Latino Turnout a Breakthrough

Urged to vote for a popular school bond measure, coaxed by their support for Mayor Richard Riordan and swept up in a slow but inexorable movement toward citizenship and increased participation, Los Angeles’ Latino voters went to the polls in groundbreaking numbers Tuesday and in the process may have made history.

“This is not quite the year of the Latino, but it’s close--we’re getting there,” said Guadalupe Jimenez, 50, one of many volunteers who rallied to support Proposition BB, the school bond measure. “I think everybody has a different reason for voting. One could be to make their position better. Others are scared because of new changes in health care laws and welfare. I think the new laws are making people see that some politicians are closer to the Latino people than others.”

Whatever the precise reasons, a Los Angeles Times exit poll of voters in Tuesday’s election found that Latinos appear, for the first time in city history, to have voted in greater numbers than blacks and second only to whites. Their share of Tuesday’s voting electorate, 15%, represents the highest Latino participation ever in a Los Angeles city election. According to the poll, which has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points, whites made up 65% of Tuesday’s voters, and blacks comprised 13%.

The point where African Americans and Latinos vote in equal numbers in a city election is quietly referred to among some political operatives as “the pivot,” and it represents a historic moment that could redefine some political relations in the county’s most ethnically diverse big city. Although it is too soon to tell for sure, some believe that the pivot point was reached Tuesday.

“We’re here, and we’re voting,” said City Councilman Mike Hernandez, whose Eastside council district saw a 20% increase in voter registration between 1993 and 1997. “With new citizenship and more representation, we have more reason to vote. We can be a swing vote in almost any council district in the city. You’re going to find our community will gain more and more influence. Those politicians who continue to ignore it will find themselves in jeopardy.”

Latino Support Helps Prop. BB Win

On Tuesday, Latino support helped bolster the margin of victory for Proposition BB, the school bond measure, which won its strongest backing from Latinos, more than 80% of whom voted in favor of it.

And Latinos joined with whites and Asians--along with Protestants, Catholics and Jews--in helping deliver Mayor Riordan his reelection and his sought-after multicultural mandate. According to the Times poll, the mayor won the backing of 60% of the Latinos who voted in Tuesday’s election.

Because of it, Riordan enters his second term with the backing of a powerful white-brown coalition, one that recalls former Mayor Tom Bradley’s ability to bring together blacks, other minorities and white liberals. In the long run, that could portend new political alignments in the city. In the short run, its greatest impact may be to smooth the task of governing by giving the mayor new credibility to claim a mandate with the ethnically diverse Los Angeles City Council.

Still, there are reasons to be cautious about proclaiming either the emergence of one significant new voting bloc or the twilight of another. Latino voters are far from uniform: Recent immigrants from Mexico have different perspectives than second- and third-generation residents, and still different views come from people arriving from El Salvador or other Central and South American countries.

And black voters remain a substantial portion of the city electorate--13% in Tuesday’s election, according to the Times poll. African Americans in Los Angeles also are well organized, vigorously represented and highly politicized.

“To win elections in Los Angeles, you have to forge a coalition across the city,” said Bill Carrick, who consulted the campaigns for Riordan and City Atty. Jim Hahn, both of whom won overwhelmingly Tuesday. “But there are different models for doing that. The growing importance of Latinos adds to the number of possible models.”

Another local political expert added that ethnic politics in Los Angeles plays out on two levels, one purely political, the other related to governance and stability.

As a pure political matter, that observer noted, a strong candidate can win a citywide post, including the mayor’s office, with nothing more than solid support from white voters, who still remain a plurality of the city electorate. That was essentially Riordan’s situation in 1993.

But such a leader enters office with little ability to claim broad support, making it easier for opponents to dismiss his leadership. As a result, support from other ethnic groups can greatly strengthen the power of a mayor, helping him in his relations with the City Council and other political figures.

What’s more, the strong turnout and the success in helping win passage of Proposition BB could have a dual effect, observers said, simultaneously demonstrating the growing clout of Latinos and expanding that clout as victory reinforces the idea that participation is meaningful.

For decades, political observers have thought of the Latino presence in Southern California as a slumbering giant, a huge reservoir of votes waiting to be unleashed by the right candidate or cause. Although the large number of illegal immigrants make precise numbers hard to come by, Latinos are estimated to make up about 32% of the population in Los Angeles, yet they represent just 14% of its registered voters.

But Tuesday’s election was the second consecutive one in which Latino turnout both broke records and exceeded expectations. Statewide, a Los Angeles Times exit poll found, Latinos comprised 10% of the November electorate, up from 8% four years ago.

The Southwest Voter Registration Education Project, which has charted Latino voting trends for years, estimated that about 75% of registered Latinos voted in the city of Los Angeles in November, and 70% voted in the state. That was dramatically higher than the overall turnout of 53.5% citywide and 65.5% statewide.

As a result, five Latinos were elected to Congress and another 20 to the Legislature, which later elected Cruz Bustamante of Fresno as the Assembly’s first Latino speaker. One of the newly elected congressional representatives, Loretta Sanchez, was a political neophyte who beat longtime Orange County Rep. Bob Dornan; a Times analysis of that race found that Sanchez benefited from a marked increase in Latino participation, which jumped from 14% in 1992 to 20% in 1996.

They presumably were motivated by such initiatives as the anti-illegal immigration Proposition 187 that affected the Latino community.

Antonio Gonzalez, president of the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project, said Tuesday’s results reflect the growing power and restlessness of California Latinos.

“Latinos are in a vengeful mood,” he said. “People are becoming citizens. They feel like they have been treated with disrespect. They want to participate.”

New Voters Add to Latino Power

Harry Pachon, president of the Riverside-based Tomas Rivera Policy Institute, agreed. He said the surge of Latino voters Tuesday was propelled by the participation of new voters--most of them recent citizens eager to cast their ballots for the first time and many of them energized by Proposition 187.

“I think what is catching people by surprise is that it’s having such a quick impact,” he said. “People didn’t expect it to be translated into voting power so quickly. We were thinking it would happen in 1998 or 2000. But if anti-immigrant bashing and rhetoric continues, you naturally are going to see the largest minority community running out to the polls in self-defense.”

No such obviously galvanizing measure was on Tuesday’s ballot, but interviews with a number of Latino activists and first-time voters suggest that the school bond measure helped energize many voters.

Take Maria Meza, 32. She became a citizen two years ago and voted for the first time in the November elections. But in the campaign to pass Proposition BB, Meza acted like a veteran political organizer.

A single mother of four, she spent March walking the streets of her East Los Angeles neighborhood, campaigning for BB and lobbying parents at her children’s schools. She hung signs at the neighborhood dentist office, bakery and thrift shop. She spent three or four hours a night calling voters, repeatedly trying to reach many who didn’t have an answering machine and were rarely home. Meza even got her 14-year-old daughter involved and asked her to make calls when the voters couldn’t understand her limited English. In all, Meza estimates that she talked to 300 people.

Meza started campaigning for BB because she was upset about the rusty faucets and ailing facilities at her daughter’s school. But after a month of voter outreach, Meza said she was excited about the role she played in getting the proposition passed.

“I feel like I can let people know that even me--just a homemaker--even people like me can vote and get people to vote,” Meza said. “The people I talked to said they want to vote so they can have a say in the U.S. for the first time. They want to be noticed.”

Similarly, Jimenez said the school bond measure appealed to Latinos in part because it was a tangible, relevant issue they could fight for, not fight against.

“It’s part of the culture,” she said. “For people who have arrived recently in the country, schools are the only way you can [have] access to better jobs, better lives. It’s something very important for everyone, but for us, in our culture, especially.”

Since she became a citizen in 1981, Jimenez has opened her house as a precinct polling place four times and worked as a precinct official. In light of the school bond’s passage, Jimenez said she expects this kind of civic involvement from the scores of new citizens who just got a taste of casting their ballot Tuesday.

“People feel that now that we can vote, now that we’re citizens, we can make a difference,” she said. “This is a sentiment that was very strong in the minds of those who voted yesterday. When they went to vote, they felt they were powerful. They felt they were important. Before, there wasn’t a sense as much that it was important, but now people realize it’s something they should do.”

That message was so powerful it even reached some volunteers not yet able to vote. Blanca Amador, 29, is a single mother of five, and is not yet a citizen. But she dedicated her days to the campaign because her children’s school is in dire need of repairs.

“Many of the parents at the school talked and said, ‘If I was a citizen, I could vote and make a difference,’ ” Amador said. “That’s why I did this. I think more people are going to vote now because they know we can do it.”

On Tuesday, Amador helped her father go to the polls. Soon, she hopes to be able to vote herself.

“A lot of people were saying, ‘What if this doesn’t work?’ she said. “When I heard [Proposition BB won] this morning I thought, ‘Look, there we are. We did it.’ ”

Times staff writers Cathy Decker and Jodi Wilgoren contributed to this article.

* SCHOOL BOND: School administrators begin planning how best to spend their $2.4-billion windfall. B1

* MORE ELECTION COVERAGE: A26, A27