An Unsettling Ambivalence After the Verdicts

The Verdicts have left me confused and unsettled.

I don’t like the idea that Henry Watson and Damian Williams were acquitted of most of the charges stemming from the out-of-control violence last year at Florence and Normandie. The attack against Reginald Denny may have been the focal point of the trial, but I wanted a measure of justice for Fidel Lopez, a Latino immigrant who was attacked for no apparent reason. Not only was he assaulted, but he suffered the indignity of having his genitals spray-painted. Such a demeaning and senseless act deserved a felony conviction.

But I’m no law-and-order Chicano. I come from a part of town, the barrios of the Eastside, where justice has a particular way of meting out harsher punishment than in other parts of Los Angeles. I’ve seen it up close and, believe me, there’s an anger that boils inside of me when I have to explain myself or my law-abiding actions to the Border Patrol or the police.

So when I saw Williams hug his attorney in court, I understood the joy they shared. It’s the realization of a fair justice system, one that Latinos have been seeking since before the 1943 Sleepy Lagoon case, the famed trial in which Mexican-American youths were unjustly convicted of a murder they didn’t commit.

This ambivalence gnaws at me; I know it won’t go away anytime soon.

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I am not the only Latino plagued by conflicting reactions. I found out many Chicanos, Salvadorans, Guatemalans and Nicaraguans--and their leaders--feel the same way.

Our uncertainty might well explain why Latino elected officials were quiet when the verdicts were announced. While African-Americans celebrated and whites protested, there were no news conferences called to give the Latino perspective, no party line.

Some explained the uncertainty by noting that there were more important things for the city’s Spanish-speaking residents and its leaders to worry about: There’s the fight to break up the giant Los Angeles Unified School District, where Latinos make up nearly 70% of the enrollment. There’s the rising anti-immigrant wave that frightens many of us.

That’s what I heard when I caught up with county Supervisor Gloria Molina the other morning. She had joined the city’s political and corporate elite at a groundbreaking ceremony in Boyle Heights for a $9.5-million new home for the Puente Learning Center, a nonprofit skills program. The dignitaries on hand showered its executive director, Sister Jennie Lechtenberg, with praise and best wishes.

Many at the ceremony just wanted to get the whole Denny mess behind them, and wished only to talk about Sister Jennie’s work. When I asked the supervisor for her reaction to the verdicts, Molina, the liberal champion of the underdog, admitted she’d been shocked.

“Personally, I was absolutely surprised by the verdicts,” she said. “I thought they would have been much harsher. (But) . . . I wasn’t part of the jury. I didn’t sit for the entire (trial).”

In the next breath, she went on to say, “There has always been a sense that (Latinos) have been victimized by the legal process, going back to Sleepy Lagoon.”

An old-timer in the crowd overheard my conversation and gruffly approached me with his thoughts.

“I wanted them to be guilty if they threw a brick at my head,” he growled. But then, he softened. “My brother got beat up by the cops. They said he was in a gang. He went to prison just because the cops said he was bad. He was screwed over like a lot of us have (been) by the system. Hell, cops think every Mexican is in a gang.”

Latinos may be buying into the idea that the trial of Watson and Williams was merely a black-and-white conflict. Although Latinos were both victims and victimizers during last year’s unrest, the news media framed the courtroom battle in simple terms--a white truck driver at Florence and Normandie was attacked by blacks. That made the story easier to tell, but we know the events at Florence and Normandie were far more complicated.

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While I’m uneasy about the Denny verdicts, there are a number of court cases stemming from last year’s riots that I can get good and angry about.

In one, lawyers R. Samuel Paz and Jorge Gonzalez hope to prove that the police mistakenly killed a father of two, Franklin Benavidez, 27, who authorities said was armed and tried to rob a gas station on Western Avenue at the height of the rioting last year. The lawyers, contending that Benavidez was unarmed and not a robber, don’t buy the Police Department’s explanation of the shooting.

“I think it was out-and-out murder,” Gonzalez said.

Cases like this are the reason I’m confused and unsettled.