California’s New Breed of Latino Lawmakers

When Cruz Bustamante was 17 he got his first taste of politics watching his father run for the Fresno County Board of Supervisors.

“Everybody knew him,” Bustamante says of his dad, who had spent over 20 years behind a barber’s chair in rural Dinuba. “Everybody liked him.”

Or so they thought.

For campaign purposes, the senior Cruz Bustamante billed himself as “Buzz,” trying to convey a regular-guy image and, not incidentally, play down his ethnicity. It was a time, after all, when Latino candidates were routinely linked to the farm workers movement and thus, opponents asserted, to communist influence.

Bustamante was crushed in the contest, despite his eager but unsophisticated attempt at an image make-over, and grew to hate the phony nickname.

More than two decades later, the memory still rankles his oldest son, the speaker of the California Assembly. Because he was Mexican American, Cruz recalled, people assumed his father had to have a hidden agenda--the Latino agenda.

“I’ll let you in on a secret,” Bustamante says, lowering his voice. “Trying to have a decent place to live, good jobs and decent schools for their kids. That’s the Latino agenda.”

These days, the Latino agenda is increasingly California’s agenda.

Nearly 50 years after Ed Roybal’s breakthrough election to the Los Angeles City Council and 30 years after the Chicano rights movement, Latinos have emerged as a bigger, more influential force in state government and politics than ever before.

From Sacramento to Washington to school boards and sanitation districts, a record 800-plus Latinos serve in elected positions, including the first Latino Assembly speaker in state history.

But this new wave of Latino leadership is notable not just for size but for political scope and savvy.

Moving well beyond the bounds of the barrio, candidates with names like Figueroa and Pacheco are winning elections in neighborhoods where Latinos are a small fraction of the population.

And unlike those forebears who derived strength from their proximity to power, lawmakers like Bustamante and Assembly Majority Leader Antonio Villaraigosa have emerged as high-profile powers in their own right, thanks in no small part to the wholesale purge of senior lawmakers resulting from legislative term limits.

“There was a stage where it was simply enough electing people who looked like you, had a name with as many vowels as your name,” says Jaime Regalado, who teaches political science at Cal State L.A. “There is a realization now that you have elected officials who are not there simply to be window dressing.”

Roybal and other political pioneers in California’s first wave of Latino leadership fought as outsiders to break into the establishment. By contrast, many among this current third wave are the product of elite universities, graduates from powerful government staff jobs, or boast other platinum-plated insider credentials.

“They don’t approach politics in terms of we vs. they,” says Leo Estrada, a demographer at UCLA’s School of Public Policy and an expert on California’s Latino community. “They don’t fight the system, but understand the system can be manipulated to work on their behalf.”

The state’s second wave of Latino leadership produced barrier-breaking lawmakers such as Los Angeles County Supervisor Gloria Molina, state Democratic Chairman Art Torres and Los Angeles City Councilman Richard Alatorre. But the early part of their careers were spent in relative isolation.

Torres, who was elected to the Assembly in 1974, jokes that he was the “Latino governor-in-exile” during his early years in Sacramento, taking up issues such as bilingual education, farm worker rights and immigration in large part because few others would.

Today, there is plenty of clout to go around. With 18 Latino lawmakers in the Legislature alone, officeholders “are finally allowed to focus on the issues that really matter most, like crime, education and the economy,” says Fernando Guerra, director of Loyola Marymount’s Center for the Study of Los Angeles.

Or as analyst Andres Jimenez put it: “The horizon has become broader as the group has become larger.”

Indeed, some Latino lawmakers now worry about focusing excessively on ethnic concerns. “Sometimes we go too far in identifying with the community,” says Rep. Xavier Becerra (D-Los Angeles). “It’s important for people to know I’m not just a leader for Latinos.”

Underlying that sentiment is a new confidence within California’s Latino community, borne not just of political strength but the group’s growing share of the state population, now approaching 30%.

Historically, California Latinos have not voted in numbers approaching their percentage of the population. That helps explains why no Latino has won statewide office in modern times. But Latino turnout rose significantly in 1996, spurred by anger over immigration issues. The pattern has persisted in local races this year.

“There’s more cultural self-assurance,” says David Hayes-Bautista, head of UCLA’s Center for the Study of Latino Health, who wrote his dissertation 25 years ago on the identity crisis among Chicano medical students.

“There are now four or five [Spanish-language] cable stations, 15 to 18 radio stations, newspapers, CDs, movies, you name it. There’s not a sense of being an aggrieved, practically on-the-road-to-extinction minority anymore.”

This panoply of perspectives is reflected in the varied backgrounds and philosophies of the third wave of Latino leaders.

San Diego Councilman Juan Vargas talks of traditional values. Assembly Leader Villaraigosa values liberal tradition. Rep. Becerra struggles to reconcile identity and ambition; San Mateo Supervisor Ruben Barrales strives to square his Republican philosophy with the GOP’s stance on immigration.

“What it really shows you,” said Jimenez, of UC’s California Policy Seminar, “is the diversity of the Latino community in California.”

Practicing the Art of the Possible: SACRAMENTO

The office of the Assembly majority leader is a majestic setting, richly appointed with vaulted windows, hardwood furniture and large portraits depicting a mission scene and a field bursting with poppies.

Antonio Villaraigosa brusquely dismisses the inherited oils. “Not my art,” he sniffs.

Instead, he points to one of the few personal effects in his third-floor Capitol office. The plaster-and-metal sculpture shows two grim-faced men behind a cyclone fence topped with barbed wire. A sign reads “INS Detention Center.”

Gesturing at the piece, Villaraigosa calls himself “an activist trying to make government work for people like the people behind that cage.”

Yet if Villaraigosa has done little to change his office, the same can hardly be said about how the office has changed him.

Villaraigosa’s path to power is typical of that followed by earlier Latino leaders, with a grounding in 1960s protest politics and years of community activism in his native Los Angeles before reaching the Assembly in 1994.

But his willingness to compromise, to trim his ideology and work to build coalitions, is a distinctive mark of the new cohort of Latino lawmakers.

“They’re effective because they are willing to cross those borders that weren’t crossed earlier,” said UCLA’s Estrada. “Before, you were judged in terms of whether you toed the party line, whether you were ‘loyal’ and a reliable vote. These guys have broken the mold.”

An unabashed liberal whose central Los Angeles district includes Eagle Rock, Silver Lake and Echo Park, the 44-year-old Villaraigosa cites Jesse Jackson and Ted Kennedy among his political heroes. But he is just as quick to cite the obligation he feels as majority leader to accommodate more conservative Democrats in his caucus, and to reach out to Republicans.

One example is gun control, which Villaraigosa ardently supports and which is popular in his densely urban district. Instead of pushing restrictions opposed by lawmakers from the gun-friendly Central Valley and Inland Empire, Villaraigosa maneuvered to pass more modest steps, such as a curb on the manufacture and sale of cheap handguns. The legislation cleared the Assembly with the crucial support of moderate Democrats and three Republicans.

“I call myself a progressive, but I’m also pragmatic,” says Villaraigosa, who has term limits and close ties to Speaker Bustamante to thank for his rapid rise in Sacramento. “I don’t try to mau-mau my view of the world.”

Republicans insist, however, that beneath Villaraigosa’s surface charm and professions of goodwill lurks the heart of a ruthless partisan.

“His role on the floor is to be the heavy, which he plays with relish,” says John Nelson, a spokesman for Republican Leader Curt Pringle of Garden Grove. “When he’s on the floor, he’s every bit the partisan warrior.”

Villaraigosa came to Sacramento from the political trenches--a labor organizer and local leader of the American Civil Liberties Union who once disdained electoral politics. Eventually, he realized the impact lawmakers “have over people and their lives and circumstances.”

He says he still clings to the idealism that fired his protest days. But now, as part of the leadership, the fire has banked--his passions tempered by a duty, as Villaraigosa sees it, to answer to a much larger constituency.

“That’s the kind of compromise most people expect,” he says. “Reach out and say, ‘Hey, I don’t agree with you on this totally, this isn’t exactly the world as I would create it, but it’s the best we can do right now.’ ”

Eyeing the Future, Honoring the Past: WASHINGTON

The room is too hot.

Xavier Becerra has been standing before TV cameras for nearly 30 minutes decrying the plight of Central American refugees facing expulsion under the new immigration law.

He wears a gray double-breasted suit and his father’s wedding ring. The first is a function of his role as U.S. congressman, policy wonk and Stanford graduate. The second is a reminder of his roots: the ring no longer fits his father’s hand, bent and thickened from years of digging ditches.

The news conference is running too long. The House Ways and Means Committee is meeting a building away and Becerra is 20 minutes late.

Does he stay to fight for immigrants? Or bail for the powerful committee that writes the nation’s tax laws? The suit wants to go. The ring wants to stay.

He stays.

This balancing act is the story of Becerra’s three terms in Congress. Already the 39-year-old Los Angeles Democrat has made a mark as an immigration expert, one of a generation of Latino scholars who came to Washington armed with not just conviction, but a top-drawer law degree as well.

“He’s one of the bright hopes of the future,” says Harry Pachon, an expert on Latino politics at Claremont Graduate University.

People keep asking Becerra if he wants to be governor, senator or Los Angeles mayor. He doesn’t exactly discourage the speculation. But he insists that he prefers to talk about the here and now, keeping his head down, doing his best.

His goal is to rise beyond so-called Latino issues and enter mainstream power circles--not as an ethnic lawmaker but as a lawmaker who has not forgotten his ethnic roots.

“I want folks to know I can be influential and not just on immigration policy,” he says. “If someone’s got a tax concern, they should come to me. If someone’s got a health concern, they should come to me. I still want to be identified as a Latino, but that’s not all I do.”

Along the way, he concedes, he hears critics who charge that he is trying too hard to leave his past behind.

The trick is to broaden his landscape without neglecting the causes that brought him to Congress to begin with.

Immigrant rights advocates say he hurt their cause in 1996 by giving up a strategic seat on a key immigration subcommittee to become the first Latino on the Ways and Means Committee in its 120-year history.

But others say the attention to broader issues makes perfect sense for constituents of his mostly Latino district, centered on downtown Los Angeles.

“If you were to ask Latino voters what are the most important issues they’re concerned with, what they look to government to solve, it would be crime, education, the economy, jobs,” said Loyola Marymount’s Guerra.

“What are called traditional Latino issues are barely in the top 10.”

Becerra’s political ascent has hardly been flawless. In January, he was elected chairman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, then took a trip to Cuba to meet with Fidel Castro. Two Cuban-American caucus members resigned, leaving the group with no Republicans and, thus, no bipartisan credentials.

By all accounts, however, Becerra is going places. He’s smart, handsome, charming--and nimble.

A white woman at a Chamber of Commerce mixer once complimented Becerra on how well he “blends.” After some thought, he decided he wasn’t offended.

Building Beyond the Barrio: FREMONT

When Liz Figueroa decided four years ago to run for the state Assembly, the first place she turned to was the Latino caucus in Sacramento. The lawmakers enthusiastically backed her successful campaign and she has felt a special kinship ever since.

Until its members sing.

“I don’t know any of the songs,” she confides, explaining her left-out feeling. “I don’t know any of the words.”

After all, the Bay Area-born Figueroa grew up listening to her father’s Frank Sinatra records. She had meat and potatoes for dinner. Baby-sitting jobs took her to the mansions of Hillsborough.

She lived, in short, a thoroughly assimilated middle-class existence in the white-bread suburb of San Mateo, just south of San Francisco.

It was a place not unlike the district Figueroa now represents--the two are kitty-corner from the bay--in its relative comfort, middle-of-the-road Democratic politics and, most significant, its overwhelmingly non-Latino population.

In the 1980s, Latinos made important political strides across California thanks to a more equitable drawing of the state’s political boundaries, which enhanced the strength of minority voters.

Today, Latino candidates are making even broader inroads, easily winning districts that are predominantly non-Latino. Eleven of the Legislature’s 18 Latino members represent majority-white districts. For three, the demographics are particularly striking: Assembly members Deborah Ortiz (D-Sacramento), Rod Pacheco (R-Riverside) and Figueroa (D-Fremont) all serve districts that are less than 14% Latino, according to the 1990 census.

Although the emergence of a Villaraigosa or Becerra is undeniably significant, UC’s Jimenez suggests, “what’s important here is that it’s no longer solely Latinos representing the Latino community, but Latinos representing the community at large.”

The ability to win support across ethnic lines “demonstrates a greater political sophistication on the part of this younger generation,” he says, “which comes from a whole different set of experiences.”

Pacheco, for instance, is a former prosecutor who specialized in death penalty cases. Ortiz served on the Sacramento City Council.

Figueroa, who ran her own job placement company, was a longtime Democratic activist. The party chief in Alameda County, she ran for the Assembly when she couldn’t recruit anyone else. Even with the help of the Latino caucus, she ran an explicitly non-ethnic campaign. In this overwhelmingly white district, her slogan--”She’s one of us”--played up Figueroa’s roles as a businesswoman and mom, not her Latina heritage.

Although Figueroa speaks Spanish, the first language of her Salvadoran-born parents, her two children don’t. And although Figueroa, 46, recalls reading about the struggles of the farm worker movement, which shaped a whole generation of Latino leadership, it was more an abstraction than inspiration.

Instead, Figueroa discusses the pull of public life in the context of personal tragedy. One younger brother died of a drug overdose. The other has spent his life in and out of prison on narcotics charges.

“My parents chose to come here to make a better life for themselves, and they accomplished that,” Figueroa said, scarfing a bowl of Rice Krispies before rushing off to ride in the local Mission Days parade. “The rest of my family wasn’t able to, so I have an obligation to continue that for my parents’ sake.”

Now in her second term in the Assembly, with an eye on the state Senate, Figueroa has made health care a specialty, carrying bills to end so-called drive-by deliveries and stiffen regulation of health maintenance organizations.

At home, she stumps tirelessly throughout her district, the very image of a working pol, from a two-handed handshake to her perfect recall of names and faces to the saris--one turquoise, one apricot--she wears to mingle with her many Indian constituents.

Although proud of her heritage, Figueroa says her ancestral roots are unimportant to voters here. To them she is “just Liz,” she says, “not Latina Liz.”

Working Two Sides of the Street: REDWOOD CITY

Ruben Barrales always knew he was different. It was reinforced early, when his mom called him home for supper--ven a comer, she would holler--and other kids would tease and laugh.

Growing up the son of Mexican immigrants in this bedroom community, a few miles south of--and light years removed from--Figueroa’s adolescent abode, Barrales was both proud of his family’s heritage and self-consciously aware of how they stood out in their working-class neighborhood.

“We were very Mexican in terms of food, culture, language,” he recalls, recounting how a gradeschool teacher once visited his home to admonish his parents for speaking Spanish.

Now, as a member of the San Mateo County Board of Supervisors, Barrales chooses to be different. He is a Republican, which makes him a distinct minority within the state’s burgeoning ranks of Latino lawmakers.

Indeed, the only other Latino Republican serving at the county level or higher in California is Pacheco, the freshman assemblyman from Riverside.

Unless that one-party orientation changes, Pacheco and others contend, Latinos will never have the political power they could get, given their share of the population.

“We have to be everywhere if we want to achieve,” Pacheco said. “We have to be doctors, lawyers, custodians as well as Assembly speakers. We have to be Democrats and Republicans.”

Of all people, state Democratic Party Chairman Art Torres agrees. “We need that representation across the board,” he says.

Like many Mexican Americans, the 35-year-old Barrales grew up in a family that was Democratic almost by reflex, to the extent anyone followed politics. His father fixed roofs, storing his tar kettle in the backyard. His mother worked assorted menial jobs, even cleaning house for some of Ruben’s better-off classmates.

Barrales was pretty much indifferent toward electoral politics when he graduated from UC Riverside in 1984 with a degree in political science and administration. He planned to join his father’s trade as “the best educated roofer on the San Francisco Peninsula.”

Instead, he got involved in a community mediation service as a volunteer and then a paid leader. He formed a citizens advisory group with neighbors who believed that their North Fair Oaks community, by then predominantly Latino, was being neglected by the county.

When a seat on the Board of Supervisors opened in 1992, Barrales ran and squeaked through with just over 50% of the vote. It was only a year or two earlier that he switched his registration from nonpartisan to Republican.

His allegiance to the GOP “is kind of a challenge saying there are values we share in terms of supporting lower taxes, supporting small business people and neighborhood improvement, not just through government but through community involvement.”

With a proud, proprietary air, Barrales leads a tour of his racially and ethnically mixed district, pointing out a low-income housing development and charter school established through a combination of county seed money and private donations. “It wasn’t just government,” he enthuses, “but we as the people who live here, in partnership with government.”

After winning reelection last year with a handsome 71% of the vote, Barrales has set his sights on higher office, possibly running for state treasurer in 1998.

But proselytizing for his party has gotten tougher in the wake of Proposition 187, the anti-illegal immigration initiative passed by voters in 1994.

“The Republican Party is perceived as the party that hates Mexicans,” says Allan Hoffenblum, a veteran GOP strategist, who faults party leaders for their pugnacious promotion of the incendiary measure. “Rather than have a serious discussion it was, ‘Ah-ha, we have a wedge issue to beat up the Democrats.’ ”

Barrales, who opposed Proposition 187, agrees. The inflammatory rhetoric may have been a good short-term strategy, he says, “but in the long run it’s going to cost the Republican Party the ability to become a majority party.”

He scoffs at a recent state GOP resolution calling for inclusiveness and greater outreach to Latinos.

“To me, that’s worth the paper it’s written on,” Barrales says. “We need to be inclusive.”

When Heritage and Politics Collide: SAN DIEGO

Juan Vargas is arguably the most successful Latino politician in San Diego history. A mere 36, he would love to move from the City Council to Congress to work on matters such as community development, transportation and family values.

And he seems the ideal candidate for the 50th Congressional District, a racially and ethnically diverse collection of blue-collar neighborhoods that stretches from downtown San Diego to the Mexican border. He even grew up there.

But the district--with its 40% Latino population--already has a popular incumbent with no intention of stepping aside. He is Bob Filner, who is white and has twice fended off primary challenges from fellow Democrat Vargas with the help of local Latino leaders.

Vargas doesn’t hide his anger.

“A lot of our so-called Latino leaders are gutless,” he fumes. “I talk to these cry-baby Latino leaders and they say they can’t win elections until Latinos are a majority. That’s b.s.”

The contempt seems mutual.

“Filner delivers for this district,” says Daniel Munoz, editor-publisher of La Prensa, San Diego’s Spanish-language newspaper, which staunchly supports the incumbent Democrat. “Vargas comes to parades and goes to Chicano Park to hand out cookies but nothing really has changed in Barrio Logan and San Ysidro because of him.”

For all the political progress Latinos have made in the 1990s, there are still places like San Diego where the political power structure is more reminiscent of the 1950s--run by a mostly white, mostly Republican establishment.

“There’s not a great tradition of Latino leadership here,” says Steve Erie, a UCSD political science professor and expert on ethnic politics, who sees the city as a throwback to the Los Angeles of 40 years ago.

“Usually, when you get one or two Latinos in key offices, they can mentor and bring along the next generation. We don’t have that critical mass yet.”

Vargas has never styled himself as an ethnic politician and never moved in activist circles. Although he has fought for a police substation in his district, other issues--like calling for a dress code on city beaches--have seemed more whimsical.

Filner, in contrast, has prospered “through classic pork-barreling and constituent service,” Erie says, which seems to count for more in the Latino community here than any common cultural ties.

Vargas was born in National City, in the heart of the 50th District, to parents who emigrated from Jalisco in western Mexico. The family had 10 children--Vargas was the third.

After graduating from the University of San Diego, he entered the Jesuit novitiate in Santa Barbara, worked as a chaplain in Downey, a soup kitchen coordinator in the Bronx and a social worker in El Salvador, then left the order because he wanted to pursue a law degree, marry and have children. He graduated from Harvard Law School in 1991 and returned to San Diego to join a blue-chip law firm.

The missionary impulse led him to politics and he ran a strong but losing campaign against Filner in the 1992 Democratic primary. He ran and lost again to Filner in 1996. In between, Vargas was elected to the City Council.

Youthful, impatient and still brimming with a Jesuitical impulse to improve the world, Vargas finds himself at a crossroads as 1998 approaches: He can run for reelection to the council, have another go at Filner--or quit public life altogether.

“Politics is not an obsession with me,” Vargas says. “It’s something I’m doing now. I want to do good things, but if it doesn’t work out for me, I’ll go on to something else,” perhaps working with homeless children.

Filner, a prodigious fund-raiser and tireless campaigner, isn’t waiting. He has already sent out letters seeking contributions for an anticipated rematch next year against Vargas.

A Speaker Who Talks of Life’s Lessons: SACRAMENTO

Cruz Bustamante likes to keep a well-stocked cookie jar in his Capitol office. It’s for strokes, not snacks.

Inside are buttons he hands out to tourists and the school-age pilgrims who often visit. “You Can Too,” they say.

It is Bustamante’s great blessing and great curse to be a historical figure and a fleeting one too: The first Latino Assembly speaker in California history, serving at a time when government is out of fashion and the speaker’s office has been denuded of much of its power and stature.

Bustamante is the most prominent beneficiary of term limits, which cleared his path. He is also one of its major victims. He gained the speakership just four years after winning office but will have to give it up--unless the courts intervene--after a mere two.

“He’s generally viewed as one of the weakest speakers in California history,” said Tony Quinn, editor of the Target Book, a leading guide to state campaigns and elections.

Ultimately, Bustamante’s most meaningful role may be that of teacher, a pastime he relishes, presenting himself as an object lesson of life’s possibilities and how California has changed.

He speaks of ganas, desire, touching a hand to his chest, as he says, “Even though you come from a rural area and you don’t have a whole lot growing up . . . with a lot of desire--and a lot of hard work--you can achieve a certain amount of success.”

Raised in a Central Valley town as small as it was small-minded, Bustamante set his sights early on leaving. He fibbed to get into Fresno City College, claiming he wanted to be a butcher, the sort of job then deemed suitable for a Mexican American. He even took vocational classes for a year and today is probably the most proficient meat carver at Morton’s, a favorite Sacramento steakhouse.

The political bug bit during a summer internship in Washington at age 19. Bustamante worked in a series of staff jobs for Central Valley lawmakers and began plugging into an emerging Latino political network around the state, establishing links that would be crucial later.

Once he reached the Assembly in 1993, he quickly set his sights on the speakership, a notion that would have seemed preposterous for such a junior member if not for the purge resulting from term limits. Indeed, the turnover has probably done more than anything to boost Latino power inside the Legislature.

“You can assume there would be no Debra Ortiz if there were no terms limits to get rid of Phil Isenberg. You can assume there would be no Tony Cardenas if you didn’t get rid of Richard Katz,” said Claremont’s Sherry Bebitch Jeffe, naming just two of the termed-out Assembly veterans.

Surely there would be no Speaker Bustamante. When the job came open in November, the 13 Latino Democrats in the Assembly provided Bustamante more than half the votes he needed.

That building-blocks approach to power distinguishes the new Latino political leaders, who have the infrastructure and mentors--not to mention the opportunities and energized voter base--that prior generations lacked.

“They expect to be leaders, not minor partners in a coalition,” says Guerra of Loyola Marymount.

It is an attitude Bustamante hopes to pass along during his brief speakership. Consider how far the state has come in just the 27 years since his father felt compelled to adopt a made-up nickname to pursue his political ambitions, he says.

“I tell kids,” says Bustamante, “whether you’re Latino, whether you’re Hmong, whether you’re African American or a poor white kid, I want you to know it can happen”

Times staff writers Faye Fiore in Washington and Tony Perry in San Diego contributed to this story.