COVER STORY : CROSSING LINES : Two Years After the Riots, the Divisions Among Ethnic and Racial Groups Are as Wide as Ever

As the smoke and flames of the nation’s worst urban unrest this century dissipated throughout central Los Angeles two years ago, the city’s minority communities heeded the wake-up call to take care of their own.

They turned inward to heal their wounds, establish organizations and coalitions, and beef up their social and political muscle. Inclusion was the first order of business. Unity with other racial and ethnic groups would come later.

But in the two years since rioting rocked Los Angeles’ already shaky multicultural foundation, that unity has been slow to emerge. Racial dividing lines are as strong as before the unrest, and few efforts to cross those lines--or even just blur them--exist.

“The politics in this town have become more ‘racialized,’ ” said attorney and activist Angela Oh, pointing to a number of incidents in the past two years that have widened racial gaps.

“I don’t hear or see any more examples of diverse communities now really working together.”

There are no studies or opinion polls to show who’s talking to whom or what ethnic or racial organizations are working together to seal the racial rifts, but there have been pockets of change: a handful of multiethnic efforts that are slowly progressing; multiracial discussions on college campuses, and quiet, small-scale programs that evolved into multiethnic groups.

The situation also has created two different schools of thought--those who believe it is imperative to move now to create interracial and inter-ethnic coalitions among the city’s Asian American, Latino and African American communities, and those who say they must first strengthen their own communities before joining the collective effort.

“There’s a tendency for communities to encircle the wagons after a crisis. That has not been a very successful approach,” said Jorge Mancillas, an assistant professor of anatomy and cell biology at UCLA. “The successes we’ve witnessed in bringing about any kind of progress, in bringing change to the social structure of L.A., has happened when people cross ethnic lines.”

An example, Mancillas said, was last year’s highly publicized 14-day hunger strike at UCLA, in which Mancillas joined seven students to protest Chancellor Charles Young’s decision not to create a Chicano studies department. Another example would be the rallies by Local 11 of the Hotel and Restaurant Employees Union, which has a large Latino membership.

The disagreement over whether to move ahead quickly or to take more time to forge a multicultural effort has not impeded some groups from working together, although it has slowed some inter-ethnic discussions.

Many community leaders point to the racial and ethnic gridlock among the city’s political circles as part of the reason for the absence of a mass multiethnic movement. What’s needed to break that gridlock, they say, is a stronger commitment from politicians to move toward mending the racial tensions.

“There’s not a sense of vision from City Hall about seeking to put together or work on a plan to get rid of racial divisions,” said Gary Phillips, co-director of the Multicultural Collaborative.

Constance L. Rice, an attorney with the NAACP Legal Defense & Education Fund, said common ground between groups can only be found by organizing with each other. “It’s not just flash-point issues, it’s long-term resolutions,” she said.

According to an October, 1992, Times Poll, nearly one-third of Angelenos said they believed ethnic minorities could make more progress by strengthening their own communities rather than building coalitions with other ethnic groups.

“The inward-looking issues are not necessarily polarizing, but it’s a development that needs to happen in order to have a multicultural community,” said Debbie Ching, president of the Asian Pacific Planning Council. “Each community has to have a strong voice and organization for communication to flow.”

The council, which was established before the riots, is a multiethnic effort of about 10 groups within the Asian and Pacific Islander community. It initially dealt with health care, but the unrest prompted the organization to broaden its scope and get more involved in human relations work. Part of that expansion has included collaborating with other Asian American groups to hold multicultural talks, such as a recent round-table discussion at UCLA on race relations in Los Angeles.

The most prominent arena for multiracial dialogue has been on university campuses.

“In academic circles they’re talking about a wide range of multiethnic issues,” Oh said. “Everything from ‘women of color’ to ‘how do small ethnic communities deal with all the attitudes they confront?’ It doesn’t work as well in public lives because dialogue is an intangible thing.”

For the 2-year-old Multicultural Collaborative, dialogue has worked. It has forged discussions between ethnic organizations, community leaders and academics to affect policy and mend social and racial rifts.

“This is a multicultural, multiracial group seeking solutions to human relations when there’s still little commitment to human relations by anyone else,” said Larry Aubry, former consultant for the Los Angeles County Human Relations Commission.

The collaborative was formed after the riots as a think tank to study multiracial relationships in the city and work on solutions to inter-ethnic conflicts.

However, with few similar efforts being made to create racial and ethnic ties, the collaborative ended up being pulled in several directions during its first two years.

“We didn’t expect to create an activist structure,” said Manuel Pastor, one of the founders of the Multicultural Collaborative and a member of the New Majority, a multiethnic organization founded before the riots. “We kept seeing issues arise and looked in that direction. But we’re now narrowing our focus.”

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Since early last year, the collaborative has held about half a dozen community forums discussing policy, community empowerment, development issues and other topics as they affect each of the city’s racial communities. Its three co-directors--one African American, one Asian American and one Latino--have been involved in community groups for several years and work with various ethnic community-based organizations.

“People talk to each other beyond race and ethnic lines,” said Rice, of the Legal Defense & Education Fund. “There is a pluralistic ethos being developed.”

There are various ways of achieving such pluralism. One such effort is the Pico-Union Improvement Assn. Prompted by riot destruction in the neighborhood and Pico-Union’s longstanding problems with crime, Mike Hoy and other community residents mobilized to improve the area.

They formed the association, a Neighborhood Watch group whose mission is to rid the 2.5-square-mile area of crime and drug dealers.

“I saw my Neighborhood Watch group disappear. I observed a lot of groups in Pico-Union doing different things, but they weren’t coordinated and working together,” said Hoy, who is white and has lived in Pico-Union for 10 years.

In addition to Hoy, the core group of organizers included one African American and two Latinos. Most of the group’s 200 members are Latino, but also participating are a handful of whites and African Americans who are either residents or merchants in the area bounded by 7th Street on the north, the Santa Monica Freeway on the south, the Harbor Freeway on the east and Normandie Avenue on the west.

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“It’s not about race; it’s about people who live and work here and want to make some positive changes,” said Hoy, coordinator of the group. “But I guess that’s almost the same goal for multiracial plans.”

Improving ethnic relations in addition to imparting business know-how is part of a fledgling plan for training future teen-age entrepreneurs. Every Saturday, nearly 40 Korean, Latino and African American teen-agers get a joint lesson in cultural understanding and business savvy.

The two issues are inseparable if a business is going to survive in the city, especially in central Los Angeles, said Bernard Braddy, a representative of the Community Coalition Against Substance Abuse and co-coordinator of the Multicultural Youth Business Job Creation Venture.

The program is a joint effort between the Korean Youth and Community Center and the Community Coalition. Its goal is to break down stereotypes and give youths business insight. The project began in February, 1993, although it was proposed before the civil unrest, Braddy said.

“One of the basic ways groups will be coming together will be through economic development,” he said. “And issues of poverty and unemployment will divide people because there are serious class differences.”

Much of the tension that surrounds conflicts between racial and ethnic groups is sparked by the lack of equal financial footing, said Jackie Dupont-Walker, a former consultant with RLA, formerly Rebuild L.A.

Oh agreed, adding that language barriers are also a factor. “People are being driven by economic fear, and our inability to communicate in the most fundamental way inhibits us from breaking through to each other,” she said. “So, for vast inter-ethnic dialogue, it might be too early.”

Within the Asian American community, Asian Pacific Americans for a New L.A. has moved ahead with comprehensive efforts to mend wounds among some of the city’s Asians and within the city’s Asian community as a whole. A coalition of more than 40 community-based organizations, APANLA has been politically active since it was created in May, 1992, to assure that riot victims’ issues were being addressed.

The organization has been working with Asian merchants whose liquor stores were destroyed during the riots and are now trying to convert them to self-serve laundries. It was also influential in lobbying for Linda Wong to be hired as a consultant at RLA.

But APANLA’s progress, like most organizations born from the ashes of April 29, 1992, has moved slowly, mired in meetings.

The fledgling Latino Unity Forum has encountered the same problems.

The organization began in June, 1992, to build bridges among Latino immigrant populations throughout the county, but it spent its first year dealing with internal snafus and figuring out its direction and purpose. Only now has it found a niche that will guide it through the next several years, its directors say.

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During its first year, the forum, comprised of some of the more prominent community activists in the city’s Latino sector, remained low-key and focused on “organizational matters,” said the forum’s current chairman, David Jimenez.

Mancillas of UCLA was briefly involved with the forum during its infancy in 1992 but criticized the group because of its lack of activism in the Latino community in the first few months after it was created.

The group went through considerable growing pains that first year, losing two-thirds of its membership and dealing with a change in leadership that put Jimenez at the helm. It is now on better footing to move forward, Jimenez said.

“I think we’re at a point now where we can stand publicly on an issue,” he said. “We want to be on the proactive and not reactive approach.”

The group’s ultimate goal is to put together a collective federation similar to the Jewish Federation Council of Los Angeles, said Latino Unity Forum director Hector Perez-Pacheco. It has also held several informal meetings with members of APANLA, continuing the inter-ethnic dialogue.

It is too early to tell what inroads the Latino Unity Forum will make.

Its immediate plans are to create a networking infrastructure for Latino organizations and agencies throughout the county and to be more representative and vocal about Latino issues, particularly immigrant-bashing, Jimenez said.

“It’s a complicated issue,” he added. “It’s our collective nature to take care of (our) own first. We want to know what we’re doing first before going out and saying five different things to five different groups on five different days. So when you meet, you speak with a collective mind. We need more time to do that.”

Several group leaders and community activists complain that two years is not enough time to see the fruits of anyone’s labor.

“Anybody who knows anything about community development knows that two years is nothing,” Dupont-Walker said. “Yes, you should be able to see some progression, but in some ways it’s as if we want instant gratification, and that’s crazy. It takes time to piece these things together.”

Frank Villalobos of Barrio Planners, an urban planning firm in East Los Angeles, said: “Two years is only enough time to document the birth and maybe the staying power of some of these organizations. It’s hard to size up success at this time.”

The best assessment of progress in bridging the gaps among the city’s ethnic communities will be to revisit them five years after the riots, said Pastor, who is a professor at Occidental College.

Pastor said he is hopeful that in the next three years there will be extensive inter-ethnic cooperation on economic issues and significant alliances between blacks and Latinos.

“I see indications that in the next couple of years we will be able to break through,” Mancillas said with guarded optimism.

Jimenez had fewer expectations, but more basic and fundamental solutions.

“I think our multiethnic situation (in Los Angeles) is almost a national treasure,” he said. “I don’t know if there’s one simple solution. But I know what we don’t do. We don’t cut each other down. We don’t bash each other’s efforts.”