A New Leader Emerges for L.A.’s Salvadorans

Roberto Lovato is a new, unique leader emerging from Los Angeles’ large Salvadoran community. He’s the first Salvadoran to head up the L.A.-based Central American Resource Center, the largest advocacy and social services organization for Central Americans in the United States.

Since its founding in 1983, CARECEN was guided largely by sympathetic whites--Spanish-speaking progressives who protested against political repression in Central America and for liberal political asylum policies in this country. It was a powerful agenda that made CARECEN a leading voice for the nearly 900,000 members of Southern California’s Central American community.

But now, leaders like Lovato--born here, but retaining a solid grasp of their roots--are coming forth to tackle new and more difficult problems. For Lovato, the biggest challenge may be selling the hyphen: Turning a largely refugee population into Salvadoran-Americans, Guatemalan-Americans and Nicaraguan-Americans.

It’s a road that other immigrants to L.A., notably Mexicans and several Asian groups, have successfully traveled over the years. It’s a trip Lovato, a 30-year-old graduate of UC Berkeley with a degree in rhetoric, has already taken.

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Born in San Francisco to Salvadoran immigrant parents, Lovato always knew what it was like to be Salvadoran. As a kid, he went every year to visit relatives in El Salvador. He didn’t always like it.

“The milk was different, the roads were rocky,” he recalls. “Everybody there wants to give you lots of carino (love). I didn’t understand it, but as I got older, I did. My parents never said, ‘This is what it means to be Salvadoran.’ They just showed me by living.”

Although active in Chicano student politics while at Berkeley, Lovato said he seemed lost about his future goals by 1987. “I was asking myself,” he remembers, “ ‘Who the hell am I?’ ” So he did what a lot of American kids do to figure out life. He took a road trip.

For four months in 1987, he traveled by bus through Mexico and Central America. Experiencing the civil war in El Salvador firsthand made up his mind. He would devote himself to helping these people once they came north. “If you know the Salvadoran people, you’ll be moved by them and you’ll eventually support them,” he says.

After the trip, he settled in L.A. and joined a growing number of Salvadorans working for local Central American groups. A number, sharing Lovato’s motivation, went on to catch the Establishment’s eye: Oscar Andrade, director of El Rescate; Judith Amaya, a grass-roots organizer who campaigned for legal residency status for Salvadoran immigrants, and Carlos Vaquerano, a CARECEN staffer who was the only Central American on the board of Rebuild L.A.

Since its inception, CARECEN has grown steadily. During the three-year tenure of Madeline Janis-Aparicio as executive director, its operating budget went from about $300,000 to nearly $2 million last year. But it was clear to Janis-Aparicio, a white law student who worked for CARECEN since its beginning, that change was in the air.

“The activism that went to human rights in Central America changed to political empowerment in the United States,” she says in explaining her decision in January to step down, knowing it was time for a Central American such as Lovato to take over.

Lovato was appointed to the $32,000-a-year post last May. Change has come swiftly. CARECEN dropped the word “refugee” from its name, replacing it with “resource.” It has taken up the cause of L.A. street vendors who want to legally sell clothes and foods. It is going ahead with plans to transform a former motel and detention center run by U.S. immigration authorities, located in the Pico-Union district, into the first community center for Central Americans in this country.

And it is readying plans for citizenship and voter registration campaigns. “We’re not refugees anymore,” Lovato says. “We’re now committed to helping Central Americans become a permanent part of the L.A. community.”

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Despite these ambitious plans, Central America’s continuing problems haven’t gone away. El Salvador’s presidential election is set for March. One CARECEN staffer, sent recently to monitor ballot preparations there, was told to leave the country immediately. He did so.

Meanwhile, the group’s staff and supporters, including actor Martin Sheen, have received death threats reminiscent of those openly issued by Salvadoran death squads before the civil war ended last year.

“This may be idealism, but we’re going on with our own community here,” he says. “And I’ll continue to visit El Salvador and struggle with the people there, too.”