COLUMN ONE : Coming Together in Anger and Charity : The son of immigrants finds new bonds between African-Americans and Latinos in a place where poverty and frustration are common enemies.

Sometime during the heat of the riots, a message was spray-painted across an industrial building in South Los Angeles, transforming a teetering wall into an impromptu billboard for racial unity.

“Black Power!” the graffiti artist wrote. Unsatisfied, he added: “Brown Power!” And finally: “Black and Brown Together!”

During the short time I lived in this neighborhood last year, I never heard any militant talk of Latino-black solidarity. While the two groups shared the same streets, they didn’t share an identity as a single community. These graffiti were something new, a product of social upheaval.

I had lived on 53rd Street to document the transformation of this traditionally black neighborhood into a Latino barrio. Back then, I discovered two communities separated by language and culture, a neighborhood where families from such places as Georgia and Guatemala lived next door to each other but rarely communicated.

Now, for the first time, Latinos and blacks had made history together, joint participants and victims in the nation’s first bilingual, bicultural riots.

“We’re not seeing each other as different now--we’re one community,” 15-year-old Ingrid Grande told me a few weeks after the fires. The daughter of Salvadoran immigrants, Ingrid is the first Latina student body president at John Muir Junior High School. “We’re more together.”

I had seen evidence of this “togetherness” first-hand when I drove through the neighborhood on the afternoon of Thursday, April 30. The riot was in full swing at Slauson and Vermont avenues, with several hundred looters ransacking stores. Much to my surprise, most of the looters were Latinos.

As I watched a few Latina women running down Vermont pushing shopping carts filled with clothes and disposable diapers, it all made sense.

This wasn’t just about race, it was about economic class. Blacks and Latinos might not speak the same language, but in South L.A. they both understand poverty and frustration. Immigrants who came to this country hoping to find gilded streets instead find the drudgery of low-wage jobs. They needed things like diapers. For many, the opportunity to get some for free couldn’t be passed up.

Later, I would learn that one of the looters was a 17-year-old high school student who is active in the Nativity Catholic Church. Octavio Sandoval had joined a small army of jubilant looters and taken three mattresses from the Hi Brite furniture store on Vermont.

“Everybody treats us like we’re low,” he said, explaining his actions. “That’s why it made it easier for me to take the beds. Blacks and Latinos right here, they are considered low-class persons. So when the blacks were rioting and looting, the Latinos started doing the same thing.”

And besides, Octavio added, he and his brothers needed the beds because they sleep on the floor. Guilt-ridden, he later turned the beds over to a church because the furniture store had burned to the ground.

At least 15 other neighborhood buildings were destroyed, including many shops I had patronized. The record store where I browsed for reggae tapes was gutted, as were two public libraries. A Latino church where I listened to impassioned evangelical sermons was a blackened shell.

In conversations with my former neighbors, I quickly learned that the flames did more than incinerate buildings--they also burned new ideas into the minds of Latino families. Usually a pretty conservative lot--many are homeowners--some were asking the same questions about economic inequality and racism that blacks in South Los Angeles have asked for years.

“I have seen now that there isn’t justice for everybody in this country,” Pablo Marquez, a 45-year-old Mexican immigrant and factory worker, told me as we sat in his tiny living room. “The roots of this problem go way back. (The riot) is something that had to happen. Here we are, at the end of the 20th Century, and we’re not seeing any progress in our community.”

When I last visited him several months ago, Marquez had been more concerned about neighborhood crime and its effect on his property values. Now, with the smell of ash from the Vermont fires still lingering, Marquez wanted to talk about “exploitation”--as if the anger of the rioting had awakened his own simmering frustrations.

He remembered that his wife, a seamstress, often earns less than minimum wage. Latinos suffer every day just because they have brown skin or speak with an accent, he said. Of course people are angry. It’s no surprise some would want to burn things.

“We earn so little we can’t give our children the things they want and need,” Marquez said. “So people tell themselves, ‘If I can’t get what I want here by obeying the law, then I’ll resort to violence.’ ”

Clearly, the riots destroyed illusions many immigrants still might have about finding the “American dream” and “streets paved with gold” in Los Angeles. And for those who had fled war-torn countries such as Guatemala and El Salvador, the riots were also a harrowing re-encounter with the kind of random violence and mass destruction they thought they had escaped.

On the Thursday afternoon of the riots, when the neighborhood was still shrouded in smoke, I paid a quick visit to the Maldonado family, where I stayed in a rented room last year.

Afraid to step outside, Reina, Gumercindo and their three children huddled inside the living room, behind the safety of a wrought-iron door.

The Maldonados looked startled and afraid. Gumercindo told me he had been awake all night, standing on the roof with a garden hose, afraid that the sparks from a dozen nearby fires would ignite his home.

Like my own parents, the Maldonados are Guatemalan immigrants. Who would have thought this could happen here, Gumercindo told me, in the United States, supposedly the most prosperous country on Earth?

We listened on Spanish-language radio to the announcement of a curfew, “toque de queda.” The Spanish phrase resonated with the overtones of Central American political intrigue. Gumercindo looked at me with a perplexed expression. “Toque de queda?” It seemed like we were in Guatemala again.

A few weeks later, the Maldonados were talking seriously about selling their home and moving to Lancaster. “I don’t know how we’ll be able to do it,” Reina said. “Nobody’s buying now. Especially here in the South. But we really want to get out.”

This was an especially sad turn of events. Widespread Latino homeownership in South Los Angeles helped contribute to stability in the area. Now the Maldonados and surely other homeowners will want out, just like generations of white and black homeowners before them.

A few months ago I had described this neighborhood as a tranquil place--at least by Los Angeles standards--where old Craftsman homes and well-tended lawns created a suburban feel. With the riot, the middle-class veneer is gone, exposing a gritty, inner-city core. One day soon, the Maldonados will load up their mini-van and head for a real suburb.

Still, there are others who have little or no intention of moving. As long as his 53rd Street storefront is still standing, Benjamin Palacio said he will keep his immigration consulting firm where it is. A native of the Central American nation of Belize, he has to stay in the community to stay close to the Belize immigrants who make up most of his clientele.

Palacio and I exchanged stories about things we had seeing during the rioting. When the verdicts in the Rodney G. King case were announced, Palacio had joined a group of young black men on a nearby street corner in a spontaneous protest.

“I wanted to be in the middle of the action because I knew it was history in the making,” he said. “I was so angry at the verdict I felt like taking my naturalization certificate and turning it in. I didn’t want to be a citizen of this country. The system failed us.”

When some of the young men started throwing bricks and rocks at passing cars, he sought refuge in his business. Over the next several hours, Palacio watched the riot evolve from a black protest into a multiracial “rebellion,” events unfolding before him in a series of comic and surreal images.

A black youth tried to set the local liquor store on fire, but failed when the Molotov cocktail he threw into the building bounced but did not break--he was successful on a second try. Later, a Latino man and his wife joined in looting the furniture store. As they were hauling off a large couch, a police patrol car stopped in front of them, allowing them to cross the street safely.

“Latinos and blacks became one,” Palacio said. “They truly became one. It was almost unfair, when you think about it, to have two communities fighting against one.”

Unable to strike directly at the political and economic system that oppresses them, the arsonists and rioters had participated in what amounted to community suicide, destroying their own neighborhood.

How much further, I thought, will this community sink before it begins to fight back against the politicians who seem perfectly willing to allow South Los Angeles to devour itself.

While walking along Vermont Avenue a few days after the burning had ended, I encountered six Latino adults scavenging for glass in the charred ruins of a liquor store. Covered in ash, Jose Luis Martinez, a homeless 22-year-old man from Oaxaca, told me he was making about $5 a day recycling the bottles and broken glass. His hands were covered in blood from grasping shards.

Is this what we have been reduced to?

Three months ago, I had written about the birth of a new Latino barrio. Now one job this new barrio had to offer six strong immigrants was this, scavenging through burned-out ruins. The young barrio may already be dying, a malnourished child that may never bloom into healthy adolescence.

If there is hope, it is with the youth of South Los Angeles. One positive outcome of the riots is that it has sparked a growing political consciousness among the community’s young people, much as the Watts riots did a generation ago.

That much was clear when I visited John Muir Junior High to meet with Michelle Rainey’s leadership class, which brings together about 30 of the school’s brightest students, both Latino and black. Even before the riots, the differences of race and culture were not as strong here. Now they are beginning to disappear.

Nearly everyone in the class, regardless of ethnicity, knew someone who had looted a store. And almost all the students said they shared the frustrations and anger of those who joined the “uprising.”

Ingrid, the student body president, talked about blacks and Latinos working together to “protect each other” against a hostile, outside world. “If we help them,” she said, “they will help us too.”

Making a new future for South Los Angeles might just be that simple.

About These Stories

Last year, Times staff writers Charisse Jones and Hector Tobar lived next door to each other for a month on West 53rd Street in South Los Angeles, producing a series of articles on life in a neighborhood undergoing dramatic ethnic changes. Once predominantly black, the community has now become one of the fastest growing Latino barrios in the nation. Jones and Tobar recently revisited 53rd Street to see how the riots had changed the psyche and look of the neighborhood.