Anaheim Latinos: Force in Numbers but Not Politics : Representation: They are now 31% of the city’s population but the council remains all Anglo.

Anthony Rodriguez doesn’t think much about his city government.

He’s not sure who the mayor is, or any other council member for that matter. The few times he has tuned into the weekly City Council meetings on cable TV, he said, the politicians have reminded him of right-wing TV personality Wally George.

Out of work for the last six months, the body-shop worker is more concerned with the survival of his three children and a working wife than with politics.

Down the street, a 27-year-old Latino woman said she never has time for local politics. Instead, she dreams of one day moving out of Anaheim’s Colonia neighborhood, “maybe to Irvine,” so her four children will no longer have to duck when they mistake vehicle backfires for gunshots.

“I know that stuff (government) is important,” said the woman, who declined to be identified. “But the first thing you think about is keeping the kids off the street.”

New census counts show that Latinos make up more than 31% of Orange County’s second-largest city--a 122% increase in the last decade--but local Latino leaders say Rodriguez and the young mother are emblematic of the minority community’s struggle to transform population growth into political power in a city that has never had a Latino City Council member.

“We are a long way from there,” Meliton (Mel) Lopez, superintendent of the Anaheim City School District, said about the City Council.

“I don’t think the awareness is there,” said Lopez, who heads a district in which 59% of the 15,000 elementary students are Latino. “When I talk to parents, they are more concerned with survival, how they are going to keep the kids in school.

“The demographics have changed drastically,” he said. “That doesn’t mean power, it means potential. We have not learned how the system works.”

Mastery of the system, though, requires participation. Records show that just 10% of those registered to vote in Anaheim are Latino, according to the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund.

The reasons are old but very real. The traditional economic difficulties of a new immigrant population remain in place. And the recession has left an impact on the community’s working poor and middle-class residents.

But perhaps most discouraging is the perception that Anaheim has not been enthusiastic about its recent demographic evolution. Mayor Fred Hunter said the census figures have jolted some longtime city residents.

“A lot of people have this fear,” he said. “They shouldn’t, but they do. It comes from not understanding. People have been traditionally isolated from each other, Anglos from Hispanics.”

Hunter said he has been trying to gauge the community’s reaction to a slowly developing effort to create a “sister city” relationship between Anaheim and the Mexican town of El Grullo. The small town in the state of Jalisco is the home left by hundreds of Mexicans who have settled in Anaheim.

Even though the cities have participated in cultural exchanges, Hunter anticipated that his support of the sister-city project will not make him popular with some constituents.

“I’ll probably lose some votes, but I gain some respect,” he said. “There is an Hispanic explosion going on here, and it will continue. It is incumbent upon Anglos to better understand.”

Lopez said he learned of the city’s reputation for low tolerance of cultural diversity about five years ago, when he applied for the superintendent’s job after working in the Bay Area.

“People would tell me, ‘Oh, Anaheim. You don’t have a chance there.’ I was discouraged from applying,” he said, “because I was told Anaheim doesn’t hire Hispanics.

“Yet I was hired. I was shocked at coming here. After living six years in a community with a lot of acceptance of diversity, coming here was quite a bit tighter.”

When he arrived, Lopez said, he was told to “watch out for the police in this town.”

These days, Lopez acknowledged, there is more “sensitivity”--but there remains “a long way to go.”

During his reelection campaign last fall, Hunter called attention to the needs of the city’s growing Latino population. But most agree that few Latinos would be considered serious contenders in a council election.

Among those most often mentioned as future candidates are Lou Lopez, an Anaheim City School District board member, and Amin David, vocal director of Anaheim-based Los Amigos of Orange County. That organization identifies the needs of the county’s Latinos and is probably the largest local group of its kind that does not have headquarters in Santa Ana.

“Things just have to change,” David said last week before bringing the weekly Los Amigos meeting to order at the Jolly Roger restaurant on Lincoln Avenue.

Latino leadership, he said, “is an ever-present topic. It’s continually on the table at these meetings. Every discussion has some component about what to do about having Latinos on boards and commissions in Anaheim. It’s always a continuing problem.”

David said elective leadership positions and the large amounts of money needed for council campaigns in Anaheim and elsewhere (the two Anaheim mayoral candidates spent more than $100,000 in their campaigns last fall) are barriers to minority participation.

Councilman Tom Daly said the city does not ignore the area’s growing Latino presence.

“When people like Amin David speak, I listen,” Daly said. “Anaheim has had a tradition of working for citywide improvements. Hispanics have always been assimilated, not for ethnic reasons but more for practical reasons.”

The view is different for some in neighboring Santa Ana, where there is a tradition of Latino political leadership and where the Latino population stands at 65%.

John Acosta, one of Santa Ana’s two Latino City Council members, said elected officials in Anaheim have failed to reach out to their minority residents.

“How can an Anglo think like a Hispanic?” Acosta asked, referring to Anaheim’s all-Anglo City Council. “You’ve got to bring the melting pot to the table.

“In Santa Ana, it’s very difficult to ignore the Latino community,” he said. “We have a much larger minority population. Anybody with an ounce of brains knows where the future is without winking an eye.”

But even in Santa Ana, City Councilman Miguel A. Pulido Jr. said, the growth of the Latino population has not necessarily translated into more votes for him, Acosta or others.

“Much of the growth is among new immigrants,” Pulido said. “Few are registered, and even fewer vote. Voting Hispanics are a very small number. You will find that we are often elected by diverse populations.”

The future of Latino leadership in Anaheim depends on identifying more candidates for city commissions and school boards, said Al Peraza, a member of the city’s Planning Commission and former Anaheim City School District trustee.

Peraza predicted that the wait for a Latino city councilman could last well into the next decade.

“Most of the councilmen are well backed by developers,” Peraza said. “I haven’t seen anybody willing to go out and raise the money.”