Latinos Changing the Face of the County : Census: The minority group now makes up more than a quarter of the population, a shift that is reshaping education, politics and commerce.

The strong wave of Latino immigration reported by the Census Bureau last week confirms that Ventura County has again become a major port of entry for poor laborers seeking a better life.

The new figures show that the county’s Latino population surged by nearly 64,000, or 56.6%, during the last decade--more than double the county’s rate of growth overall.

And Oxnard, Santa Paula and Fillmore--havens for past generations of workers from Mexico--are again filled with young men from rural Mexican villages. All three cities now have Latino majorities.

“Oxnard is really a starting-off place, and it has all the problems and good things that come with beginning a new life in the United States,” said Marco Antonio Abarca, a lawyer for farm workers. “This is our version of the immigrant story.”

The new census shows an acceleration of the historical trend of Latino migration to Ventura County, where some families trace back 150 years and where thousands arrived after the first and second world wars.

By 1970, 74,000 Latinos were here. The census counted about 113,000 in 1980, then 177,000 last year. Latinos, always the county’s largest minority group, now account for one of every four residents.

Indeed, as fast-growing Ventura County continued a steady shift from white and rural to racially mixed and urban, the number of Latinos in all 10 cities increased sharply in the 1980s.

Public officials and Latino leaders say the new census only confirms the obvious: that immigration of young Spanish-speaking workers and their families is dramatically changing Ventura County.

That change can be seen not only in the county’s barrios but in its changing political picture, not only in its crowded farm-worker apartments but in auditoriums where Latino arts are flourishing.

Change came first and most strongly in the county’s schools.

The majority of students in several districts now are Latino, because of the immigration of larger Mexican families and a decline in white births. As a result, recruitment of bilingual teachers is a top priority countywide.

And officials at school districts in Santa Paula and Oxnard say they are seeing limited “white flight” as parents enroll their children in private schools or transfer them to other districts. The parents fear that their children will get too little attention as teachers concentrate on the needs of non-English-speaking students, educators say.

Some cities have also experienced a housing crunch.

In Oxnard, which gained 30,000 Latino residents in the decade, officials say that hundreds of garages, apartments and small houses are jammed with residents trying to stretch small paychecks by living together, sometimes sleeping in shifts.

“It’s a change for the worse,” said Dorina Zamudio, who owns a house in Rose Park adjacent to La Colonia, the county’s largest barrio. “A lot of people live in garages. I believe they cannot afford the rent.”

Health and welfare services are also increasingly taxed: in January 33% of public-assistance cases involved people who spoke only Spanish, compared to 21.7% in 1988, the county reports. And about half of all babies born at the county’s hospital, which provides subsidized care for poor people, are Latino.

But the Latino shift also has been good for business. In Oxnard, Latino-owned enterprises have doubled to about 400 since 1980, said Ralph Sanchez, president of the Mexican-American Chamber of Commerce.

“Drive down any main thoroughfare in Ventura County, and count the businesses that are trying to capture the Spanish-speaking market,” said Karl Lawson, Oxnard’s census coordinator. “It’s not good or bad, it’s just what’s happening.”

The 1980s saw the rise of a stronger Latino middle class, stocked with doctors, lawyers, teachers and social workers--many of them natives of Oxnard and Santa Paula.

Insurance agent Jim Tovias, 37, whose great-grandparents settled in Santa Paula in the 1920s, returned to the town in 1985 and helped found the city’s Mexican-American Chamber of Commerce the next year.

“It’s a warmer environment and a nice place to raise your kids,” Tovias said. “And you know, a lot of people in my high school class who went away have come back in the last few years, too.”

In Oxnard, a core of 50 Latino professionals volunteer their time to support a variety of Latino causes.

“Ventura County is a smaller-town atmosphere, and a lot of Latino professionals have returned and tried to contribute to the community,” said Marcos Vargas, director of El Concilio, a Latino-rights agency in Oxnard.

The Latino arts community also has flourished. The Oxnard-based Ballet Folklorico Regional, one of five Latino youth dance companies in the county, has given about 1,000 performances since its founding in 1980, director Javier Gomez said.

A Latino theater group, based in Santa Paula, performs seven plays a year in both English and Spanish. And a Spanish-language television station in Oxnard broadcast its first program last October, joining two Latino radio stations in that city.

That enhanced presence is often viewed by Latino leaders in a political context.

“This has changed Ventura County,” said Carmen Ramirez, a lawyer for low-income people in Oxnard. “But the key question now is will the change in numbers mean a change in power: political power, economic power, power for parents to have a say about the education of their children or about services Latino families will get from the county?”

Such decisions often are made by elected officials, and many Latino leaders are focusing on how to improve their track record in politics.

Latinos make up 26.5% of the county’s population but hold only 11.8% of its city council and school board positions. Just three of 52 council members and 14 of 92 school board members are Latino. No Latino sits on the county Board of Supervisors.

“It’s kind of a vicious cycle,” Ramirez said. “For a long time, people go and vote and don’t get anybody elected, and they kind of give up on it.”

Latino activists say that is partly because city councils and school boards are elected by voters citywide or at-large instead of in separate districts, which dilutes Latino voting strength.

Voting-rights advocates are considering lawsuits to try to install district elections by court order, including one against the Oxnard Elementary School District. That district’s enrollment is 72% Latino, but it has elected just two Latinos in its history. One Latino activist has already sued the city of Oxnard trying to force the election of council members by district.

Opponents of district elections say they are divisive and get in the way of making decisions that are good for the whole community.

Even without district elections, some Latino officials see political gains from the new immigrants.

“There are going to be a lot of dramatic changes that are not being seen right now,” said Manuel Lopez, an Oxnard councilman since 1978. “In 10 or 15 years, the children of the immigrants will be able to vote.”

Victor Salas, a Santa Paula Union High School District trustee, said that last fall’s election was an early sign of that breakthrough. Santa Paula voters added Robert Villa to the high school board, making it the first elective body in the county with a Latino majority.

“Things are changing,” Salas said. “There’s no stopping it.”

In Oxnard, Mary Barreto, a former teacher, was elected last fall to the elementary school board. Pete E. Tafoya was elected to the governing board of the Ventura County Community College District.

But in Fillmore, which is 59% Latino but has no Latino on its council or school board, no Latino ran for City Council last year. Three had been defeated in 1988 because of low turnout by Latino voters, and former Mayor Ernest Morales said he and others were frustrated by the loss.

As the county has become more racially mixed, some Latino and white officials say an undercurrent of tension has developed and a bias is sometimes revealed in comments about gangs.

“There is an increasing perspective in Ventura County that any group of Latino youth walking after dusk is a gang,” said Vargas of El Concilio. “It’s a problem that continues to grow.’

Bernardo Perez, a councilman in Moorpark, said he is bothered by the perception of many white newcomers in his city who fled Los Angeles partly to escape urban problems such as crime.

“There is a perception of trouble with our youth,” Perez said. “But I don’t want the Latino youth to be painted with that broad brush. I know these kids. They are good kids.”

Latino gangs have been involved in some highly publicized violent crimes, including the 1988 shooting of a Ventura High School freshman on campus by a member of a Santa Paula gang. And last week, a confrontation between black and Latino gangs at Oxnard High School erupted into a brawl in the school gym.

Oxnard Police Chief Robert Owens said he has sometimes refused to describe a crime as gang-related even if it is, because he is concerned about the impact that term carries.

“I’ve tried not to cry gang,” he said, since gangs in Ventura County are much less structured and violent than those in big cities.

“The perception is of a group that meets every week to commit violence and mayhem, and it’s not true. These are very loose aggregates of kids who are homeys, who live in the same neighborhoods.”

While the number of Latino gangs in Oxnard has doubled to 10 since 1980, they are still small, and most members leave the gangs without ever being arrested for a serious crime, Owens said.

In fact, as Oxnard grew by 30,000 Latinos in the past decade, the city crime rate declined by 26%. Oxnard had 1,000 fewer crimes in 1989 than in 1980, the FBI reported last year.

Countywide, the crime rate dropped 22% in the 1980s, even though the population increased by 140,000, including 64,000 Latinos.

Aside from the gang stigma associated with Latino youth, other racial tensions have surfaced between whites and Latinos in Fillmore and Oxnard in recent years.

In 1986, Latinos in Fillmore were outraged when the City Council endorsed a statewide proposition supporting English as the state’s official language.

And in a 1988 incident, a former Fillmore Senior High School principal refused requests of Latino students to have the valedictorian’s speech translated into Spanish because the white graduation speaker objected.

Since then, each valedictory speech has been read in both English and Spanish, said counselor Al Arguelles. The new principal, Jaime Castellanos, routinely speaks to groups in both languages, and the student body president, a Latina, does as well, Arguelles said.

The Oxnard Elementary School District also was accused of bigotry in 1988, when it abandoned a 1971 court-ordered integration plan for two elementaries.

District officials argued that it no longer made sense to bus children across town between Marina West School, in a largely white neighborhood, and Rose Avenue School, in a predominantly Latino community.

“Activists in the community said we were disturbing the racial and ethnic balance in the schools, but our point was that we have very few white students to distribute between them any more,” Supt. Norman R. Brekke said.

From 1971, when the court ordered desegregation, enrollment in the 12,000-student district has changed from 46% Latino to 72% and from 41% white to 18%, he said.

In the end, the Oxnard district lured some white students to Rose Avenue by offering the district’s program for gifted students only at that school. Today, Rose Avenue students are 13.8% white, compared with 21.5% under the desegregation plan.

Zamudio, a Rose Park mother involved in the controversy, said the new plan seems to be working well.

Brekke said the flare-up was just one dispute in a larger effort to make educational sense out of a school district where a third of the classes are now taught in Spanish.

Finding teachers qualified to instruct the 4,000 students who speak little or no English is “a primary instructional concern for us,” he said. The district recruits from as far away as Texas but has too few bilingual teachers. Just 18% of its teachers are Latino.

Moorpark Unified School District recently dispatched two recruiters to Puerto Rico in search of teachers. And other districts, such as Santa Paula elementary, offer annual bonuses to teachers who speak Spanish. But Oxnard has not approved extra pay for bilingual teachers.

“We’ve got to fall back and regroup on this. . . . Obviously, the primary motivation to learn Spanish is going to be financial,” Brekke said. Such bonuses have been proposed before and gone nowhere because of little support from the teachers union, he said.

Brekke and Salas said they know that some parents--concerned that their children will be lost among non-English-speaking students who need more help--have opted for private schools, transferred their children to districts where they work or moved away.

“But these are not only Anglos,” Salas said. “They are Latinos, too.”

But Salas, 57, whose parents moved to Santa Paula in the early 1900s, points with pride to his three sons, all honors graduates from Santa Paula High School.

Victor Salas Jr. is one of three young Latino lawyers in town.

“And we have three Latino doctors,” Salas said. “When they came to town, they thought they weren’t going to make it, and now they have patients hanging from the ceiling.”

RACIAL PROFILE Chart compares the percentages for each race in 1980 and 1990

City Year Anglo Hispanic Black Asian Am. Ind. Total pop. Camarillo 1980 84.0 10.1 1.1 3.7 0.8 37,797 1990 80.0 12.0 1.5 6.1 0.5 52,303 Fillmore 1980 51.5 47.9 0.1 0.6 0.8 9,602 1990 39.0 59.0 0.1 0.7 0.5 11,992 Moorpark 1980 62.8 33.7 n/a n/a n/a 7,798 1990 70.0 22.0 1.4 6.4 0.4 25,494 Ojai 1980 89.8 8.0 0.1 0.9 0.9 6,816 1990 85.0 12.0 0.2 1.5 0.6 7,613 Oxnard 1980 42.9 44.4 6.1 6.1 0.9 108,195 1990 32.0 54.0 4.8 7.9 0.4 142,216 Port 1980 66.2 22.7 4.5 5.3 1.5 17,803 Hueneme 1990 58.0 30.0 5.1 6.3 0.7 20,319 Santa Paula 1980 47.1 50.5 0.1 0.8 0.8 20,552 1990 39.0 59.0 0.3 0.9 0.5 25,062 Simi Valley 1980 86.6 9.3 1.1 2.2 0.8 77,500 1990 80.0 13.0 1.5 5.3 0.5 100,217 Thousand 1980 90.3 5.8 0.8 2.6 0.5 77,072 Oaks 1990 84.0 10.0 1.2 4.7 0.3 104,352 Ventura 1980 82.8 12.1 1.1 1.5 1.3 74,393 1990 77.0 18.0 1.6 2.6 0.8 92,575 COUNTYWIDE 1980 72.4 21.4 2.1 3.0 .9 529,174 1990 65.9 26.5 2.2 4.9 .5 669,016

GROWTH BY RACE, 1970-1990

Year Anglo Hispanic Black Asian Am.Ind. Total Pop. 1970 *75.0 19.6 1.7 n/a n/a 376,430 1980 72.4 21.4 2.1 3.0 0.9 529,174 1990 65.9 26.5 2.2 4.9 0.5 669,016

* Anglo percentage is an estimate, because precise data on Asians and American Indians for 1970 is not available.