Latinos Look Beyond Vote in Watsonville : Elections: Hoped-for gains did not come about, but civil rights workers see progress toward more political power.

After a four-year, $2-million court battle, Latinos may have failed to increase their voice on Watsonville’s City Council, but the activists who gave them the opportunity to do so were not discouraged Wednesday.

Although the lone Latino incumbent was ousted as a new Latino was elected, Tuesday’s much-anticipated, earthquake-delayed municipal election--in which candidates were selected from districts rather than at-large--was still hailed by civil rights workers as a watershed in California politics.

“I don’t see momentum being lost,” said Arnold Torres, a Sacramento-based political adviser for the League of United Latin American Citizens. “The intent was to have a political presence (in Watsonville) when historically that presence was never there.”

Joaquin G. Avila, the Fremont civil rights lawyer who argued successfully before the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in favor of district elections in this Salinas Valley farm town of about 30,000, said he was disappointed by the failure of three of four Latino candidates to win seats on the seven-member council.

“But,” Avila added, “I think that the election itself had a very positive effect on future Latino political involvement.

“What we’re looking for is the long-term picture,” he continued, “and I think that will show more participation by the Latino community. It might not have occurred in this election, but I think it will in the future.”

Indeed, the momentum created by the federal court suit that revamped city elections in Watsonville is likely to have further impact today. Trustees of the San Jose Unified School District are scheduled to vote today on a proposal by Avila and the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund to initiate district elections for board members.

The neighboring San Jose-Evergreen Community College District already has agreed to a December, 1990, referendum asking voters to approve district elections for that agency’s board.

Meanwhile, Avila said that he and MALDEF, together with the Southwest Voters Registration Project and two Bay Area civil-rights law firms, already are studying 50 other jurisdictions in California to see if there is evidence of unequal representation due to at-large elections.

He mentioned the cities of Fillmore in Ventura County and Gilroy in Santa Clara County, and alluded to other jurisdictions in Tulare and Kern counties. Legislation still is pending on a case involving the City of Pomona, and other voting right activists have said that Santa Maria in Santa Barbara County and other Central Coast and Central Valley farm towns are being scrutinized.

Avila said that eventually perhaps as many as 20 cities and school boards could be sued over their continued use of at-large elections. Such elections, in certain cases, have been found to discriminate against minority voters by diluting their political power. In Watsonville, where about half of the residents are Latino, the city did not have a Latino council member until 1987, after the lawsuit was filed.

Most cities in the state adopted at-large elections as a reform move to end corrupt ward politics that once tended to pit neighborhood special interests against one another.

An analysis of semiofficial vote totals from Watsonville’s landmark city election--which established a legal precedent that will be the basis of future challenges to the election policies of dozens of other cities and school boards in California--indicates that the new district elections gave Latinos the opportunity to increase their voice on the city council, but they did not opt to do so.

In the two districts with majorities of Hispanic voters, a Latino candidate won when turnout was above average and lost when turnout was below average.

City Clerk Lorraine Washington said that 45% of all of Watsonville’s 10,300 registered voters went to the polls on Tuesday, a good showing for most local elections in California but slightly below what she said is the historical 50% turnout for mayoral elections in Watsonville.

The difference led many activists to blame farm worker Cruz Gomez’s loss on the earthquake, which not only delayed the election a month, but also left an estimated 1,500 people homeless. Many, perhaps most, of those people lived in the district that Gomez sought; several hundred still live in tents in city parks.

“People are not in tune with the election,” Washington said. “They’re worried more about where to live, where to eat. There has not been a lot of campaigning. We even set up a polling booth at a Red Cross shelter and hardly anyone’s voting there.”