Latinos Are Fighting for Community, Not Just for Property Values : Prison: A tradition of collective action infuses the fight to block construction of the state’s downtown facility.

The tenacity of the Mothers of East Los Angeles and the Coalition Against the Prison has surprised many politicos. The groups, along with city officials, have filed a suit challenging last November’s certification of a “partial” environmental impact report that cleared the way for construction of a state prison in downtown Los Angeles, within blocks of Eastside residential neighborhoods.

What the political leaders fail to understand is that the Latinos are fighting for more than property values in opposing what would be the sixth prison on the Eastside. They are primarily struggling to preserve an endangered species--their community.

For Latinos, this is nothing new. Since before the turn of the century, they have formed mutualistas. These mutual-aid societies aim to protect Latinos from the dehumanization inherent in industrialization. Essential to them is a collective feeling of sharing, of caring, of providing for the common defense. It is this tradition that infuses the campaigns of the Mothers of East Los Angeles and Coalition members. Besides the prison, the mothers have fought a gas pipeline on the Eastside, the City of Vernon’s planned toxic-waste incinerator and expansion of the County Central Jail.

For those who live outside East Los Angeles, it must be difficult to understand why anyone would fight so hard and for so long--in the case of the prison, five years--for what the media portray as a gang-infested and economically blighted area mostly populated by “illegal aliens.” The five jails already on the Eastside house 75% of the county’s inmates. Within two miles of the proposed prison are 27 public and seven parochial schools.

For a while, the Eastside activists looked as if they would block the prison legislation. Then, both Democrats and Republicans betrayed the community’s wishes when they passed a “pain for pain” law. By proposing that another new prison be built in largely white, Republican Lancaster, the politicians hoped to undermine the Latinos’ contention that they were being unfairly discriminated against. This exchange of “pain” was transparently lopsided.

It is customary that an environmental impact report be conducted before a site is approved for a government purpose. Although a full report was required in Lancaster, only a “partial” was approved for the L.A. site. (At one time, the requirement for an environmental report was waived altogether.) But even before that study got under way, the land had been bought by the state Department of Corrections.

Also, the Eastside did not receive equal protection under the State Environmental Quality Act. The environmental report on the proposed prison is not required, as the law otherwise stipulates, to explore alternative uses for the state-owned land or to investigate other sites for the facility.

Finally, environmental impact reports are, by law, conducted by the affected municipality. The “pain for pain” law, however, turns the task over to the state, thus giving it the power to certify itself. This is crucial. Eastsiders contend that the prison site is riddled with toxics at a depth of 120 feet. The state Department of Health Services investigated the claim, stopping at 62 feet. The burden of proof for the other 58 feet falls to the community, at a cost of at least $100,000.

So why does the Eastside continue to fight? It’s more than simple moral outrage, though there’s plenty of that. Rather, it’s the sense that their right to live in dignity has been betrayed by government. That feeling galvanized people like Juana and Ricardo Gutierrez, the parents of nine children, and Erlinda Robles, who has lived all her 60 years within sight of the land on which the prison would be built. Sympathy for that feeling led Father John Moretta of Resurrection parish, planner Frank Villalobos and then-Assemblywoman Gloria Molina and her successor Lucille Roybal-Allard to take up the cause.

In their struggle, Eastsiders have learned that institutional racism, left unchallenged, will condone the dumping of unpopular facilities in poorer neighborhoods. They have learned that a neighborhood is not the basis of a community if no one fights for it. Most important, they have learned that organization and political sophistication are indispensable to providing for the common defense of the community.