Blacks, Latinos Clash Over Redistricting : Voting: Plan drafted by MALDEF would hand over part of Walters’ district to Alatorre and Hernandez. It draws fire from the head of the local NAACP.

Tensions moved from the streets to City Hall when black and Latino groups clashed Thursday over a City Council redistricting plan that would strip Councilwoman Rita Walters, a black, of a coveted part of downtown and give it to two Latino council members.

The transfer was proposed Thursday in a map drafted by the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund. The map also could raise the number of Latinos on the 15-member council from two to four.

The MALDEF plan was submitted to a council panel drawing new City Council and Board of Education district boundaries for presentation to the full council, which has the final say. The plan that is ultimately approved is expected to assign hundreds of thousands of residents a different council representative, and give the city’s emerging Latino majority more clout at City Hall.

The MALDEF proposal carves out two new Latino-majority districts, in addition to the two represented by Councilmen Richard Alatorre and Mike Hernandez. One of the new districts takes in a swath of the San Fernando Valley now represented by Councilman Ernani Bernardi, who has said that he will retire next year. The other encompasses immigrant neighborhoods north and west of downtown--from Pico Union to East Hollywood--where no council incumbent currently lives.

The MALDEF map also would extend Alatorre’s Eastside district to the downtown Broadway shopping district, giving the Latino councilman a rich fund-raising source for a possible 1993 mayoral bid. It also would push Hernandez’s district, now generally running along the west side of the Harbor Freeway, east of the freeway between 9th Street and Martin Luther King Boulevard. Both areas are currently represented by Walters, who would retain Bunker Hill and a sliver of downtown.

The proposed changes in the downtown area drew opposition from Joseph Duff, president of the Los Angeles branch of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People, who said it will, if approved, increase “the alienation and isolation of blacks in this community . . . and result in the kind of uproar and unrest that we had visited on us in the last couple of weeks.”

Duff said the MALDEF proposal would strip a black council member of a rich commercial area that provides tax revenues to assist other, impoverished parts of the district. He complained that Latinos cannot “just say, ‘We’re the new majority, and you’re out.’ ”

Latinos account for nearly 40% of the city’s 3.5 million residents.

MALDEF attorney Vibiana Andrade responded that keeping heavily Latino neighborhoods in an African-American council member’s district “ignores changing demographics.”

“It’s not helpful to simply draw the line in the sand and say, ‘Not one inch, not one block,” she said.

Waters said she was “underwhelmed” by the MALDEF proposal, and vowed to fight it.

But other council members have said they will give strong consideration to MALDEF’s recommendations because of the civil rights group’s proven clout. The organization filed voting rights lawsuits that led to the election of Latinos to the City Council in 1987 and the County Board of Supervisors last year.

The City Council has until July 1 to send to Mayor Tom Bradley a map that equalizes the population in council districts to reflect changes recorded in the 1990 Census.