Racial Strife Among Youths Tests Laguna : Diversity: Fights at high school between white, Latino students threaten city’s tolerant image.

In this isolated shore town, fabled for its tolerance of a wide array of lifestyles, a string of racially charged confrontations involving young people is testing the liberal values that have attracted so many to the “Riviera of the West Coast.”

Since autumn, the rambling compound of Laguna Beach High School has been struck by a series of tense incidents pitting white teen-age boys against students of Mexican descent. The Latino students are part of a small, slowly growing minority at Laguna High, where the population historically has been overwhelmingly white. The school continues to have the highest percentage of white students in the county.

In the latest fracas, a 16-year-old white student was banished from the school last week in connection with a snack-line fight in mid-December that escalated from insults about Mexicans to a blow with a clenched fist wrapped in a chain.

School officials also tried to expel a white athlete who snatched a lead pipe from a wood shop to threaten Latino students in October, according to school Supt. Paul Possemato. But after appeals from the student’s parents and lawyer, Possemato said the student ultimately was allowed to remain in continuation high school under special supervision.

While those events were unfolding, the veteran chairman of Laguna High’s foreign language department fired off letters to Possemato and school principal Barbara Callard, complaining about another student who trailed him along the city’s winding streets, taunting him with ethnic slurs about his Mexican background.

The teacher, Rod Ortiz, was troubled by some homework assignments he had been grading. “They come over to the U.S. and abuse the country,” read one essay on student impressions of Latinos. “They should all go back to their country and work out all their problems there,” read another.

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The demographic changes at Laguna High prompted one school official to muse: “This is such a small town. They attempted to isolate themselves, but the isolation isn’t working. Some of these kids always thought they would own the town. They thought everyone would be blue-eyed and blond and the beach was theirs. It’s not.”

Possemato vowed to deal with future offenders in a severe manner.

“We cannot tolerate any pupil feeling unsafe,” he said. “Public institutions have a certain responsibility and we should teach, in a number of ways. I don’t treat this lightly when a student doesn’t fulfill these responsibilities.”

Last Thursday, a select group of invited students gathered at the high school for a kickoff meeting to debate values and strategies designed to promote racial harmony. Students were invited by school administrators and foreign language teachers who hoped to attract a range of viewpoints.

On the same night, members of a volunteer community group called the Laguna Beach Cross Cultural Task Force convened a meeting to hear an update about the student body’s mood.

But underlying all the debate was a simple question: How could this happen here?

Since the turn of the century, the hillside views and balmy winds of Laguna Beach have attracted an eclectic collection of artists and sea worshipers, hippies and movie legends, and one LSD guru.

Its bracing air of tolerance has drawn many gay residents, and the city has emerged as a bastion of support for gay and lesbian rights.

This is a city that cares so much about the frail that it supported an animal shelter with a no-kill policy, and passed an ordinance allowing local police to retrieve animals left in sealed cars.

But it is also a city that has struggled with issues that focus on its small, but growing, Latino population, which numbers about 1,600 and is made up largely of people of Mexican background.

Late last year, the city enacted a tough ordinance aimed at clearing Latino day laborers from a corner in north Laguna Beach and moving them to a designated location across from a lumber yard with restroom facilities and benches.

The ordinance was prompted by complaints from north Laguna residents, who said they disliked the groups of workers who loitered in their neighborhoods. They complained that the day laborers accosted them, harassed women and urinated on the street.

Some teachers and school officials wonder if some students are simply reflecting the fears and doubts of the adults in their lives.

“You have to change hearts and minds of not just students, but the faculty,” said Myra Sosin, a former Laguna High teacher whose daughter now attends the school.

Others suspect that the fires that devoured Laguna Beach homes may have left many of the students feeling vulnerable and defensive.

“There is more stress than I have ever seen,” said Margie Zimmerman, who teaches English to Spanish-speaking students at Laguna High. “The school is undergoing construction. We’ve been through a major fire. And tensions are high, and behavior is not normal.”

Some students believe that the problems are isolated to a few of their peers. “This is something they talk about among their friends,” said Tim Torro, a 14-year-old freshman. “They make fun of the races only among people who think the same way.”

Said Kara O’Keefe, a 16-year-old junior: “I don’t look at it like these are the people that represent our school.”

But one student said teens feel threatened when they hear a language they don’t understand. “They think they might be talking about them,” said Kanoeani Connor, a 17-year-old senior.

But Sosin’s 16-year-old daughter, Sara, believes Laguna High students have for too long been shielded from real world concerns. She devoted her college application essay to that theme.

“I live in a bubble,” she wrote. “In Laguna Beach, we are surrounded by a thin, protected shell. Laguna has a reputation as an artist’s colony full of gays, but the 24,300 residents are primarily affluent white Christians and conservative.”

The awkwardness she feels is magnified for the Latino students, Sara Sosin said. They are easily identifiable by the color of their skin and the words of their language, she added.

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Last year was the first time that Ortiz, the school’s foreign language chairman, detected the serious misgivings of his students about the school’s growing Latino student population.

Twenty years ago, when he was a student teacher, there were only three Mexican students, he said, and little comment about their presence. But last year, as the population edged toward 50--or more than 6% of the school--Ortiz began to see negative stereotypes in homework assignments.

“My opinion is that all the legal and illegal Mexicans should go back to their own countries,” wrote one student on the theme of his impressions about Latinos. “They’re taking all our jobs and taking our money back to their country.”

“Some Mexicans are cool,” declared another student in one of the essays. “But the majority are idiots. The ones that are idiots are the ones who get in a big group and pick on one of my friends and then chicken out when it comes to a real fight.”

“I just hate the way they insult in Spanish, knowing that we can’t understand,” complained a third essay writer.

In the months that followed, Ortiz said he would hear variations of those complaints from students who also seemed to exaggerate the size of the Latino population. Their numbers seemed to expand as the other students noticed them congregating at the snack shop line, or waiting between classes by a stairwell.

The most blunt complaint came last year from a student who stood up in Ortiz’s Spanish class, looked directly at the teacher, and declared she disliked Mexicans. She preferred, she said, to study ceramics.

But Ortiz didn’t consider the nagging complaints and criticism serious enough to require immediate attention until a spate of incidents late last year that gradually escalated in violence.

First, there was a shoving and pushing match involving four white and four Latino students that resulted in two-day suspensions for all. Then, a well-known high school athlete used a lead pipe to threaten a Latino student. A few weeks later, a Latino student was hit by a student who wrapped his hand in a chain from his wallet.

Carlos Castenada, who was punched in the mouth, said he was standing in the snack line, speaking Spanish to another classmate, when the fight occurred.

“He said to me, ‘Are you talking about me? Are you saying bad words?’ ” Castenada said in Spanish. “I said, ‘No. What are you talking about?’ Then he started cursing Mexicans.”

Castenada, who said it wasn’t the first time he has been hit, blames tensions at the school on a few “racist” students. “I think they are angry with me because the boy who hit me was sent home and I think they are angry about that,” he said.

In the wake of the incidents, school officials and Ortiz have scheduled a special orientation program for the Latino students with a Spanish-speaking psychologist who can offer lessons and advice about fitting in with the other students.

On Thursday, about 30 students participated in a special school-sponsored forum on the racial tensions, which resulted in requests for more information about the problems. The students also asked school officials to issue strong public condemnations, expressing “zero tolerance” for hate attacks.

Later that night, Laguna Beach Unified School District President Carl Schwarz vowed to make communication a priority to prevent any further misunderstandings between ethnic groups.

“When I first came on the board in 1981,” Schwarz told members of the Cross Cultural Task Force, “I think the Latino population (in the school district) was less than 1%. Now that number is growing, and I will tell you that we have a reality and in this district we have to face the challenge.”

The school already has a few test cases showing the impact of education.

Last year Donna Simchowitz was student body president when she rose in Ortiz’s class to declare her distaste for Mexicans.

“I had the impression that Mexicans were dirty and poor and every time I walked down the street they would whistle at me,” she said. “The guys in Laguna Beach seemed angrier about it. It’s like, they drive through the canyon and see 40 or 50 Mexicans standing there waiting for work and they may say, ‘My father’s in construction and he’s out of work.’ ”

But Ortiz persuaded Simchowitz to stay, guiding her through a study of Aztec warriors and Mexican role models, culture and history.

“When you know the history of people, you’re able to accept them more,” she said. “I was totally inspired. I find the Mexican culture fascinating.”

This school year Simchowitz enrolled as a freshman at UCLA.

Her ambition: Spanish teacher.

Ethnic Enrollment Growing

The ethnic composition of the predominantly white Laguna Beach Unified School District remained more or less the same between 1989 and 1992. But at Laguna Beach High School, the minority percentage of the population has doubled since 1989.

School District, 1989:

White: 89%

All other: 1%

Black: 1%

Asian: 3%

Latino: 6%

School District, 1992:

White: 87%

All other: 1%

Black: 1%

Asian: 4%

Latino: 8%

High School, 1989:

White: 93%

All other: 1%

Black: 1%

Asian: 1%

Latino: 4%

High School, 1992:

White: 84%

All other: 3%

Black: 1%

Asian: 4%

Latino: 8%

Latino Growth

Latinos are the largest minority in the school district and the high school. The number of Latino students in the district more than doubled between 1989 and 1993, ad nearly doubled at Laguna Beach High. The district was home to a total of 2,437 students this fall; 761 attend Laguna Beach High.

Source: Orange County Department of Education, Laguna Beach Unified School District; Researched by CAROLINE LEMKE / Los Angeles Times