COLUMN ONE : 2 States of Progress for Latinos : For minorities in politics, Texas and California are worlds apart. Demographic patterns are part of the explanation.

Slim and cerebral, Texas state Rep. Dan Morales could have passed for another dressed-for-success comer on a partnership track in a downtown law firm as he addressed a group of young lawyers here recently.

But the 34-year-old Morales is on a different track, one that has him pointed toward Texas’ top legal job. As a legislator representing a poor and largely Latino district of San Antonio, Morales this spring won the Democratic nomination for attorney general, an office that launched gubernatorial bids for its last two occupants.

No Latino has held such an influential elected position either in Texas or California, the two states with the largest Latino communities. In Texas, at least, Morales’ trail-blazing candidacy is widely viewed as evolutionary, not revolutionary.

Over the past two decades, Latinos here have steadily progressed from the fringe toward the center of political life, entrenching themselves in local government offices from school boards to legislative offices.

“At least from my part of the state,” said Morales, “we sort of grew up having commissioners named Garza and mayors named Cisneros and district judges with Hispanic surnames.”

That has not yet become the routine in California. Latinos are roughly one-fourth of the population in both states, but political advances have come much more grudgingly in California than in Texas. Since 1973, the number of Latino elected officials in Texas has grown one-third faster than in California.

That gap frames the extent of the task that Latino activists in California face. If Texas suggests the possibilities for Latino gains in California, it also illuminates the obstacles. Many of the political and demographic ingredients that produced success in Texas are, like longhorn cows, scarcer on the Pacific Coast.

Though Latinos, the nation’s fastest-growing major population group, have acquired substantial political power in less populous states such as New Mexico and Colorado, it is in Texas and California that their success largely will be measured.

The two states present a mixed score card. With their dramatic advances since the early 1970s, Latinos hold 6.7% of all elected offices in Texas, according to calculations of the Southwest Voter Research Institute, compared with just 4.7% in California.

The gap is widest in the most influential positions. Texas Latinos hold one more congressional seat than California’s, though Texas has 18 fewer representatives in the House. In Texas, the percentage of countywide elected offices, such as boards of supervisors, controlled by Latinos is almost four times greater than in California. (No Latino, for example, has ever won a seat on the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, though that could change later this year with court-ordered redrawing of district lines).

“We have been unable to crack that mid-level, as they have in Texas,” said Fernando J. Guerra, chairman of Chicano studies at Loyola Marymount University.

Since the early 1970s, the number of Latinos in the Texas Legislature has nearly doubled. Latinos now hold 24 seats in the two chambers--almost 14% of the total--and represent an influential voting block, especially on education and social programs.

In California, however, the number of Latino state legislators has been stuck at seven since the mid-1970s. Today, just three Latinos serve in its state Senate and four are in the Assembly--a slim 6% of the total.

More Opportunities

In recent times, opportunities for statewide office also have been greater in Texas. Four years ago, a Republican Latino judge ran a strong race against then Atty. Gen. Jim Mattox, although he lost. Until former San Antonio Mayor Henry G. Cisneros, a moderate with an incandescent presence and a strong appeal to business, admitted having an extramarital affair, the only question was whether Cisneros would seek the Democrats’ nomination for governor or for senator.

Morales, with Cisneros’ active support, filled the vacuum with an aggressiveness that belies his mild appearance.

After a decisive primary victory against John Odam, a Houston attorney close to former Gov. Mark White, Morales now leads Republican state Sen. J. E. (Buster) Brown in the early general election polls. Unless November produces a strong Republican tide, most analysts here agree that Brown will be swimming upstream.

In California, no Latino has been nominated to run for a statewide constitutional office since 1958, according to Guerra’s research. Some Latinos are mentioned as potential statewide candidates in California, but none are on the November ballot or in a commanding position to compete for a major statewide post in the near term.

“It will happen,” Los Angeles City Councilman Richard Alatorre insisted. “It will not happen because of the parties; it’s going to happen because of the community. We’ve been conditioned to fail. We have to be conditioned to succeed.”

Tale of 2 States

What explains the differences between the two states?

Some analysts say that Texas Latinos have had more incentive to organize than Californians because racial prejudice historically was more severe in Texas, land of the patron and the whites-only primary election.

“Mexicans went to California from Texas because things were better,” said Rodolfo O. de La Garza, director for the Center for Mexican American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.

It may be that racial prejudice coiled more tightly around Texas than California, but most California Latino activists reject the notion that social conditions in the latter were idyllic enough to pacify potential activism.

“The myth that California was nowhere near as harsh as Texas is just that--a myth,” said Richard P. Fajardo, an attorney with the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF) in Los Angeles.

Other factors seem more telling. Most experts point to the implacable rhythms of demography and the calculated jostle of partisan politics.

With California functioning as the nation’s premier port of entry, almost half the growth of its Latino community in recent years has come from legal and illegal immigrants, according to a recent Census Bureau study.

In Texas, whose flickering economic performance has not provided nearly as powerful a beacon for immigrants, births account for twice as much of the recent Latino growth as immigration. Thus, a far greater proportion of Latinos in Texas are eligible to vote. In Texas, more than 80% of all adult Latinos are U.S. citizens, compared to just over 60% in California. Latinos now constitute about 11% of the electorate in a typical Texas election, compared to about 7% or 8% in California.

It is extremely difficult for political organizers in California to sift through the Latino population and identify those eligible to register and vote. The Southwest Voter Registration Education Project, the principal organization registering Latinos, has led effective registration drives in Texas since the mid-1970s. After several years of effort, it still has not significantly affected California politics.

The different demographic patterns of the two communities shape their political involvement in more subtle ways, too. Many experts believe that Texas Latinos, relatively more of whom were born in the communities where they live, have a greater sense of connection with local politics and society than the mobile, fluid and more ethnically diverse Latino community of Southern California.

“In Texas, the Hispanic community is more like (blacks in) the South, in that people have been here a little while,” said Austin-based Ernesto Cortes, Southwest regional supervisor for the Industrial Areas Foundation, which organizes neighborhood advocacy groups. “Here you have all kinds of networks--families that have been in their churches for three generations.”

High Expectations

With such stability come rising political and social expectations, a force whose full effect is not felt for generations but is as powerful as any in American life.

Morales’ own story illustrates the point. No one in his family had been politically active before he first ran for and won a seat in the Texas House in 1984. But his achievements stand on a platform of steady upward mobility.

Though two of his grandparents were born in Mexico, both of his parents were born in Texas. His mother, Felicia, growing up as the daughter of a Methodist minister, lived mostly in poor South Texas communities where English was the acquired language; his father, Henry, the son of a laborer, attended segregated elementary schools in small Texas towns.

Both parents attended college, his father on the GI bill, and in the mid-1950s they settled in San Antonio, where Henry Morales began a career as a teacher and school administrator. As he ascended into each new job through the 1960s, Henry Morales was often the first Latino to reach his level, and he never escaped the prickly awareness of being an outsider.

“I felt I had to put out 150% or 200%,” he recalled recently. “That was how you were accepted.”

Dan Morales, the oldest of their three sons, grew up free from that feeling of precariousness. Living in an integrated neighborhood and speaking English at home, he never contained his expectations because of his race.

“Dan is different from me because he grew up completely free,” his father said softly. “He never felt discrimination. He always felt a belongingness that I had to earn.”

That liberating sense of belonging, hard won through the generations, helped to propel Dan Morales through Trinity University in San Antonio, law school at Harvard and a short stint as a prosecutor in the Bexar County (San Antonio) district attorney’s office.

It was equally evident in his rapid rise in the state Legislature, where he cut an independent course, quickly won the chairmanship of the powerful Criminal Jurisprudence Committee and assumed more moderate positions on many issues than most of his Latino colleagues, earning criticism from some of them in the process.

Morales knows how to punch the buttons of ethnic pride, yet it is his lack of either ethnic or ideological consciousness that is most striking about him--and revealing of the assumptions instilled in him by the gains of his parents. Morales has the confidence in his appeal to whites to focus more of his message on a convergence of minority and majority interests than on the conflicts.

Common Interests

“Public education is the primary issue for Hispanics; likewise for our state,” he said briskly. “Criminal justice probably comes in a close second for Hispanics; likewise for our state. I don’t see any inconsistency in the way a legislator would be called upon to represent a Hispanic community versus the way a legislator would represent a black or Anglo community.”

That may be so, but few Latinos have had the chance to prove it. Most Latino legislators in Texas still have Latino-majority constituencies. That’s also true in California, but assembling those majorities into districts is substantially easier in Texas--another reason Latino political gains there have outpaced those of their counterparts in California.

The Latino population of Texas is significantly more concentrated into discrete areas--primarily South Texas--than the Latino population in California, which has scattered from East Los Angeles and other enclaves into new suburbs like filings rearranged by a hidden magnet.

Simultaneously, the concentration of Latino settlement has facilitated efforts in Texas to eliminate local, at-large elections that tend to leave minority candidates at a disadvantage. Using the Voting Rights Act, Latino activists in Texas have won decisions compelling dozens of jurisdictions to switch from elections in which officeholders are selected at large, where the majority population can control who wins all seats, to geographically defined districts that more accurately reflect minority concentrations.

In communities where Texas Latinos have won such suits, their representation has dramatically increased, often by three times or more.

In California, fewer than 10 such suits have been filed and those have had mixed success, according to Fajardo of MALDEF. Without judicial orders for change, the vast majority of local contests in California still are at-large elections.

Even where California Latinos have won such litigation, as in Watsonville last year, they have had difficulty translating their legal gains into electoral ones.

Latino population patterns also shape the decennial redistricting of legislative seats. Most analysts agree that the diffusion of Latinos in California, and the relatively small number of eligible voters on a typical block, has made it more difficult to draw congressional and state legislative districts that Latinos can win.

The problem is greatly complicated by the sheer size of legislative seats in California. Each California state senator represents about 750,000 people, more than 14 U.S. senators. In those massive districts even substantial minority populations are overwhelmed, like flecks of color in a bucket of whitewash. Only three of the 40 state Senate districts are as much as 40% Latino.

California Latinos worked loyally with the Democratic majority in the last redistricting, but got little to show for it because of the legislative leadership’s overwhelming priority on protecting incumbents, said Alan Heslop, a professor of government at Claremont McKenna College.

During the last California redistricting, Latinos picked up two congressional seats because the state’s overall delegation was increased; but in the zero-sum maneuvering of legislative redistricting, Latinos did not gain any additional seat even though Richard Alatorre then chaired the key Assembly committee.

In the last Texas redistricting, Latinos filed suit against the plans crafted by the Democratic majority and eventually gained four seats in the Legislature.

For 1991, Latino activists have launched an unprecedented effort to influence redistricting in six states across the Southwest. Having concentrated its legal resources on Texas last time, “our primary goal in 1990 is California,” said Jose Garza, MALDEF’s national voting project director.

Still no one is very optimistic about Latino prospects in the California redistricting.

If the state gains enough new congressional seats, one additional spot for a Latino may be carved out. But unless a flock of incumbents suddenly migrates to other careers, redistricting experts say it will be difficult for Latinos to pick up even one or two seats in either chamber.

With the pressure of incumbency limiting the options, the likelihood is that in California the already enormous gap between the Latino share of the population and their representation in the Legislature will widen further.

“We have a very bad situation here,” said political scientist Heslop. “Demographic change has been accelerating for the past decade and the representative institutions have wholly failed to keep pace with that change.”

Though that gap remains substantial in Texas, too, the outlook may be brighter. With rapid population growth in parts of South Texas, new Latino seats are likely in the next redistricting.

Meanwhile, if Morales can maintain his early lead, he can raise the sights of an entire generation of ambitious Latino politicians. One is Christine Hernandez, a San Antonio school board member who, this spring, won the nomination to succeed Morales in the Legislature.

“Once you have someone open that door,” Hernandez said, “it will inspire other people to follow.”