They Picket to Guard a Principle in the Face of Politics

As picket lines go, it wasn’t much. A couple of guys in shirt and tie, a couple others in casual clothes, a woman in jeans and a T-shirt. Over the course of an hour, their numbers grew from a handful to about 10, walking the line outside the county courthouse.

They carried signs and handed out single-sheet flyers to anyone who would take one. Schoolchildren visiting this seat of government on a field trip took several. The students browsed them and climbed back into the bus, laughing all the while. Lawyers and secretaries and anonymous citizens doing power lunches and making deli runs moved around and through the pickets as if they were invisible.

Any neutral observer would have to say the little exercise in public protest was not so much as putting a dent in anyone’s day.

A few weeks ago, when the pickets began, about 30 people showed up. Now, it’s down to a hard core. Paul Garza, one of the pickets, acknowledged that the group is running out of ideas on how to focus attention on their issue.

“How many new ways can you express outrage?” he asked.

It’s now been two years since Election Day 1988, when the county Republican Party sent uniformed private security guards to polling sites in heavily Latino neighborhoods of the 72nd Assembly district.

They didn’t go to help little old ladies walk up to the voting booth. They were there because the Grand Old Party said it had heard rumors that the Democrats were going to bus illegal Latino voters into the district to steal what everybody figured was going to be a close race.

It was a hardball rumor, the GOP said, requiring a hardball response.

So the Republicans sent out the troops. If any illegal voters showed up, by God, the troops would meet them at the bridge. If any taxpaying citizens who showed up to vote legally felt threatened by the presence of uniformed guards, well, that was their tough luck.

Wouldn’t you know, that’s just what happened.

Oh, the county party apologized. Party Chairman Thomas Fuentes, just to show his heart was in the right place, even said it in Spanish-- lo siento , (I’m sorry) he said.

Curt Pringle, the Republican, won the 72nd Assembly seat. No one could even say for sure that Pringle’s narrow election had been affected by the harassment.

A group of Latino voters filed a civil suit and collected more than $400,000 in a settlement. As for criminal charges, the local D.A.’s office looked into the case and sent its undisclosed findings a few months ago to the U.S. Justice Department, which hasn’t said what, if anything, it plans to do.

If you’re keeping score at home, that means that two years after the incident, the authorities are still investigating to see if anyone broke the law.

It looks like the bad guys are going to get away with this one. You can almost picture Fuentes and his compadres sitting around saying, “Whew. This was a close one. Let’s not try the poll guards idea again.”

Meanwhile, there’s always next Wednesday for Garza and his group. That’s when they’ll walk the picket line one more time before Election Day.

It’s not as though Garza thinks any criminal charges will ever be filed. He’s not picketing for that anymore. It’s mostly a matter of . . . are you ready for this one . . . the principle of the thing .

Garza’s got this ridiculous notion that an overwhelmingly dominant political party like the Republicans in Orange County shouldn’t try to intimidate minority group voters. He keeps reminding himself of how hard it is to register Latinos and convince them that they have a stake in the political system.

He remembers how his grandfather came across the border to Texas from Mexico following the chaos of the Mexican Revolution. And how his father, the first generation of Garzas born in the U.S., was always lukewarm to his son’s interest in politics, which began during Lyndon Johnson’s presidential run in 1964. To Garza’s father, politics wasn’t something to get messed up in.

His son tried to tell him that it was different in the States.

His father’s attitude, he says, “was typical with Hispanics in this country. One is the issue of origin, whether it’s Mexico or Central America or Latin America, where politics is a pretty dangerous business. And pretty dirty. It’s not like politics in this country. But the other part was Texas politics. Hispanics had really been kicked around a lot and intimidated from voting. . . . There’s a long tradition of Hispanics facing some serious problems when they attempted to become politically significant.”

It took Garza a long time to convince his father that politics can be a worthy endeavor. That it isn’t dangerous. Or dirty. Or corrupt.

Indeed.

Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by writing to him at The Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, Calif. 92626, or calling (714) 966-7821.