SPECIAL REPORT * As political participation begins to catch up with a wave of immigration and naturalization in southeast L.A. County . . . Communities See a Surge in Latino Voter Registration

For a decade, Pacific Boulevard in Huntington Park has been known as the Main Street of Latino Los Angeles. When Mexico’s national soccer team wins a big game, impromptu celebrations spill onto its sidewalks. Every weekend, its old gray department stores are abuzz with Spanish-speaking shoppers.

Now Pacific is at the center of another social transformation. Quiet and less visible to outsiders, it is taking place in the crowded neighborhoods of tract homes and apartment buildings that surround the commercial strip.

These humble communities--Huntington Park, South Gate and unincorporated Florence--are home to more new voters than any other area in Los Angeles County, ground zero of a statewide explosion in Latino voting.

Voter registration has risen 36% in Huntington Park since 1994, a rate seven times the countywide increase. Registered voters are still rare in these neighborhoods--perhaps a dozen on an entire block--but their lives and aspirations provide insight into the growth of the Latino electorate.

“We’ve lived here for 24 years and it was time,” said Socorro Buenrostro, 63, explaining why in the past two years, eight members of her family decided to become citizens and register to vote. “Even if the gringos don’t want us, this is our tierra [land].”

The surge in Huntington Park marked the end of a quarter-century during which the city’s electorate, eroded by “white flight,” was reduced by half. Huntington Park now has more voters than at any time since 1972.

The city’s 5th Precinct, straddling Pacific Boulevard, offers a close-up of the new electorate. Here, a fourth of all voters have registered since 1994.

The new voters are an amalgam of retired factory workers, naturalized citizens and American-born young adults. Despite being overwhelmingly Democratic, they seem to be more conservative about social issues.

Many express an ambivalence about the American political system--feeling, like Buenrostro, that they are not really “wanted”--while others are more hopeful.

“I think it can change things if there are a lot of us voters,” said Virginia Prieto, a worker at a local food packing plant. “That’s why I became a citizen. I said, ‘I’m going to vote for the Democrats.’ ”

Like many new voters, Prieto, who moved to California from Mexico in 1974, sees casting her ballot as the trophy at the end of the long struggle of her family to improve their lot and become U.S. citizens.

*

In Precinct 5, where noncitizens made up 71% of the adult population in 1990, the growth of the electorate appears to have been made possible by California’s massive wave of naturalization.

“It was a sacrifice to become a citizen, because I’m always working and there’s chores to do,” Prieto said. “I studied all my lessons here at home. God helped me pass the test and answer all those questions.”

Prieto and her husband, Manuel, also a factory worker, have owned their small stucco home on Albany Street since 1980. Plants burst from pots on the porch and front lawn.

Their arrival in Huntington Park coincided roughly with the departure of thousands of white residents and the transformation of Huntington Park from a white to a Latino working-class community.

Registration is increasing fastest in such neighborhoods in part because for years the number of voters was abysmally low. In 1962, when Huntington Park was about 85% white, the city had 15,834 registered voters. Exactly 20 years later, the demographics had flip-flopped, and only 7,309 people were registered to vote. As of February of this year, the electorate had climbed back up to 10,479.

Today, Democrat Martha M. Escutia’s 50th Assembly District, which includes Huntington Park, has the fastest growing electorate in Los Angeles County. Democratic Assemblyman Gil Cedillo’s 46th District and Democrat Antonio Villaraigosa’s 45th are a close second and third, respectively. All are centered around working-class Latino communities.

In Huntington Park, the growth of a Latino electorate is slowly changing the way local politicians campaign.

When Mayor Jessica Maes, a Latino, was first elected to the Huntington Park City Council in 1994, many of her voters were white senior citizens. She hired taxis and vans to shuttle them to the polls. Four years later, many were gone.

“They passed away. I said, ‘What happened to all my voters?’ The numbers and the demographics have changed a lot.”

*

It’s clear, however, that new voters are far from becoming a force in local politics. Maes’ most loyal supporters live in her neighborhood, a corner of Huntington Park she said has “a lot of Anglos still. I think it’s the last Anglo street.” (In the 1990 census, non-Hispanic whites made up less than 6% of the population.) “And we have a lot of Latin Americans who speak good English,” she said.

Language is a barrier preventing many Huntington Park residents from being incorporated into the local political culture.

In a quarter-century in Huntington Park, Buenrostro has attended only one city government meeting, even though she lives just eight blocks from City Hall. She and her husband were perplexed by the proceedings--the Spanish language interpreter muddled his words--and have never returned.

Asked to compare the political systems in the United States and Mexico, where she voted in several elections before emigrating, Buenrostro expressed a kind of fatalism about the process.

“It’s the same,” she said. “The ones on top win and those of us on the bottom suffer. The people who have power do what they want. And those of us who don’t have power have to suffer through the laws that they make.”

Still, the Buenrostros and others treasure the right to vote. For many, the very act is seen as a statement of personal defiance, a right that is all the more precious because of the social realities that still keep a large share of the community disenfranchised.

“A lot of people can’t vote. I think it’s like a gift,” said 21-year-old Cesar Salas, a registered voter and an employee of a Pacific Boulevard movie theater who is an avid reader of campaign literature. “They can take it away from you, the judge can if you do something bad. If you can vote, vote. While you can.”

Indeed, despite the recent increase, registered voters remain a relatively small group in Precinct 5--there are only 791, less than 17% of the voting age population, according to the 1990 census. Overall, the electorate in Huntington Park and other southeast Los Angeles County communities is less than half the size of its counterparts in the county’s suburbs.

Politicians doing traditional door-to-door campaigning in Precinct 5 might find the process frustrating. On some blocks, there are only a dozen or so registered voters. Non-Spanish-speaking pols doing “precinct walking” would be sure to encounter more than a few perplexed looks and shrugs of “No entiendo.”

In the 1990 census, more than 82% of the households in the precinct listed Spanish as the language they spoke at home, with 33% “linguistically isolated,” speaking little or no English.

*

Salas, a first-generation Mexican American, speaks English and Spanish fluently. He is the first member of his family to vote in this country, and has not missed an election since turning 18 and registering to vote in 1996, casting a ballot even in local elections when the turnout has been very small.

For U.S.-born residents like Salas, growing up in Huntington Park has meant living in a milieu where cultural assimilation--the force that drove previous generations of Mexican immigrants to quickly abandon their language and other customs--is a waning force.

The waves of televised attack ads that fill English-language television stations during each campaign season will have only a limited resonance here. At the same time, the community provides fertile territory for candidates willing to reach out to Spanish-speaking voters.

The folksy music of northern Mexico reverberates from the storefronts on Pacific Avenue, while cars cruising the shopping strip sport bumper stickers for Mexico City rock groups such as Maldita Vecindad.

Salas lives the new cultural realities firsthand at the theater where he works. When the movie house showed “Titanic” without Spanish subtitles, a small rebellion ensued. Another theater down the street did have “Titanic” with Spanish subtitles.

“That other theater was packed,” Salas said. “They had a line around the block. We didn’t.”

For some new voters--who tend to be more settled and older than their nonvoting neighbors--the social and cultural changes in Huntington Park don’t always sit well.

“When I started to live here I used to go to Pacific and everything was very clean and nice,” said one resident, a native Mexican and naturalized American citizen. “Lately, since the [1986 federal] amnesty [for illegal immigrants], there’s a lot more people living here, different kinds of people. People are more messy.”

The voter complained about immigrants from Central America moving into the neighborhood. And yet, moments later, she expressed a sharp dislike of Gov. Pete Wilson, who has championed policies to reduce illegal immigration.

“I don’t want anything to do with Pete Wilson,” she said. “If they got rid of him, it would be my happiness. I would vote to get rid of him.”

Such apparently contradictory views can be seen in Precinct 5’s voting patterns.

*

In the 1994 elections, the precinct voted more than 2 to 1 against Proposition 187. In 1996, the precinct favored President Clinton over Bob Dole by a margin of 8 to 1, but also voted 56% to 44% against Proposition 215, the measure to legalize marijuana for medicinal purposes. Countywide, 56% of the electorate voted for the proposition.

Whatever their views, one thing the new voters share in common is a growing acceptance that becoming citizens and full-fledged participants in the American political process marks the end of a long journey.

“I don’t go [to Mexico] very often,” said Virginia Prieto, a native of a small town in Guanajuato. She hasn’t visited since 1992. “My mother and my father are no longer living. All my brothers live here. I only go to sightsee. Mexico is far away for us now.”