Compton Latinos Still on Outside Looking In

He made the promise in front of everybody.

Omar Bradley, running hard for mayor of Compton in 1993, wrapped one of his tree limb-sized arms around Pedro Pallan’s shoulders and declared that it was finally time for the city’s emerging Latino majority to have a representative on the mostly black City Council.

If Latinos voted for him, Bradley said, he’d recommend the person of their choice to fill the council vacancy his mayoral victory would create.

“We were glad that for the first time in Compton, a Latino would be recommended to be on the council,” said Gorgonio Sanchez, the Mexican American president of Compton’s school board.

But it never happened.

On the night of the big announcement, civic-minded Latinos filtered into Compton’s small council chambers. When two council members recommended yet another black man to fill Bradley’s empty seat, Latinos were stunned to see the mayor-elect--helped into office by their votes--join in.

“At the moment of the announcement, we were preparing to have this big roar,” Sanchez said. “Everybody thought it would be Mr. Pallan. We were more than sure. Mr. Pallan was fixing his tie and getting ready to stand up.”

For Pallan, it was like a blow to the gut. “You know when someone hits you and you see stars?” he said. “That’s how I felt. I said, ‘Gee, I can’t believe this is happening.’ ”

At a Crossroads

Five years later, Compton’s black-run government is still largely closed to Latinos.

Compton is one of three cities in the rapidly changing southeast and western part of Los Angeles County where African American leaders and Latino activists are at a crossroads when it comes to sharing political power, and each is seeking a different path.

In Lynwood, Latinos who felt left out of government overwhelmed African American leadership in the last election and are now seizing power. In Inglewood, black leaders are seeking a multicultural government in part by helping Latinos into power. And in Compton, black politicians are clinging to power without much regard for the city’s exploding Latino community.

Mayor Bradley said Latinos will have to vote themselves into power. Similarly, he said he didn’t push Pallan’s candidacy because he had neither the council’s nor in the community’s votes.

If Pallan and other Latinos “get some votes, then they’ll get some elected officials,” Bradley said.

Bradley also alleged that Latino activists are hostile toward black people. In fact, he’s labeled them “agitators.”

He voiced that description at a time when tension between black and brown residents crackled like a live wire after the videotaped beating of a Latino teenager by a black police officer in 1994. Bradley--who lists his heroes as John F. Kennedy, the Rev. Martin Luther King and Malcolm X--played down complaints by Latinos who organized in protest.

“I see this as a well-constructed attempt to utilize the historical context of the African American civil rights movement for the benefit of a few people, who in fact probably don’t even consider themselves nonwhite,” the mayor said of demonstrations by Latino activists. “This is really about power and privilege.”

As was the snub of Pedro Pallan, some say. Power and privilege--fancy words for the appointments, jobs and lucrative contracts Compton’s city government doles out--have worked the same way for black people as they did for the white power elite, which kept African Americans down for years.

“What does power mean?” asked Randolph Ward, the black state administrator of the blighted Compton Unified School District who nonetheless is fighting for more Latino leadership. “It means influence and money. When people feel they’re losing that, they go through drastic measures to keep it.”

Compton’s ongoing black-brown discord is largely political. In the city’s neighborhoods, blacks and the mostly Mexican immigrant residents get along like neighbors anywhere.

“It’s not a race thing for me,” said Claudia Soto, a Latina whose 6-year-old daughter attends a Compton public school. “I support Latino candidates, but I also support people who do the right thing. They could be Chinese, they could be African American, whoever, as long as they do their job.”

Bradley isn’t as colorblind, said school board member Basil Kimbrew. When the mayor learned that Kimbrew would vote to appoint Sanchez as board president, Kimbrew said the mayor told him that a Latino couldn’t do the job.

“I’m appalled at stuff like that,” Kimbrew said. The district’s student enrollment is 68% Latino.

Bradley called Kimbrew’s account “an utter lie.”

The mayor said that, while he has “no hostility toward Latino people,” he will not give them a hand into government. “They have to organize. They have to strategize the way we strategized.” Bradley said.

“Power,” said Bradley--quoting the black abolitionist and journalist Fredrick Douglass, “concedes nothing without demand. Never has. Never will.”

A Familiar Pattern

Experts who study race relations and politics agree that Compton’s city government borders on xenophobic.

Although the treatment Latinos face today is different from the cross-burning, paint-smearing and name-calling black Compton residents endured when they integrated the city two generations ago, some say they see painful similarities.

Former City Councilman Maxcy Filer, who is black, remembers when white Compton shunned him. “I first got here in 1952. I went to a council meeting every week for six years and they wouldn’t even let me speak,” Filer recalled years ago.

“It wasn’t so much hostility toward blacks as that blacks were being ignored,” said former Mayor Lionel Cade. “Even by 1960, the city was about 40% black. But that 40% was being ignored. We had two towns really: East Compton was white and west Compton was black, and the whites were unwilling to integrate city government.”

At a council meeting a few weeks ago, Latina activist Lorraine Cervantes seized on the irony as she addressed the mostly black City Council.

“It was not that many years ago when black people were at this podium saying the same things to a bunch of white folks,” Cervantes recalled saying. “How could you forget?”

Compton is being watched. Academia and activists wonder if members of Los Angeles County’s two most visible nonwhite groups will forge an inclusive government or languish in the politics of the past.

To see the future, Compton residents needn’t look far. Two nearby municipalities provide clear examples of what happens when African Americans and Latinos don’t get along--and what happens when they do.

In neighboring Lynwood, Latinos, who gained a majority of council seats last year, are bulldozing the former black government.

But in Inglewood, a few miles west of Compton, the city has taken a different approach. Black politicians there reach out to Latinos as part of a program based on multicultural inclusion.

Gregory Rodriguez believes that Latinos are a force that can’t be stopped in Compton or any other Los Angeles-area city. At the same time, he feels that the fade of the black politician is tragic “because the community put so much hope into the system.

“Blacks have been in the country for hundreds of years. It makes sense that they have moved into these positions,” said Rodriguez, a U.S.-born Mexican American writer and research fellow at the Pepperdine University Institute for Public Policy in Los Angeles.

“Blacks haven’t been in power long, and as soon as they get in power, it’s being taken away,” Rodriguez said. “[Latinos] assume that our power and influence should match the population . . . but most of us just arrived. We’ve just started the process.”

African Americans have suffered through a lot more in the U.S. than Latinos, Asians and other minorities before their climb up the social ladder, Rodriguez said. It disturbs him to see other groups equate their struggles to the long black struggle for civil rights.

“Everybody’s trying to jump on the bandwagon,” Rodriguez said. “By us doing that, we’re hurting the African American.” He singled out Latino activists in making way too much of a comparison.

“Yes, there were many injustices by whites against Latinos. But it doesn’t compare to what happened to African Americans.”

Fernando Guerra understands all that, but he said one cannot ignore the changing demographics. According to the 1990 census, about 44% of Compton’s 90,400 residents were Latino, or nearly 40,000. Blacks numbered almost 48,000--just under 53%. By 1997, Claritas Inc., a Virginia-based marketing research firm, reported that Latinos represented 56% of the population in Compton, with blacks falling to less than 44%.

Guerra, an academician who studies Latinos and politics at Loyola Marymount University, believes African Americans would do well to integrate Latinos into the government before they do it themselves with the ballot.

“Compton is one of those cities where, many years ago . . . white folks eventually opted to leave,” said Guerra. “Black folks don’t have as many options. White folks could re-create what they had after moving to places like the Valley,” Guerra said. “You couldn’t do that if you were African American.”

Numbers Can Be Deceiving

Politicians aren’t likely to find a solution, Guerra said. “The whole electoral process creates winners and losers. Race relations are much too important to leave to politicians.”

Compton could create harmony if black people “try to create a different political model,” Guerra said. “It doesn’t have to go from white to black to Latino. It could go from white to black to multicultural.”

There are other reasons the political strength of Compton’s Latinos does not equal their numbers. Because there are so many unregistered Mexican immigrants, many of the city’s Latinos can’t vote. Of the estimated 40,000 Latinos in Compton, a paltry 4,431 were registered to vote in the last election, and fewer than half of those registered actually cast ballots, according to statistics compiled by the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project, which works to register Latino voters.

“We understand that we have a problem,” said Sanchez, the Compton school board president. “We don’t have the votes we should have.”

Pallan, still upset by Bradley’s snub, is more confrontational. “In April 1999, I think we will be ready,” he said. “This is our year when we go out and do it.”

The apathy among immigrants is partly “a cultural thing,” Claudia Soto said. “Wives who are home have to be at home 100% when the husband is at home. I feel many of them aren’t used to giving their all to something else.

“My husband encouraged me to get involved. I used to go to everything,” Soto said. “But I’d leave school board meetings at 1:30 in the morning because the meetings go so long. They don’t let you speak until the end. My husband said he thought it was ridiculous that I was getting home so late.”

If Latinos eventually take control of Compton without any help from black leaders, the city may look a lot like its neighbor to the north, Lynwood.

In Lynwood, Latinos gained a majority of the five-member council after years of being ignored by the black leadership. Within weeks, Mayor Armando Rea and his voting bloc on the council moved to strip some black government executives of their titles and jobs. Census figures show there are more than 14,000 African Americans in Lynwood, compared to more than 43,000 Latinos.

Paul Richards II, a black Lynwood council member who saw several of his colleagues defeated, is bitter. “What we had here is a political coup because someone invested $150,000 in the race.”

In Inglewood, a different story is unfolding. Before departing office, black former mayor Edward Vincent reached out to Jose Fernandez and helped him win a council seat.

Fernandez never forgot. “I’ve had a lot of support in the African American community,” he said. “I’ve always had it. It’s not just Latino and African American; it’s Asian as well. We’re going out of our way to work together, and it’s been fruitful.”

Although Inglewood has more than 56,000 African Americans, and more than 42,000 Latinos, Latinos hold two high public offices--fire chief and chief librarian.

That’s unlike Compton and its presumed Latino majority, where the only high-ranking Latino in city government is the water department director.

A departmental personnel summary of public jobs in Inglewood shows that only white residents are proportionally overrepresented on the payroll. They make up less than 5% of the population but hold 36% of city jobs. Black workers hold 39% of the jobs and Latinos fill 18%.

But while the statistics prove that Inglewood is trying, they also show that the city still has a long way to go, Fernandez said.

Change in Inglewood

Among Inglewood’s professionals and supervisors are 12 Latinos, compared to 53 African Americans. On the other hand, most maintenance workers are Latino, but that’s true of many municipalities where poorer Latino residents compete harder for those lower-paying jobs.

Up the pay ladder, the gap between black and Latino paraprofessionals, technicians and clerical workers is stark: 111 to 24.

On the streets, odds are better that residents will see a Latino police officer or firefighter. Inglewood has 53 Latino officers and firefighters, compared to 63 African Americans.

“We’re making every effort to bring everyone into the program,” Inglewood Mayor Roosevelt Dorn said. “Inglewood will not follow Compton.”

Some say Inglewood politicians can afford to be more generous with power than those in Compton. For one thing, they have more to give.

“I think generosity and largess comes from those who have a relative degree of comfort,” Rodriguez said. “In Compton, there’s no such comfort.”

Inglewood is a city where $200,000 homes aren’t hard to find, compared to Compton, where the housing stock is falling apart. Moreover, as Dorn truthfully boasted, “Our intelligentsia of doctors, lawyers and teachers stayed” to participate in the city’s culture and politics. In Compton, they fled.

Before the exodus that began in the late 1960s, Compton was an all-white bedroom community for Los Angeles.

It was founded in 1888, named after Griffith Dickenson Compton, a pioneer who led 30 families to the center of Los Angeles County from the depleted gold fields of Northern California.

There were several bumps on the road to progress. The city was nearly destroyed by a 1933 earthquake, and floods destroyed property each year because city planners lacked the foresight to build storm drains.

After World War II, there was a different flood--black residents. By 1968, most of Compton was black, and white people started moving out. But white politicians fought to the end.

“It wasn’t until the blacks ran for a council seat in 1958 that they let me talk,” former Councilman Filer recalled years ago. “I remember it was a budget hearing, and they were talking about having the Sheriff’s Department take over the Compton police to keep blacks off the force. That’s the way things were here.”

In 1980, the city started changing again with the latest Latino migration northward. Immigrants found cheap rents in Compton, and access to the Los Angeles job market. Soon, Spanish language signs were common, and taquerias replaced black-owned barbecue joints.

Black leaders had a choice between living with the future or the past. Compton school board member Kimbrew believes Mayor Bradley chose the past.

Kimbrew said he was pulled aside by the mayor after Bradley learned he favored seating Gorgonio Sanchez as board president.

“He said it would be a bad decision for me to put a Hispanic on as president,” Kimbrew recalled. “He made a statement to me that a Hispanic couldn’t run the Compton Unified School District.”

Critics might say the same of black politicians who’ve dominated the district for nearly three decades.

Compton schools were the first in California to be taken over by the state to repair academic and financial collapse. At the time of the takeover in 1993, Compton schools were $20 million in debt. Classrooms were flooding and ceilings leaked. Students endured heat and cold without air-conditioning and heaters.

On top of all that, black administrators refused to hire more multilingual managers and educators, even though nearly 70% of students were Latinos who spoke Spanish at home.

“In the past, there were race riots,” said Ward, the state administrator of the schools. “In the early ‘90s it was horrible. We’re doing the kinds of things needed to keep this from happening.”

Parents say Ward, who lived in Latin America for two years, won them over by addressing them occasionally in Spanish. He has also pushed for a federal grant for a program that will pair children who speak English only and Spanish only in two elementary schools so that they’ll grow up speaking both languages.

“I really enjoy this community,” Ward said. “It’s unfortunate that politics here, in my opinion, gets in the way of progress.”

* NO HELP FOR SCHOOLS: Compton officials angry with state takeover of district hail defeat of bond issue after urging voters to reject it. B1