Understanding the Riots Part 4 : Seeing Ourselves : LOS ANGELES : We don’t need to recover. . . . We need to change.

Maybe just six years in this city doesn’t entitle me to call it my city.

But all you had to do was ask my friends. They couldn’t shut me up.

I was proud to be part of the amazing diversity and richness: The Hasidic Jews walking to synagogues past my Fairfax District apartment; the flan at the Argentinian-Italian restaurant on Melrose; the mangled trailers and holes punched in cardboard that was called art at the Temp Contemp; the “world premieres” of unknown playwrights put on by casts outnumbering the audience in Santa Monica Boulevard theaters. I even felt a kinship with the homeless, whose spirits I saw rise with the quarters and harmless flirtation I shared with them.

I was in love with a dream I thought existed here.

When I mimicked the Russian-Jewish shopper asking the Mexican-American produce worker to summon his boss, the Japanese-American grocer, it was a mimicry born of love. We can all get along, I believed.

Now, I mourn. My dream seems lost as I listen to L.A. whimper in the ashes of a thousand fires of anger, frustration and hatred.

I live in the heart of L.A. but work in the San Gabriel Valley. I used to work in the South Bay. In both places, I drove against the flow of commuters and swam against the tide of common wisdom.

“You live in Los Angeles?” the Manhattan Beach folk told me. “Poor you!”

Poor them, I thought, they were stuck behind the lines in racially homogeneous communities.

Born and raised in Phoenix, I knew the lines too well. The lines of the ‘50s and ‘60s separated me, a fourth-generation Mexican-American, from the “Anglos” my mother talked of with bitterness.

They wouldn’t give her a job as a department store clerk after she graduated from high school.

“No Mexicans,” they said.

They wouldn’t give my father a haircut even when he walked into a barbershop wearing his Army uniform.

“We don’t cut your kind of hair,” they said.

And for me? Even my top high school grades and college entrance scores didn’t impress my high school counselors.

“Junior college is fine for you,” they said.

I thought it would be different in California. So I dropped out of college in 1971 and moved to San Diego with only $200. At first, I found a city that offered opportunities denied me in my hometown. I took a job answering phones at a San Diego newspaper and became a journalist in two years.

But then, in 1985, I felt the lines come down again--hard. A young black man fought back after white police officers taunted him with racial epithets and beat him. He grabbed one officer’s service revolver and wounded him and a civilian ride-along and killed another officer.

“I don’t understand why he got in trouble,” a blond-haired, blue-eyed editor told me. “I never have any problem when I’m stopped by the police.”

I could only gape. In the 15 years I had lived in San Diego, I had felt increasingly uneasy, but had often brushed things aside with a joke: The only difference between Phoenix and San Diego is the ocean. But now, even though the man was tried and eventually acquitted, I wanted out.

So I looked north and came to embrace Los Angeles. All its images became a personal coda that I sang joyously: It was the Pacific Rim, the new Ellis Island, the capital of the Third World, my new home.

I ran straight to the heart of this city, finding comfort in the accents and the diversity along Beverly Boulevard, Fairfax Avenue, Sunset Boulevard, Melrose Avenue and Western Avenue.

Sure, we fought each other and even died, but L.A. offered more hope of racial harmony than any city I had seen before.

Now, that hope lies battered and charred like the hulks of torched stores I drive past on my way to work. Voices inside my head scream, “What did you do to stop this?”

Very little, I realize with sorrow.

My apathy and that of thousands of others like me fueled the anger that sparked the looting, burning and beatings.

It is an anger that persists despite the Pollyanna talk of healing and recovery.

We don’t need to recover, for recovery means a return to the injustice and inequality and yes, the anger, of before. We need to change.

To paraphrase Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles), who stood behind the pulpit at the First African Methodist Episcopal Church the first Sunday after the riots: We need to do more than just sweep up South L.A., Pico-Union and Koreatown. We need to do more than sit back and wisely say, “I saw it coming.” We need to make fundamental changes in our personal, daily lives to move this city toward the reality of the dream it promised.

Many people are now thinking about getting out. The riots were the last straw, they say. My reply is: Fine. Go away. If you’re not willing to work for change, then Los Angeles doesn’t need you. I only pray I will be worthy.