their street address or state their trade name. The ordinance does not limit the use of Chinese characters or any other language.

Almada said he believes that the ordinance should be strengthened because merely posting the address does not overcome the objections to foreign-language signs. City Atty. Richard Morillo said he wrote the ordinance to avoid infringement on the right of free speech. Any ordinance that seeks to dictate the message in a business sign could run into constitutional problems, Morillo said, but he is drafting a number of alternatives for the council to consider at its next meeting, Nov. 25.