Nava an Unlikely Standard-Bearer in Mayoral Race

Emerging as the unlikely Latino standard-bearer in the 1993 Los Angeles mayoral race is Julian Nava, the 65-year-old educator and ex-ambassador to Mexico who has been out of the political spotlight for more than a decade.

The scholarly Nava, who broke ground in 1967 by becoming the city’s first Latino school board member, bears little resemblance to the Latino Candidate many imagined would arise in 1993.

Indeed, the smart money was behind either Los Angeles County Supervisor Gloria Molina or Los Angeles City Councilman Richard Alatorre--political veterans with Eastside roots and cross-town, multiethnic ties based on patronage, votes and ideology.

The Harvard-educated Nava, by contrast, resides in suburban Northridge and has been engaged full time in academia and diplomacy since 1979.

Still, when Molina and Alatorre recently bowed out of the mayoral race, Nava--by default--became the leading Latino in a field of nearly two dozen candidates.

Nava is not chary about using his heritage to appeal to Latino pride. “It’s about time that we have someone in the Pueblo de Los Angeles who can speak Spanish and be the mayor,” the candidate recently told a heavily Latino crowd of supporters gathered at Olvera Street.

At a forum for mayoral candidates Saturday, Nava advocated granting resident immigrants limited voting rights. Such a privilege would help make resident immigrants stakeholders in their adopted country, Nava said at Los Angeles City College.

Such a position, according to an aide to one top Latino elected official, is not only divisive, but also will make Nava a “difficult sell as a crossover candidate” who can appeal to Anglos.

Despite grave qualms about Nava, City Councilman Mike Hernandez acknowledged that the Nava candidacy should help focus the attention of the many Anglo mayoral candidates on Latino needs.

Latinos comprise 40% of the city’s population while Spanish-surnamed voters make up only about 11% of its electorate.

“He’s going to give Latinos a reason to vote,” Hernandez said. “If he wasn’t out there, I fear the other candidates would take the Latino vote for granted.”

Yet Nava’s position as the Latino candidate is clouded by questions:

Can he inspire the city’s elected Latino leadership, and more important, their constituencies, to unite behind his candidacy, and will his long hiatus from politics prove a fatal drag on his chances?

To date, the traditional Latino leadership has been decidedly unmoved by Nava’s entry into the race.

Molina did not return several telephone calls about Nava’s candidacy. Others in the Latino political pantheon were reluctant to be quoted.

“Look, I’m not going to say anything negative about a fellow Latino,” said one very prominent Latino leader.

The Latino leadership’s reservations about Nava stem from several factors, including the belief that he is ideologically suspect and, more practically, that he is unlikely to win. Even his voter registration is vague because he listed himself not as Democrat or Republican but as “declined to state.”

“I want the community to endorse the winner,” Hernandez said bluntly. “That will help ensure for us a bigger place at the table of power. But I don’t believe Julian Nava can win.”

Alatorre said he believes that Nava is “able and qualified to be mayor.”

“But he’s been out of the electoral process for a very significant time. It all gets down to his ability to put together a well-financed campaign structure and a multiethnic coalition. The Latino community can’t get elected standing alone.”

Nava tartly reminds doubters that he is the only mayoral candidate who has won a citywide elective post. As a school board trustee from 1967 to 1979, Nava was elected three times at large--by voters from throughout the sprawling Los Angeles metropolitan area.

And he, perhaps quixotically, is staking considerable hope on an Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown Jr.-style appeal--via a toll-free phone number--for campaign contributions, especially from Latinos.

Yet bitterness lingers in the local Latino community about Nava’s support for Police Chief Daryl F. Gates when the city’s Police Commission tried to suspend Gates during the controversy over the beating of motorist Rodney G. King.

“On Gates, that’s where he lost the support of a lot of traditional Latino activists,” said one such Latino activist, who asked for anonymity.

But Nava says his support for Gates has been badly misinterpreted.

“Just as I defended the civil rights of Rodney King, I defended due process for Daryl Gates,” Nava said during a TV talk show interview.

Latino leaders also have been put off by Nava’s involvement with News for America, an upstart Latino group that has eschewed coalition-building with other ethnic groups, particularly African-Americans, as it has pushed for more jobs and appointments for Latinos.

“They are heavily infiltrated by Republicans, and the GOP has never been strong advocates of Chicano-first,” said a Latino activist. “I don’t trust them and I don’t think a lot of the established Latino elite does either.”

Nava and his supporters are undaunted by the Latino elite’s aloofness.

“Obviously, I feel they should endorse me,” Nava said recently. “And since I don’t intend to make politics my profession, I’m not a threat to them. I represent a historically wonderful opportunity for Hispanics to elect a Hispanic.”

Xavier Hermosillo, a leader in the News for America group, contends that it is the Latino political elite, not Nava, who is out of step.

“He makes sense to growing elements in the Latino community,” said Hermosillo, who claims that the city’s emerging Latino entrepreneurial class sees Nava as a refreshing alternative to the liberal ideology of the Latino political elite.

Nava recognizes the need to overcome the impression that his long hiatus from political life has handicapped his candidacy.

After voluntarily stepping down from the school board, Nava was named ambassador to Mexico by President Jimmy Carter and served in that post--which perhaps made him better known in Mexico than in the United States--until 1981.

Subsequently, Nava returned to his old job as a professor of history at Cal State Northridge.

In the mid-1980s he complained loudly about the failure of the city school board to appoint a Latino as superintendent. Last year, he launched a short-lived recall drive against Mayor Tom Bradley after the mayor’s Police Commission sought to suspend Gates.

Also in 1991, Nava was named to co-chair a panel appointed by Sheriff Sherman Block to look into allegations that sheriff’s deputies frequently used too much force against minority suspects. The panel was criticized as a rubber stamp by many law enforcement critics, including Molina, and Block suspended its meetings after the Board of Supervisors named a retired judge to look into the same issue.