Campaigning Across Ethnic Lines

Open one of the campaign mailers from Judy Chu in her bid for the 49th Assembly District seat and you cannot help noticing that Latino elected officials surround her.

It’s not without reason.

Chu, a Chinese American and a Monterey Park councilwoman, is making her third bid for the seat in the Tuesday’s special election, called after incumbent Gloria Romero was elected to the state Senate.

Even with brimming campaign coffers, Chu has twice lost Democratic primaries to Latinas. Since the seat’s creation nearly two decades ago, Latino Democrats have reigned over the district, which stretches from the Eastside to Rosemead.

Chu took a baby step toward building a multicultural base two years ago when she won the endorsement of some municipal Latino leaders and the Eastside Democratic Club.

But this time she picked up the endorsements of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, the California Democratic Party and three prominent Latino officeholders--Sheriff Lee Baca and Reps. Loretta Sanchez (D-Garden Grove) and Hilda Solis (D-El Monte).

Will that be enough to help her outdistance Alhambra school board member Robert Miranda and the more formidable Alhambra Mayor Daniel R. Arguello? Arguello is a former aide to Los Angeles City Councilman Richard Alatorre and has been endorsed by the Legislature’s Latino Caucus and state Sen. Richard Polanco (D-Los Angeles).

If no candidate receives more than 50% of the vote in Tuesday’s primary, the top Democratic vote-getter will face Kim Goldsworthy, a Libertarian, in a June runoff. There is no Republican candidate.

Solis said voters in the district are moving beyond old ethnic divisions. “The voters are growing more sophisticated in their choices,” she said. “Judy,” Solis said, “is a bridge-builder with different groups. She is more than Asian American. She’s dynamic, and she has helped the Latino community numerous times over the years.”

If Solis is right and Chu grabs a big part of the Latino vote, the election may reflect a changing of the guard that reaches beyond the district, said Sherry Bebitch Jeffe, senior scholar at the USC School of Policy, Planning & Development.

“The torch is being passed to a new generation,” she said.

This new generation of politicians, she said, favors coalition-building over establishing a base within just one ethnic group.

“Race plays a role, but it is not the whole picture for voters,” said Chu, 47, a professor of psychology at East Los Angeles College.

Chu entered Monterey Park politics 13 years ago amid a struggle to stop English from being declared the official city language, a proposal viewed as a backlash against the rising Asian population there. Chu opposed the proposal and later won reelection by reaching out to Latino and white voters.

Arguello, 53, said he too was elected to the Alhambra council in 1998 by a coalition of Latinos and Asians. “I grew up in Boyle Heights when it was a boutique of diversity,” he said.

Voter registration still favors Latinos in the 49th District. . A leading firm that matches voter registration lists with Spanish and Asian surnames identified the 143,000 registered voters in the district as 44.6% Latino, 29.7% white and 25.7% Asian.

Chu, a former school board member, said education, the electricity crisis and crime are her key concerns. She wants to establish a tri-state power authority to give Western states power to negotiate the cost of electricity, and in the schools she wants to reduce class sizes in grades four through 12.

Arguello is a fiery street fighter, proud of his working-class roots. In two years on the council he has helped two Latinos get elected to the school board and a third to the council. He stresses his military service in Vietnam and his concerns about education and guns. “I know the anguish of a parent who loses a son to gun violence,” he said, explaining that one of his sons was killed as a teenager while playing with a handgun with friends.

Miranda is a political maverick who sleeps in a one-room rental to be eligible for his school district seat while maintaining a nice three-bedroom home across town. He once testified that he kept the house for the family pets. Political analysts say he doesn’t have the support to win, but he could split the Latino vote.

Some voters in the district have received phone calls urging them to vote for Miranda, but Miranda says he hasn’t paid for the calls. Arguello said he believes the Chu campaign is behind the calls, but Chu denies knowledge of them.

Chu’s campaign has raised nearly $300,000 and has deluged mailboxes with her literature. “I have had three major fund-raisers,” she said, sitting in a vault at a former bank that serves as her campaign headquarters.

Arguello is getting considerable support from the California Latino Alliance, a new political action committee with ties to Latino lawmakers that has already spent more than $40,000 on his behalf. As of Thursday, his own campaign had $19,000 on hand, compared with Chu’s $166,000.

Arguello is counting on precinct work by his campaign manager, Darrell Alatorre, Richard Alatorre’s son. “Now the game goes to the street,” Arguello said. Arguello often stresses his street roots. Wounded in Vietnam at 19, he was in a hospital bed for a year, he said. “I was a high school dropout. I couldn’t read a book lying there so I decided to go to school and college,” he said.

After college he worked for Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, and later Alatorre. Arguello is now an officer of Pacifica Services Inc. The Pasadena civil engineering and management firm, which holds numerous local and federal government contracts, is owned by a onetime Alatorre campaign official.