TV REVIEWS : KCAL Reports on ‘Emerging Majority’

The peppy, upbeat reporting in “The Emerging Majority: Mexican Americans in Los Angeles” (9 p.m. tonight, KCAL-TV Channel 11; repeats 2 p.m., Sunday ; SAP channel for Spanish-language version) reflects a developing optimism about Latinos here. You can see it on the city’s commercial streets, especially Broadway on weekends. You can hear it on the radio with KLAX-FM’s banda sounds thrashing the competition. You can count it in city, county, state and congressional seats, filled with more and more Latino representatives.

And the numbers host Sylvia Lopez serves up look good for this community. Latino business growth has shot up 80% in five years in L.A. County, where one-third of all businesses are Latino-owned. Even more impressive, 800,000 Latinos are now able to apply for U.S. citizenship through the end of 1994, thanks to immigration amnesty laws--and new citizens tend to vote.

That Latino residents now tend not to vote in proportion to their numbers is only one of the nettlesome problems given a glance here. (Illegal immigration, of course, is another.) But the glance is fleeting, and the program’s cultural framework is part of the problem. The word Chicano is uttered (by the Times’ George Ramos) only once during the hour--odd, in a program so intent on promoting the pride and progress of people with Mexican roots. The very debate over whether to identify oneself as “Chicano,” “Latino,” “Mexican American” or “Hispanic” is emblematic of the kinds of internal arguments that never surface here, as if it would mar the program’s peppiness.

Even odder, the cultural progress noted in “Emerging Majority”--Culture Clash on TV, spurts of interest in Chicano painting, the banda explosion--fails to include theater, where artists from Luis Valdez to Lisa Loomer have put a dynamic accent on a traditionally Anglo-dominated art form.