NEWS ANALYSIS : Tensions Escalate Between Leaders of Blacks, Latinos : Rebuilding: Some fear squabbles by power brokers will ultimately harm their most needy constituents.

Geri Silva, a longtime activist in South-Central Los Angeles, is disgusted by the escalating verbal warfare between leaders of the Latino and black communities.

“This divisiveness doesn’t really help the problem,” she says, referring to the latest manifestation of the tensions--a letter that Latino officeholders sent to Mayor Tom Bradley this week complaining that Latinos are being excluded from post-riot rebuilding efforts.

“Our aim is to unite racial minorities around issues they face in common,” says Silva, who works for the Equal Rights Congress, a group battling to protect the benefits of Los Angeles County welfare recipients amid the state’s budget debacle. “History has shown us that people at the lowest end of the economy are always pitted against one another to their own detriment.”

Even as they feud, ethnic leaders are beginning to acknowledge that just such dangers lurk as Los Angeles--which had come to believe in its image of multicultural harmony--heads into what may be a lengthy post-riot period of tension between blacks and Latinos, its largest non-Anglo ethnic groups.

City Councilman Mark Ridley-Thomas says tensions are “percolating.” And he is not surprised.

“This is a function of being a part of the most ethnically diverse city in the world, a city that doesn’t have a lot of examples of effective human relations. It is without precedent what we are trying to manage in this city,” Ridley-Thomas says. “When you have poverty, racism and classism and xenophobia, it’s quite easily understood why there would be tensions.”

Says City Councilman Mike Hernandez: “The leadership has to have a discussion about divisiveness and how do you become one city. I’m sorry to say that is a phase we have to go through, because there is so much misunderstanding.”

While there is evidence of growing cooperation at the grass-roots level, there are mounting signs of discord among some black and Latino leaders.

This week, the friction went public as Hernandez, his City Council colleague Richard Alatorre and a dozen other Latino leaders sent their letter of protest to Mayor Bradley--and distributed it to the press.

Meanwhile, a Latino coalition, the Alianza, released a statement saying that Bradley was attempting “to dictate who the Latino community’s representatives will be” on the board of Rebuild L.A., the post-riot renewal group. The letter urged Rebuild L.A. Chairman Peter V. Ueberroth to appoint Lee Baca, deputy chief in the Sheriff’s Department, and Xavier Hermosillo, an outspoken businessman who has had strained relations with both blacks and the Central-American immigrant community.

The ethnic gulf has shown signs of widening since the civil disturbances of April and May.

There have been highly publicized shutdowns of reconstruction sites by black activist Danny Bakewell, which temporarily shoved some Latino laborers out of work.

There has been concern that neglected Latino communities, such as Boyle Heights and Pacoima, would not share in the rebuilding aid, because residents there did not riot.

And there is friction over a redistricting plan for the Los Angeles City Council that could dramatically increase Latino representation--potentially at the expense of black officeholders.

The political conflicts, in particular, draw on the long-nurtured anger of some Latinos who feel that--despite Bradley’s close ties to some Latino political figures--they have never played a central role in the mayor’s longtime governing coalition. That network is composed primarily of blacks, Westside liberals and the downtown business community.

“Racial politics has always been present in the city,” says Carlos Villaraigosa, an official of United Teachers-Los Angeles and also a member of the Rapid Transit District board.

“But it’s different than it was 30 years ago, with one group (Anglos) running everything,” he says. “Now with the changing demographics of the city, no one group dominates that way. The relative power of the groups is more even. . . . Unfortunately, the level of ethnocentrism is a lot like the level of ethnocentrism in Sarajevo. That’s scary.”

The prospects of “us-versus-them” battles among the city’s less affluent groups worries Rudolfo Acuna, a Chicano studies professor at Cal State Northridge.

“What I resent here is that professionals like myself, Hermosillo, Bakewell, we can do all the rattling of sabers that we want, but ultimately we don’t have to pay the price for black-brown tensions,” Acuna says. “That price is paid in the streets.”

Acuna wants ethnic leaders to sit down and talk. But he acknowledges the depths of their disagreements.

“Here you really have two different mentalities,” he says. “I think we should respect the civil rights history of blacks and the fact that they did suffer under slavery in this country. At the same time, the black community is going to have to come to grips with the fact that this land was once ours and it was taken away from us--the whole history of colonialism, conquest, repression of Latinos.”

Byran O. Jackson, a Cal State Los Angeles political science professor, agrees that it is hard to find common ground. The city’s leaders, he says, need to be more forthright about addressing specific problems so that the current situation does not deteriorate into “a street brawl.”

Bakewell’s attempt to secure a fair share of construction work for African-Americans, Jackson said, is “characteristic of how blacks have had to include themselves in processes from which they’ve been excluded. . . . Unfortunately, it involves two minority groups trying to get a piece of the same action.”

Still, there are a number of signs of interracial collaboration in the city.

For the past several years, the South-Central Organizing Committee--operating in a historically black area that has become increasingly Latino--has been working across racial lines on employment and housing issues.

And recently, Concerned Citizens of South-Central Los Angeles, a longtime--mainly black--activist group, formed an alliance with the Central-American Refugee Center, known as CARECEN. Concerned Citizens will provide CARECEN with space in its Dunbar Hotel Museum on Central Avenue, help the group build expertise on economic development issues, and try to create a Latino block club.

“We all need to work together,” says Carlos Vaquerano, community relations director of CARECEN, whom Ueberroth named to the Rebuild L.A. board.

Indeed, Ridley-Thomas said he has scheduled a meeting with Councilmen Hernandez and Michael Woo “on the issue of multiracial relations. Not one of us has to compromise his sense of ethnic priority. But in the interest of fairness, we have to talk together and work together to provide leadership.”

Changes in L.A.’s Ethnic Makeup

The dramatic growth in the city’s Latino population--amid declines in the Anglo and black populations--is the most striking demographic fact in the background of mounting tensions between ethnic groups in Los Angeles.

ETHNIC GROUP 1990 1980 % OF CHANGE Anglo 1,299,604 1,419,413 -8.4 Latino 1,391,411 816,076 +70.5 Black 454,289 495,723 -8.4 Asian 320,668 NA NA

SOURCE: U.S. Bureau of the Census

NA--Not Available

Compiled by: Richard O’Reilly, director of computer analysis, and Maureen Lyons, statistical analyst.