COLUMN ONE : Barriers to Power for Minorities : California is heading toward a nonwhite majority. But electoral victories do not automatically follow population gains.

Sifting through the embers of his defeat, Jim Hsieh tried to make sense of a Cerritos City Council election in which all four nonwhite candidates lost in a town so ethnically diverse it has been described as a microcosm of California in the year 2000.

“I did not think of race as a handicap here. But to be honest, image-wise, the fact that so many Asians were running might have hurt a little bit,” said Hsieh, who is Chinese-American.

Hsieh lost in a place where Asians represent nearly 40% of the population. Latino candidates suffered defeats in nearby Bell Gardens where Latinos make up 75% of the population. Late last year, three Latino candidates suffered the same fate in Watsonville in Northern California despite a court decision there that people thought would pave the way for Latino electoral victories.

By early in the next century, California is expected to be the first state in the nation with a nonwhite majority--more than 30% Latino, 13% Asian and 7% black. The balance has already been tipped in Los Angeles where the 1993 mayoral race could consist of an Asian and two Latinos running for an office held by a black.

“Latinos will control California politics. That is what the battle of the ‘90s will be all about,” said Stuart Spencer, a Republican Party strategist who has advised Ronald Reagan and George Deukmejian.

Yet, California politics in the 1990s may reflect its white past as often as it heralds the future. Electoral setbacks in Cerritos, Bell Gardens, Watsonville and elsewhere in the state should not be taken lightly, analysts warn. As their numbers swell, ethnic groups still face roadblocks to political power. Big gains in population are not automatically followed by a corresponding rise in electoral victories.

Here and there, mostly on city councils and school boards, the complexion of California politics is bound to change over the next decade. The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors is likely to gain a Latino member as a result of a lawsuit challenging the board’s ethnic makeup. The City Council could make room for two more Latinos and one more Asian.

For the most part, however, say the experts, the political reins in California will stay in the hands of whites--giving a shrinking segment of the population a disproportionate share of power.

“The character of the populace and the character of the electorate will draw further apart--the voters increasingly old and white, the people younger and nonwhite,” said Alan Heslop, director of the Rose Institute, a political research center in Claremont.

The barriers to ethnic political power in California are many and varied: discrimination; mistrust of politics by refugees fleeing totalitarian regimes; the apathy of newcomers who are preoccupied with moving up the economic ladder; tension among ethnic groups fighting for jobs and opportunities; the power of incumbent politicians and the prohibitive costs of running for office these days.

The state’s political geography is also a factor. Latino activists believe that their advancement continues to be thwarted by gerrymandered electoral districts that split Latino voting blocs into ineffectual fragments.

At the same time, the tendency of some groups, Asians and, increasingly, blacks, to spread out into the suburbs weakens their ability to marshal their forces behind a particular candidate or issue.

Many Latino leaders believe they will score their most important political victories in the courts where they will continue to mount challenges to legislative districts that dilute Latino voting strength.

Even the threat of a legal action can be helpful, said Richard Alatorre, a Los Angeles city councilman and former state legislator.

“You’ve got to be able to hold something over their heads,” Alatorre said. “You can’t just go to the Assembly and say ‘please be good to Mexicans’ because they don’t give a damn.”

Asians, like Nghia Tran, a legislative aide in the Assembly, believe that deep-seated contempt for politics must be changed before people will participate in greater numbers.

“When I told my parents I was going to pursue a career in politics they told me that I would be poor for the rest of my life and that no one would marry me,” Tran said.

Yet, attitudes are changing. In Arcadia, where Asians make up about 15% of the population, Sheng Chang, a doctor, and his wife decided to take part in civic affairs, joining the PTA and other local groups, because of small imbalances and injustices that rankled them.

Chang said he would like to see more Asian language books and magazines in the local library. But what really got his goat was a bureaucratic decision about the height of a wall.

After allowing a non-Asian to ignore the city’s height limit for residential walls, said Chang, city officials refused to give the same break to an Asian homeowner.

A variety of leaders--Latino, black and Asian--argue that coalition politics offers the best chance for political gain in the ‘90s and many believe that a common concern about economic survival offers the most effective rallying point.

“Ultimately, the success of Hispanics, of Asians, of blacks will be through coalitions,” said Alatorre. “Sure, there are differences, but we don’t have to fall in love with each other in order to work together.”

But by and large, Asian and Latino political experts do not expect to reap a large share of political power in the 1990s.

“We have the numbers, the people, but I don’t see a dramatic shift in political power before the turn of the century,” said Richard Santillan, who directs the department of ethnic and women’s studies at California Polytechnic University at Pomona.

Santillan pointed out that with close to one-quarter of the state’s population, Latinos account for only 6% of state and local elected officials in California.

Two other Southwestern states with substantially smaller Latino populations, Texas and New Mexico, have more Latino elected officials than California, according to the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project, an organization devoted to increasing Latino political influence.

For the time being, at least, blacks have the highest proportional representation among the state’s nonwhite ethnic groups. Seven percent of the state’s population is black as are 11% of the elected officials. However, many political scientists believe that black representation in government may decline as black neighborhoods continue to absorb large numbers of Asian and Latino immigrants.

The slow assimilation of ethnic groups into the state’s political life is unique in American history. Life was very different for the first great wave of immigrants in the 19th Century who came ashore on the East Coast. In New York and Boston, many European immigrants were courted by political bosses ready to hand out jobs, distribute food baskets, find lodging or pay home heating bills in return for political support.

Out of necessity, the newcomer quickly became a political animal. The European immigrants depended on the big-city machines for survival and vice versa. From that mutual dependency grew new constituencies of Irish, Italian, Polish and German voters and a degree of ethnic political clout that has not been equaled in the West.

Machine politics have never flourished in California, and politicians have never relied on the immigrant vote the way they did in the East. Moreover, Chinese-Americans were barred from voting until 1943 and Japanese until 1952. It was not until 1974 that the first Japanese-American, California Democrat Norman Mineta, was elected to Congress from the U.S. mainland.

Today, many experts say that immigrant groups continue to be ignored by political parties.

But with few jobs to pass out or favors to dispense, the parties lack the leverage they enjoyed with 19th-Century immigrants. It is harder to answer the newcomer’s time-honored question: “What’s in if for me if I vote for you?” Party strategists have found that while they can persuade many people to register, they are much less successful in getting them to vote.

Studies over the decade have shown that Asians and Latinos vote at a significantly lower rate than other citizens. A study by political scientists at Caltech found that 11% fewer Asians and 20% fewer Latinos voted in the 1984 presidential election, compared to blacks and whites who voted at virtually the same rate.

Reacting to figures like those, the parties, and especially the Republicans, are focusing their efforts on people most likely to vote--those who already have a stake in the economic system. For Republicans, it can mean targeting middle-class Latino voters in the San Gabriel Valley who have generally conservative views on family values and law and order.

“The Mexican-American we get is the upwardly mobile, someone who appreciates what we have to offer,” said Spencer. “We look at the kind of precinct in the San Fernando Valley or the San Gabriel Valley where you find them living alongside Anglos. You knock on the door and a blonde answers, but she is married to someone named Lopez.”

Aimed at a limited number of Latinos, the strategy that Spencer describes means a lot of immigrants don’t get courted the way they used to. But party strategists, like Spencer, admit they don’t need everybody to win.

“The way the demographics work we don’t need 55% of the Mexican-Americans to win because we have other coalitions to put together with, say, 40% of the Mexican-Americans,” Spencer said.

There is good news for Republicans in the voting habits of Latinos and Asians. It appears that the state’s trend toward conservatism is reflected in the political preferences of many newcomers.

Although Republican registration remains below 10% among Latinos, the tendency to vote for Republican candidates often is much higher. Nearly 50% of Latino voters in California favored Republican George Bush in the 1988 presidential election, said Hernandez of the Southwest Voter Registration Project.

In 1986, 54% voted against then-California Chief Justice Rose Elizabeth Bird, who was tagged a liberal opponent of the death penalty.

“Latinos tend to have a higher incidence of voting for and identifying with Republicans in California than elsewhere in the Southwest,” said Hernandez.

With Asians, the tendency to register Democrat and vote Republican can be even more pronounced. According to the Caltech study, 42% of Asian-Americans were registered Democratic, but 67% of them voted for Republican Ronald Reagan in the 1984 presidential election.

Eschewing party loyalty, registering one way and voting another are signs of alienation from traditional American politics. A large number of Asian voters, in fact, refuse to identify with either party.

Some experts warn that the skepticism some voters feel toward both major parties could hurt them. It could leave them without strong advocates in Sacramento during next year’s legislative redistricting--a process that will largely determine how much political clout ethnic groups will have during the next decade.

Asians could be especially vulnerable in the process since there is not now a single Asian member of the state Legislature.

There are other reasons why redistricting looms like a storm cloud on the political horizon.

Many politicians are worried that the 1990 census, which is off to a rocky start, won’t yield accurate data on ethnic groups in California. If the people doing the redistricting don’t know how large a group is or where its members live, it will be hard to draw districts that maximize ethnic voting strength.

But the greatest threat posed by redistricting is that it will spark hostilities among ethnic groups that need each other.

Los Angeles, where Latinos are moving into inner-city neighborhoods long represented by blacks, could be the site of the state’s most bitter redistricting battle. Several black seats in Congress, in the state Legislature and in the Los Angeles City Council could be subject to change as new Latino residents seek to carve out districts for themselves. Moreover, as strategies are hatched and compromises conceived, neighboring seats, long the domain of the city’s white liberal congressional delegation, could be vulnerable.

“There is an obvious potential for clashes,” said Alatorre. “It’s going to take a delicate balancing act. People could easily get lost fighting over crumbs.”

If the quest for more equitable political representation has been a slow one, there has been progress.

Thirty years ago, there were only two blacks and one Latino and no Asians among the state’s top 300 elected officials. Today, there are 30 blacks, 17 Latinos and six Asians, according to a study by Fernando Guerra, who heads the Chicano studies department at Loyola Marymount University.

The gains, while modest, helped assure that issues such as bilingual education and reparations for Japanese internment victims were part of the political dialogue. The rise of ethnic politicians has also brought new government contracts and business opportunities to their constituents. As a young Latino population reaches adulthood, as hundreds of thousands of immigrants become citizens through the federal amnesty program, as more and more newcomers learn the connection between politics and economic advancement, the state’s emerging nonwhite majority will assert itself.

“Demography is destiny,” said Erie at UC San Diego. “At some point, 20 or 30 years from now, the day of ethnic political reckoning is coming.”

ETHNIC MINORITIES IN STATE OFFICES A study by Fernando Guerra, assistant professor of political science and director of the Chicano Studies Department at Loyola Marymount University, found that blacks have made the largest gains in holding statewide political offices. Although Latinos now make up nearly one-quarter of California’s population, they hold less than 6% of top state offices. And while Asians constitute nearly 10% of the population, their share of state officeholders has actually declined slightly in the last decade.

The study surveyed 288 elected offices, including the top seven constitutional offices in the state; the four members of the State Board of Equalization; the 47 members of Congress and the U.S. Senate from California; the 120 members of the state Legislature; the 35 members of the boards of supervisors of the state’s seven most populous counties, and the 75 mayors and city councils of the seven most populous cities.

Percent of Percent of state Calif. population elected officials 1960 Latinos 9.0 0.4 Asians 2.4 0 Blacks 5.6 0.8 1980 Latinos 19.2 3.6 Asians 6.7 2.8 Blacks 7.6 9.9 1990 Latinos 24.7 5.9 Asians 9.7 2.1 Blacks 7.5 10.8