A LOOK AHEAD * Latinos in Lynwood recently seized power from another ethnic group, blacks. The change may be a forerunner of votes in Compton and elsewhere, because . . . : After Shift in Demographics Comes Change in City Leaders

Since the late 1960s, the city of Lynwood, like many other southeast Los Angeles communities, has been a window on the shifting demographics of Southern California.

Its population was first dominated by whites, then blacks and for the last decade, Latinos. But it wasn’t until last week’s municipal elections that Latinos fully exercised their power at the polls. When the ballots were counted, voters had elected a City Council with a Latino majority.

For black politicians in Compton and Inglewood, where the Latino population is growing dramatically, the Lynwood election may be a harbinger, analysts say.

“Everybody has been talking about this sleeping giant called the Latino community,” said political analyst Kerman Maddox. “The way it works is people like to elect people who look like them. There’s just going to be a shift in power. I think Latinos have been left out of power for a long, long time, and they’re going to put on a full court press.”

In the early 1990s, Latinos won control of a few small cities, such as Huntington Park, that had been dominated by whites.

But Lynwood appears to be the first city where one minority group--Latinos--seized control from another--blacks.

Four seats on Lynwood’s five-member council were at stake in the election. Three members were up for reelection, and a fourth seat had been open since Councilman Louis Heine died in March.

Two Latino businessmen, Ricardo Sanchez and Arturo Reyes, won seats for the first time, and the city’s first Latino councilman, Armando Rea, won reelection. The three men ran on a slate with a non-Latino candidate, and framed the election as a referendum on the ethics of two incumbents, Paul Richards II and Robert Henning.

Henning was defeated, but Richards hung on to his seat.

For Rea, a former sheriff’s deputy who now works as a private investigator, the new majority is the result of sustained growth in the city’s Latino population, which he courted assiduously in a registration drive.

“I’m overjoyed,” said Rea, who was elected to the council in 1989. “It was worth the wait.”

Few in the 1960s would have predicted the Latino rise to power. Whites so dominated the population that the city was known by some as “Lily White Lynwood.”

But Lynwood was sliced in half by the planning and construction of the Century Freeway in the 1970s. More than 1,000 homes were demolished. Employers fled. Property values tumbled.

Even as the black population ballooned, whites kept control of the City Council. It wasn’t until 1983, years after blacks became a majority of residents, that voters elected a black man, Henning, to a council seat.

Through the 1980s, an influx of immigrants from Latin America moved into the city, and the face of Lynwood changed again. Blacks moved to outlying suburbs. Between 1980 and 1990, Lynwood’s black population dropped 13%. Today, Lynwood’s population is about 83% Latino and 17% black.

Political analysts predict that surges of immigration may have a similar impact on the city governments of places like Compton, where the black population slipped 18% in the 1980s. Compton’s population is about 56% Latino and 43% black. No Latino has been elected to the council there.

State Sen. Richard G. Polanco, (D-Los Angeles), who endorsed the Latino slate in the Lynwood election and appeared at its fund-raiser, said the city’s Latino population--propelled to the polls by what they see as anti-immigrant sentiments in Congress and the governor’s office--had reached “political maturity.”

Councilman Richards downplayed the significance of the Latinos’ ascent. He noted that although the Rea slate was successful, three other Latino candidates on the ballot lost.

“Our community, believe it or not, is fairly colorblind,” he said.

Richards attributed the challengers’ success to well-funded independent expenditure committees, and said he was conducting an inquiry into “all types of improprieties” in their campaign and voter registration effort.

At a special meeting Friday night, the three black council members voted, with Rea absent, to appoint a special counsel, attorney Ronald N. Wilson, to look into allegations of voter fraud in the election.

The slate candidates said they welcomed any analysis of their record-keeping and countered with attacks on Richards, who they said ran up city credit card expenses and traveled excessively.

Richards dismissed their criticism, saying he used the credit card because it saved the city the cost of having to process checks. “Lynwood needs a new direction,” said Reyes, who runs an accounting firm.

For years, he said, many Latinos in the city dismissed local politics.

“ ‘Why get involved?’ was the general attitude,” he said. “They now know they can make a difference. It’s changing. Very slowly. But it’s changing.”