Latinos Slowly Gaining Ground With City Hall : Oxnard: La Colonia, cut off from the rest of the city by railroad tracks, has become the focal point of a new activism.

La Colonia--a gritty, working-class neighborhood in Oxnard with the city’s highest concentration of Latinos--shares the many typical barrio problems of gangs, drugs and crime.

Residents complain of too few police patrols, poorly maintained roads and no place but the streets for youngsters to spend their afternoons. These problems, they say, are part of a larger issue: the Latino community’s difficulty in getting the attention of Oxnard City Hall.

But that appears to be changing in the neighborhood that needs the most attention. La Colonia, cut off from the rest of the city by railroad tracks, has become the focal point of a new Latino activism that organizers say may ultimately change the complexion of city politics.

Since April, 1989, the number of participants in La Colonia’s neighborhood council has jumped from about 20 to more than 100. “We are struggling but we are coming along little by little,” said Ignacio Carmona, former vice chairman of La Colonia’s neighborhood council.

Proving that there is power in numbers, La Colonia residents have since started to feel that City Hall is paying more attention to their concerns, Carmona said.

For example, he said Police Chief Robert Owens recently met with the council to talk about crime in the neighborhood, and Assemblyman Jack O’Connell lobbied for and won a $450,000 state grant to build a youth gym in La Colonia. The Oxnard Public Works Department recently solved a longtime parking problem that caused congestion in the neighborhood.

“We had issues that needed to be taken care of,” Carmona said. “But I guess it was just the case of the wheel that squeaks the loudest gets the oil.”

There are about 35 active neighborhood councils in Oxnard, said Eleanor Branthoover, chairwoman of the Inter Neighborhood Council Committee. The grass-roots organization is designed to give residents a coordinated way to express their concerns to City Hall.

She said she is impressed by the number of residents who now show up at La Colonia’s neighborhood council meetings. “That’s a really good turnout,” she said.

The city began encouraging Latino activism after La Colonia residents asked the City Council for more representation and better city services. City officials assigned the job of encouraging Latino representation to Karl Lawson, a community relations specialist who worked for the United Farm Workers Union for 11 years before he was hired by the city.

Lawson, who said he learned Spanish on the streets of Oxnard, organized a door-to-door campaign to encourage Latino participation and promoted the neighborhood council in ads in newspapers and on Spanish-language radio stations.

However, Latino advocates and city officials believe Latino representation in Oxnard is still inadequate.

“This is just a first step,” said Marco Antonio Abarca, an attorney for the California Rural League Assistance in Oxnard. “It’s really a modest step if you think about it. But at least it’s a step in the right direction.”

Abarca pointed out that more than half of Oxnard’s population is Latino, yet only one City Council post is occupied by a Latino. Last year, when the council appointed 22 citizens to an economic advisory committee it selected only three Latinos, he said.

“We make a pretense of being a democracy, but democracy means the representation of every person,” he said.

Mayor Nao Takasugi said he sees the growth of La Colonia’s neighborhood council as a good sign, but he agrees that much more needs to be done to establish fair Latino representation in Oxnard.

“We don’t want any part of the city to feel neglected or cut out,” he said.

Takasugi said La Colonia--a neighborhood of mostly older, single-family homes in the northeast section of Oxnard--is physically cut off from the rest of the city by the Southern Pacific Railroad tracks.

Takasugi said he believes the tracks not only form a physical barrier for the residents, but a psychological one as well.

During his last campaign effort, Takasugi talked to many residents in La Colonia who, he said, “feel they have been cut off from the rest of the city.”

For the most part, he said, residents have complained about deteriorating streets, old and leaky pipes and problems with utilities.

Councilman Manuel Lopez, the third Latino elected to the council since the city was incorporated in 1903, said the problem of Latino under-representation is not unique to Oxnard.

“There is a tremendous under-representation in all governments,” he said. “A lot of strides have been made, but not enough.”

He said part of the problem is getting Latinos to believe their voices can make a difference. “I think they feel alienated; they feel there is nothing they can do,” he said.

Lopez attributes the feeling of powerlessness partly to racism. For example, Lopez said, when he ran for the mayor’s seat two years ago, representatives of one of his opponents asked voters if they would be ready to have a “Mexican mayor.”

“People are always looking for reasons not to grant the people their rights,” he said.

Lopez predicts that Latino representation on the City Council will not change significantly until the city is required by a court decision to elect council members by district. Considering recent court decisions involving redistricting in Watsonville and Los Angeles, Lopez said district elections may come sooner than most anticipate.

So far, no such court challenge has been filed.

But last year, a citizens group tried unsuccessfully to gather enough signatures to challenge the city’s at-large election system, which is accused of diluting minority voting strength.

Gilbert G. Breezley, an Oxnard paralegal who had headed the Council District Initiative Committee, said the group gathered about 3,000 signatures, short of the 7,300 needed to put a measure on the ballot that would carve the city into six council districts.

The ballot measure, if approved, would have gradually replaced all of Oxnard’s four council members, who live in the same predominantly white, upscale neighborhood, with six council members from districts of about equal population throughout the city.

Breezley said the signature drive failed partly because of opposition from incumbent council members.

But he has not given up. Breezley is now considering a petition that seeks approval of a 15-member city charter commission, which would be asked to draft new guidelines for city elections.

The guidelines could include district elections as well as the election of a full-time mayor who would act as the city’s top administrator, Breezley said.

He said he and a committee of 40 residents would begin circulating the petition within two months.

“I feel very good about it,” Breezley said.