Latino Youth Rekindle the Spark of Activism : Vote: The spirit of the fight against Prop. 187 seems to linger in a San Francisco referendum.

There’s a Joan Baez song with a line in it about “little victories and big defeats.” I’m not doing justice to her poetry by summarizing it, but the moral is that the former help make the latter more tolerable.

That’s how I feel now that San Francisco voters have rejected a move to restore the old name of the city street that last January was renamed in honor of the late farm labor leader Cesar Chavez. The vote against Proposition O, which would have changed the name of the nondescript roadway that runs through the predominantly Latino Mission District back to Army Street, was 55% to 45%.

It was a symbolic victory for the 100,000 residents of San Francisco who are Latino. Having a street named after a revered Mexican American is a point of pride for them. And some Latinos I know in the Bay Area even see the Proposition O vote as one of those little victories that could help heal the sting of the big defeat California Latinos suffered a year ago.

I refer, of course, to the vote on Proposition 187, the muddled initiative that a relative handful of anti-immigrant extremists and political snake-oil salesmen sold California voters as a “solution” to the state’s illegal alien “problem.”

Not surprisingly, since the most visible illegal immigrants in California are from Mexico, the campaign for 187 had a decidedly anti-Latino tone. Politicians who used it to boost their own campaigns, from Republican Gov. Pete Wilson to Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein, aired countless TV spots showing illegal immigrants sneaking across our southern border.

Not surprisingly, 187 passed easily despite such an ugly campaign. Most Californians aren’t as extreme in their views as 187’s loudest proponents, but they do worry about the influx of immigrants to this state. Exit polls indicated that people voted for Proposition 187 because they wanted to “send a message” to Washington, where immigration policy is set.

Those same exit polls showed that Latino voters did not join the pro-187 consensus. Although pre-election polls found that Latinos are every bit as concerned as non-Latinos about illegal immigration, almost 80% voted against 187. Again, that is really no surprise. Latinos were put off by the tone of the 187 campaign.

Many Latinos remain angry about Proposition 187, but a year of hindsight makes it easier to see some good things that happened as a result of it. The most obvious is the fact that Latino immigrants, who have traditionally had the lowest naturalization rate of all immigrants to this country, are now applying for citizenship in record numbers.

Less obvious, but potentially just as important, is the fact that the campaign against 187 helped politicize a younger generation of California Latinos, many of them the children of immigrants. Those young people were well on their way to assimilating to life in this country, and probably would never have thought of themselves as anything but Americans until Proposition 187 came along.

Even those who were too young to vote against 187 reacted to the campaign that portrayed their parents and neighbors so negatively by asserting their pride as Latinos. That is why there were so many anti-187 protests at high schools and colleges throughout California. And that is also why so many Mexican flags were visible at those protests.

To this day, veteran Latino politicos complain about those Mexican flags. They’re convinced that such displays of cultural pride hurt the anti-187 campaign.

I’m not so sure. The momentum behind 187 was so great that nothing could beat it. So it is far more important that those young people expressed their pride by waving the flag of their parents’ homeland than it would have been to leave the flag home for the sake of a few more votes. It was part of the consciousness-raising that will make them more dedicated community activists in the years to come.

What brings all this to mind is the fact that several Latinos I spoke to in San Francisco this week mentioned the highly visible role that young Latinos played in the campaign against Proposition O.

“I figured the vote would be close,” said Juan Gonzalez, the publisher of El Tecolote, a weekly bilingual newspaper. “But then a lot of the kids got energized, not just by pride over Cesar Chavez Street but by the anti-curfew campaign.”

He was referring to another ballot measure, Proposition L, promoted by Mayor Frank Jordan, to impose a tougher curfew on young people in the city as an anti-crime measure.

“I thought the curfew would pass with ease,” Gonzalez said. “It was a law-and-order issue, and Jordan’s an ex-cop.” But Proposition L was defeated, and Gonzalez thinks young people were a key factor in that outcome.

Like Proposition 187, Propositions O and L “gave kids an impetus to get involved with politics,” Gonzalez said, “Now that they see we can win some of these campaigns, I think many of them will stay energized.”

Here’s hoping Gonzalez is right, and that these little victories--like that one big defeat--may portend better things, someday, for California Latinos.