The Trust Factor

Ignacio Carmona has spent most of his life working with his hands, from picking tomatoes for 10 cents an hour to tuning carburetors at the garage he once owned.

Nao Takasugi’s hands have rarely been dirty. High school valedictorian, graduate of the prestigious Wharton School of Business and Finance, a successful businessman and a state assemblyman recently elected to a third term, Takasugi is as comfortable in a suit and tie as Carmona is in overalls.

The only thing the men have in common, it would seem, are homes in Oxnard--albeit on opposite ends of the city. Clearly these were two ships destined to pass in the night.

Instead, however, the ships collided. Forced together more than 50 years ago, at a time when many immigrants were subject to severe repression in their adopted homeland, Carmona, 79--who was born in Jalisco, Mexico--and Takasugi, 74--the American-born son of Japanese storekeepers--have grown to become unlikely allies in community leadership.

And theirs is the kind of alliance that may soon become common in local government. In less than three years, California is expected to become the third state with a nonwhite majority (the first two being New Mexico and Hawaii); when that happens, the ability of minority groups to work together could become vital in keeping government functioning.

“These are two good examples for all of us to have confidence in the future,” says state Sen. Jack O’Connell (D-San Luis Obispo), who has worked with both men. “They are both hard-working, dedicated. . . . They have a long list of success stories.”

A phone rings in the kitchen of Ignacio Carmona’s warm home in Oxnard’s La Colonia district, one of Ventura County’s poorest neighborhoods. From the living room sofa, where he sits surrounded by family pictures and dozens of neatly displayed civic awards, Carmona calls out to Emma, his wife of 52 years.

“See if it’s Nao,” he shouts. “I’ve got a call in to him.”

It’s election season and Carmona has an issue to discuss with Nao Takasugi, who represents the state’s 37th Assembly District, a heavily Republican area that includes parts of Thousand Oaks, Moorpark, Camarillo and Port Hueneme in addition to Oxnard. But Carmona considers Takasugi more than just a politician.

“We’ve been friends for so many years, he knows I wouldn’t call him and take up his time unless I felt it was important,” says Carmona, the man everyone calls Nacho. “And once in a while he calls me, too, with things that he has going.”

During the past 20 years, Takasugi has risen from City Council member to mayor to the state Assembly while Carmona has served with dozens of community groups, ranging from the grass-roots neighborhood council to the Ventura County Parks and Harbor Commission, which oversees a multimillion-dollar budget. None of it came easy for Carmona, who began by taking copious notes at board meetings, then seeking out a dictionary to look up the words he didn’t understand.

“I got involved little by little, little by little . . . until I was too involved,” he says. “I was never at home. I was never there with the family.”

Maybe that’s because he fears crowds: With seven children, 26 grandchildren and 13 great-grandchildren, Carmona family reunions carry enough votes to swing a close election.

La Colonia, which boasts one of Ventura County’s highest concentrations of Latinos, has long been on the other side of the tracks from Oxnard’s city leaders--literally. Rails laid by the Southern Pacific Railroad separate the gritty, working-class neighborhood from the rest of the city and that physical isolation was long compounded by a political one: In Oxnard’s first 87 years as an incorporated city, only three Latinos were elected to its City Council.

This was the legacy Takasugi inherited when he was elected mayor in 1982, and it’s one he’s worked to change. Not everyone agrees he’s succeeded; some believe Takasugi has been friendlier to developers than to La Colonia residents. Many of the same critics have said that Carmona, who has lived in the neighborhood for five decades, is equally out of touch with the needs of an area sagging under the weight of crime, drug use and gang activity.

Gangs and drugs are a problem, Carmona concedes, but that hardly makes the neighborhood unique. And there have been improvements. Among the ones Takasugi takes credit for are the paving of the neighborhood’s dirt streets, the installation of street lights and the establishment of a nearby police substation.

“Because he was a minority and he felt that the Colonia area had been neglected for many years, things that were needed here, he helped them become a reality,” Carmona says. “He always made it a point to represent more the Mexican community.

“[And] he speaks good Spanish. If he didn’t, I think people would be more reluctant to trust [him].”

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Trust. Carmona earned that much from the Takasugi family long before they shared a common language.

It was 1946 and the deadliest war in history had just ended. Among its victims were 112,000 Japanese--American citizens and noncitizens alike--who had been held for four years by the U.S. government in concentration camps throughout the West.

Oxnard’s Asahi Market, like many Japanese-owned businesses in Ventura County, had been cleaned out when the Takasugis were carted off to the Gila River camp in Arizona. For young Ignacio Carmona and others like him, the Japanese’s misfortune became a golden opportunity.

“We knew there were a lot of businesses being left . . . so those who could afford it were taking over,” he says.

So Carmona took over Asahi, changing its name to Los Amigos Market and changing its stock from Asian dry goods to chorizo, pan dulce and menudo. But unlike others, who sought title to their new businesses or raided the personal belongings of the former owners, Carmona signed short leases and steered cleared of the market’s locked storerooms.

“We knew that their private property was there and we respected their property,” he says. “We knew eventually they would take back the store.”

He wasn’t there when that happened, however, because the war eventually pulled him away from the market too. In an irony that seems lost on Carmona, he was with the U.S. Army in the Marshall Islands, cleaning up after some of the most ferocious fighting with Japan, when the Takasugis returned to Oxnard. Nao, off studying in Philadelphia, heard stories about the reception his parents received. He even retold some of it in a speech at the 1988 Republican National Convention.

“My folks said, ‘Well, when we came back [the Carmonas] said welcome back and thank you for letting us run the store. And here’s the keys and here’s the property,’ ” Takasugi relates.

When Carmona returned from the Pacific, he came by the store to say hello, but returned infrequently after that. The older Takasugis didn’t speak much English, he remembers, so his visits were always brief and uneventful. Without the market to tend to, Carmona worked as an auto mechanic for 15 years before again going into business for himself, this time with a gas station. He retired in 1970, turning the garage over to his sons and filling his newfound free time with community work. Six years later, when Nao Takasugi was elected to the Oxnard City Council, the two families’ paths crossed again.

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Carmona has already given Takasugi something his mother never could: a vote. Even though Yasuye Takasugi lived long enough to see her son elected mayor, she wasn’t able to support him at the polls because she never became a U.S. citizen.

Shortly after Shingoro and Yasuye Takasugi arrived here from Okayama prefecture in southwest Japan, a wave of anti-immigrant hysteria led to passage of a series of laws that, among other things, made foreign-born Asians ineligible for U.S. citizenship and unable to own land in California. Then came the indignity of wartime relocation, an experience so painful that, half a century later, it can quickly bring Takasugi to tears.

“Put behind barbed wires and mounted searchlights and armed guards, I was very bitter,” he remembers. “Of course, being 19 I was very idealistic . . . and overnight all my dreams were dashed. Everything was just happening so fast. We were confused, bewildered.”

In July, those emotions erupted in the Assembly chambers during debate over a resolution seeking redress for a small number of U.S. citizens relocated to Japan during World War II. The painfully staid Takasugi brought the normally chaotic chamber to a standstill with a moving speech recounting his family’s internment, blunting opposition to the bill from members of his own party and leading to the resolution’s unanimous approval.

It was the first time Takasugi, for four years the only Asian in the state Legislature, had made note of his internment because, O’Connell says, “that’s not his style.” But it wasn’t the first time he had opposed party leaders on matters of the heart. For example, he quietly refused to back Gov. Pete Wilson in the bruising battle over Proposition 187, the anti-immigrant initiative that won a landslide victory in 1994.

“We know that sometimes those issues can be turned around and used in a very racist, very divisive [way] against us,” he says. “I’m just one generation away from the immigrants coming into the U.S., into California. So I need to be very, very sensitive.”

In Nacho Carmona’s living room, that kind of sensitivity means more than party affiliation anyway.

“I don’t look at him as a Republican. I look at him as an individual . . . the type of person he is and what he represents,” he says of Takasugi. “The whole thing boils down to the individual. I don’t care where they were born or what nationality they are.”