Tension between Asian and Latino students in the Alhambra School District has climbed to a fever pitch. Occasional violence has officials scrambling to bridge . . . : Racial Rifts on Campus

It’s lunchtime at San Gabriel High School. Here are the Asian students, clustered on the grassy knoll. Over there are the Latino students, gathered around the cafeteria tables.

There’s little inter-ethnic mingling on this 3,232-student campus, where most of the student body is evenly split between Asians and Latinos.

“I say ‘hi’ to them, but we stay to ourselves, that’s just the way it is,” says Angelica, 16, a Mexican-American clad in the teen grunge of flannel shirt and torn jeans. “Chinese are kind of conceited. They don’t want to talk to us. They’re always putting Mexicans down. . . . You should see the cars they drive. Honda Accords, BMWs. And we have to walk home from school.”

“I’m not prejudiced, but I don’t like Mexicans,” says Diane, 17, a Cambodian student with a scoop-front blouse from the pages of Sassy. Her friends agree. “It’s hard to get to know them. Some of them ‘dog’ you, they give you dirty looks. They think they’re better than you.”

Tension and mutual suspicion between Asian and Latino students in the Alhambra School District have climbed to such pervasive levels that a Pitzer College professor is embarking on a study of race relations at the schools. Parents have grown alarmed enough about what they see and hear from their children to form a human relations committee.

Their aim is to ease the resentment and misunderstanding that comes when ethnic groups that historically have had little contact suddenly find themselves sharing close quarters--in this case, the Southwest San Gabriel Valley. And in the case of the schools, the quarters are close indeed, as high schools built for 1,500 students each now enroll 3,000.

While adults can retreat to ethnic enclaves within the region, students must crowd for hours together in classes.

At home, the youngsters often speak an immigrant parent’s native language, eat distinctive traditional foods, worship in different faiths.

In the morning, they leave those worlds for school, where they are expected to share thoughts about the class topic of the day, cooperate in team sports and share scarce school supplies.

Little wonder that campuses have become lightning rods for race-charged conflicts over grades, dates, turf and even accidental pushing in busy halls.

Last February, the tensions boiled over in two days of fistfights at Mark Keppel High School in Alhambra. Police arrested five Asian and seven Latino students and confiscated seven knives, a piece of sharpened glass and a loaded gun. School officials expelled 24 students and recommended that those arrested be prosecuted for hate crimes. Three were eventually charged with battery; their cases are pending. The rest were not charged.

“I wish I could rationalize it,” Rudy Chavez, Mark Keppel’s principal of 10 years, says grimly. “We’ve observed threats and violence that seem to be motivated only by the fact that (the students involved) are from different ethnic backgrounds.”

Fistfights between Asians and Latino students are still the exception in the school district, which serves parts of Monterey Park, San Gabriel, Rosemead and Alhambra and whose student population is 49% Asian and 39% Latino, with the rest divided among Anglos and various other ethnic groups. Before this year, the last serious racial violence occurred in 1991, when a group of Latino students beat up two Chinese brothers at San Gabriel High School.

But the incidents crystallized a persistent racial tension that bubbles below the surface of daily school life, “like a volcano that has to explode,” says one student.

Not everyone feels it; teachers say extroverted students who have adopted more of American culture move between groups easily. John Tran, a 17-year-old Vietnamese youth, plays on the basketball team at Mark Keppel and is well-known for his athletic prowess.

“I don’t feel no pressure,” John says. “I hang around more with Latinos than Asians. I do a lot of sports. Everybody knows me.”

But the John Trans aren’t that easy to find on campus; more common are students eager to talk about how racial tension and sporadic violence affects campus life, their words tumbling out quickly and with strong emotion. But don’t use my name, they add hastily. I don’t want to get jumped.

Nancy, a 17-year-old junior at Mark Keppel, explains why she no longer uses the washbasin in campus bathrooms. “I don’t feel safe,” says the Chinese teen-ager. “In the restroom, the Latinos will be up closer to the mirror and the Asians will be back. I won’t go up to the mirror.”

Daniel shares his classmate’s fears, but the 17-year-old Latino junior feels threatened by Asians. “You can feel it when you walk down the halls. You get called wetback, dirty Mexican,” he says.

The racial divisions persist despite a new state curriculum that stresses a multicultural approach to history and despite schoolwide celebrations of Cinco de Mayo and Chinese New Year. Sometimes the lines divide adults as well as students.

Last December, a Latina school board member provoked a storm of bitterness when she criticized the all-Asian academic decathlon team at San Gabriel High School for failing to represent the school’s ethnic make-up. Dora Padilla also said non-Asians weren’t encouraged to try out, which decathlon coaches denied.

“Problems start because of attitudes in the community, and it spills over into the school,” says Stephen Kornfeld, dean of students at San Gabriel High.

Gay Wong, an education professor at Cal State Los Angeles who sits on the Alhambra human relations commission, says adults should look inside their own hearts to understand the troubles their children face at school.

“We’ve been dealing with surface problems, like fighting of children and name-calling, but in fact it’s not that simple,” Wong says. “Children reflect the attitudes of the family. And adults also have ignorances that need to be addressed.”

The roots of this conflict are as familiar as the history of racism itself: sweeping population shifts, the arrival of new immigrants with different traditions, clashes in values and resentment when one group sees the other as more privileged.

But there is an unusual demographic twist this time around: Latinos, long seen by other groups as the newcomers seeking a better life in Southern California, are the entrenched group with a stable population in Southwest San Gabriel Valley who see a crop of new Asian immigrants moving in and outnumbering them--and in some arenas, faring better.

Before this movement, conflicts between Asians and Latinos had been relatively rare, according the Los Angeles County Human Relations Commission.

The new resentment is fed by the Asians’ success in their new home, immigration scholars say; not only are the newcomers in town different, but the old guard doesn’t even get the satisfaction of looking down on them.

“This isn’t (a type of immigrant) we have seen in the past. This is a middle-class migration, people who come with resources and move ahead quickly,” said Roger Waldinger, a UCLA sociology professor who studies immigration.

“The Latinos, even though they’ve been there longer, find themselves in a subordinate position. There’s real competition.”

Latino history has deep roots in the area; many families clustered in houses around the San Gabriel Mission since the days of the padres, said longtime Alhambra resident Padilla, the school board member. After World War II, more Latino families moved into heavily Anglo neighborhoods in Monterey Park, Rosemead and Alhambra. The San Gabriel Valley suburbs were seen as a step up from East Los Angeles and Lincoln Heights, a place where families moved after they had made it in America.

Then in the last decade, tens of thousands of Asian immigrants, especially Chinese, settled in the southwestern valley--Alhambra, Monterey Park, San Gabriel, Rosemead and South San Gabriel--drawn by the proximity of Chinatown and ads placed overseas by a local developer who touted Monterey Park as a “Chinese Beverly Hills.”

In some cities, the Asian population tripled or more, although breakdowns of ethnicities within that category are not available. Monterey Park now has the highest concentration of Asians--56%--of any city in the country. There are Asian-owned banks, shopping centers and up to 100 Asian restaurants in the 7.7-square-mile city alone.

The influx of Asians in the 1980s prompted many old-time residents in the area to sell their homes and businesses and leave town; the Anglo population dropped by 30,000 in the southwestern valley, according to the 1990 Census. Meanwhile, the Latino population remained fairly stagnant. While Mexican families with money and means moved out, poorer immigrants took their place, historians say.

Similar population shifts occurred to a lesser degree in San Gabriel Valley cities such as Baldwin Park, Rowland Heights, Pomona, Hacienda Heights, Walnut and Diamond Bar. Many of those communities are now one-third Asian. In school districts where Latinos are the other significant minority, educators also have reported ethnic tensions.

At Los Altos High in Hacienda Heights, Latino students at an awards ceremony five years ago booed each time an Asian name was called out, recalls former English teacher Marita Villanueva.

Now teaching at Garey High School in Pomona, Villanueva recently led a class discussion in which both Asian and Latino students expressed frustration at their academic stereotypes.

“We weren’t born smart, we weren’t born with backpacks on our backs, we work hard to get what we want,” said 18-year-old Leslie Lee, a Garey senior who is Vietnamese and Chinese.

“At least (Asians) have a good stereotype,” shot back her Latina friend Norma Aguilar. “Everyone thinks Mexicans are in gangs. We’re always looked down on. People assume we’re not going to go to college.”

The perception that Asians succeed beyond measure and buy BMWs at will doesn’t bear up under statistical scrutiny: Income levels of Asians and Latinos are very close in the southwestern part of the valley, according to the 1990 U.S. Census--about $30,000 annually for both groups.

But there is a vast disparity in education levels: Asians are more than three times as likely to have a college degree as Latinos, the census found. Those educational differences appear especially stark in the schools, where academic achievement is the constant measuring rod.

At Alhambra High, for instance, Latinos account for 34% of the student body but 70% of the suspensions. Last year, 111 Asian students took physics but no Latinos did. Eighty-six percent of Alhambra’s seniors who said they were headed for universities in 1992 were Asian; 11% were Latino.

When asked about their own academic success, Asian educators, parents and students all cite the high value their culture places on learning. At school, Asian students often tutor each other in cooperative groups. Parents drive their children hard to get good grades, often at the expense of sports, social life or extracurricular activities, the students agree.

“My parents made me quit the tennis team because of grades,” said Becky Hong, 16, of Mark Keppel. “They believe, if you don’t make the grades you don’t get the privileges.”

By contrast, Latino students are more likely to grow up in an environment in which education “is accepted and respected, but it’s not a reachable goal,” says Armando Navarro, an assistant professor of ethnic studies at UC Riverside. In Mexico and Central America, “if you get a sixth-grade education that’s good.”

Blanca Saldana, 18, a high-achieving Latina, can relate. “If you’re Hispanic, and your father made a living as a dishwasher, it’s like, why can’t you do that?” the San Gabriel High senior said. “Even my parents told me, ‘I did it without an education, why do you need to go to college for all those years?’ ”

Grasping for reasons to explain the troubled academic performance of their own ethnic group, some high-achieving Latinos fall back on stereotypes. Nisha Joshi, the sole Latina in her advanced placement chemistry class at Mark Keppel, acknowledges that many Latinos are angry at their exclusion from honors classes.

“But they don’t deserve it, because they don’t work hard enough,” said Nisha, 16, who is Colombian and Indian.

Connie Ahumada, a bilingual teacher’s aide at Temple Intermediate School in Rosemead, said Latinos often call high-achievers schoolboy or schoolgirl, a derogatory slang for someone worried about homework and grades.

“There’s so much pressure NOT to do well in school in the Hispanic community,” Ahumada says.

Educators said they must devise methods to motivate Latino students instead of throwing their hands up and settling for less.

“We should laud the Asian students who are doing well,” said Jose Calderon, a Pitzer College professor of sociology and Chicano studies who in March received a $16,000 grant to study race relations in the Alhambra School District. “But schools have to look at themselves and ask, why aren’t Latinos doing well?”

Maria, a Latina at Mark Keppel, has a theory about that. She had to draw up an academic class schedule for her little brother, she said, after counselors steered him toward vocational classes. Another counselor once tried to talk Maria out of taking an advanced placement class.

“He said, are you sure? It might be too much for you,” Maria recalls. “That happens a lot here.”

Teachers say the tendency to stereotype Asians as achievers also masks reality; more behavioral and academic problems are beginning to crop up among Asian students, educators say. Vietnamese gangs are of particular concern at San Gabriel High.

It doesn’t help students’ understanding when stereotypes about each other’s cultures persist even among adults most committed to erasing them. And they are publicly proclaimed on both sides.

“The recent Latino arrivals, they come here and they don’t hate anyone,” said Jose Campos, a counselor at Mark Keppel. “But they see how many thousands of dollars they have to pay for college. They see how the Asians can get anything they want. And they get frustrated.”

“Hispanics do well in sports,” said Marina Tse, president of the Chinese American PTA of Southern California and co-chair of the San Gabriel Valley Multi-Ethnic Task Force. “Maybe Hispanics can help Asians with sports and Asians can help Latinos with computers and math.”

But both groups are trying. Alhambra’s human relations committee has thrown cross-cultural mixers, held seminars on overcoming stereotypes and this spring, prodded the Alhambra school board to adopt a policy to improve campus race relations.

Leaders are now studying recommendations such as conflict resolution classes for students, cultural diversity training for teachers and staff and counseling that would help parents overcome stereotypes.

Meanwhile, their children go about their wary campus dance, unable to resolve the tension but resigned, even sanguine, about its existence.

The fear “rises and falls, but it’s always there,” sighed one 18-year-old Mexican-American. “Whenever you get large numbers of different people together, there’s always going to be tension.”

School Tensions Racial tensions between Asian-Americans and Latinos at several schools in the Alhambra School District stem in part from sweeping demographic changes that have brought increasing numbers of Asian immigrants into traditionally Anglo and Latino areas.

Although Asians and Latinos in the area have similar incomes, Asians are seen as more successful, scholars of race relations say, in part because Asians have more formal education. POPULATION SHIFTS

1980 1990 % CHANGE Latino 84,673 91,771 +8 Asian** 33,405 98,548 +195 Anglo 75,188 47,685 -37 Black 1,574 2,471 +57

INCOME AND EDUCATION

ASIAN LATINO Median household income $33,252 $30,687 Bachelor’s degree or more 19.7% 5.4%

SAN GABRIEL HIGH SCHOOL, 1991-92

San Gabriel High School statistics illustrate differences in school achievement between Asian and Latino students in the Alhambra School District. Those differences help feed stereotypes and ethnic tensions, educators say.

% ASIAN % LATINO Total school enrollment 42 42 Proportion of suspensions 12 81 Enrollment in physics classes 90 7 Enrollment in advanced math 90 6 Four-year college-bound 60 20

*Statistics for the southwest San Gabriel Valley are based on 1990 Census data for Alhambra, Monterey Park, Rosemead, San Gabriel and South San Gabriel.

**Census figures for Asians include Pacific Islanders and Asians who also identify themselves as being of Latino origin.

Sources: U.S. Census Bureau and Alhambra School District