Devoted Voter : Election: Man who recently became a citizen enthusiastically casts his first U.S. ballot.

Luis De Mata made his way down La Cienega Boulevard, an umbrella aloft in one hand, his sample ballot in the other. He wondered out loud if the rain would stop people from voting. “People will find any excuse not to come out and vote,” he would muse later. “It makes me feel sad in a way.”

No quirk in the pantheon of Los Angeles disasters would have stopped De Mata, a 38-year-old Guatemalan-born hairdresser and newly minted U.S. citizen, from his civic duty Tuesday. He was voting for the first time as an American, having voted only one other time in his native Guatemala.

“There you are,” said volunteer election worker Floyd Dodd, handing De Mata his pale blue ballot. De Mata spent five minutes in the wooden voting stall, a shabby contrast to the sleek, art-filled walls of the Los Angeles Art Assn. Galleries, which doubled Tuesday as a polling place.

“I had difficulty putting the card in” the ballot-marking device, De Mata confessed later. “But then it clicked.”

In an era when voter ennui is taken as the norm, De Mata sounds as if he stepped out of a citizenship class, which he in fact did last year. “It’s your duty to vote,” he said. “Otherwise other people are making the decision for you.”

De Mata was 17 when he immigrated to Los Angeles in 1973 with his mother after his father died. They came at the urging of two of his older sisters, who were already here. He and his mother, who has since died, bought a roomy duplex on a wide, leafy street near West Hollywood. The house, where De Mata runs a one-chair hair salon in a back room, is now worth more than 10 times what he paid for it, he estimated.

“I have to say this country’s been good to me, and I’ve been very lucky,” he said, settling back on a floral print couch in his meticulously kept house. A portrait of his mother hangs on one wall. All three of his sisters live here. Only his brother is still in Guatemala.

De Mata, who hails from a part of the world where free elections are dearly prized and steeped in blood, was always puzzled by the legendary American voter apathy.

“To Latin American people, an election means a lot--to express your feelings about what’s going on,” he said.

Ten years ago, long before he had earned his U.S. citizenship, he coaxed a blase American friend into voting in a presidential election. “I said, ‘I’ll drive you,’ ” De Mata recalled. He waited in the car while his friend cast his vote.

De Mata applied for citizenship in May, 1993, and was interviewed in January by an immigration official who quizzed him on the broader points of Americana. “Basic things,” De Mata said. “Who is the President, who is the vice president . . . “

On the day in June that he was sworn in as a U.S. citizen at a ceremony in the L.A. Convention Center, he was handed a certificate of citizenship and an application to register to vote. He mailed in the application the next month.

In preparation for this election, he spent an hour at his kitchen table Sunday night poring over the voter information pamphlet sent out by the state and filling in his sample ballot. He was a thorough voter on Tuesday. No proposition, no judicial race was left unpunched by his stylus.

“I figure it this way,” he said. “It’s my first time. I want to do it right.”

Despite his respect for the duty of voting, De Mata came to the task with the same reservations that many veteran American voters have. He spurned the negative campaigns of the past months and believes that campaign spending should be limited.

“I think they should emphasize more what they’re going to do and less mudslinging,” he said. “It’s tiring. You turn on the TV and they have three commercials in a row. I put it on mute--or change the channel. Sometimes that doesn’t help.”

Yet as sick as he was of the hatchet ads, he found some of the information useful. “The people who have ads on TV and in the paper are the ones you get to know. The others you don’t know. And I think that’s not right--voting for someone you don’t know.”

A soft-spoken man of measured words, he does not argue politics and is reluctant to reveal whom he chose on his ballot.

But he made no secret of his new right to vote.

Twenty minutes after returning from his maiden voyage to the polls, his phone rang. “You know, it felt good,” he told a friend.

Fifteen minutes later a neighbor rang. “Yes, I did it,” De Mata told the caller.

He hung up and smiled shyly.

“Since I registered, I told everybody,” he said and chuckled. “I’m going to save my little stub and frame it, I think.”