Ross Perot and the Search for Utopia

For a campaign headquarters, Ft. Perot is almost as unconventional as the Ross Perot campaign itself.

The fort is actually Casa del Alfarero, a fundamentalist church at 25th and Main streets, just south of downtown Los Angeles in a neighborhood of poor Latino immigrants. It became known as Ft. Perot during the riots when looters moved against the church. Some congregants stood outside and persuaded them not to burn the place. Their stout defense, along with the Casa’s grim exterior, made the title a natural.

Before becoming a church, the building was a lodge hall, a dance hall and, finally, a nightclub that closed after a fatal knife fight in the parking lot. The old bar, with its many booths, is still upstairs, although the church people have converted it into an alcohol-free refreshment stand.

Its very strangeness is what makes Ft. Perot a perfect site for the Perot Petition Committee’s South and East L.A. signature-gathering drive. For the Perot campaign is very much in the wacky tradition of California protest politics.

As the late Carey McWilliams wrote in his 1946 book, “Southern California: An Island on the Land,” no phase of society here has “attracted more attention than its utopian politics, its flair for the new and the untried.”

Much of the story of California politics involves such movements, emerging from places as strange as Ft. Perot, from odd churches, utopian colonies, old storefront offices, oddball radio stations and tables in Clifton’s Cafeteria.

The Perot campaign is another search for Utopia, a quest begun whenever our troubles seem insoluble by ordinary political means. That is why the Perot movement has been so warmly welcomed in California.

The man in charge of Ft. Perot is volunteer Jerry Mosqueda, who owns Mosqueda & Mijas, a commercial and political marketing firm. Mosqueda is helped by another volunteer, Anthony Sotomayor, the Perot Petition Committee’s Los Angeles County Latino coordinator.

Mosqueda told me a friend had invited him to a Perot petition drive organizing meeting in Sherman Oaks early in April. When Mosqueda got up to speak, he talked about South-Central L.A.

“I said that this is a neighborhood you never want to drive through at night,” Mosqueda recalled. “I believe our streets are totally out of control and that Mr. Perot has the same mind-set we do.”

He and an African-American man, Vincent Hollier, volunteered to run the petition drives in East and South L.A. Early in May, Mosqueda received a call from the Perot national Latino coordinator in Dallas, who gave him a go-ahead to set up an operation.

Mosqueda rented offices in the church. The rent was low and Perot headquarters in Dallas agreed to pay.

“We set up our first table at the Boys Market at Crenshaw and Rodeo on Saturday, May 2,” said Mosqueda. He remembers it was the Saturday after the riots began and the area still smelled of smoke from the burned Thrifty’s drugstore across the street. “Eighty percent of the blacks who walked by our table signed petitions, especially younger people. A lot of the young registered to vote.”

Mosqueda is part of a loose campaign operation, headed by the state chairman, Bob Hayden, a Ventura engineer. I met Hayden election night, at Perot headquarters on Ventura Boulevard in the San Fernando Valley.

Hayden is a C-Span junkie. That’s where he and his wife first saw Perot. He wrote Perot a letter after that appearance, but never got around to mailing it. After he saw Perot on the Larry King show, Hayden signed up.

We talked in a room crowded with Perot supporters, all of them as earnest-looking as Hayden. Folding chairs were scattered around. Assignments were posted on the walls with Perot-like efficiency.

The surroundings didn’t compare to the splendor of the Biltmore Hotel, where I had spent the early part of the evening at the Democrats’ victory party.

But I couldn’t dismiss the efforts going on at the rundown storefront, just as I couldn’t put down the activities at Ft. Perot.

For I’ve read about these California adventures into utopianism. More to the point, I’ve covered one, which began in a storefront just a few miles from Perot’s Valley headquarters.

Fourteen years ago, a group of men and women--just as politically inexperienced and as dedicated as the Perot people--began circulating petitions for a tax limit plan that eventually became Proposition 13.

First they were ignored. Then people scoffed. But in the end Proposition 13 won. It didn’t create Utopia, but California hasn’t been the same since. The same will be true of the United States if Ross Perot becomes President.