Santa Paula Not Alone in Latino Voting Issue

Santa Paula is the only California city the federal government is publicly threatening to take to court to give Latinos a stronger voice in local affairs.

But it’s not the only city where Latinos appear to be under-represented politically.

Of 46 California cities with a greater proportion of Latinos than Santa Paula’s 59%, a Times analysis found seven cities, including Fillmore in Ventura County, that like Santa Paula have only one Latino council member. Two other cities have no Latino council members.

And like Santa Paula, each of these nine cities--Firebaugh, Gonzales, King City, Holtville, Livingston, Wasco, Los Angeles County’s Bell and Santa Fe Springs, and Fillmore--chooses its council through at-large, or citywide, elections.

Critics say this procedure often dilutes minorities’ voting strength and prevents them from electing their candidates. The U.S. Department of Justice has threatened to sue under the federal Voting Rights Act if Santa Paula does not switch to a system in which council members are elected by geographic districts.

Department officials refused to say whether they are considering similar action against the other nine cities, but Latino activists hope the government’s action against Santa Paula is the first step toward fulfilling a decades-old desire to bring political power to the barrios and burgeoning Latino subdivisions across the Golden State.

“There isn’t anything I could say about those nine places, but certainly we have enforcement efforts all over the country, not just California,” Department of Justice spokeswoman Christine DiBartolo said.

“But if people feel perhaps there are violations and information that should be brought to our attention, they should do that.”

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At the center of the Santa Paula case is the Voting Rights Act, which was designed to empower nonwhite voters whose candidates were consistently not elected because whites voted in blocs against minorities.

Dividing the city into districts would increase the likelihood a minority group could elect its candidate of choice, because minority populations tend to be concentrated in geographic pockets.

Santa Paula has always voted for its City Council candidates in at-large elections, and has never had more than two Latinos on the council. The federal government began investigating the city more than a year ago, and in recent weeks has threatened to sue.

The council has not decided whether to cave in to the government demand to change its elections method, but recently hired a prominent voting rights lawyer who has defended other California cities in voting rights suits.

To learn how many other California cities have a political landscape similar to Santa Paula--and therefore could conceivably come under investigation--The Times analyzed 1990 census data. The analysis identified 46 cities with proportionally larger Latino populations than Santa Paula’s. Most are in Los Angeles, Imperial, Fresno and Monterey counties, and largely in agricultural areas.

The Times study found that in general it took a critical mass of 72% or more Latinos before minorities took control of a council.

Ten of the cities reviewed by The Times--including Bell Gardens, Commerce, Cudahy, Irwindale, Maywood and South El Monte in Los Angeles County--are represented by all-Latino councils. Latinos represented on average 88.4% of the population in those cities.

Nine other cities--including Hawaiian Gardens, La Puente, Pico Rivera, San Fernando and South Gate in Los Angeles County, as well as Huntington Beach in Orange County and Guadalupe in Santa Barbara County--are represented by Latino majorities of 4 to 1. Latinos represented an average of 82% of the population in those cities.

Latino under-representation was more likely to occur in cities where Latinos made up a slimmer majority, between 60% to 70% of the population.

Minorities using the Voting Rights Act to correct such apparent imbalances in California have had mixed success.

The groundbreaking case was filed in 1985, when the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund sued the city of Watsonville, a farming town about Santa Paula’s size. Latinos made up just over half the Watsonville population but had never elected a Latino to the council. But the fund had a powerful ally in the U.S. Supreme Court, which only three years earlier ruled that litigants need not show an electoral system was created with discriminatory intent, merely that an at-large system had a discriminatory effect.

MALDEF prevailed three years later, when an appellate court ordered Watsonville to change its election system. The decision was the first of its kind in California and the eight other western states covered by the appellate circuit.

Ten years later, four of Watsonville’s seven council members are Latino.

The Watsonville decision was supposed to be the powder keg that would force the ouster of white-controlled councils throughout the state.

Victory in hand, former MALDEF President Joaquin Avila and other activists involved in the Watsonville case forced several other California cities to shift to district elections. Today, the Salinas council is Latino-controlled. The San Joaquin Valley communities of Dinuba and Sanger now have two Latino council members.

About the same time, pressure from local Latino activists caused the Ventura County Board of Supervisors to redraw its boundaries to create a majority Latino district. The Oxnard-area district was and still is represented by John Flynn, who is white.

In Oxnard, where a 54% Latino population helped create the largest city in Ventura County, an unsuccessful Latino candidate in the 1990 mayoral race challenged the at-large elections system, but eventually dropped the case. The push for litigation eased after 1992, when Manuel Lopez became the city’s first directly elected Latino mayor.

But Watsonville’s impact fell short of what activists had hoped. Some cities survived the court challenges. Other cities refused to change their systems but were never sued.

Ultimately, Avila believes, most cities that refused to change simply figured they had numbers on their side. The investigations take years to complete and can cost “tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars,” Avila said. Activists didn’t have that kind of money, and the cities knew it.

“They probably figured, ‘There’s thousands of jurisdictions . . . we won’t have to worry about this until the year 4000.’ ”

During this time, the Department of Justice was not heavily involved in California voting rights cases, officials say.

Exceptions were Los Angeles, where the Justice Department and MALDEF successfully sued the City Council in 1985 and the county Board of Supervisors in 1988. The suits forced each jurisdiction to draw new districts favoring Latinos. That paved the way for the 1990 election of the county’s first Latino supervisor, Gloria Molina. The Justice Department also forced Alameda County earlier this decade to make voting information available in Chinese.

Nearly a decade later, Marcos R. Contreras, state director of the League of United Latin American Citizens, believes federal investigators may begin focusing more consistently on the increasingly Latino West, bringing it the sort of attention the South received when blacks could not get elected.

While activists have limited resources, the federal government doesn’t. California cities with high Latino populations and low Latino representation should see the Santa Paula investigation as a warning sign, Contreras said.

“One has to realize there’s going to be a lot more focus on California because of a change in demographics,” he said.

“When we get a case like Santa Paula, we think it may have some effect on other areas as well,” Contreras said. “The communities will begin to realize that things can be changed. And the people in power will begin to realize it [status quo] cannot go on forever.”

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Avila said at least four of the nine cities identified in The Times analysis--Fillmore, Gonzales, King City and Livingston--are on his list of cities to look at and should be reviewed. “We just didn’t pursue them because we didn’t have the resources,” he said.

Pursuant to building a case, investigators trace the ethnic makeup of a council over the course of decades. They also research voting patterns to determine Latino turnout and whether races voted in blocs.

The investigations include a geographic study of a city’s demographics. If the minority group in question is spread evenly throughout the city, dividing the city into political districts may not yield additional minority power.

Further, identifying a city council’s ethnic makeup at one point in time provides only a snapshot of a city’s political pattern, not enough information to determine whether an investigation is warranted, said Denise Hulett, a senior litigator in San Francisco for MALDEF.

“There may be other cities [than the nine] that are equally or even more vulnerable for a lawsuit because the central question is whether the at-large system affords Latinos an equal opportunity to elect candidates,” Hulett said. “And one election can’t tell you that.”

In interviews, mayors of some of the nine cities say while Latinos may not have a strong council presence now, that hasn’t always been the case.

In Gonzales, for instance, there were four Latinos on the council earlier this decade, Mayor John W. Kistinger said.

Luis Gonzalez, the sole Latino council member in Santa Fe Springs, said he believes racism was a factor in his city’s decision several decades ago to switch from a district to an at-large system. “It was so the Anglos would be reelected, because Latinos were starting to get elected,” he said.

But Gonzalez doesn’t believe the same issues are at work today in the 67.4% Latino city. Latinos helped elect the white council members, and don’t want to vote them out, he said.

“I think the residents of this town think, ‘The city’s doing a good job, so why vote out the incumbents?’ ” he said. Gonzalez was elected in 1997, when two of the five council seats were vacant. Two other Latinos also ran that year but lost.

Still, Contreras said, many of the nine cities identified are worth studying because of their common history. “The overriding thing is they’re predominantly farming communities,” he said.

“There are people who own farms and control the agricultural industry who for many years have been in control of local governments in the areas, and they’re not about to give up their power. Who’s in power in agricultural towns? Not the farm workers.”

John E. McDermott, the lawyer hired to advise Santa Paula, said the existence of a Latino majority on 28 of the 46 councils in The Times’ analysis is just as noteworthy as the absence of Latino council members in the nine cities--particularly because all but one of the 28 cities use an at-large elections system.

He argues the at-large system is not the root of the problem in most cases. Neither is racial politics, he said.

McDermott believes in many cases the appearance of under-representation is a matter of misinterpreted data. In many cases, he said, Latinos vote for white candidates. And in agricultural towns, large Latino populations haven’t always translated to proportional Latino voting populations--or voters who bother to vote in city council races.

Latino representation will increase over time, without federal litigation, he said. When the 2000 census is completed, McDermott predicted, it will reveal a significant increase in Latino populations in many California cities--and a significant increase in registered Latino voters.

Bell Gardens is one city where Latinos took control without federal intervention. Whites controlled the council through 1991, though Latinos made up nearly 88% of the population.

What changed the political landscape there was not a lawsuit. City elections today remain at-large. Instead, it was a contentious plan to change zoning to limit the number of homes in the poor community.

A massive voter registration drive was launched, and with unprecedented Latino turnout, four of the city’s white council members were ousted. Today, Bell Gardens’ council is all Latino.

Bell Gardens’ mayor, Ramiro Morales, said Latinos in many cities have the ability to exert their will without help from the Department of Justice. Often, he said, they don’t because they are accustomed to the status quo. In Bell Gardens, it took the threat of losing their homes to get most people to turn out.

“Hispanic descendants, they need to get involved,” Morales said.

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Times researcher Maloy Moore and staff writer Daryl Kelley contributed to this report.

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Latino Representation

Below is the Latino city council representation in California cities with a greater proportion of Latino residents than Santa Paula:

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No. Latino Percent council Election City County Latino members (of 5) system Bell Gardens Los Angeles 87.5% 5 At large Calexico Imperial 95.6% 5 At large Commerce Los Angeles 90.7% 5 At large Cudahy Los Angeles 88.9% 5 At large Huron Fresno 96.5% 5 At large Irwindale Los Angeles 85.6% 5 At large Maywood Los Angeles 93.1% 5 At large Orange Cove Fresno 86.0% 5 At large San Joaquin Fresno 75.4% 5 At large South El Monte Los Angeles 84.6% 5 At large

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Average percent Latino population for 5-0 Latino representation: 88.4%

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Coachella Riverside 95.3% 4 At large Greenfield Monterey 77.2% 4 At large Guadalupe Santa Barbara 83.0% 4 At large Hawaiian Gardens Los Angeles 66.6% 4 At large Huntington Park Orange 91.9% 4 At large La Puente Los Angeles 74.9% 4 At large Pico Rivera Los Angeles 83.2% 4 At large San Fernando Los Angeles 82.7% 4 At large

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Average percent Latino population for 4-1 Latino representation: 82.0%

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Arvin Kern 75.0% 3 At large Brawley Imperial 69.1% 3 At large Calipatria Imperial 74.2% 3 At large Delano Kern 62.4% 3 At large El Monte Los Angeles 72.5% 3 At large Lynwood Los Angeles 70.3% 3 At large Soledad Monterey 89.5% 3 At large Westmorland Imperial 72.2% 3 At large Watsonville Santa Cruz 60.9% 4 of 7 District

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Average percent Latino population for 3-2 Latino representation: 71.8%

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Dinuba Tulare 60.4% 2 District El Centro Imperial 65.3% 2 At large Lindsay Tulare 64.9% 2 At large Paramount Los Angeles 60.8% 2 At large Baldwin Park Los Angeles 70.8% 2 At large Sanger Fresno 72.9% 2 District Santa Ana Orange 65.2% 2 At large Selma Fresno 61.3% 2 At large Woodlake Tulare 74.6% 2 At large

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Average percent Latino population for 2-3 Latino representation: 66.2%)

Bell Los Angeles 86.1% 1 At large tino representation: 66.2%)

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Fillmore Ventura 59.3% 1 At large Firebaugh Fresno 80.7% 1 At large Gonzales Monterey 82.1% 1 At large King City Monterey 66.7% 1 At large Santa Fe Springs Los Angeles 67.4% 1 At large Wasco Kern 63.3% 1 At large

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Average percent Latino population for 1-4 Latino representation: 72.2%)

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Holtviille Imperial 62.5 0 At large Livingston Merced 73.2 0 At large

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Average percent Latino population for 0-5 Latino representation: 67.9%)

Source: 1990 U. S. census, interviews with city staffs