Latino Activists Should Not Ignore the Dirty Pols

Ten years ago a recall election was held in the small Los Angeles County city of Bell Gardens that one overly enthusiastic observer dubbed “a revolution.”

That hyperbole sounds sadly ironic a decade later, now that the “revolution” has descended into personal infighting, outrageous political tactics and, quite possibly, corruption.

Latino activists don’t like to dwell on what has been going on the last few couple of years in Bell Gardens and a handful of neighboring cities that straddle the Long Beach Freeway about 10 miles southeast of downtown Los Angeles. All are heavily Latino, and their small-town political wars are seen as an embarrassment at a time when Latino mayoral candidates are being taken seriously in big cities from Los Angeles to New York to Houston.

Latinos in Southern California soon will have to focus more on Bell Gardens and its neighbors. Political corruption trials are looming for some of the leaders of the erstwhile “revolution.” And rather than look the other way, Latino leaders should weigh in loudly on the side of cleaning things up.

Some history may help put the coming unpleasantness in context.

Cities such as Bell Gardens and South Gate were once the heart of blue-collar Los Angeles--home to steel mills, tire and rubber factories and automobile plants. Two very real revolutions began changing them long before the recall 10 years ago.

One was the international economic shift that saw heavy manufacturing move from the United States to developing countries. The other was the migration of unemployed workers from rural Mexico to that nation’s cities and to el Norte.

By the 1970s, these two historic shifts combined to dramatically change southeast L.A. County, as older white residents moved and were replaced by younger Latinos. Huntington Park was 85% white in 1962, for instance, and 82% Latino by 1980.

Perhaps inevitably, these changes stirred tensions that played out in local politics. The Bell Gardens recall vote of Dec. 10, 1991, was one of the more dramatic, as four white City Council members who tried to change zoning laws to control housing density were ousted. A key leader of the recall effort, and eventually of the council’s new Latino majority, was Maria Chacon.

In January, Chacon--now on administrative leave from the Bell Gardens city manager post--will face a hearing in Los Angeles Superior Court on felony charges that she allegedly pressured her City Council colleagues to get her current job.

Chacon’s trial won’t be the last, either--not if Los Angeles Dist. Atty. Steve Cooley has anything to say about it. He has investigators from his new Public Integrity Division working in Cudahy and Huntington Park, too.

Cooley is especially eager to find who is behind the particularly virulent politics in South Gate. That city’s treasurer, Albert Robles, has been engaged in a running battle with critics, including the local police union, which has accused him of trying to use public funds to build a personal political machine.

If the heated effort to recall Robles’ allies on the South Gate City Council leads to an election, things could get rougher. Recent elections have been marked by campaign mailers falsely accusing some of Robles’ election rivals of being everything from child molesters to deadbeat dads. Some officials in the southeast cities criticize Cooley for singling out Latinos. But so far no reputable civil rights group has bought that line.

Recently, the National Assn. of Latino Elected Officials was asked by activists from those cities to come to the defense of their beleagured politicos. It has taken no action so far, but the group should stay out of this mess.

NALEO is a respected organization whose membership includes thousands of public officials from all over the country, as well as members of Congress and California state officials. And as long as political problems fester in heavily Latino communities, they cloud the reputation of every capable Latino public official who tries to serve honorably.

Rather than worry about Cooley’s investigations, Latino activists should wish him well.

*

Frank del Olmo is the associate editor of The Times.