Redistricting May Pit Blacks Against Latinos : Politics: Latinos have grown in numbers and are likely to gain in City Council remapping. But African-Americans want to hold on to three seats.

At City Hall, the back rooms are beginning to get busy. The professional body counters from Caltech and Berkeley are poring over census tracts. Lawyers are standing by. The City Council is getting ready to divide up the town again.

The 10-year ritual of redistricting is upon us.

More than ever before, the process will be driven by ethnic politics. This time, the traditional strains between Anglos and non-Anglos could take a back seat to interethnic rivalries pitting Latinos and African-Americans in a confrontation over who will control the central city.

“We have the potential of a political bloodletting along minority lines,” said John Mack, president of the Los Angeles Urban League. “I hope we can work it all out without going at each other’s throats.”

Technically, redistricting is the way in which political boundaries are altered to adapt to population changes after each census. The population of Los Angeles grew by more than 17% during the past decade with Latinos and Asian-Americans accounting for the influx.

But as those populations expanded, their political representation lagged behind.

Latinos now account for nearly 40% of the city’s population but make up only 13% of the City Council.

By carving out new Latino-dominated council districts, redistricting can become a means of righting political imbalances. At the same time, critics of the process worry that it could foster electoral segregation, pitting one ethnic group against another and making it ever more difficult to achieve consensus in a multicultural city.

This year, redistricting could lay the foundation for a historic transition away from Anglo control of the 15-member council. A possible outcome, experts say, is an ethnic majority made up of four Latinos, three African-Americans and one Asian-American.

For that to happen, two new Latino council districts would have to be drawn in place of two Anglo districts. But while population trends may justify such a plan, demographers disagree over whether there are enough Latino voters to maintain four safe Latino seats on the council.

The City Council has until July to come up with a redistricting plan that responds to Latinos, African-Americans and Asian-Americans. African-Americans want to hold onto their three council seats despite a declining population. And Asian-Americans do not want their communities split into several different council districts--as has been the case with Chinatown and Koreatown.

In the past, redistricting was a game played largely for the benefit of incumbent politicians. For the City Council, the point of the game was to strengthen a council member’s base of support in a given district by annexing friendly neighborhoods and cutting loose unfriendly ones.

However, the settlement of a lawsuit in 1986 made the City Council change its priorities. For the first time, it forced the council to create a district in which an ethnic group, in this case Latinos, could elect one of its own. The case put council members on notice that they must serve the interests of underrepresented minorities before they turn to their political agendas.

At first, the 1986 settlement threatened to plunge the council into turmoil. But the death of Councilman Howard Finn allowed his colleagues to create a new Latino district without displacing an incumbent.

This year, the council might not have it so easy drawing more Latino districts.

Councilman Ernani Bernardi, an Anglo representing an increasingly Latino district in the San Fernando Valley, has indicated that he may not run for reelection. With Bernardi gone, it would take relatively minor boundary changes to make his district a safe Latino seat, according to demographers.

But elsewhere in the city, there could be strong resistance to efforts to obtain more Latino districts.

How rough it gets depends, in part, on the strategy pursued by the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, the Latino civil rights organization that brought the 1986 suit and whose aggressive use of the Voting Rights Act has led to dramatic changes in the local political landscape over the past decade.

“It’s up to MALDEF,” said one City Hall source who is involved in the council’s redistricting efforts. “If they push for more than the one district, I don’t see how they can avoid a black-Latino collision.”

Along with growth in the San Fernando Valley, the biggest surge in Latino population has occurred in the heart of the city, in council districts represented by two of three African-American members.

Leo Estrada, a professor of urban planning at UCLA and MALDEF’s principal demographer, said he believes that “the numbers are there” to justify the creation of two new Latino-dominated districts, one in the San Fernando Valley and one in the center of the city. But Estrada said no decision has been made to pursue that strategy.

Arturo Vargas, director of policy for MALDEF, said that his organization would like to establish two new Latino districts, but “our first priority would be not to do it at the expense of the African-American community.”

“Our purpose is not just to add Latino faces to the City Council,” Vargas said. “We want a new style of leadership that can establish coalitions among all ethnic groups.”

Moreover, Vargas said that in a redistricting battle with African-Americans, MALDEF might lack the legal edge it has enjoyed in the past.

In challenging Anglo political domination, MALDEF has relied on the Voting Rights Act. But Vargas and other Latino leaders know that they may not be able to invoke that law in a dispute with another minority group.

Passed in 1965 during the movement for racial equality in the South, the Voting Rights Act offers redress for minority voters disenfranchised by the majority. But when it comes to vindicating the rights of one minority in conflict with another, experts say the Voting Rights Act is silent.

“It would put us on the frontier of voting rights law where there are no clear legal guidelines,” said Bruce Cain, a political scientist at UC Berkeley who has been retained by the City Council to assist in the redistricting process.

In Los Angeles, confusion over the official size of the city’s population also adds to the uncertainty surrounding redistricting.

The 1990 census set the population at about 3.5 million, but a post-enumeration survey by the Census Bureau concluded that Los Angeles had been undercounted by close to 200,000 people. As yet, city officials have not decided which figure to use.

Estrada and other population experts maintain that the larger figure would bolster the case for two new Latino districts because most who would be added to the rolls are Latino. Estrada pointed out that many of these people live in the center of the city, where blacks and Latinos are already uneasy about the possibility of conflicting redistricting strategies.

If there is a fight, it is likely to be over the fate of downtown Los Angeles, which for nearly 30 years has been a prized property of the 9th District, one of the three council districts represented by African-Americans.

At least one Latino council member, Richard Alatorre, is on the record saying he would like to represent a part of the downtown.

“The downtown may represent a major battleground,” said Mack of the Urban League. “If Latino elected officials have designs on taking it away, that would pose a serious problem for us.”

There are other problems with the 9th District that help make it a target of the Latino redistricting strategy.

During the past decade, the district’s African-American majority has turned into a minority. The black population has fallen from 56% to 36%. The Latino population, soaring on a wave of Central American immigration, has risen to 61% from 36% 10 years ago.

Yet, African-Americans remain the district’s biggest bloc of voters by far.

Blacks argue that as long as they cast the lion’s share of votes, they should control the fate of the district.

In a way, the 9th District is a paradigm of Los Angeles. Citywide, the voting population--made up mostly of Anglos and African-Americans--is being dwarfed by Latino and Asian immigrants, many of whom do not vote. The City Council reflects that imbalance. Sixty percent of the council is Anglo compared to 37% of the population. Twenty percent of the council is African-American as compared to 13% of the populace.

Politicians who struggle with that imbalance face tough choices.

The Voting Rights Act requires that the council take seriously the desires of minority groups.

Council members also know that some of the ethnic strategies could change their districts in ways that would make it hard for them to get reelected.

As one council aide put it: “You worry about falling afoul of the Voting Rights Act and you worry about getting gerrymandered out of office.”

Amid the push and pull of ethnic politics, there is at least one moderating influence.

The council will be adopting a redistricting plan less than a year before the next mayoral election, a citywide contest that will require candidates to build coalitions among a multiethnic electorate. The mayor’s race is not suited for politicians known for favoring one ethnic group over another.

“It’s one of those years that makes you think about your priorities,” Estrada said.