Here’s a Hot Seat: Latino Voters’ Liaison

Rosa Vizcarra miscalculated the depth of the political waters in Orange County when she decided to come on board with the Registrar of Voters two years ago. She was hired to be the friendly face of the election bureaucracy within the Latino community, still smarting over a voter-fraud scandal she had barely heard about.

Vizcarra was newly wed at the time and newly arrived from Chicago, where she had reigned as Reina de las Fiestas Patrias, queen of Mexican Independence Day festivities. That was like being Miss Latina of the Windy City for a year, a role the college graduate assumed despite her contempt for the superficiality of beauty contests.

She had competed in honor of her late father, an auto mechanic who always dreamed of the crown for his daughter. His memory would also help her overcome the challenges she was about to face in her new government job in California.

Vizcarra possessed all the useful attributes for performing community outreach. She was pretty, poised and practiced at public speaking. But she was unprepared for the verbal whipping she took when she first appeared before Los Amigos of Orange County, a group that had helped fight charges that corrupt Latinos stole the 1996 election from former congressman Bob Dornan.

Some activists still bore grudges. Rightly or wrongly, they resented the registrar for allowing the impartial county office to be used in clearly partisan investigations of Hermandad Mexicana Nacional, the agency that had helped hundreds of immigrants become citizens and voters, sometimes simultaneously. Despite lengthy county, state and federal probes, no proof has emerged that anybody knowingly caused noncitizens to vote.

Vizcarra thought the controversy was history and she would be spared any fallout. But Los Amigos were still less than friendly. They chewed her up with questions, pummeled her with lingering suspicions and made her doubt her ability to do the job of achieving good relations with the community.

She left that meeting discouraged and deflated.

“That was the most difficult stage,” said Vizcarra, 27. “But I told myself I was not to blame for what had happened and I could not give up. I resolved to make changes: We must overcome these resentments.”

Her strategy: Be persistent and participate. She continued attending meetings and community events. When Vizcarra showed up with her infant son at a weekend rally for declaring a Cesar Chavez state holiday, she finally won the admiration of a staunch skeptic, Galal Kernahan.

“She has a certain center of gravity, or something . . . a certain poise in the midst of rowdy meetings,” said Kernahan, a regular at Los Amigos meetings. “She’s probably the best thing that’s happened to the Registrar of Voters in a long time.”

Vizcarra already had some experience in conflict resolution. After getting her bachelor’s degree in Spanish from the University of Illinois in 1997, she worked as a mediator between the community and Chicago police.

“I learned [in that job] how difficult it can be to have a dialogue with certain government agencies,” said Vizcarra, who’s married to a Los Angeles police officer. “And I learned that some communities get better and faster service from government than others.”

Vizcarra now coordinates regular meetings of a Latino advisory committee, recruits bilingual volunteers to help at polling places, and makes presentations about voting procedures to groups all across the county. This morning at 10 o’clock she’s scheduled to speak in La Habra at Our Lady of Guadalupe Church.

Latinos often have trouble understanding the absentee ballot, which is mailed in by those who are unable or unwilling to submit ballots in person. Immigrants are unfamiliar with the system, she said, and many believe their vote is somehow more valid if cast at a polling place on election day.

In any case, Vizcarra always stresses that new citizens should not--repeat, NOT--vote until they have been sworn in. That’s what got people in trouble during the Hermandad controversy. Some eager citizens jumped the gun and voted before their swearing-in ceremony.

I always believed it was a tempest in a GOP teapot. Even if they had voted prematurely, these quasi-citizens had already passed all the hurdles for citizenship, including the INS test.

But believe it or not, the government is still scrutinizing the Hermandad cases and others. In December, the California secretary of state asked Orange County to purge the voting records of people still suspected of being noncitizens. Sacramento provided a list of 480 names, winnowed down from the 1,502 people identified by congressional investigators as potentially unqualified voters.

The county registrar has sent bilingual letters advising those questionable voters they may be dropped from the election rolls. And Vizcarra has had to deal with angry and perplexed responses from U.S. citizens demanding to know how they got on the squirrelly list.

So far, about 100 legitimate voters have responded--like the man who had served in Vietnam and couldn’t believe his citizenship was being questioned.

Been There Herself

That’s par for the course in this scandal--bad lists, mistaken identities, a whole lot of fuss for nothing, at taxpayers’ expense.

Meanwhile, last month Vizcarra also handled Hermandad cases referred to her by the INS in Los Angeles. These are immigrants whose applications for citizenship are still pending while the feds figure out if any voting laws were broken.

They are being asked by INS to get copies of their voting records. Many tell Vizcarra they are worried that they may be rejected for citizenship, even deported.

The issue hits close to home for her. Her own parents, Jose and Rosalba Vizcarra, first came to this country illegally three decades ago. Rosa Maria, their eldest child and only daughter, was born in East Los Angeles in 1972; she was 7 when the family moved back to Durango in northern Mexico.

The family returned to the states, this time to Chicago, and the parents eventually became permanent residents under the 1986 amnesty program. Vizcarra’s mom, who still works at a Chicago chocolate factory, applied for citizenship just last month.

When her father died in 1993, Vizcarra had not yet turned 21. She began assuming more responsibility for her two younger brothers and helping her grieving mother with household expenses.

Vizcarra had been her father’s consentida, his pet. It was sad, she thought, that he had not lived to enjoy the fruits of his hard work in this country, to see his daughter graduate from college, to meet his grandchildren.

Vizcarra--who eschews jewelry and forswore a fancy wedding as a frivolous expense--ran for queen because she wanted to prove that her parents’ struggle to succeed in this country was not in vain. She credits them for nurturing her self-confidence, always telling her she could do whatever she set her mind to, giving her the freedom to grow and explore.

Vizcarra may have misjudged the political climate in Orange County. But she came here knowing her own strengths.

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