Why Overcoming L.A.’s Ethnic Barricades Will Be So Difficult : Governance: One result of nonpartisan city elections is the rise of the politics of ethnicity. We need an equivalent of the old local parties.

One of the most complex questions facing Los Angeles is how it can overcome the separation that its ethnicity creates. We have barricaded ourselves behind high mental walls since last spring, hoping someone would find a solution. This task is all the more difficult because the city lacks suitable mechanisms to bring its residents together.

To be sure, ethnic problems in Los Angeles are more dramatically drawn than they are elsewhere in the country, in large part because of the April riots. One fear amplified by the violence and looting is that immigration will overrun city and county resources. It seems the dominant issue in the early mayoral debates. It is also a concern felt in many immigrant communities, including the Mexican- American, according to a recent survey of Latino attitudes, though not perhaps among new Central American arrivals.

The fear that Los Angeles may not survive its immigrant explosion has been voiced by one of the mayoral candidates, former Deputy Mayor Tom Houston, to great political effect. Although the poor state of the economy is clearly an impetus for taking on L.A.’s newest residents, implicit in such attacks as Houston’s is the deeper fear that immigrants will eventually shift the city’s balance of power.

That immigrant-bashing has a political future in Los Angeles is worrisome, especially when there are so many other pressing issues. But it highlights the city’s loss of deeply rooted institutions that support communities and bring them together. At the turn of the century, that job was competently--and reliably--done by local political parties.

Today, ad hoc coalitions between ethnic communities often try to do the job. But they tend to be fragile, having little to sustain them beyond the personal commitment of their leaders. Lacking the power to reward participation, these coalitions are vulnerable in rough economic times; they are incapable of overcoming genuine economic conflict. The formal declaration of defeat and disbandment of the Black-Korean Alliance, at a time when tensions between the two communities are so high, is a case in point of the limits of ad hoc coalitions.

Unfortunately, one effect of the city’s nonpartisan elections has been to increase the importance of ethnicity in making electoral choices (the character of the candidates matter, of course, but most of the time we know surprisingly little about them). There are many reasons why local party organizations have collapsed, not the least of which were their greed and excess. But their passing is a significant factor in the rise of ethnic politics. The mayoral candidates who have announced are largely measured by their potential appeal to various ethnic constituencies, at least for the primary.

It was the local political parties that mediated between the individual and government. They helped the poor get jobs, or a street light at the end of the block. Today’s social service agencies, the best substitutes we have for parties, are often unable to help illegal residents, leaving the task to the private agencies.

The parties also mediated between groups, using pieces of the economic pie to reward loyalty and to build consensus. The resulting coalitions made the parties the most heterogeneous--and durable--structures in American society.

If we are unwilling to resurrect local political parties by making local elections partisan, we need to invent something very much like them, something that can resolve the natural tension between wanting control over our own lives and wanting the city to act forthrightly and demonstrate leadership for the region. Without some institutional connection to government, society is unstable.

The absence of this institutional connection puts a premium on leadership, which today in Los Angeles is the ability to represent one’s own constituents to the larger world in a way that brings others together. Granted, compromise with another group is a dicey predicament for a leader, because he or she risks losing his or her constituency.

We need to risk trust, of our own leaders, of other groups. That way we can begin to nurture the psychological environment necessary to create the connective tissue of mediating institutions. We are too large a society to imagine we can each go it alone, but building trust will be the hardest thing of all.