NEW CULTURAL FOUNDATION : ETHNIC COUNCILS QUIT BOWERS FOR IRVINE

Six years ago, the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana set up the first of its much-heralded ethnic community councils. Today, the number of councils has dwindled from 6 to 1, and leaders of several of the original Bowers ethnic groups have switched their allegiances to a new organization based in Irvine.

Far from fighting the switch, Bowers has all but conceded the territory to the new group, the Historical & Cultural Foundation of Orange County.

The Bowers program, some ethnic organizers argued, became a casualty of bureaucratic infighting between the city-run museum administration and the volunteer corps over the museum’s expansion and fund-raising plans.

“We got lost in the shuffle. It got so that we didn’t know where we stood. We felt that some city people thought of us as window dressing, to bring out only when they needed us for show,” said one former Bowers council organizer who asked not to be named.

After a sweeping City Council-ordered reorganization of the museum and its volunteer organization in 1985, the exodus to the new group began, led by the Japanese-American and Chinese-American councils.

Today, only the Mexican-American council is still operating at the museum, while the new foundation also has councils representing Native Indian/Alaskan, Vietnamese and Judaica groups. Three other groups are in the formation stages: black, Asian Indian and the Consejo Latinamericana.

Although the 2-year-old foundation has yet to raise large corporate donations and is only now applying for state and federal grants, backers say the foundation is emerging as the county’s most important--and organizationally stable--program for promoting ethnic cultures.

“In no way do we see our foundation as competing with other multicultural programs, such as with Bowers Museum,” said Elizabeth Tierney, foundation board president. “We see ourselves as much broader and more cross-cultural in approach and achieving greater coordination among the various councils.”

Linda Lau, the volunteer leader most credited with starting the councils program at Bowers in 1981, is a key organizer of the new foundation and considered the driving force in recruiting the new ethnic groups.

But Lau and other former leaders of the Bowers councils deny that they “defected” from Bowers. It was, they argued, simply a case of seeing the handwriting on the wall. “At Bowers, there was no money, no staff for our program,” Lau said. “We had no choice but to leave. Everything (at Bowers) was in disarray.”

When the Bowers Museum Foundation, the museum’s volunteer organization, began the ethnic program in 1981, the organizers’ stated goal was to rectify omissions in the standard history books. Missing, they said, were descriptions of the roles of Mexicans, Asians, blacks and other minorities in the county’s agricultural, business and social development.

By 1984, some councils, especially the Japanese-American group, had undertaken tape-interview “oral histories” of pioneer survivors and their families in connection with scholars from Cal State Fullerton, Cal State Long Beach and UC Irvine. All councils were offering various cultural series, such as lectures, concerts, films, historical exhibits and crafts festivals.

The dissension over the councils came to a head in early 1985, when the City Council created its own Charles W. Bowers Museum Corporation to operate the museum and assume fund-raising and all other functions of the Bowers Museum Foundation. The 38-year-old museum foundation disbanded.

Until last year, when the city embarked on a plan to construct an $8.8-million annex to Bowers and to revamp the museum’s staffing and fund-raising, some of the other ethnic councils, including the black and American Indian groups, were still operating at Bowers.

“We thought things could be worked out in the new (museum) setup. But no one told us anything. We didn’t have a sense of any continuity, any real belonging, so we, too, disbanded,” said Fran Williams, former president of Bowers’ black council, who is forming a new black group under the Historical & Cultural Foundation.

Leaders of Bowers’ original Mexican-American council said they also considered leaving. “But we figured we have achieved an identity (with Bowers) and a certain momentum in programming. We figured we should stay, but keep in close contact with the new (Latino) group,” said Genevieve Barrios Southgate, a council official.

Hector R. Godinez, chairman of the Bowers Museum board of governors, said the museum has not abandoned the idea of expanding the ethnic council program. “We’re still open to the idea of having more groups again. But right now, frankly, our highest priority is building up our other programs and staff and going ahead with our facilities expansion.”

The Historical & Cultural Foundation is housed in an office donated by the Irvine Co., which also provided a $15,000 grant for operations (the foundation’s1987-88 operating budget is $61,000). The executive director is Virginia Donohugh, an administrator with the Bowers volunteer organization when the ethnic councils were formed in 1981.

The new foundation is sponsoring a traveling mini-exhibit program for public schools devoted to the costumes, music and other arts of various ethnic groups. It also is co-sponsoring the second annual “Imagination Celebration Internationale” concert, featuring Jose Feliciano and Burl Ives, at the Orange County Performing Arts Center on May 10.

The foundation has applied for the first time for grants from two prestigious sources. It is seeking $20,000 from the National Endowment for the Humanities for a proposed Chinese-American art exhibit this fall at the Irvine Fine Arts Center. Also sought is $10,000 from the California Arts Council for underwriting the mini-exhibit and other projects of five councils.