Water Bill Touches Off a Revolt

After years of apathy, it took the simplest of complaints to awaken the fighting spirit of the Pulido family and their Latino middle-class neighbors in Maywood, a pistol-shaped city southeast of downtown Los Angeles.

Edauco Pulido, a Mexican-born construction worker and homeowner, thought he was being overcharged on his water bill in 1995. He told two friends. Together they went to the offices of Maywood Mutual Water Company No. 2 to complain. A week or so later, without really meaning to, they had started a movement.

The water company’s officials were rude. Some made fun of their customers’ Spanish accents. But Pulido and his neighbors pressed ahead, meeting once a week in his garage. They formed the Grupo Pro-Mejoras de Maywood, made fliers and knocked on doors.

“I don’t like to stay quiet,” Pulido says in Spanish. “I told [the water officials] to be ready because I was going to fill that place full of protesters at the next meeting. And I did it.”

This year, one of the group’s members, a Guadalajara-born truck driver, became president of the water company’s board of directors. Pulido and his friends still have their accents, but no one at the water company makes fun of them anymore.

As a measure of political muscle, Grupo Pro-Mejoras (Spanish for “Pro-Improvement Group”) received none of the attention of the large, angry street demonstrations by Latinos against state ballot measures aimed at immigrant rights and bilingual education. But the group’s tale is a reminder of how a growing and politically restless number of property-owning Latinos--not merely the poorer, newer arrivals whose plight is simpler to document--are refashioning American democracy.

Grupo Pro-Mejoras, whose ranks include an accountant, construction workers and the occasional retiree, is not unlike the hundreds of neighborhood organizations that try to influence local government across Southern California’s patchwork of suburbs.

But it is something of a novelty in Maywood, the most densely populated city in California, a community where barely 31% of adult residents were U.S. citizens in the 1990 census.

Meeting every Friday for the last three years in a tiny garage barely the size of a station wagon, the Pulido family and a dozen or so of their Spanish-speaking neighbors have quickly mastered U.S. civics.

In June, they organized the only opposition to a municipal bond initiative that would have raised local property taxes to pay for street repairs, and won a hard-fought campaign that saw them butt heads with all five members of the City Council.

Now they want to breathe new life into the Chamber of Commerce. They talk late into the night about the water board, the city budget and the police department. They wonder if Maywood should have its own school district.

“We are like people who’ve woken up after a long coma,” John Velasquez, the 50-year-old grandfather who is the group’s president, says in Spanish. “We want to do everything at once.”

Among those who have started attending the meetings is a 72-year-old white property owner who doesn’t understand much Spanish but believes deeply in the group’s goals.

“Sometimes they tell me what they’re talking about,” said Bill Riseden, who symbolizes the old Maywood before a wave of immigration in the 1980s completed its transition from a traditional white suburb to a teeming, Spanish-speaking city where families often build additional units for uncles and grandparents in their backyards. “I have to admire these people because I know a lot of people who speak English and they can’t get away from the television set.”

Small-town government has long been the distinctive cornerstone of American democracy. “Towns are like great meeting houses with all the inhabitants as members,” Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in his 1835 book “Democracy in America,” a seminal treatise on U.S. political institutions. In towns, Tocqueville wrote, “it is impossible to prevent men from assembling, getting excited together and forming sudden passionate resolves.”

Maywood is the latest Los Angeles County community to be gripped by such fervor a decade after new Latino majorities were elected to the city councils in a dozen other cities like South Gate and San Fernando.

In the San Gabriel and San Fernando valleys, and in Southeast Los Angeles County, middle-class voters--some naturalized citizens, others born here--have helped propel Latino candidates for the state Legislature and Congress into office.

Up to now, electoral politics in the Latino community has been, for the most part, the purview of English-speaking Mexican Americans. Neighborhood groups led by Spanish-speaking immigrants have tended to focus on local ad hoc issues--for example, opposing a state prison on the Eastside and a trash dump in Huntington Park. Only recently have organizations like Grupo Pro-Mejoras come forward to seize a share of political power.

Much of Maywood’s population of 28,000 is made up of immigrant families, many of them renters. It is a far cry from the place originally subdivided in the 1920s in half-acre “garden home sites,” just a few stops down the Pacific Electric Railway from the downtown Los Angeles business district.

Still, like their predecessors in the Maywood of the 1940s and ‘50s, most members of the Grupo Pro-Mejoras are either citizens or property owners--or both. Most are better off than their neighbors.

Huge Rise in Water Bill

Edauco Pulido, the man who took on the water company, owns two buildings on his property on East 55th Street. He doesn’t have much of a frontyard, and the backyard is all concrete. That’s why he was mystified back in 1995 when he opened his water bill and found it had jumped from about $130 to $210.

He was even more perplexed when he checked his water meter and found it covered with dirt--apparently, no one from the water company had bothered to read it for months, if not years.

Pulido went to the water company to complain. “They said I had to pay or they would cut my service.”

His neighbors got similarly rude responses. Gonzalo Banuelos recalls being told: “If you don’t like it here, go to Mexico.”

“They treated us as if we weren’t worth anything,” Pulido said.

It has become an axiom of modern Southern California that Mexican and Central American immigrants aren’t likely to complain when they are cheated, short-changed or otherwise taken advantage of. And with their immigration status often uncertain, they tend to avoid interactions with officials of any stripe.

But Pulido, a 28-year resident of the United States who is not a citizen but has legal status, had nothing to fear.

With his two friends, Pulido started knocking on doors. Their bilingual fliers declared “Together We Will Be the Strength!,” an awkward English translation of the popular Latin American call to arms “Juntos Haremos la Fuerza.”

Among the first to join the group was Gustavo Villa, a 43-year-old truck driver and father of six. Before emigrating to the United States, Villa had received a bachelor’s degree at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, and had been exposed to the many political currents that swirl on the Mexico City campus.

“When you come to this country, all you worry about is supporting your family,” Villa said. “But if we don’t get involved in our community, no one will do it for us.”

What’s more, group members said the disrespectful attitude of the water company and its board president, Cleo Evans, had transformed the issue into a matter of pride.

“It all started with one word from Cleo Evans,” Villa said. “He said ‘First go learn English and then come back and talk with me.’ That got people going.” (Evans has denied making such a remark).

Soon, Pulido, Villa and the others had managed to muster a protest of 200 people at the water company’s nondescript offices on Slauson Avenue.

Villa said he suggested the group take a name “so that people in the neighborhood can know what we stand for. We made it a Spanish name because we’re 80% to 90% Latinos here.”

Next, Villa obtained a copy of the water company’s bylaws. What he discovered came as a surprise: It was a publicly owned company, with each Maywood property owner granted shares of stock--and the power to vote for board members.

“The water company belongs to us,” he told Grupo members at their next meeting.

The 78-year-old utility was about to undergo the most profound change in its history.

After gathering proxy votes from 700 Maywood households, the Grupo Pro-Mejoras succeeded in getting Villa and another member, Mark Mejia, elected to the Board of Directors in early 1997.

This January, Evans resigned after serving 39 years as board president, a position that involves supervising day-to-day operation of the water company. Group members said they pressured him to resign; the 78-year-old Evans says he simply saw the writing on the wall.

“They want to get rid of me because I don’t speak Spanish,” he said. “That I don’t like, because this is America and you should speak English. They can speak English well enough but they want everyone to speak Spanish.”

“We’re not objecting to these people being on the board,” Evans continued. “They operate a little differently because they’re from a different culture. Since [Maywood] is all Hispanic anyway, they should have people on the Board of Directors.”

Villa became the new president of the five-member board after another member, an ally of Evans, turned down the job.

In between his full-time job as a big-rig trucker, Villa oversees the water company, which serves about 1,900 households. Like other board members, he is paid $400 a month.

“I’ve come to realize that in this country democracy really does work,” Villa said. “We’ve lost our fear. We’re a small, humble group, but we’re a legitimate group.”

Opposition to Ballot Measure

Flush with victory, the Grupo Pro-Mejoras moved on to new struggles.

Pulido told his colleagues, “I have a garage I can fix up and we can keep this going.”

The small space with its concrete floor became the group’s headquarters. They pushed an old file cabinet into one corner and tacked up a map of the water district boundaries to the wall, next to a calendar poster of an Aztec warrior. Soon, they added another decoration, a framed copy of their official registration with the secretary of state as a political organization.

About the same time, the Maywood City Council was debating what to do about the city’s crumbling, potholed streets. It decided to place a $12-million bond initiative on last June’s ballot, Proposition 98-1.

At first no one stood up to oppose the initiative. The city printed and mailed election materials that included only a single argument in favor of the street bond--signed by all five members of the City Council--and no arguments against.

Enter Pulido and his neighbors. They said the tax (about $100 annually per family for 30 years) would be an unfair burden in a community where the median family income is just $27,350. They combed the initiative’s fine print and argued that even though the program would cost three times the city’s annual budget, there was no guarantee every block in the city would be repaired.

As before, the group issued bilingual fliers, though the English was much improved. “We encourage you to use your power,” one flier said alongside the more forceful Spanish translation, “Lo invitamos a que use el poder del voto.”

Whatever the language, the message of the Pro-Mejoras group hit a nerve.

“People got angry,” Velasquez said. “They felt fooled.”

Group members said they pressured the City Council to sponsor community forums on the initiative.

“They were the only ones working against [the bond], but they were tenacious,” said Councilwoman Elvira Moreno de Guzman. “We hadn’t seen that type of activism in the city in a long time.”

Then-Mayor Tomas Martin, a 62-year-old native of Cuba and supporter of the bond, became a frequent target of the group’s attacks.

“The Grupo Pro-Mejoras has some good ideas for the community, but on this bond initiative, I think they were completely wrong,” Martin said. “They did a lot of propaganda about the taxes . . . but it was only $8 per month. That’s not much compared to the benefit for the city.”

With just 4,000 registered voters in the city, the outcome of the election would probably be decided by a few hundred votes. On election day, members of the group filled the council chambers to watch the city clerk tally the votes. Needing a two-thirds majority to pass, the bond initiative barely got a third, losing 671-1,291.

A week later, the group met again in Pulido’s garage. As usual, Maria Pulido made coffee and set out a plate with Mexican sweet bread. Most of the 20 or so members present wore name tags. When darkness fell and a crescent moon rose over the backyard garage, someone turned on the bare lightbulb on the ceiling. The circle of chairs spread out from the garage to the concrete patio outside.

The discussion soon turned to the water company, group members peppering Villa with questions.

As president, could he fire people? Could he cut water bills by lowering salaries?

Decisions about the company, Villa said, had to be approved by the board as a whole. Still, there would be reforms. That was a certainty.

“We’re even going to change the system of billing,” Villa promised. “They thought that as president I was going to drown under the job. Now I have 20,000 things I want to do. But we have to move forward with tact and caution.”

The members seemed a bit impatient. Often, they see their local government cynically, through the lens of their experience in Mexico, where democracy’s promises are regarded as fragile. Antonia Perez compared the water company to the government of a corrupt Mexican state where everyone is tainted by cronyism.

As the meeting wound down a few hours later, Maria Pulido collected $2 from each member, then raffled off a cap and a basket of fruit someone had donated. Everyone helped put the chairs back inside the garage until next week’s meeting.

Velasquez says that if democracy is to prosper in Maywood, more of its small core of educated, middle-class residents and property owners will have to catch the civics bug.

“There are many talented, professional people in this city,” Velasquez said. “We have teachers, university students, accountants. But the talent and the experience of these people is going to other communities.”

Villa sees hope in the group’s humble beginnings and its quick successes.

“Be careful. We’re just a little pueblito now. But in 10, 15 years, who knows? If this can happen in Maywood, it can happen in other places. This might be contagious.”