Standing His Ground : Amin David Makes Sure Policy-Makers Pay Attention to Latino Issues, Using Charm and Finesse--and Often Confrontaion

A fair shake. Some frank dialogue and a fair shake is what Amin David says he wants for Orange County Latinos. In return, he’ll buy you breakfast.

For 17 years, policy-makers and other local leaders have had a standing invitation to meet over morning eggs and coffee with Los Amigos of Orange County, a group of Latino business leaders. Each Wednesday since 1977, the group has met at an Anaheim restaurant to discuss any and all issues that affect the Latino community.

That amounts to nearly 900 breakfasts now. The coffee, and the issues, are still steaming.

At a recent standing-room-only meeting of about 60 people at the Jolly Roger on Lincoln Avenue, speakers alternated freely between Spanish and English as they discussed the week’s topics: the upcoming school board elections, complaints that the United Way neglects local Latino causes, and rivalries between two Golden West College Latino groups.

Permeating all the issues was the year’s hot-button topic: Proposition 187, the contentious ballot initiative that seeks, among other things, to deny public schooling and non-emergency medical care to illegal immigrants.

“We’re just figuring out what we need to fight this one,” David says. “Do we need a howitzer, do we need a tank, do we need a lot of prayers?”

As chairman of Los Amigos, David, 61, has made advocacy his mission. Whether the issue is gang violence, immigration, a dry-wallers strike or U.S. Border Patrol roundups, David’s goal is to hold bureaucrats, the news media and the Orange County Grand Jury accountable for their treatment of Latinos.

Los Amigos is a combination social watchdog and kaffeeklatsch, an ever-evolving mix of mostly Latino business people, teachers and other professionals who keep abreast of issues. From just a dozen in the early years, membership is now about 200, with about 60 regulars at the breakfast meetings.

The organization purposely keeps a broad focus, donating its business or legal expertise, fund-raising skills or organizing know-how to specialized advocacy groups when the need arises. Los Amigos members do not hesitate to fire off letters to the editor and, a few months ago, to the new Orange County Grand Jury, requesting that the members stay sensitive to Latino issues.

Last year, when Latino youths from San Clemente were arrested after an altercation with white teen-agers in a beach parking lot, David directed his anger toward the news media, saying that the death of Steve Woods in the incident was given prominent attention only because the victim was white. If Woods had been Latino or black, David insists, there would have been no front-page newspaper photos showing defendants at their bail hearing.

To keep all these issues in the public eye, David will cajole and caress, wheedle and berate, and talk and talk. Although his associates acknowledge that his style can sometimes be overbearing, they uniformly admire his sincerity and effectiveness as a champion of Latino causes.

“Amin can’t be bought off, scared off or pushed off,” says Bill Thom, a founding Los Amigos member and a former mayor of Anaheim. “He’s an advocate for human rights and human dignity in the Latino community, and he believes in it like he believes in his religion--deeply.”

David roams about the lounge of the Jolly Roger, welcoming new attendees, delegating tasks and calling on members to offer their slants on matters at hand. His round, massive shoulders, big mustache and liquid brown eyes endorse a friend’s description of him as a big, emotional teddy bear.

But bears get hungry. As with many political activists, David’s success is measured in part by the frustration of the adversaries he leaves behind.

“I have high regard for Amin, but he has a demeanor that can set you off on the wrong track,” says Irv Pickler, who as a 12-year Anaheim City Council member has clashed with David on numerous issues, including that of the city’s attempted ban on truck vendors in Anaheim neighborhoods.

“Maybe there’s a method in his madness, in the way he wants to stir things up,” Pickler says. “The attitude is what bothers me more than anything--just to stand up and say, ‘It’s gotta be this way.’ Well, some people want it another way.”

Says Sal Mendoza, president of the Santa Ana Unified School District board and a Los Amigos member: “A lot of policy-makers don’t appreciate (David’s) style; he ram-charges to a certain extent. But he does impact policies and plays a vital role in making sure that policy-makers are listening in and sensitive to (the Latino) community.”

Proposition 187, David says, is a massive piece of insensitivity to Latinos and typifies the common misunderstanding of Latin American immigrants’ economic role in California. To fight Proposition 187, Los Amigos members are volunteering to serve on a speakers bureau assembled by the Orange County Immigration Coalition.

“The immigrants are not coming to use the services, they’re coming to work,” David says. “It’s a type of Marshall Plan that is healthy for both countries. Money goes directly to the hands of the recipient (in Mexico) from the sender. It doesn’t go through bureaucracies. . . .

“There are some mean-spirited people behind 187, and no matter what kind of empirical data you show them, they cannot get past the item that says (these immigrants) are here illegally. Then the dialogue stops.”

To David, Proposition 187 is just the latest insult to Latinos from Harold Ezell, co-author of the bill and former western regional commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service.

David has characterized Ezell’s tenure as a “reign of terror on the Latino community,” pointing to ongoing factory raids by the Border Patrol and a 1988 incident in which an INS agent entered an Orange church during a Sunday morning service to pursue a suspected illegal immigrant.

Although most of David’s political opponents concede his effectiveness, Ezell, a longtime nemesis, cuts him little slack.

“I don’t pay a lot of attention to him. I don’t think he’s a real factor,” Ezell says. “I don’t think he has a support base--he has 12, 15 members, if that. Any organization like (Los Amigos) needs to be a pro-American-issue kind of group, and they represent illegal aliens.”

In David’s spacious home in a quiet Anaheim neighborhood, a family portrait dominates the living room. Although it is late evening, he keeps a cordless phone handy as he describes his upbringing and the roots of his activism.

His father, a Lebanese immigrant, was a dentist and part-time inventor in Chihuahua, Mexico, when David was born in 1933 as the third of four children. Among his father’s innovations were translucent false teeth; he also tried to interest the U.S. military in a design for a minesweeper.

“I wasn’t deprived in my childhood. But in 1942 my parents divorced, and my father moved to Juarez and practiced there many years,” David says. “I would take the streetcar across the border every day to school in El Paso.”

Later his family moved to El Paso, then to an uncle’s ranch near Houston. After moving to California, David graduated from Sacramento High School and got a job with the Southern Pacific Railroad in Tucson. He was drafted by the Army in 1953 and became a naturalized citizen that November.

In 1955, after his discharge, he enrolled at the University of Arizona, then moved to Los Angeles and took night business courses at East Los Angeles College. By day he worked in management for Wiggins Inc., an aerospace manufacturer. David met his future wife, Irene, at a campus Latino club meeting; they were married in 1960.

In 1966, with a friend from his Arizona college years, he founded Regal/Imperial Products and began to import terrazzo tile from Mexico. For the next 20 years, his business grew along with the building boom in Southern California. The Anaheim firm now specializes in wholesaling specialty plumbing parts; David is president and his second son, David David, is general manager.

David’s social activism began in 1967 when a friend invited him to help administer a federal job training program in Los Angeles.

“We would take Latinos and train them to work as apprentices in shipping and receiving at Northrop, Rockwell, places like that,” David recalls. “The employers benefited because they had a body there but only had to pay a small percentage of the salary.

“At that time I was becoming increasingly aware of the awful term ‘discrimination’--Latinos relegated to entry-level jobs, no career ladders, no Latinos in police or fire departments. The awakening came when I became a Catholic--I had been a Protestant until I married Irene. I just heard that knocking at the door.”

David’s reputation in Latino activist circles preceded him when his family outgrew their house and moved to Anaheim in 1973. He was immediately invited to join the board of the Orange County Human Relations Commission.

The commission had its first real test of power in the hot summer of 1978, after a clash between Anaheim police and Latinos at Little People’s Park left 30 people injured and 12 arrested.

“The commission worked hand-in-hand with members of the community who felt they had been brutalized,” David says. “We told them how to submit their case for review by the county grand jury. We were all shocked when the grand jury . . . said they found evidence of undue police force.

“Here you have conservative Orange County, and you know who was on the grand jury: conservative, retired, well-to-do white people. Can you imagine the preponderance of evidence they uncovered to have come to that conclusion?”

Working through then-Mayor Thom and the Anaheim City Council, the commission was able to enact major policy changes within the Anaheim Police Department, David says.

“We got the police to put large visible numbering on the patrol cars, all police officers had to wear badges, all officers had to give business cards on demand,” he says. “Plus, police complaint forms were to be in English and Spanish and were to be furnished to anyone who asked. Now you can get complaint forms at public libraries.”

The commission also arranged to train officers in issues of sensitivity toward Latino culture. During the park fracas, for example, police had complained that the Latinos did not make eye contact when addressed. But in Latin American countries, David says, avoiding eye contact is not a sign of insolence toward authority, but rather indicates respect.

During the mid-1970s, Thom had helped get Latinos in Anaheim appointed to various city boards and commissions. David was among them and became the city’s first Latino planning commissioner in 1977.

In gratitude, residents formed a group, Los Amigos of Bill Thom, and sponsored a noche de gracias, or night of thanks, in Thom’s honor. At the party, Thom accepted their good wishes but told them not to disband their group.

“I changed the direction and said let’s do it for the Hispanic community,” Thom says. Since then, the former mayor has been a regular at Los Amigos meetings, which have moved three times to bigger restaurants to accommodate the growing membership.

At the meetings, neither dues nor roll calls are taken, and David does not recruit members.

“We get a lot of young kids coming to the meetings lately, and it makes us feel good,” David says. “But to the youngsters, our consistent plea is: Tend to the school. Forget Los Amigos, forget any activity. Then if you have time, join us later.”

In his 21 years here, David has come to see Orange County as a proving ground for Latino issues.

“In the eyes of a progressive individual, Orange County is somewhat lagging behind L.A. or San Diego County,” he says. “Orange County seems to be the holdout, somewhat more resistant to debate issues and put them on the table--especially (Proposition) 187. We have all come from somewhere else and settled here. We’ve all walked in the shoes of an immigrant. Why have we forgotten that experience so quickly?”

Regarding criticism that he can be confrontational on issues, he says: “I see myself as a fair individual. I don’t shirk from confrontation when the occasion warrants it, but I don’t enjoy being like that. The older you get the wiser you are with your time, and you’re less apt to spin your wheels.”

All but one of David’s four children live nearby in Orange and Anaheim; the youngest is Christina--”she’s 14 going on 22,” her father says--and David enjoys playing with her new personal computer. His spare time--he works six days a week--is taken up by family activities and St. Anthony Claret Catholic Church in Anaheim. He takes occasional gambling trips to Nevada, and recently took his wife on a weekend gambling cruise to Ensenada.

But he spends much of his waking time working with Los Amigos.

“In our meetings a lot of people give tremendous ideas, not realizing that that’s the easy part,” David says. “The hard part is to act on it, and I ask good hard questions and keep on them about putting their ideas into motion. And after a little victory, you feel like a million dollars, and you go on.”

Amin David

Age: 61

Background: Born in Chihuahua, Mexico, raised in El Paso and Sacramento.

Family: Married to Irene M.; four children--Lisa, Amin, David and Christina.

Passions: Playing with home computer, gambling trips to Nevada.

On how he became Los Amigos chairman: “I was the least vulnerable. I didn’t owe my job to a higher-up, so I could ask the tough questions. I’m an independent businessman and so I brought with me a little bit of experience in addressing the body politic.”

On Chicano studies: “As a business person, I have difficulty encouraging (students) to take Chicano studies as a major. I haven’t seen many Chicano studies majors go into social work. I would rather see them go into science or business. . . . I would make Latin American history a requirement, but more importantly, for non-Latino students.”