Grass-Roots Politics Hints at Cracks in L.A.'s Ethnic Walls

By MATEA GOLD

Jan. 14, 2001 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

Once synonymous with racial tension and riots, Los Angeles has been a perilous place to practice ethnic coalition building.

But recent grass-roots efforts crossing racial and ethnic boundaries suggest that demographic changes may be forcing communities to reassess that assumption.

It’s a question that will be central in the city election campaigns that formally opened this month, in which the abilities of candidates to patch together diverse coalitions of supporters will be a major test of how far the city has progressed in overcoming identity politics.

Fledgling alliances, from partnerships in fighting for school construction dollars to talk of a Latino-Jewish institute, could turn out to be fragile. Indeed, local politics often remains polarized along ethnic and racial lines. The city’s traditionally black council districts are represented by African Americans; the three most heavily Latino districts have Latino council members; white officials hold power on the still mostly white Westside; and the race to succeed Rep. Julian Dixon in a largely African American district has turned into a clash of some of the region’s best-known black elected leaders.

A layer below, however, along the streets of the city, African Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans and Jews have formed partnerships that could have political ramifications.

“We are really on a different course than we were eight years ago,” said H. Eric Schockman, a USC professor of political science who studies ethnic politics. “People are operating on paradigms of strength, not fear. I think the city has gone through a metamorphosis and we’ve come out the other end.”

Some examples:

* In Watts, African Americans and Latinos jointly sued the Los Angeles Housing Authority for racial discrimination, winning a fund to compensate victims and the creation of a blue-ribbon committee to examine the issues. Now, parents of both races meet together to tackle school violence and test scores.

* In South Los Angeles, African American and Latino teenagers--many of whom had never before had friends of another race--took on the Los Angeles Unified School District together, winning a greater share of Proposition BB money for repairs at their run-down campuses.

* Asian American activists have joined with Latino groups to push for sweatshop reform in the garment industry, and will open a worker center in downtown Los Angeles this month to help build relationships between Latino and Asian workers who rarely interact on the job.

* Jewish and Latino leaders are discussing the creation of a joint institute to encourage people in each community to learn more about one another--and perhaps to spark a new political alliance.

“If you weren’t looking, you could really miss some of the subtlety of some of the cultural change,” said Joe Hicks, head of the city’s Human Relations Commission. “People have, by and large, begun to make peace with the fact that they’re going to be living in this multicultural, multiracial world, and have to make some accommodations to that.”

Those alliances have not been tested since the 1992 riots or the recession of the mid-1990s in a high-profile, citywide campaign. It has been nearly 30 years since Tom Bradley became Los Angeles’ first African American mayor, swept into office by a coalition built mainly of Jews and blacks. Bradley, who won five elections, played such a dominant role in city politics for so long that the city’s shifting demographics were not acutely felt in mayoral elections.

Los Angeles’ reckoning with its changing power structure was further delayed in 1993, when the riots of the previous year combined with the recession to create powerful support for Richard Riordan, a Republican who poured millions of dollars into his own campaign.

This year, however, the mayor’s race is wide open, and its leading candidates reflect at least some of the city’s increasing diversity and changing bases of power. Among the top six contenders, two are Latino, two are Jewish and one is a woman. There is no African American candidate among those considered in the top tier.

That field faces a city vastly different from the one that elected Bradley in 1973.

Today, white residents make up about a third of the population but are about 55% of the registered voters, giving them a disproportionate political voice. But they are spread along the political spectrum, and the large mayoral field will make it hard for one candidate to win the support of most whites.

A Testament to Ethnic Loyalty

Meanwhile, Los Angeles’ growing Latino population is expected to be as much as a fifth of the electorate, up from 15% in 1997, spurred in part by the active campaigns of the two Latino candidates. Unsuccessful efforts by prominent Latino leaders to persuade one to drop out to avoid fracturing the Latino vote are a testament that some politicians still believe ethnic political allegiance to be strong.

African Americans, who traditionally have played a strong role in local politics, made up about 13% of the voters in the 1997 mayoral election. This time around, their numbers are expected to stay about the same or dip slightly.

“The basic lesson here is that it’s a multi-ethnic world, and only a multi-ethnic politician will get elected,” said USC demographer Dowell Myers.

Historically, that has not been the case. Bradley’s coalition famously cobbled together disparate groups, but Riordan demonstrated that concentrated support, particularly among white voters, also could win a modern election here.

“I don’t think anybody can repeat the Bradley coalition or the Riordan coalition,” said Raphael Sonenshein, author of “Politics in Black and White,” a book about the Bradley era.

“No matter how powerful you are, you can’t get in by yourself. . . . So what people are fighting over are the pieces of those two coalitions and seeing what they can create.”

Capitalizing on new inter-ethnic bonds could help a candidate form a strong governing coalition. But it remains unclear how strong these relationships are and whether plugging into these alliances could help propel someone into office.

Finding common interests between African Americans and Latinos has been a major thrust of a growing number of groups across the city, among them the Watts/Century Latino Organization and the Community Coalition, an 11-year-old group in South Los Angeles.

Ten years ago, as Latinos poured into Watts, many wary African Americans feared that the recent immigrants would change the community and monopolize scarce resources and jobs. Racial violence was common.

Arturo Ybarra, a former student activist in Mexico, was working at a factory in South-Central when he noticed the lack of Latino participation in the community.

“We saw a natural need for Latinos to be heard . . . and to build bridges between Latinos and African Americans,” he said.

Ybarra helped form the Watts/Century Latino Organization and joined forces with the Watts Health Foundation, a longtime presence in the community. Together, the groups created the annual Latino/African American Cinco de Mayo celebration, and jointly successfully sued the Los Angeles Housing Authority for discrimination.

The Community Coalition has different roots and objectives, but has forged new alliances by pursuing neighborhood projects in racially mixed communities.

Problems Don’t Have a Color

Housed in a plain concrete building along a worn strip of Vermont Avenue, the 2,500-member group has worked on issues ranging from improving the welfare system to preventing the proliferation of liquor stores.

“Race relations is fashioned through work,” said Executive Director Karen Bass. “If there’s a drug house on your block, black and brown people care about it the same.”

One of the coalition’s biggest victories was a two-year battle by its youth leadership group to win a larger share of the Proposition BB bond money for decrepit schools in the area. After documenting conditions such as leaky roofs and dirty, broken-down bathrooms and lobbying the school board, the teenagers won an extra $153 million in 1999 to patch up the crumbling campuses.

“[Such local groups] really are providing exemplary and visionary leadership, but overall, they represent more of an oasis in a desert,” said Bonghwan Kim, executive director of the Multicultural Collaborative, a group formed after the 1992 riots.

Much of Los Angeles politics, analysts say, is still ensnared in the rigid paradigm of ethnicity and race. The 1998 state Senate primary between then-City Councilman Richard Alarcon and former Assemblyman Richard Katz was tinged with accusations of race-baiting.

The removal of school district Supt. Ruben Zacarias the same year drew cries of racism from Latino supporters and threatened to pit Latinos and Jews against each other.

“There still is this fairly nasty game of ethnic politics that takes place at the level of leadership, with exceptions,” said Hicks of the city’s Human Relations Commission.

Stewart Kwoh, who runs the Asian Pacific American Legal Center, sees progress on a neighborhood level, but not in citywide leadership.

“Fortunately, we’re not in a tense, divisive period,” Kwoh said. “This is the time you have to establish those leadership networks, because in a crisis, you don’t have time.”

In 1995, the center sued an El Monte garment factory that imprisoned about 70 Thai workers and subjected 22 Latinos to horrific work conditions, eventually winning them more than $2 million. Workers of different backgrounds who never had spoken to each other--because of a language barrier and employer intimidation--got to know each other as they traveled to Sacramento to testify about the garment industry.

Not Just Social, but Political

The center continues to represent workers in sweatshop cases, and is lending its support to a coalition of groups trying to improve conditions in factories around the region. A workers center with resources for laborers of different ethnicities is scheduled to open in the Garment District on Jan. 20.

“You have the beginning of, not just a social friendship, but really a political bond,” said staff attorney Muneer Ahmad. “Our hope is that it could turn into a political relationship between the two communities.”

Some of Los Angeles’ most notorious ethnic conflicts in recent years have been between blacks and whites--during the beating of Rodney G. King, for instance--and between blacks and Koreans, most notably during the 1992 riots.

But relations between Jews and Latinos also have flared in recent years, especially in the Alarcon-Katz race and the Zacarias ouster.

In the aftermath came talk of improving relationships, including the creation of a Latino-Jewish Institute dedicated to fostering strong ties between the two communities. The strong political representation of Jews, combined with the growing number of Latino voters, could make a union between the two groups a potent political force, analysts say.

But participants acknowledge that discussions for the joint institute are in an “academic phase.”

Many Jews are distant from working-class issues, said Rabbi Gary Greenebaum, regional director of the American Jewish Committee, while many Latinos haven’t seen the need for coalition politics.

“It has been a challenge,” Greenebaum said. “But politically, the relationship between leaders in the two communities has deepened with time, and I think it’s going to be something looked at more seriously by Latinos in the next 10 years.”

Arturo Vargas, head of the National Assn. of Latino Elected Officials, said the biggest hurdle is that the two communities are not very familiar with each other. Differences of religion, language and culture are substantial and not easily overcome.

The citywide elections, some say, offer new chances to explore and expand those connections--or to suffer the consequences of failure. The election is April 10, with a runoff scheduled for June 5.

“I think there’s been a lot of ethnic evolution in the last eight years, and I’m not sure it’s clear that people understand where it’s going,” Greenebaum said. “It’s a very interesting, exciting, dangerous time.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Ethnicity and Voting in City of Los Angeles

L.A. population (1998 estimate)

Latino: 48%

White: 29.7%

Black: 11.5%

Asian: 10.3%

Other: 0.5%

Registered voters (April 2000)

White: 55%

Latino: 22%

Black: 12%