Influx of Immigrants Changing City--Again : Demographics: Longtime Pomonans, many of them Latinos, adjust to a surge in newcomers from Mexico.

When 74-year-old community newspaper publisher Candelario J. Mendoza was a boy in Pomona, he was relegated to the segregated seats of theater balconies and could only swim at the public pool on Mondays.

Things have changed.

The city’s Latino population exploded by 139% in the 1980s, and Mendoza’s little paper gradually metamorphosed from an English-language weekly to all-Spanish. Today, the Pomona Unified School District is more than 60% Latino, and voters last month ushered in a Latino-majority City Council.

A central part of the transformation, however, has taken place within the Latino community itself: Second- and third-generation Mexican-Americans once dominated Pomona’s civic landscape, but recent Mexican immigrants have surpassed them in numbers, community leaders say.

With the dramatic changes have come growing pains. Some longtime Pomonans of Mexican descent harbor resentments against their newcomer neighbors, and Latino activists fear a broader backlash of anti-immigrant sentiment.

Most civic leaders agree on one point: Pomona offers a glimpse at the changes sweeping many California suburban communities as citizens and immigrants alike steer clear of troubled urban centers.

Rather than following the overused routes to Los Angeles and Santa Ana, Mexican immigrants are coming directly to Pomona and neighboring San Bernardino County communities, following family and friends, and hoping to avoid the overcrowding, high crime and shrinking job opportunities of the inner city.

“There aren’t the massive numbers of people here as in Los Angeles,” said a young man named Martin, 27, as he munched on seasoned ears of corn outside a Pomona market recently with his wife, Frances, and 1 1/2-year-old son, Antonio. The couple asked that their last name not be published.

“And there isn’t as much crime. Yes, it exists, but not as much as in Los Angeles. Where I live, it’s very calm,” added the father of five, who moved straight to Pomona from Mexico’s central Pacific coast state of Nayarit three years ago. Antonio’s siblings include twin girls and two other boys.

Like many of Pomona’s recent arrivals, Martin was lured by a network of family--mostly cousins--who settled in the eastern Los Angeles County city and sent back word of opportunity.

Others, like 23-year-old Marisela--a single mother of three selling the ears of corn garnished with cheese and chili pepper from a pushcart--came because the city’s Latino atmosphere held the promise of work.

After spending six months in Mira Loma in Riverside County, where the Mexico City native said only housework was available, she headed for Pomona a year ago on the recommendation of a female friend.

According to 1990 census figures, about 49% of Pomona’s 67,900 Latinos were not born in the United States. The proportion is probably even higher because illegal immigrants tend to avoid participating in the census. And many new arrivals, such as Marisela, have made Pomona their home since the census was taken.

Throughout Pomona, tell-tale signs of the changes abound. Outside a Mexican bakery, several blocks from Marisela’s corn cart, 45-year-old Maria Salinas huddles over a collection of Mexican cassette tapes, hoping to make a little money to help with the family’s expenses.

Two years ago, debilitated by arthritis, Salinas journeyed to Pomona from her small town in the Mexican state of Guerrero to join her son.

“Pomona has become a point of entry,” said Councilman Tomas Ursua, who will face Planning Commissioner Eddie Cortez in a mayoral runoff later this month. “Los Angeles and Santa Ana used to be the primary points. Now you’re finding auxiliary nodal points--Pomona, San Bernardino, Ontario--because another generation has already settled here.”

“If you go to (the Mexican state of) Jalisco--Pomona and Ontario--people know where (they are) now. That is very important, in the sense that people are beginning to recognize this area,” added Fabian Nunez, a mortgage broker in Pomona who used to head that city’s One Stop Immigration and Educational Center.

“Before, it was just Los Angeles.”

For years, Cristina Carrizosa--a 30-year resident newly elected to the City Council--was hard-pressed to find fellow Pomonans from her home state of Nayarit. Today, so many have come that even the quebradita-- a dance craze born from the beat of Nayarit music--is hot in Pomona, she said.

“The second and third generation is very minimal at this point. It’s becoming more and more first generation,” said Carrizosa, a bilingual resource specialist at Pomona’s Philadelphia Elementary School.

In Carrizosa’s school alone, about 700 of the roughly 1,200 students are receiving instruction in English as a second language, she said. Although Pomona also receives a steady trickle of immigrants from Asia and the Middle East, the overwhelming majority are Latino.

The Pomona Unified School District--with a total student population of about 30,000--was 63% Latino at last count in September. The citywide census figures from 1990 reveal the intensity of the community change: The Latino population grew from 30% of the total population in 1980 to 51% of the 132,900 residents a decade later.

The Anglo population, meanwhile, dwindled from 47% to 28%. The African-American community grew slightly but shrank in proportion to the total, from 19% in 1980 to 14% in 1990.

Although other San Gabriel Valley cities have Latino communities that in the 1990 census made up more than 51% of the total populations--Azusa, Baldwin Park, La Puente, El Monte, Irwindale--none grew as fast as Pomona’s.

“We have reached a point in the population of Pomona that it’s rapidly becoming a Latino city, so much so that we have two Latinos running for (mayor), which is something that as an old-time resident, I thought I would never see,” said Mendoza, owner and publisher of La Voz--a 20,000-circulation, Spanish-language weekly now in its 13th year of publication. He also is president of Pomona’s school board.

But the large-scale changes have created ripples within Pomona’s existing Latino community.

“With the incoming groups of immigrants, there’s a new way of life. And I think these people feel a little threatened,” said Mendoza, who has been known by the nickname “Cande,” since his third-grade teacher from Kansas shortened his first name for simplicity’s sake. “They’ve been here for years and years and years and got used to a certain way of life. Now they see that they’re being outnumbered.”

Since January, about 50 people have come to mayoral candidate Cortez--who founded the Latino Chamber of Commerce three years ago--complaining about their immigrant neighbors, Cortez said.

“Unfortunately, I have Latino people coming to me and saying they are very unhappy with their brothers and sisters,” Cortez said. “(The newcomers) don’t know that you’re not supposed to park your car up on the lawn and tear your motor out. They don’t know that you’re not supposed to live six families in a home. Instead of barbecuing in the back yard, they do it in the front and stand around singing loud music.

“It has become an issue, and I think it’s an important issue. We certainly don’t want to have a division in our community over people not knowing the laws, and people just parking in the middle of the street to chit-chat, people deliberately jay-walking,” he said.

Education is the answer, Cortez said. When newly arrived immigrants learn the laws and customs, the tensions will dissipate. But, he added, it is no surprise that the city’s Latino community is somewhat fractured.

“They have been Americanized, and I don’t mean by the culture. They have been Americanized into living under the laws and codes of the United States,” Cortez said.

“Like myself: I’m an American. That’s what I am first. That’s what my parents are. We are Americans of Mexican descent. I’m not a Chicano; I’m not a Latino. I’m an American of Mexican descent. That’s where I start.”

Other community activists concede that some tensions exist. But the outcome of Pomona’s dramatic demographic changes will be positive in the long run, they say.

“It presents us with a cultural situation that the community is forced to deal with,” Nunez said.

“Pomona, I see in the next five or 10 years, is in a way going to be another East Los Angeles, where you drive down the street and all the business names are in Spanish. It’s inevitable.”

Some--like Councilwoman Nell Soto--wryly see the current cultural landscape as a return to Pomona’s roots.

“I find it interesting that Pomona may go full circle,” said Soto, who traces her family to the massive land grant of Rancho San Jose and the days when California belonged to Mexico.

“Before California ever became a state, that’s all it was,” she said of the new Latino majority. “I am a sixth-generation Pomonan at least.”

The influx of newcomers has been healthy for Pomona, she added.

“The people who are coming in are keeping whatever economy we have going because these are the people who come here to work,” Soto said. “And they spend their money in Pomona. They shop at the Indian Hill Mall and they shop at the markets we have here.

“I think it stands for us to take notice that these are now going to be our citizens.”