Winner Brings an Independent Style to Council

During the campaign in the Los Angeles City Council’s new 1st District, Councilman Marvin Braude offered his endorsement to candidate Gloria Molina but first wanted to know how she stood on an important issue to him--oil drilling in Pacific Palisades.

Molina declined to take a position, saying she first wanted to study both sides. “I was impressed by that,” said Braude, who endorsed her anyway.

Such is the independent, sometimes stubborn style--and how it works for her--of Assemblywoman Molina, who won Tuesday’s election.

The councilwoman-elect defied her former boss, powerful Assembly Speaker Willie Brown Jr., in leading a fight against construction of a prison on the city’s Eastside. An outspoken feminist, she went up against a male-dominated Latino political establishment to win election first to the Assembly and then in the council’s new Latino-majority district.

In Tuesday’s election, Molina, 38, defeated a candidate backed by an archrival, Richard Alatorre, whom she joins as the only other Latino--and first Latina--on the 15-member council. She is the fourth woman to join the council.

The five-foot-tall Molina is the oldest of 10 children of a Mexican-American farm-worker couple.

She dreamed of being a fashion designer but had to go work as a legal secretary when her father was injured in an accident.

Raised in Pico Rivera and Montebello, she first became politically active as a student at Rio Hondo Community College, where she counseled girls who were members of tough street gangs, and she later helped organize a Los Angeles Latino women’s rights group.

She went to work as an aide to state Sen. Art Torres (D-Los Angeles) when he was an assemblyman, and then joined President Jimmy Carter’s Administration as deputy director in San Francisco for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Then she joined Brown’s speakership staff, serving as his top Southern California deputy before launching her Assembly campaign. A Democrat, she was reelected to her third term in November.

Molina was married last year to Ron Martinez, a Northrop Corp. manager.

She decided to run for the council after becoming, by her own admission, frustrated by a long list of failed bills in Sacramento--defeats her critics say were brought about by her own stubborn refusal to cut deals with other lawmakers. She replied that it showed she had principles.

She decided to abandon the 80-member Assembly in the hope of meeting with more success in the 15-member City Council.

Like Alatorre, also a former assemblyman, Molina is an ambitious politician who hopes to use the council, which offers more visibility than the Legislature, to run for the congressional seat held by her mentor, Rep. Edward R. Roybal (D-Los Angeles), when he retires.

Those who know Molina expect her to be the same kind of council member as she was an assemblywoman: outspoken, willing to tackle controversial issues and independent--qualities that were apparent in her victory statements. “I think Richard Alatorre was looking forward to having two votes on the council,” she said at a press conference Wednesday. “Now he’ll have his own.

“I look forward to being the kind of vote on the City Council that will be independent and listen to the needs of this community.”

City Hall insiders expect her to reflect a different political style than the other three women on the council, who tend to avoid controversy and confrontation.

“I think Gloria says what she thinks needs to be said and lets the chips fall where they may,” said Carol Schatz, co-chair of the Los Angeles Women’s Campaign Fund, a political action committee that helps elect women candidates.

“I think there are a lot of people elected to office who choose to take a sort of softer, more negotiable approach to the issues. But I think we need someone like Gloria to shake things up a bit.”

Molina, who has not decided when she will formally resign from the Assembly, showed, however, that she is not always above compromise.

Under the council’s alphabetical seating arrangement, she will be seated next to Councilman Gilbert W. Lindsay, an admitted “male chauvinist” who, when addressing one of the council’s woman members, often says, “honey.”

Asked about this Wednesday, Molina, an avowed feminist, said, “Oh, Gil Lindsay is Gil Lindsay. I’ve always gotten along with him. That’s just his style.”