Que Pasa? : PEOPLE

* Cynthia Ann Telles, vice president of the Los Angeles City Ethics Commission and a UCLA psychiatry professor, traces her desire to help others back to her childhood. As a girl, she worked in an orphanage with her grandmother and volunteered in a Costa Rican hospital. Dismayed by the poverty there, Telles decided that “I wanted to give something back to the (Latino) community.” Telles, 39, heads the Spanish-Speaking Psychosocial Program at UCLA and counsels immigrants with mental illnesses or acculturation problems. “I guess I feel we are all part of the social ecology,” said Telles, who also chairs a new county task force on the incarcerated mentally ill. When anyone in society experiences hunger, abuse or poverty, she said, “we are all affected, and therefore all responsible.”

* Latinos “had a real impact on this year’s redistricting process,” said Arturo Vargas, who coordinated efforts in the courts for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund. The legislative district lines drawn by MALDEF became “the standard” by which other efforts were measured for compliance with the Voting Rights Act, he said. “I think we (Latinos) got the minimum number of seats that we were entitled to with the exception of an Assembly district in the San Joaquin Valley,” said Vargas, 29, a MALDEF vice president who is a Belmont High and Stanford University graduate. And, although Latinos did not get all they wanted in the process, they did achieve a great deal, he said.