Latinos Asserting Voices Through Votes

It’s been a banner year for Latino politics in Orange County and California.

Last month, more Latinos voted than ever before in the nation’s history. And the results showed in elections from Santa Ana to Sacramento.

Eight years ago, when I first came to Orange County as a reporter, there was only one Latino on the five-member board of trustees for the Santa Ana Unified School District, the county’s largest, with a student enrollment that’s more than 90% Latino.

In a startling reversal, the board is now 100% Latino. The newest trustee is Sal Tinajero, a previously unknown schoolteacher who came out of nowhere in November to capture the most votes in a wide field of Latino hopefuls of all political leanings.

At City Hall, the story of Latino representation has been less decisive, but no less newsworthy. This year saw the fall of former councilman Ted R. Moreno, a home-grown politician whose guerrilla war for control of the council won him a prison term for fishy fund-raising.

Moreno had spent years recruiting and promoting fresh, unknown candidates to run for local office. A few came close to tumbling incumbents; others went down with their patron, who was no saint.

Ironically, Moreno’s political ambition was partially achieved, but only after he was out of the picture.

In November, two newcomers--Claudia Alvarez and Jose Solorio--won seats on the City Council after previous defeats at the polls for both. They didn’t need Ted’s slate to do it. They won the old-fashioned way, with good credentials and a nonthreatening agenda. You know, better schools, public safety, business growth.

They are the new Latino faces for a centrist era. Mexican immigrants with community roots, but also young professionals. Alvarez is a lawyer working for the district attorney; Solorio is a Harvard grad working for the Orange County Transportation Authority.

Getting Out Into Community

Already, I’ve run into Santa Ana’s newest politicians at functions their white, conservative counterparts tend not to attend. Solorio was the only city official I saw at the recent opening of a photo exhibit on the history of the county’s colonias, or barrios. He even brought his wife, a Santa Ana high school teacher, and their young son. The exhibit is showing downtown at the Old County Courthouse, just a few blocks from the Artists Village that regularly draws the council majority for cultural events that suit their interests.

Maybe this portrait of Orange County’s humble, farm-worker roots isn’t glamorous enough for the city’s artsy crowd. But the future belongs to the children of these old-timers, pictured picking oranges and posing with classmates who were segregated at all-Mexican schools.

Alvarez, the first Latina elected to the council in Santa Ana, was among the guests last week at an event sponsored by the Chicano/Latino Studies Program at UC Irvine. It was good to see her, albeit briefly, at the dinner, which was followed by a panel discussion about the significance of this year’s election for Latinos.

In the past, Santa Ana officials often didn’t bother attending Latino community events. Many even skipped the social shindig of the year, the annual banquet of the Hispanic Education Endowment Fund.

Why waste time and energy on a constituency that doesn’t vote? That was the common wisdom of the old politics. But those days are over, let’s hope.

“I’m optimistic,” said anthropology professor Leo Chavez, who organized the UCI dinner discussion at which I was one of three panelists. “Finally, we’re starting to see the outcome of a lot of these [citizenship and voter registration] efforts. It’s starting to pay off.”

Big time, according to my co-panelist David Ayon of Loyola Marymount University.

This year, he said, the Latino vote “surpassed even the most optimistic predictions.” Ayon confessed that even he underestimated the national Latino turnout last month, which exit polls pegged at 7 million.

Ayon showed a bar chart marking the steady, stepladder progress of the Latino electorate over three decades, starting with 2.1 million Latino votes cast in 1972. The biggest gain came in the past four years. In 2000, the Latino vote soared 40% over the previous record of 4.9 million Latino ballots cast in 1996.

The trend, if confirmed, “would mean that this population is in an extended and accelerating phase of political mobilization that is unique in U.S. society today,” Ayon wrote in a recent analysis.

Beware of assuming, however, that Latinos have finally arrived politically. There are 5,000 Latino elected officials nationwide, Ayon notes. But there are no Latino governors or senators.

The disparities are greatest at the local level, he found. In California, there are at least 10 small cities with all-Latino city councils. But there are many others with majority Latino populations that have only one Latino elected official, or none at all.

“Such extreme cases of total Latino political domination on one hand, and minimal Latino representation on the other, exist literally side by side,” Ayon said.

Still, the biggest strides have been made in California. Latinos now make up a fourth of the 80-member state Assembly, Ayon said, thanks to the recent election of four new members in districts that had never before favored a Latino.

There are now 20 Latinos in the Assembly, up 25% from two years ago when Lou Correa was first elected to represent his district in Anaheim and Santa Ana. Correa was easily reelected this year.

Such successes have been a long time coming.

Rose Espinoza, who gained fame with her tutoring program operated out of her garage, was finally elected to the La Habra City Council after three previous attempts. Like Alvarez in Santa Ana, Espinoza became the first Latina to sit on her city’s governing body.

After so long, it’s understandable that the founder of Rosie’s Garage would want to relish the moment of her swearing-in earlier this month.

“I wanted everything to go in slow motion,” Espinoza told The Times after the official ceremony in La Habra. “I wanted to enjoy the moment as long as I could.”

*

Agustin Gurza’s column appears Tuesday and Saturday. Readers can reach Gurza at (714) 966-7712 or agustin.gurza@latimes.com.