U.S. Probe Spotlights Small Town Ethnic Relations

For the past year, the U.S. Department of Justice has been quietly investigating this city’s electoral history after receiving a complaint that the system of at-large elections keeps Latinos off the City Council.

Nobody knows exactly what the government will do. But if it decides that minorities have been denied power in a city in which two-thirds of the 27,000 residents are Latino, it could sue to carve the 4.5 square miles into separate political districts.

That could shift the balance of political power to Latinos for the first time in the city’s history.

Few people around town seem to know much about the federal probe. Justice Department officials would not comment except to say that an investigation is underway and that there is potential for litigation.

Although there are some wealthier people up on “the hill,” as the bluff on the north side of town is known, most people in the city are either middle class or are laborers who get up early to work in the fields and packinghouses. They say they’re too busy to follow politics.

But when it comes to talking ethnic relations, everyone is an expert. And there is no consensus.

“I don’t think there is racism,” said Martha Luna, who with her parents served up gorditas on Main Street one recent afternoon to raise money for her church. Luna left Mexico with her parents at age 10 and hopes to become a citizen soon. There are problems, she said, but they are endemic to a large population of Latino noncitizens who can’t vote, often can’t speak English and are too poor to mesh with the rest of the city.

Others such as Julie Ming, who works the cash register at Santa Paula Hardware and was raised by a white mother and a Latino stepfather, see a fully integrated community that is a role model for the rest of Ventura County.

“It’s a cool little town,” she said.

But Ramon Rodriguez, a Chicano studies teacher and Latino civil rights activist who chairs the Santa Clara Valley Democratic Club, said ethnicity divides the city.

“There’s a racist status quo in the city, and they’re trying to maintain their system of political apartheid,” Rodriguez said, referring to the City Council with its 4-1 white majority.

Although Latinos make up two-thirds of the population, they constitute considerably less than two-thirds of the U.S. citizens in the city.

Exactly what proportion are citizens is unknown. Rodriguez estimates it at 50%. He says he doesn’t think it matters. Although residents may not be able to vote, they should have the right to be represented, he said. “Regardless of whether the majority of those Hispanics are citizens, Hispanics are the majority.”

Although the county doesn’t keep records on the ethnicity of its voters, the Democratic Party estimates that as of 1998, 4,538 of the 11,058 Santa Paulans registered to vote were Latinos.

Even with that low number of registered voters and historically low Latino voter turnout, some in the city believe that if five council districts are created, Latinos voters could determine at least two and probably three of the winners.

A City With a Segregated Past

However much ethnic division exists today, Santa Paula, like many other California cities, has a segregated past. Local historian Judith Triem says whites were attracted here in the late 1800s by the developing oil industry. Mexicans came to the area to work the fields for white ranchers, arriving in large numbers in the first two decades of this century.

The dividing line was 10th Street--whites settled west of it and Mexican immigrants to the east. The Ku Klux Klan was active in the 1920s. The local movie theater was segregated, as were schools until the early 1950s.

Although many whites and Latinos now in their 40s and 50s remember playing together as youths, the cultures generally lived and worked apart during the earlier part of the century. In recent decades, however, second- and third-generation Latinos have established themselves as business owners and community leaders. Many Latinos and whites in Santa Paula intermarried.

Today, many middle class neighborhoods are ethnically mixed. Even “the hill” is home to many established Latino families.

Still, according to the 1990 census, Santa Paula is the poorest city in Ventura County, with the highest welfare and teenage birthrates.

Although Latinos hold few high bureaucratic jobs, the police chief and city clerk are Latino. The two local school boards are controlled by Latinos, who hold 3-2 majorities.

Some say these examples weaken the argument that Latinos lack political power in the city.

But others point to the nonpartisan council, the most powerful political entity in the city, on which Laura Flores Espinosa is the only Latino representative.

And with the exception of council member Richard Cook, a retired policeman who is now an investigator for the county public defender’s office, the whites on the council are members of the business community, whose motto, critics say, might be summed up as: “As Main Street goes, so goes Santa Paula.”

Mayor Jim Garfield is a real estate broker. Councilman Donald Johnson owns the local newspaper, the Santa Paula Times. Councilwoman Robin Sullivan is an attorney specializing in escrow and business law. All favor expanding the city to attract small businesses, light industry and high-end residential development.

Espinosa, a legal assistant for the Ventura County district attorney’s office, favors a more moderate growth plan and supports efforts to build more affordable housing.

In the face of the Justice Department probe, the council majority last week voted to hire a civil rights lawyer on a $10,000 retainer, even as city leaders say they are too cash-strapped to give raises to police officers who earn less than their counterparts in other cities.

Criticism Stuns White Members of Council

The majority of the council is struggling to fend off allegations of racism in the face of what they believe is a crisis manufactured by those with a political agenda.

Latino and some Democratic activists accuse the white council members of being more concerned with development, gentrification and helping their friends make money than with serving the Latino working class, the backbone of the local agribusiness economy.

They say the council is reluctant to erect more low-income housing. They chafe at plans to build a grocery store on the east side of town that could displace residents in a mostly Latino neighborhood.

White council members say they are stunned by the criticism. Although Sullivan does not speak Spanish, she is one-fourth Latino. Cook has Latino grandchildren. They say they are offended by the criticism that they have been insensitive to Latinos.

The planned grocery store would serve an area where there is now no supermarket within walking distance, Garfield said. He is confident that everyone who loses a home will be compensated sufficiently to buy another one of equal or better value.

The four white council members say they want more high-end housing and industry--not to drive the Latino working class away but to draw more revenue to a city that has a low tax base.

“There is no money,” Johnson said. “Until we find better ways to bring money into the city, we’re going to have all kinds of problems. It’s an issue of economics.”

That’s unconvincing to some.

“They’re white, they’re conservative, and they represent the business community,” Rodriguez said. “They don’t represent the rest of us.”

In Santa Paula, not all see the conflict along purely ethnic lines.

Gloria Garcia operates a video store in town with her husband, who ran unsuccessfully for the City Council. She acknowledges that some well-established Latinos are put off by immigrant laborers who come into town sweaty after a full day’s work.

She admits having been wary of some Latinos years ago, and credits her husband with making her see that most immigrants are good, hard-working people who are doing the best they can. “Our community needs to be more united,” she said.

Connie Reed, a white businesswoman who owns a country crafts store near the Garcias’ shop, says that although much of the city is integrated, some wealthier residents feel uncomfortable in the downtown business district. “A lot of people will not shop in Santa Paula, because they say it’s [too] Mexican,” she said.

Reed said she feels that Latinos who support the Justice Department probe are lashing out because it’s the only way they know to fight the element of society that shuns them. She thinks that’s a form of racism itself.

“We’re supposed to be one and the same,” she said. “It shouldn’t matter what race is in [office]. Something like this divides our town more than it’s already divided.”

Ben Harrold, a white airplane technician, says the division exists with or without politics. Despite the fact that he has several Latino friends, he said he doesn’t like a lot of Latinos “because there’s gangs, spray paint everywhere. There’s been a lot of stabbings, and it’s mostly Mexican gangsters.

“There’s the few out of the crowd who give the whole group a bad name,” he said.

Tony Nehyba, who came to Santa Paula in 1981 after defecting from Czechoslovakia, said he feels bad for immigrant laborers and supports efforts to give them more representation. He says they have a harder time being accepted by established society than he did when he arrived. Whites “don’t have a problem with me because I appear white,” he said.

The Justice Department’s probe makes sense to him. “It’s mostly Latino here,” he said. “I think they should do something to help themselves. I don’t think that’s unfair.”

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Santa Paula’s Latino Residents

Some activists want Santa Paula to convert from at-large City Council elections to district elections, which they believe would give Latinos a greater chance of winning office.

This map shows where the heaviest concentrations of Latinos live.