Fighting With Blacks for Jobs Is Self-Defeating : Race: Rather than ply the politics of racial entitlement, Latino leaders must look into their own back yard for economic empowerment.

At an off-the-record dinner in April with Latino journalists, Supervisor Gloria Molina was asked to comment on a reporter’s contention that local African-American political leaders were continuing to deny Latinos their fair share of the city’s political and economic pie. Molina replied she understood the reporter’s frustration. Sooner or later, she went on, Latino leaders like herself would have to persuade their African-American counterparts to face up to the political consequences of demographic reality: Latinos are ready to accept the rewards of being the county’s new majority.

Molina correctly sensed the growing dissatisfaction with the way some African-American leaders have used race to define “minority” struggles for social and political justice. Today, other Latino community leaders, some elected, are voicing this dissatisfaction in public.

The escalating rhetoric surrounding job competition in the rebuilding of South Los Angeles signifies the quandary in which Latino political leadership finds itself: Although they perceive themselves as agents of change, they ply the old politics of racial entitlement. And their failure to face up to this contradiction has distracted them from taking inventory of the political and economic power they already possess.

This does not mean that Latinos should drop their demands for more responsive and inclusive government. But Latino leaders simply can’t afford to continue to express their frustration in ways that reinforce a status quo predicated upon a system of race-based power sharing. And that’s precisely what they do in seeing government as a banquet, at which guests are served according to how loudly they proclaim their appetites.

Latino leaders insist that because their constituencies have grown in numbers, they deserve a proportionate share of the feast. Sound fair, no? Not to African-American leaders, who argue that their constituencies are entitled to a larger banquet share to compensate for past injustices.

The riots only exacerbated these competing claims. All of which explains why playing politics as a zero-sum, race-reductionist game is bound to lead to confrontation.

Latino leaders don’t have to play this no-win--and humiliating--contest with African-Americans for government jobs and urban-revitalization funds. By doing so, they not only perpetuate the image of ethnics as victims; they also distract ethnic communities from cultivating--and using--the power they potentially possess. For Latino leaders, economic empowerment is as close as their political back yard--if they would only look.

For Latinos, the most pressing task is to recognize that the huge Latino community east of the Los Angeles River defies the barrio stereotype of a third-world landscape of deprivation and powerlessness.

To be sure, the Greater Eastside--an area stretching from Olvera Street to Pomona and home to more than 70% of the Latino population--has its share of chronic problems. But it has served as the county’s industrial shop floor for more than five decades. As such, the Greater Eastside has survived several industrial transformations, the latest of which is the transition from mass-production unionized industries to small and unorganized specialty manufacturers.

Consider some of the features of this micro-economic landscape:

-- Until recently, the Greater Eastside has enjoyed a surplus of jobs, compared with other communities. Although not all the jobs are held by Latinos, enough of them are to significantly shorten, on average, their drive time, when compared to workers who reside in other communities.

-- Greater Eastside is home to both huge numbers of low-tech, low-wage craft-specialty jobs and high-tech, high-wage employment. This manufacturing diversity is mirrored in the region’s residential landscapes, which range from the overcrowded worker suburbs of Bell Gardens to the relatively stable and prosperous middle-income suburbs of Santa Fe Springs.

-- The transformation of the Greater Eastside into an industrial landscape was largely financed by massive infusions of property taxes diverted to redevelopment agencies during the last 30 years. More than $186.2 million, or 51.7%, of 1989-1990 property taxes were channeled to 64 municipal and county redevelopment projects now operating in the Greater Eastside’s 1st Supervisorial District. By contrast, $25 million, or 6.9%, of that year’s taxes were diverted to 20 projects in the 2nd District, which includes South Los Angeles. This transfer of public capital represents only part of the redevelopment equation, since tax dollars invested in site preparation, abatements and so forth attract private capital.

-- Huge sums of public and private capital marshaled by redevelopment ends up in private hands. Despite vehement claims to the contrary, redevelopment has yet to live up to its promise to augment the county’s tax revenues. Instead, public capital diverted to redevelopment has increased, while tax revenues needed for public services has dropped to dangerously low levels. The crowning irony of this continuing economic slight of hand is that the 1st District, which suffers from chronically underfunded schools and hospitals, is home to the county’s most numerous and most aggressive redevelopment agencies.

-- The prime agent of uneven economic redevelopment is ghost government. In Greater Eastside cities--Vernon, the City of Commerce, Santa Fe Springs, the City of Industry, for example--a handful of mostly unelected bureaucrats make decisions that shape the lives of millions of Eastsiders. This lack of political accountability so typical of many redevelopment projects spills over into other forms of economic government. Increasingly, major questions of industrial policy are being decided piecemeal by such local bureaucracies as water- and air-quality control agencies, or county regional planning commissions. Again, the 1st District is rich in ghost governments.

But the Eastside’s concentration of ghost governments is, in its own way, a kind of political asset and a potential source of empowerment. For starters, the agencies are all within easy driving distance. This is important, because more and more decisions are being made by less conventional forms of economic government the local level. Second, Latino elected leadership, taken as a whole, already represents every inch of the Greater Eastside. Even if no new Latinos were elected, the present cast of elected officials possess enough political authority to begin the kind of wide-ranging community-level discussions that might lead to the creation of a coherent micro-industrial policy for the Greater Eastside.

Two obstacles impede this evolution: Latino leaders operate according to an outdated model of political culture, and they fail to understand the changing nature of post-industrial society.

Molina and City Councilman Richard Alatorre, for example, have demonstrated an inclination to treat their districts as if were conquered urban turf. The results, in part, are personality politics and a fragmented understanding of the subtle ways in which economic realities blur Eastside political boundaries.

All the more reason why Latino leaders must articulate a new form of industrial policy that recognizes both the dangers and opportunities of living in a post-industrial age. Such an undertaking requires them to map emerging forms of new technologies and identify the changing patterns of work organization. Only by taking on this basic task will Latino leaders be able to launch a dialogue with consumers, labor, manufacturers and ethnic entrepreneurs.

Now, more than ever, the industrial Eastside challenges Latino leadership to abandon the old politics of racial entitlement and articulate a program of economic alternatives that aim to create more wealth and social justice.