Politics? Just Blow Drying in the Wind

When the scissors are clicking, blow dryers blowing and “Livin’ La Vida Loca” is playing in the background, you can get people to talk about practically anything. What else do they have to do?

At the Magic Touch hair salon in Highland Park on Wednesday, the imposed topic of the day was politics. More specifically, whether the candidates for mayor are in touch with what this slice of the city cares about.

“What we need are more jobs. And higher wages so people can live better lives. That’s the main thing,” Lilia Ballesteros says in Spanish as Blanca Gudino trims her long, black hair straight across the middle of her back. Ballesteros’s 4-month-old daughter sits on her lap, playing with a black hair clip. Her 3-year-old son circles the chair. Her family is able to get by with her husband’s building maintenance job, but she knows many others have a hard time paying the bills.

“They should do another amnesty, too, to help people legalize their status,” adds the 25-year-old housewife.

She’s not a citizen, so she doesn’t take the time to follow politics. “Who’s running for mayor?” she asks with a smile. “I couldn’t tell you.”

Across the way, Leslie Szego, knows it’s James Hahn and Antonio Villaraigosa. Maybe he’ll vote for Hahn because he knew his father, he said, but he’s still not sure.

“They all stand for the same thing: police, education, crime,” says Szego, a retired pianist from Romania.

He wishes that whoever takes office would do something about the garbage service (“The trash is the worst! I have to call them almost every week because they leave the trash behind.”) and the graffiti.

“I tell you if I would have the power I would get rid of the graffiti--radically,” he says, clenching a fist. “If I would catch them, I would make them lick the graffiti with their tongues until the blood comes out.”

Graffiti is one example of the neighborhood decline Szego says he has witnessed during the 34 years he has lived in Highland Park.

In the 1960s and 1970s, he says, business was booming. Lately, he’s seen many businesses fail and counts too many vacant storefronts. The only new business in a long while is a Sav-On drug store. It’s being built on a lot where a mortuary had been located for years.

But it’s still a decent place to live, he says.

“It has a bad reputation. To everyone I tell I live in Highland Park they go: ‘Oh, it’s full of gangs.’ But I don’t notice so many gangs,” Szego says. “The reputation is much worse than the actual situation.”

Heavily Latino Neighborhood

One of Los Angeles’ first suburbs, Highland Park is overwhelmingly Latino, sprinkled with Asians, white retirees, and a few writers and artists.

Many of its roughly 250 businesses line Figueroa Street, which winds from the southwest to the northeast end of this neighborhood, located east of Mount Washington and west of South Pasadena. They are mostly small, owner-operated shops, such as Magic Touch, which is owned by business partners Armando Reyes, a former clerk for a children’s mental health institution, and Ruben Moreno, a hairstylist with a university degree in veterinary medicine from his native Mexico.

Even people much younger than Szego have noticed the changes here.

“They need to clean up these streets! They’re filthy,” Sabrina Casillas, 28, says as she waits for her sister to get her hair trimmed. “It wasn’t like this 15 years ago. It looks so low-class.”

The neighborhood was home mostly to Germans, Italians and other whites when her grandmother moved in about 40 years ago and was still pretty quiet when Casillas and her sister were growing up in the 1980s.

“When we were like 15, 16, we didn’t go drinking, causing problems. We hanged out in front of our house, listening to music,” Casillas says. “I was telling my 19-year-old neighbor that the other day. He said that was a long time ago.”

Now youths run around without parental guidance, she complains, there are drugs and drunks and drivers speed on Avenue 52, the once-peaceful residential street where her grandmother lives.

“The street sweepers don’t go down that street anymore because nobody moves their cars. There are a bunch of junky cars parked in the street,” she says.

She has a few opinions about child care, health care and education, too: They should be free.

Casillas’s sister, Cynthia Walker, nods in agreement. She pays $400 a month for day care for her 4-year-old daughter Breanna and knows she’s getting a good deal. Health insurance is an additional $140 a month out of her wages as a saleswoman in a women’s clothing store. The government doesn’t begin to compensate parents for the cost of raising children, she says.

Which of the two liberal politicians vying for the mayor’s job are more in line with the sisters’ philosophies? Casillas doesn’t vote. Walker can’t remember whom she selected for mayor when she cast her ballot in March.

“It’s been a while. Who was it? . . . I vote for Hispanics,” she says with a shrug.

Becerra? Villaraigosa?

“I can’t even pronounce his name. Mr. V! Mayor V,” she laughs.

Walker and Casillas are third-generation American-born Latinas who do not speak Spanish. It is a skill they wish their grandmother had passed on.

“All jobs require bilingual applicants. I can’t even apply for a lot of jobs because I’m not bilingual,” Walker says. “That’s one thing he could do. He could provide classes in school that are bilingual.”

Villaraigosa has salon owner Moreno’s vote. As he trims Walker’s short, dark hair, he says he admires Villaraigosa for having come so far from such humble beginnings. Plus, having a Latino mayor might help “get rid of the reputation of Latinos as low-class, lazy, drug traffickers,” he says, turning off his electric trimmer for a moment to make his point. “That’s what people think of us.”

‘Taxes for This, Taxes for That’

But Moreno’s partner, Reyes, is more concerned about the bottom line.

“There’s more and more small businesses, and I don’t think we get the breaks that the big companies get,” says Reyes, who is clearly the money behind the operation.

“Taxes for this, taxes for that. A lot of profits go into the city license,” he adds. “When you look at the bottom line, I don’t know how some business owners do it without a second job.”

Four chairs away, Hector Ramirez doesn’t see that elections make much difference.

“When it comes to voting, I don’t choose to. I think no matter who we vote for it’s not going to make a difference,” he says. “I think they all make promises they can’t keep. . . . Why am I going to take interest in a bunch of liars?” Ramirez, 25, grew up in Highland Park and moved to nearby Lincoln Heights when he got out of the Navy.

He had shaved his head weeks ago in solidarity with a cousin whose hair fell out during treatment for cancer. Ramirez’s hair had grown like a wild bush until Wednesday, when he decided to get a trim before a job interview.

As his brother pays the $9 bill for the cut, Ramirez tells a story about a somewhat recent visit to a bank where a local politician tried to recruit him for his campaign.

“I said: ‘Are you going to pay me?’ and he said it was volunteer work,” Ramirez says, smiling broadly. “I told him to take a hike.”