Call for Ethnic Dialogue Is More Than Academic : Urban scholars in UCLA Extension program urge community involvement to ease tensions.

After explaining a series of downward-spiraling charts and graphs showing the deteriorating economic status of Latinos and African-Americans in Los Angeles County during the past two decades, Occidental College Prof. Manuel Pastor’s voice cracked. The topic was more than academic for Pastor.

“We’ve pointed out these problems before but our voices were ignored,” he said, looking up at the 100 or so people in the audience. “We hope this time our voices aren’t ignored until there is another act of desperate violence.”

Pastor, along with other minority urban scholars, is taking part in UCLA Extension’s “Agenda for Justice in a Multicultural City,” a program intended to open what they hope will be an ongoing dialogue with the communities they study. The scholars point to the level of ethnic tensions in area schools as a recent example of the need for such forums. The program concludes Wednesday night. “Los Angeles, for better or worse, is a model for whether multiculturalism will work,” said Fernando Torres-Gil, a professor of social welfare at UCLA. “We cannot afford racial, cultural or ethnic nationalism.”

The series, which focuses on Los Angeles’ ethnic hodgepodge of peoples, was under consideration by UCLA Extension in January, but the planning was expedited by the riots. The classes are being held outside the Westwood campus in an effort to attract a diverse audience, said UCLA sociologist Melvin Oliver. He said that many minorities consider Westwood “hostile” territory.

“There need to be public spaces where people can come together and talk,” Oliver said. “This is a very privatized city, and we need to implore our public institutions to be more accessible to everyone, not only college students.”

At the first two of the seminars, which meet at the Kaiser Permanente Medical Center, 6041 Cadillac Ave., audience members represented a spectrum of the city’s ethnic groups. The class is open to the public and starts at 7 p.m. The cost is $8.

“This class is designed to try to identify the barriers to building a multicultural city . . . and moving toward establishing a multicultural future,” Oliver told the students. “The focus is not mainly for minorities or people of color. The issues are meant to have a universal appeal because until we discuss them, debate them and analyze them, they will remain unresolved.”

The fact that it took this country’s worst urban unrest in nearly a century to focus attention on urban ills is not lost on those who study the inner cities.

“We’ve been doing this kind of research for a long time, but all of a sudden our work is important because of what happened,” said Fernando Guerra, chairman of the Chicano Studies Department at Loyola Marymount University. “The problems might have surfaced only this past April, but it has been a long-term development.”

The first two seminars have focused on the involvement of minorities in the city’s economic and political systems. The participants included UCLA urban planners J. Eugene Grigsby III and Paul Ong, City Councilman Mark Ridley-Thomas, and Arturo Vargas, vice president of public policy for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund.

On Wednesday, attorney and former Police Commission member Melanie Lomax, among others, will discuss whether the criminal justice system is biased against minorities in a class titled “Criminal Justice in the Wake of Rodney King.”

Don Nakanishi, director of the UCLA Asian American Studies Center, said the time to seek answers to the city’s ethnic tensions is long overdue.

“Before April, people would ask, ‘How is L.A. going to respond to these demographic changes?’ ” said Nakanishi, a professor in the School of Education. “And now, six months after the riots, clearly the process of rebuilding and transforming the city is more compelling than ever. It’s important (for scholars) to discuss ideas both academically and with the community.”