Elections ’92 : L.A. County Latinos Headed for 6 Seats in Assembly, 4 in House : Elections: The races underscore battles between the camps of state Sen. Art Torres and Supervisor Gloria Molina.

The political power of Latinos in Los Angeles County kicked into higher gear Tuesday as Latino Democrats won six primary races for the state Assembly and four for Congress, all in districts that make them virtual sure-fire winners in November.

At the same time, the endorsement clout of the county’s ranking Latino, Supervisor Gloria Molina, was sorely tried. In key races in heavily Latino-influenced districts with large Democratic majorities, only two of the seven candidates she endorsed won.

In the five races where the Molina-backed candidate lost, the winner was backed by allies of Democratic state Sen. Art Torres (D-Los Angeles), who lost to Molina last year in an acrimonious supervisor’s race.

If these districts all vote for the nominated Latino Democrats in November, as they are expected to, 25% of the county’s delegation to the Assembly will be Latino--a gain from three to six.

Los Angeles County will likely send one additional Latino to Congress to join the three already there.

On Wednesday, both the Molina and Torres camps sought to cast a unity theme, Molina backers in particular pointing out that, even if most of the people she endorsed lost, women gained. Four of the six Latino nominees for Assembly are women.

“It was a sweet and sour night for me,” Molina said. “I felt miserable about the people I supported who didn’t make it. . . . But yet the other part of me was doing cartwheels because of Xavier Becerra and Barbara Boxer. I’ve been with them since the beginning.”

“It’s great, but it was not a matter of beating (Molina),” Torres said on Wednesday. “It was the quality of the candidates.”

Angel G. Obregon, the California Trucking Assn.’s government liaison who is heavily involved in Latino issues, was exultant at the results.

Looking past the usual insider political handicapping, he said, “This is a new group of Latino leadership, and I think the Latino community in sum should be very proud of the people who won. . . . They will be very independent. . . . They will vote their conscience and what is in the best interests of their community.”

Harry Pachon is executive director of the National Assn. of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials. What Tuesday’s results showed him, he said, is that Latino political influence “is no longer an Eastside phenomenon.”

In two bellwether races, 34-year-old Assemblyman Xavier Becerra--endorsed by Molina--won nomination in the 30th Congressional District. And Louis Caldera, 37, a Harvard and West Point-educated attorney who was endorsed by Torres, beat Berta Saavedra, a Molina-backed candidate, in the 46th Assembly District.

Becerra said he doesn’t “subscribe to the whole thing about political machines . . . the results do show clearly that endorsements don’t get you everything.”

Torres staffer Diane Gonzalez, who worked for Becerra’s losing opponent, school board member Leticia Quezada, said the loss hurt. Yet, apropos of the victories over Molina-backed candidates, she added, “We kicked her in the butt.”

But Richard Martinez, executive director of the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project, sounded a more nonpartisan note, one that played well up and down the state Tuesday for both Republicans and Democrats: that the clout of endorsements and alliances and grudges is waning as term limits force the old players out of the game.

The challenge to newcomers, he said, “is to understand they have an opportunity to make a breakthrough in the way Latino politics are exercised in a place like East L.A. or even Sacramento. They have a great opportunity to be a significant voting bloc--10% of the Assembly--because they’re not bringing with them the personal grudges and baggage that have exemplified the past delegations” in Sacramento. “The past 10 years were not very collegial, to say the least.”

Tuesday’s results prove that “the issue is no longer ‘Will we gain in political strength?’ That answer is yes. The real question now is: What is the quality of our exercise of political power? And these folks come to the table almost tabula rasa, with the opportunity to begin to define what that really means.”

Molina said of Tuesday’s winners, whether she endorsed them or not, that “if I feel that their policies will betray the community, I will be the first to hold them accountable as they would hold me accountable.”

Tuesday’s score card:

* Assembly: Incumbent Richard Polanco renominated in the 45th; Louis Caldera in the 46th; Diane Martinez, daughter of Rep. Matthew G. Martinez, in the 49th; Marta Escutia in the 50th; Hilda Solis in the 57th; and Grace Napolitano nominated in the 58th. In a San Bernardino district, Joe Baca beat four non-Latino challengers for the Democratic nomination, and in the San Joaquin Valley, Democrat Michael Machado won nomination and will take on the Republican incumbent in the fall.

* Congress: Two Latinos were renominated--Matthew G. Martinez and Esteban Torres. Becerra was nominated to succeed retiring elder statesman Edward R. Roybal. The nomination of his daughter, Lucille Roybal-Allard, in the adjoining 33rd District, could add one more Latino to the state’s congressional delegation.

Despite the talk of increased representation, hard feelings endure between the Molina and Torres factions, where having power is a new phenomenon and sharing it is even newer and more challenging.

Richard Martinez acknowledges that “the morning after and the week after, feelings are very strong and polarized.” Frankly, he added, “these campaigns on all sides were some of the most intensely contested in any general area I’ve ever seen, period, regardless of the ethnic group.”

More important than men vs. women or Latinos vs. Latinos “was a clash of eras,” between the more traditional politics of the Torres-Polanco group and the newer Molina power base.

“If you’re keeping score that way,” he said, the Torres camp did better “because of dollars and cents.” Molina’s network is “very much a grass-roots organization”--and it was stretched thin by so many races.

“How many campaigns can realistically be engaged effectively (with) that size of a network?” asked Richard Martinez.

But any Latino camp faces one single and daunting problem: voter registration and naturalization.

Fewer than half the state’s 4.7 million Latino adults are eligible to vote, according to figures from the National Assn. of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials.

“I could look at 100 random Latinos,” said Pachon, and “our analysis shows 34 of those (are) under 18. Of those 66 California Latino adults, 33 will not be able to register or vote because they’re not U.S. citizens. That leaves 33. Of those 33, about 16 won’t bother to register to vote, and of the 17 who register, only 11 will turn out to the polls.”

For example, in the 30th Congressional District, where Becerra won, 61% of the district’s 570,000 residents are Latino, but Latinos represent only a third of registered voters. On Tuesday, only 36,000 votes were cast.

Although Tuesday’s gains were encouraging, said Pachon, “the negative is that . . . we have to use the yardstick that one out of every four Californians is now Latino, and we still have a long way to go insofar as fully penetrating the political system.”

Only when naturalization and registration efforts succeed can Latinos be elected in representative numbers, he said.