Charting a New Course : Ethnic Leaders Muster Their Resolve for Change After a Tumultuous Year Following the Riots

The year since 1992’s civil unrest has been a time of soul-searching in Los Angeles’ minority communities.

The riots prompted Latino, African-American and Asian-American leaders to re-examine their priorities and devise ways to unite their communities and transform their numbers into political muscle.

On the Eastside, the established Latino leadership realized it needed to reach out to the growing immigrant populations in South-Central and the Downtown area.

African-Americans stepped up their calls for jobs, business ownership and youth programs.

And Asians, particularly Koreans, vowed to make their presence felt at City Hall.

But looking back on the last year, leaders from each community acknowledge that their efforts have just begun.

Years from now, the riots may be seen as the turning point in the quest for unity in the city’s divided Latino community.

The unrest showed how out of touch the established Mexican-American leadership was with the newer, fast-growing immigrant populations in South Los Angeles and the neighborhoods just west of Downtown. Indeed, as some Central American and Mexican immigrants pillaged their own neighborhoods in those areas, many Mexican-American leaders conceded they had little understanding of the underlying economic and social factors that led to the rage and looting they watched on television.

“I think the riots highlighted how isolated we were from the community,” said longtime activist Beatriz Stotzer, president of New Economics for Women and a Rebuild L.A. board member.

Efforts to bridge the gap between the Mexican-American and newer immigrant communities are under way. And while the crime, poverty and despair that led up to the rioting still exist, many established Eastside organizations have formed an alliance with newer groups in Pico-Union and South-Central to address the common problems facing Latinos. The riots also focused attention on the Central American community, pushed its leaders to prominence and resulted in new grass-roots organizations.

Among them is the Latino Coalition for a New Los Angeles, which formed last summer and includes the leadership of 35 community organizations from the Eastside, South-Central and Pico-Union. The membership ranges from longtime Eastside institutions such as the East Los Angeles Community Union, a nonprofit community development organization, to newcomers such as La Union de Comerciantes Latinas y Afiliadas, a vendors group in Pico-Union.

While it remains to be seen what the coalition can accomplish in the long-run, its members are establishing footholds in South-Central, where relatively few Latino organizations exist to serve a population that the 1990 U.S. Census found was 48% Latino.

For instance, the Eastside mental health clinic El Centro opened a facility three months ago near Vermont Avenue and Adams Boulevard. Clinic officials realized the need for such services after seeing haunting images of traumatized Latino riot victims on television, said Xavier Aguilera, president and chief executive officer of El Centro.

El Centro and other organizations in the coalition are also planning to open a social service center in South-Central. The project, still in the preliminary stages, would include health, job-training and immigration services.

In Pico-Union and Westlake, Central American leaders are cautiously optimistic that the coalition can bring together the culturally and geographically divided Latino community. Many in the Central American community felt slighted by the lack of sensitivity displayed by the Eastside leadership after the riots. Few Eastside leaders attempted to reach out to Latinos in Pico-Union and South-Central in the days immediately following the riots.

“Latinos are not only in East Los Angeles. Latinos are not only Mexican-Americans,” said Carlos Vaquerano, a coalition member, an official with the Central American Refugee Center in Pico-Union and a member of the Rebuild L.A. board. “As long as we understand that, we’ll be OK.”

Still, one significant hurdle looms in the path of Latino political unity: the animosity between the camps of county Supervisor Gloria Molina and City Councilman Richard Alatorre. The feud began in 1982 when Molina successfully ran, as an outsider, for an Assembly seat against the wishes of the Alatorre-Art Torres political machine on the Eastside.

The result of the discord, some leaders said, is that Latinos have been unable to form a united political leadership to speak for Latinos in the year since the riots, and a disproportionate amount of resources and attention have gone to the smaller but politically more powerful African-American community.

“It’s like we don’t exist. It’s been no contest (between Latinos and blacks),” said Fernando Oaxaca, president of Coronado Communications and co-chairman of the Latino Coalition.

In what was viewed as an important first step toward resolving the political conflict, Molina, Alatorre and other prominent Latino politicians made a show of unity at a news conference the day before the verdicts were handed down in the recent Rodney G. King federal civil rights trial.

In the wake of the riots, the city’s African-American community demanded opportunities that had been denied for years: jobs, youth programs and financial support for entrepreneurial ventures.

But since the unrest that destroyed vast sections of South Los Angeles, the black community has found itself no further along than before, many of its members and leaders said.

“Post-rebellion Los Angeles looks very much like it did before the rebellion last year. And that increases the cynicism,” said Joe Hicks, executive director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

Such cynicism is fueled by the fact that few of the promised economic and social programs have materialized. The smattering of new job-training programs set up in South-Central have produced fewer than 1,000 jobs for a population of more than 270,000 blacks, according to Rebuild L.A. and other estimates.

And the rhetoric about getting ex-gang members jobs and helping them get businesses off the ground has produced little, people in the community said.

“It was all empty, superficial dialogue,” said Fred Williams, an ex-gang member and founder of Common Ground Foundation, a 5-year-old school dropout retrieval program based in Watts. “We thought we heard people talking about restoring jobs, but I guess now they meant restoring jobs people already had. But we didn’t have any.”

Williams added that the guilty verdicts in the federal King case are a peripheral issue in the black community and among gang members looking for work. “That is not any step toward helping the black community,” he said.

Williams, who was involved in the Watts-based truce between Bloods and Crips gangs, is disappointed that the truce has not been taken seriously by established black leaders.

“The truce movement still hasn’t been embraced. And we still don’t have financial support,” he said.

City Councilman Mark Ridley-Thomas, whose 8th District is 63% black, said some progress has been made. He cited two black-owned businesses and a job-training center that have opened, in addition to the reconstruction at Manchester Boulevard and Western Avenue and other major intersections in his district, which runs from Baldwin Hills east to USC and south to South Los Angeles.

But longstanding ills such as inferior schools, crime and inadequate housing have overshadowed the community’s limited progress, Ridley-Thomas said. And many fear that the future of the black community may look much like its past.

“I’m not at all certain that any seeds have been planted in terms of dealing with the causal factors” of the riots, said Larry Aubry, senior consultant for the Los Angeles County Commission on Human Relations. “The emphasis has been on the smoke and not on the fire.”

According to some leaders, it’s too soon to expect major changes in a community that sustained tens of millions of dollars in riot damage and had been politically neglected for more than two decades.

“In one sense, a year is too short,” said Karen Bass, executive director of the Community Coalition for Substance Abuse, Prevention and Treatment. “But on the other hand, I don’t think people have seen anything coming that’s qualitative.”

Many substantial accomplishments have been by independent grass-roots organizations. But without working as a collective body to achieve change, the individual efforts have not been as forceful as they might otherwise have been, leaders said.

Danny Bakewell, president of the Brotherhood Crusade and a member of the organization for 22 years, is pessimistic about conditions in the black community improving in the next year or two.

“If I had to judge the future based on what I’ve seen in the past, the future is bleak,” Bakewell said. “That’s the sad reality.”

Last spring, after city leaders failed to speak out on behalf of the 2,300 Korean-Americans whose businesses were vandalized, looted and burned, the Korean-American community knew it was politically powerless.

A year later, the community still lacks clout at City Hall. But the complacency that Korean-Americans felt toward government before the riots has been replaced by a push to establish a political voice.

“The riots changed my whole view of life,” said Brian Choi, general secretary of the Korean American Republican Assn. “Even though Koreans have been giving money to political candidates, City Hall ignored us. It was a slap in the face, but we wouldn’t have learned any other way.”

The Korean American Coalition has registered 1,500 voters since last year’s unrest--about a 3% increase in Los Angeles County’s 50,000 Korean-American voters.

The first Korean-American Republican and Democratic organizations formed. And dozens of 1.5- and second-generation Korean-Americans have become active in the community, joining organizations and lobbying for assistance for riot victims. (Those in the 1.5-generation immigrated to the United States as children, speak fluent English and understand American customs.)

Koreans scored a political victory last November with the election of Jay Kim, a Korean-American from Diamond Bar, to the House of Representatives.

“Both Republicans and Democrats from the Korean community supported him,” Choi said. “It was after the riots and they said, ‘This is the reason why we need a Korean-American up there.’ ”

Although roughly 73,000 Koreans live in Los Angeles, only a fraction are eligible to vote because most aren’t U.S. citizens, said Eui-Young Yu, a sociologist at Cal State Los Angeles. Most Korean-American voters in Los Angeles County live outside the city limits.

Although many said the new 1.5- and second-generation Korean-American leaders have helped mobilize the community, some older immigrants have been hesitant to embrace the young leaders because they believe they cannot completely understand their views.

And some Korean-Americans said the community is making little political progress because various organizations are operating under their own agendas.

“We’re one of the least-organized communities,” said John Lim, past president of the Korean American Bar Assn. “There are so many organizations and so many self-proclaimed leaders that you don’t know who the leaders are. A lot of efforts are being made to bring about a network organization to pull together the resources of various organizations and serve as an umbrella group.”

But Indong Oh, chairman of the Korean American Coalition, said it’s healthy to have more than one voice: “Koreans have lived under a dictatorial government for 30 years. We always think we need one strong leader, but why? The only hope of this community is to educate people. We need to send lots of people to the media and to become political candidates.”

The unrest also propelled a push for unity among Asians. About 40 Asian groups recently formed Asian Pacific Americans for a New Los Angeles advocacy group. Several Chinese-American organizations raised $23,000 for riot victims--$15,000 of which was given to Korean-American, Latino and other minority organizations, said Deborah Ching, executive director of the Chinatown Service Center.

“The riots underscored the need to reach out to other ethnic groups,” Ching said.