Growing Clout Reshaping Latinos’ Image in L.A.

As the emerging majority in Los Angeles County, Latinos are not only making political and economic strides, but are gaining greater recognition from other ethnic and racial groups, according to a United Way report being released today.

A growing interest in Spanish is one bellwether cited in the report, which provides a detailed look at the nation’s largest Latino population center. Across all ethnic lines, more than two-thirds of the parents surveyed in the county said they wanted their children to learn Spanish.

K.J. Lan of Rancho Palos Verdes agrees with that finding. He paid $75 to enroll his 10-year-old son, Lawrence, in a twice-weekly Spanish session.

“In California, we need Spanish,” the Taiwan native said. “The kids use English, but they want to learn Spanish.”

That view is in sharp contrast to what some older Latinos said they experienced a generation ago, when they often were punished for speaking Spanish in school.

Now, more than two of five residents in the county are Latino, but the report says that figure will climb to 51% of the population by 2010.

Among other gains shown by the report: an increase in Latino homeownership, which has skyrocketed with more than a 700% increase in FHA loans in the past decade.

One of the 30,000 loans made in 1999 went to new homeowner Maria Loera of La Puente.

“We were tired of moving around and decided our best investment was to buy a house,” said Loera, who with her husband and three children moved into their four-bedroom home in December.

“I feel like we have accomplished something. We have something to look forward to,” she said, adding that most of her neighbors are Latino homeowners.

The trend in increasing Latino homeownership has helped improve rundown areas in and around Los Angeles, according to those polled for the report, funded in part by the Los Angeles Times.

Economically, Latino buying power translated to $112 billion in 1997, the report said. Most respondents in all ethnic groups said businesses that learn about Latino culture have a better shot at tapping into that market. A majority also felt that immigrant Latinos are hard workers.

“A lot of people, when they hear ‘Los Angeles’ and ‘Latino,’ they see somebody with little skills, little ambition. Wrong,” said Jack Kyser, chief economist at the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corp.

“They think it’s sort of a disadvantaged community, but in a couple of generations it’ll be our new middle-class community that is still striving to move up.”

Politically, Latinos also are gaining, the report found. As of September, there were 240 Latinos holding elective office in the county, most of them in city posts and on school boards. Latino voter registration in the county increased 25% between 1994 and 1997, to more than 800,000.

Meanwhile, foreign-born Latinos are seeking to formalize their ties to the United States, as reflected in a doubling in the naturalization rate over four years. Fifteen percent of Latino immigrants in the county became American citizens in 1998, compared with 7% five years ago.

Latinos surveyed for the report credited their growing clout to Proposition 187, passed in 1994 by 60% of California voters and aimed at barring illegal immigrants from most taxpayer-funded services.

An overwhelming majority of U.S.-born Latinos polled said the measure galvanized them.

It “woke us up to ourselves as a community, and it made us aware that, yeah, we do contribute socially, economically, politically and everything else to this community,” said one focus group participant.

In fact, Latinos believe that their contributions will set the stage for them to run Los Angeles in the near future, the report showed. More than half of immigrant Latinos believed that, compared with 49% of U.S.-born Latinos.

Tensions Between Groups Cited

Other ethnic and racial groups were less convinced of that prospect. The report says that fewer than 40% of whites, African Americans and English-speaking Asians believed that Latinos soon would be “running” Los Angeles.

Most respondents surveyed also felt that tension exists between Latinos and other racial and ethnic groups, although the poll question did not define what that meant.

Latinos were more optimistic that they were “going in the right direction” than other ethnic groups. They also felt more confident about their financial prospects, the report found.

Yet the numbers show that they remain the poorest among the area’s ethnic groups, often relegated to low-paying, service-sector jobs. Within the Latino community, those of Salvadoran origin tended to be the poorest, earning an average of $6,248 a year, while Cubans were the highest-earning with an average of $14,860, according to the 1990 census.

The report also identified ways of helping the Latino community, such as increasing access to centers offering child care and health services, increasing homeownership, and providing additional educational opportunities for all ages.

The United Way report will be unveiled at noon at a Town Hall Los Angeles discussion at USC. Besides census numbers and the phone survey, which has an error margin of plus or minus 3 percentage points, the report drew on Rand Corp. and county Office of Education statistics as well as comments from focus groups made up of a cross-section of Latinos.

The phone survey of 1,019 households was conducted by David Hayes-Bautista, a UCLA researcher, who said it was a “pleasant surprise” that Latinos and other ethnic groups surveyed agreed on many issues.

Los Angeles United Way President Joe Haggerty said the report marries demographic information with interviews and an attitudinal survey, thus yielding a more complete picture of Latino influence in the county.

“It’s not just a geographic issue,” he said. “This is a fast-growing population . . . and we need to learn how, as a community, to find the best way to work together.”

*

Community correspondent Sylvia Pagan Westphal contributed to this story.