No Longer Society’s Victims

On Monday, a three-member panel of federal judges will take up a voting-rights case whose outcome could profoundly alter the way Latinos view themselves and their place in California. The lawsuit also raises questions about the future of a Latino civil rights strategy at a time of growing Latino political power.

The Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund is challenging portions of a redistricting plan the Legislature approved last year. Adopting a strategy used a generation ago for African American voters in the segregated South, MALDEF contends that two Southern California congressional districts--one in Los Angeles County, the other in San Diego County--were drawn with the intention of diluting Latino votes and ensuring the reelection of Anglo incumbents.

It’s no secret that redistricting maps are incumbency-protection plans. Nor is it hard to believe that the incumbents in the challenged districts consciously moved Latino voters elsewhere. But to win its case, MALDEF must prove that the redrawn districts deprive Latinos of a fair opportunity to elect “representatives of their choice.” Put another way, the civil rights organization must show that voters in the two districts would not--and could not--elect a Latino candidate to office.

The lawsuit’s implicit view of Latino identity is as contentious as its legal positions. MALDEF contends that whites, as a bloc, still tend to vote against Latino candidates; the defendants say that white, Asian and black voters all are more and more willing to cast their ballots for Latino politicians. But whether decided in this case or the next, it is becoming increasingly apparent that, while cultural prejudice may persist, California’s Latinos are fast approaching the day when they will no longer be considered a helpless minority in need of legal caretakers.

While the MALDEF suit concerns only electoral behavior, the question of Latino electability is a much broader one: Do Latinos now enjoy unprecedented levels of social acceptance in California society? Complicating matters is the fact that 23 of the state’s 26 Latino legislators approved the redistricting plan and are, in a sense, co-defendants in the suit. Furthermore, the more controversial of the challenged districts belongs to Rep. Howard L. Berman, a 10-term liberal Democrat long considered by Latino advocacy groups as a political friend. It is Berman’s connection with the suit that has ratcheted up both the stakes and rhetoric.

In a remarkable break with past rhetoric, several prominent progressive Latino legislators and union officials have publicly challenged the idea underpinning Latino civil rights strategy and voting rights case law: that Latinos are necessarily best represented by a Latino official. In part, politics--solidarity with a fellow progressive--explains the change of mind.

Both United Farm Workers’ co-founder Dolores Huerta and L.A. County Federation of Labor chief Miguel Contreras have vouched for Berman’s effectiveness as a Latino advocate. In an Op-Ed piece in The Times last November, state Sens. Martha Escutia and Gloria Romero dismissed the idea that Latino representatives had a “monopoly” on advancing the “Latino agenda.” They also disputed any need to create more Latino-majority districts through civil rights litigation. “Latinos need not limit themselves to only seeking office in ‘safe’ Latino districts,” they wrote. “We should not relegate ourselves to a few court-imposed barrios.”

Even former Assembly Speaker Antonio Villaraigosa, who lost his historic bid for mayor last year, has asserted that he does not believe there is a bloc of voters within the contested Berman district “who would systematically vote together to defeat a Latino candidate.” He, along with much of the Latino political establishment, thinks the political playing field has been leveled.

MALDEF’s complaint does not dispute the fact that Latinos have made remarkable political strides over the last decade. Still, the lawsuit implicitly contends that California’s racial climate has not changed that much. When asked how a plan with strong Latino political support could be discriminatory toward Latinos, MALDEF accuses Latino officials of looking out for their own incumbency rather than for Latino voters--an odd contortion, to say the least.

So, who does represent the “Latino community” in California? In defending the legislation that included the redistricting plan, Democratic Assemblyman Gil Cedillo went beyond progressive politics when he suggested that Latinos had reached a point at which they shouldn’t depend “on the courts or advocacy groups” to protect their rights. “We, the voting representatives--the representatives of the communities who sent us here--can speak directly for our communities to safeguard their democratic rights,” he said. More extraordinary, however, is that Cedillo, who comes out of the Chicano civil rights movement, has suggested that Latinos have entered an entirely new era “in which we need not insist that we are so powerless” and have to “take our grievances to other nonrepresentative institutions.”

Therein lies the rub. The growing number of high-level Latino officials makes it more and more difficult to espouse the traditional grievance-oriented civil rights line. Does that mean that no Latinos suffer discrimination? Of course not. But it does imply that discrimination at the hands of others is no longer the overriding factor in determining Latino political or cultural identity.

If they aren’t defined by their minority status, who are Latinos? In its suit, MALDEF must show that Latinos are a “politically cohesive” group at odds with the larger, white minority. If it fails, the moral may be that Latinos are a heterogeneous group dynamically and increasingly integrating with society. Latino identity, at that point, would be officially released from its civil rights box.

Truth be told, Latinos have already jumped out of that box. The larger problem today is that outside interests--be they businesses or political causes--daily strive to repackage Latinos to serve their purposes. A decade ago, Latinos as a group expected society to neglect them or, as in the case of Proposition 187, hate them. Today, they are assiduously tracked, courted and engaged at every turn. In the early 1970s, books on U.S. Latinos frequently included the word “forgotten” in their titles. The operative word now would be “overexposed.”

Latino identity, then, is constantly manipulated by broader interests. Anthropologist Arlene Davila contends that it was marketers and advertising agencies that defined Latino consumers as brand-loyal, culturally static and permanently foreign. A pro-gun columnist wrote that “Latinos are easy converts to guns,” and the National Rifle Assn. has translated its children’s safety guides into Spanish and rehatched its mascot Eddie Eagle as Eddie Aguila.

In sum, defining what it means to be Latino in America has become something of a political Rorschach test. The reason is that we still insist on defining a minority in one-dimensional terms, as does the MALDEF suit. Furthermore, boxed identities are easy to manipulate or “own.” Yet, as Latinos gradually become a larger, more integral part of California, the idea that they form a single, cohesive “community” will be less and less convincing.

Once the training wheels are off, whether in the form of voting rights lawsuits or preferential programs, we will be forced to discover anew who Latinos are. But rather than a single, uniform portrait, this time we should expect a kaleidoscopic, contradictory series of images--all of which will be true.