A Glimpse Into L.A.’s Ethnic Isolation

Whether or not Rosa Lopez was telling the truth at the O.J. Simpson murder trial, the story of how she ended up there Friday shows how the Southland is divided into isolated ethnic worlds.

Lopez is a major defense witness who is expected to testify that Simpson’s Bronco was parked in his driveway at the time the prosecution said he murdered his former wife, Nicole, and her friend Ronald Goldman. At the time, Lopez was employed as housekeeper at the house next door to Simpson’s.

A few weeks ago, Lopez disappeared. The world press--or at least that portion of it covering the Simpson trial--tried to find her, without success.

Over at Spanish-language television station KMEX, Channel 34, reporter Rosa Maria Villalpando began thinking about the missing maid. “It just came to me, what do we have that the other media doesn’t have,” Villalpando told me.

It was, of course, a Spanish-speaking audience that included L.A.’s large Salvadoran community.

When Villalpando did a Simpson story on the 11 p.m. news one night, her tag line was a question: Does anyone in my audience know Lopez, or where she could be found? “I got an anonymous tip from someone who saw her,” Villalpando said.

She went to the house where Lopez was staying and found a frightened woman, terrified of the cameras she knew were dogging her. Villalpando talked to her in a sympathetic way. “I felt close to this woman,” the reporter said. “She was frightened.”

Villalpando got the story that everyone else wanted.

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This story of a scoop tells us much about our region.

There’s a whole Latino world out there, composed of L.A.’s largest and oldest minority, that is unknown and unexplained to the Anglo world.

There are many other communities. As many others have pointed out, L.A.--in fact much of the Southern California--is divided into ethnic worlds, largely ignorant of each others’ virtues and foibles.

So when Rosa Lopez suddenly found herself in the heartless glare of the world press, I thought she was looked upon as sort of an exotic, even though she has lived and worked in this country for 34 years. It’s a subtle kind of thing, but I thought the tone of the questions and some of the coverage dismissed her as a stranger from a strange land.

I wasn’t the only one who thought so.

She was, said Cruz Reynoso, a former justice of the state Supreme Court, “practically marginalized” by a media unfamiliar with Latino culture, especially that of the war-torn and tortured land of El Salvador.

“When I grew up in Orange County during the Depression,” said Reynoso, a Mexican American who now teaches at UCLA Law School, “we viewed the world as them and us. The world is viewing this witness as them, not us, not part of the American experience.”

Author John Gregory Dunne, whose wife, Joan Didion, wrote the book “Salvador,” agreed. He felt the press and the commentators didn’t understand the El Salvador that produced Rosa Lopez and the many of hundreds of thousands of Angelenos like her.

It is a community afflicted by fear, with many immigrants who have relatives killed in El Salvador’s long civil war. When Proposition 187 passed last year, Salvadorans, even U.S. citizens, were gripped with fear that the American government would persecute them.

As a result, said Dunne, Salvadorans are often guarded and vague in the presence of authority. Quoting a line from “Salvador,” Dunne said, “This is not a culture in which a high value is placed on the definite.”

Or as Los Angeles attorney Paul Fitzgerald said, “It’s hard to tell whether or not her marginal economic existence, her scattered family and upbringing in Salvadoran culture simply have combined to contribute to a kind of confusion over what’s happening to her. I personally found her very sympathetic. Essentially, she’s being castigated by the prosecutors and commentators for not being focused. But here she is in fear for her job, unable to walk the streets and under continual harassment by the press and authorities. This poor woman feels oppressed by the pressures of this whole thing and she has a generalized fear based on her inexperience.”

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The jury will decide whether Rosa Lopez is telling the truth, and her testimony will be balanced with all the other evidence presented at the trial.

Maybe she’s a liar. Or maybe she is, as defense attorney Harlan Braun said, “either telling the truth about what she saw that night or is simply mistaken.”

Whatever the case, she’s entitled to the respect and understanding of the press, the lawyers and the court.