An Incident at Big Bear

Big Bear is an amiable blend of mountain beauty and urban clutter, a community of about 6,500 permanent residents on a mountaintop of equal elevation.

On some days during the skiing season or on holiday weekends, its population can explode to as high as 100,000, jamming the stretch along Big Bear Lake and the roads winding up to it through the San Bernardino Mountains.

I was there on a day so bright it hurt the eyes. The lake was luminescent and the remaining snow on distant peaks shone with an iridescence that made it seem surreal.

But it was ugliness, not beauty, that brought me to the pine-scented place in the mountains. A cry of racism was distorting the community’s appeal like an abstract rendition of a darkened paradise.

For me, it began with an e-mail message from Rafael Gonzalez and Victoria Ballesteros, two young, prominent L.A. Chicanos who were accusing a restaurant at Big Bear of racism. The message was cool, intelligent and fat with details.

They said they had stopped with their year-old son, Maximo, and two friends for dinner at Sushi Ichiban, a small eatery on Big Bear Boulevard. As they waited for dinner, Maximo let out a yelp. Ballesteros calls it a baby noise.

Before the evening was over, the “yelp” had turned the stop into a confrontation between Maximo’s parents, the restaurant owner, a waitress and two sheriff’s deputies.

Gonzalez and Ballesteros believe that, because they look Mexican, they were singled out for “punishment.” The owner says it was a terrible misunderstanding.

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The term racism slides easily off the tongue, but its import is immense. It has been used to justify criminal conduct and to exact vengeance against a group or a community. It stings. It thunders. It resonates.

Gonzalez, 32, and Ballesteros, 28, both college-educated professionals, swear that they do not use the word loosely. I believe them. Kazumi “Kay” Abe, owner of the restaurant, swears that racism was never the intent of the confrontation. I believe her.

But it is also easy to see how the perception of racism evolved during the incident. Gonzalez and Ballesteros and their friends were the only dark-skinned people in the restaurant. Other children were noisy, but it was the yelp from their son that caused the waitress to approach.

Owner Kazumi Abe says it wasn’t a yelp, it was a scream. The waitress, Anne Takenaka, says she was asked by other patrons to have Ballesteros “control” her baby. Ballesteros says Takenaka treated them like second-class citizens.

Upset and angry, Ballesteros refused to accept the dinner she had ordered. In a few moments, two deputies, called by Takenaka, appeared and Ballesteros was threatened with jail for refusing to pay for her meal. It ended, she says, with the owner ordering them out of the restaurant and saying, “Babies are welcome here, just not your baby!” Kazumi Abe denies ever saying that. Both she and the waitress have apologized for the incident. “It was a bad experience,” Abe says, “but not a racial one.”

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Rafael Gonzalez is executive director of Public Allies-Los Angeles, a nonprofit organization that trains young people for leadership roles. Victoria Ballesteros is co-chairwoman of the Million Mom March L.A. With them that night were Sandy Mendoza, director of public affairs for United Way, and Mari Lopez, director of civic education for the National Assn. of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials.

These were not troublemakers, not ethnic radicals spoiling for a cause. What happened was real. And their pain is real. Gonzalez says simply, “It hurt.”

Dave Lenoch, executive director of Big Bear’s Chamber of Commerce and a former Yankees farm-club pitcher, has tried his best to mediate the dispute. He says there’s never been a racial incident in the community before.

He calls the confrontation at Sushi Ichiban “a major misunderstanding” and says the restaurant owner and waitress lacked “finesse” in handling it. He has invited Gonzalez and Ballesteros back for a free weekend.

Ballesteros remains angry. “No matter how many generations we’ve been here, no matter how educated we are and how selflessly we work to better our communities, there will always be people who look at us and see noisy or dirty or lazy or scroungy or fill-in-the-blanks Mexicans.”

What bitter seeds of racism motivate human conduct we’ll never know. We do know, however, that all the apologies in the world cannot ease hatred’s pain. Incidents of racism, perceived or real, leave indelible marks on the soul.

But we can take comfort in the fact that, as Gonzalez and Ballesteros demonstrated, it will never go unchallenged again.

Al Martinez’s column appears Sundays and Wednesdays. He can be reached online at al.martinez@latimes.com