Mexican, Japanese Disasters Touch Southland Residents

When a magnitude 7.5 earthquake cracked buildings and claimed lives in Southern Mexico on Thursday, Spanish-language news stations in Los Angeles went live with coverage, including a statement from Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo.

When, about the same time, a nuclear accident sent radiation spilling out of a uranium processing plant in Japan, workers in Japanese businesses in Los Angeles dropped what they were doing and went to the Internet.

On the most basic level, this is what it means to live in a multicultural, multinational region: When things happen somewhere else, they matter here.

An earthquake in Armenia or Taiwan, a hurricane in the Caribbean--it’s hard to think of a place in the world where a disaster would not be local news for someone in Southern California.

That’s especially true of Mexico, given the huge population of Mexicans and Mexican Americans in Southern California--about 4 million people in Los Angeles County alone, many of them relatively recent arrivals. News of the quake lighted up the Mexican consulate’s switchboard in Los Angeles.

“It’s not just the Mexican people,” said acting Mexican Consul General Victor Trevino. “All the people in Los Angeles demonstrate solidarity with Mexico. It’s the good spirit, the friendship in this kind of situation.”

Southern California is also a center of Japanese American culture, with an estimated 200,000 to 300,000 people of Japanese origin, although the connection to the home country is perhaps not as strong.

“The vast majority are third, fourth and fifth generation,” noted John Okura, interim development director at the Little Tokyo Service Center, a social service provider in downtown L.A. “So at this point, the ties to Japan are not as great as they were 20 or 30 years ago.”

At the Japanese consulate, staff member Miriam Stenshoel said only a few people had called with questions about the radiation leak. In Little Tokyo, most people said they’d heard nothing about it.

By contrast, the Mexican consulate set up a phone line, (213) 351-6825, to offer information about the quake, which was centered in the state of Oaxaca, about 300 miles south of Mexico City.

Lorenzo Antonio Lopez, 33, a Oaxaca city native who has lived in Los Angeles for more than 11 years, watched news of the quake on Spanish-language television at La Guelaguetza, a Oaxacan restaurant in Koreatown. He said he had spoken to relatives by telephone and found that they were fine. Still, he said, “It’s scary.”

Shinighi Watahiki, a Japanese business executive in Los Angeles, similarly called home the minute he heard about the radiation leak in Ibaraki Prefecture, about 90 miles northeast of Tokyo. His home is about three miles from the uranium plant, he said, and his wife is there.

“I said to her to stay in the apartment,” he said. Then he, along with his co-workers at JETRO, a quasi-governmental Japanese trade organization, spent the day glued to the Internet, scanning the latest developments in the global village.

Correspondent Joseph Trevino contributed to this story.