Grass-Roots Organization Is Making a Statement

Forged in anger, a small Latino activist group has grown since its founding early this year into a potent political force, gaining followers among the city’s poorest and enemies among officialdom.

The group, Vecinos Unidos, or United Neighborhoods, has since its opening salvo on the steps of Anaheim City Hall in March taken a keen sense of injustice, a penchant for allegations of police abuse and a confrontational style from the City Council chamber to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

Now the group is expanding in membership and scope. And its leaders are not timid about their mission.

“It’s payback time,” said Richard Castillo, an Anaheim musician who helped found the group. “I grew up living with injustices I couldn’t do anything about. Now I am out here to make noise. I am out here to right some wrongs.”

Last month, United Neighborhoods directed its rage at a city-run food pantry it claimed was mismanaged--then started its own food bank a block away in the Anaheim barrio, convincing prestigious Catholic Charities and local merchants to donate food.

This month the group became the ninth chapter in Orange County of the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), conferring an air of respectability on the local organization that city leaders have openly called illegitimate and irresponsible.

And although it has made no friends in City Hall, United Neighborhoods is starting to get the ear of politicians outside Anaheim. Rep. Loretta Sanchez (D-Garden Grove) accepted the group’s invitation to visit Anaheim’s Jeffrey-Lynne neighborhood on Friday, where some of the city’s poorest live.

But United Neighborhoods’ tactics have made it few friends outside the Latino community. And even among some other Latinos in Anaheim, the group is seen as more interested in tearing down than in building up.

While other Latino activists have worked together with police and city officials, United Neighborhoods has spent much of its time railing at city leaders for alleged injustices that Anaheim officials say the group has been unable to prove.

“People get impatient sometimes with the slow process of developing relationships and building toward community, and that tends to rush people toward judgments that are kind of harsh and not always on the mark,” said Orange County Human Relations Commission director Rusty Kennedy, who has led countywide attempts to resolve racial disputes.

United Neighborhoods “has been quite free with judgments that tend to tear people apart,” Kennedy said.

But LULAC’s district director for Orange County praises United Neighborhoods, saying she invited it to join the national civil rights organization because it is the first Anaheim group ever to fight racism and abuse directed at the city’s Latinos.

“We’re excited about the work that they’re doing. It’s long overdue,” LULAC’s Susie Flores said.

“They are a very powerful force, and they are getting more people behind them. That’s something that should be going on in every community. I mean protecting people, treating people with respect and dignity, sticking up for people and their rights.”

That’s what United Neighborhoods leaders said they were trying to do when, together with LULAC, they aired complaints of alleged police abuse before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights this spring.

The group’s appearance at the hearings followed months of similar complaints to the Anaheim City Council that earned the group a rabble-rousing reputation.

The alleged beatings of Anaheim youth by police and the Police Department’s persistent practice of stopping and photographing youths “just made me fighting mad,” said United Neighborhoods leader Josie Montoya. Montoya said that Anaheim’s powerful can never understand life on the streets.

“We don’t believe city leaders give our people an adequate voice,” Montoya said.

Montoya, 57, made a name for herself in the 1970s and early 1980s as a respected community organizer in Santa Ana, but had largely disappeared from public life until founding United Neighborhoods with a handful of friends last fall.

Montoya said the group was born after she and the friends saw police searching and citing several teenagers sharing a beer at a community picnic in November and then photographing them for police records on gangs.

To Montoya and others who witnessed the police action, the officers’ attitude toward the youths was part of a pattern of harassment, use of excessive force and stereotyping of Latinos.

Police officers confirmed the sweep and the citations, but said the youths, some of whom are related to Montoya and her friends, were suspected gang members. Police said they did nothing wrong in taking pictures for their “gang book.”

Since that initial complaint, United Neighborhoods members have teamed up with several civil rights attorneys to help pursue more than a dozen claims by young people of police harassment.

City and police officials who have investigated the charges insist none of the allegations have been substantiated.

“I think they’ve been long on rhetoric and short on true problem-solving,” Anaheim Mayor Tom Daly said of United Neighborhoods. “They’re more interested in playing ‘gotcha’ than in working together for positive change.”

The genesis of United Neighborhoods’ food program is an example of why the group makes some people mad.

Until September, the food bank was managed out of the city-run Jeffrey-Lynne Neighborhood Center, a onetime apartment building. It was a struggling institution that local Latino leaders had worked hard with Anaheim officials to found.

While the center ran the food pantry, it focused its efforts on literacy and training programs to break what social workers at the center called a cycle of dependence among residents of the area.

Allegations by United Neighborhoods of mismanagement eventually convinced local charities to pull their support for the food program and for a separate employment training program.

But a two-week probe by an independent investigator hired by the city found no basis to the allegations.

That didn’t stop United Neighborhoods from spreading its message among residents of the poor neighborhood of something woefully wrong at the community center. As confidence in the center has slipped, attendance at family planning classes, after-school study groups and tenant meetings is off significantly.

“After all that work to create it, how is it that in one month [United Neighborhoods] can destroy everything?” asked Delia Barrela, who was active in founding the Jeffrey-Lynne center and is president of Padres Unidos, a church-affiliated Anaheim neighborhood group. “I don’t think they have any intention of constructing something comparable in its place.”

In response, United Neighborhoods leaders point proudly to their steadily growing food pantry.

Supermarkets have donated food for the program for the past three weeks, and on a recent day more than 50 people registered for food. Nearby, a registered nurse who is a member of United Neighborhoods offered free blood tests.

United Neighborhoods officials insist they are doing a better job than the city-run program did, and say their victory in this arena serves as an example of what they plan to do in the future.

“I don’t like that my people are abused. I don’t like that they don’t know how to defend themselves, that they don’t know where to go,” said Francisco Ceja, 45, a Mexican immigrant who has become an active member of United Neighborhoods.

Ceja, a maintenance worker in Brea, is taking computer literacy courses at a local college. He said he is attracted to the group’s aggressive approach to solving problems.

“We are motivated by frustration, by the desire to do things for ourselves, by the desire to stand behind our people,” Ceja said.

“We want to achieve real results.”