The Tools to Help Us Get Along : Education, crime and economic opportunity are the keys to building bridges between cultures, some community leaders say.

Question: What do you believe are the top issues that minority communities should be dealing with as a coalition and how do we work together?

Vargas: I think the top issues are economic development and quality education. There are disagreements between our communities but if we can agree to disagree, we can move forward. Issues like immigrant-bashing and language are also important to the Latino and Asian communities.

Toma: I would add crime issues, which cannot be addressed by more prisons, more prosecutors and police and higher sentences. In Texas they started to mandate drug and alcohol treatment as part of the sentencing and they stopped building prisons and began to address the root of the problem.

Reeves: My primary focus would be on the education of our children and getting parents involved. When you talk about economic development, African-Americans need to broaden our own economic base and recognize our economic power in this country. As we build coalitions with others, we need to do our own coalition building.

Q: You recommend a “language center” for youth in Los Angeles to help bridge cultural differences, but African-Americans, Latinos and Koreans may speak English perfectly and still we have conflict.

Reeves: If we start with our children and we begin to share our language and our cultures, there are ways to bring our community together. We as adults must remember that racism is not genetic, it is learned.

Q: In the case where the Filipina nurse in Pomona was demoted for speaking Tagalog on the job: How do we prevent things like that from happening?

Toma: If you allow employee conflict to focus on language, then you make one group feel inferior for speaking their native language when it doesn’t interfere with their job. This should be dealt with as a human-relations issue, not as a discipline issue or a policy where one language is respected and another is not.

Q: How can you encourage Latinos and Asians to participate in the political process?

Vargas: A major problem that Latinos face is lack of citizenship. Citizenship drives will be very important. To encourage people to become citizens you need to show them that voting and electing officials who can be held accountable makes a difference.

Q: What are your views on the liquor licensing in South-Central?

Toma: There should be a reduction of liquor stores, if that is what the community wants. There needs to be compensation to the store owners but the question is: Where does it come from? Folks are being denied their license and denied the right to relocate elsewhere and not being given any other option.