An Unbowed Lopez Vows to Carry On

The day after losing his Santa Ana school board seat in a landslide, Nativo V. Lopez sounded serene. Almost.

The man who marched with Cesar Chavez and whose supporters compare him to civil rights leader Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. instead likened himself to a legendary boxer on the bloody losing end of the 1951 middleweight championship.

“After the fight, Jake LaMotta looks at Sugar Ray Robinson and says, ‘You never knocked me down, Ray. You never knocked me down,’ ” Lopez said after his defeat in the Feb. 4 election. “Well, they never knocked me down!”

Lopez wants everyone to know he is not done fighting.

Ousted by 69% of the voters in a bitterly fought recall election, the 51-year-old Boyle Heights-born activist has vowed to continue championing the rights of immigrants and the working class in Santa Ana, the city that has more Spanish speakers for its size than any other in the nation.

Lopez views his loss as “the affluent and well-heeled having their economic and political way -- plain and simple.”

Lopez’s message has changed little from his days as a student and labor organizer in the 1960s and 1970s. He has spent his adult life railing against injustices, perceived or real, committed against working-class Latinos by a mostly white, mostly rich establishment. And he has done it with the pugnacity of a boxer.

“Nativo does not equivocate,” said Amin David, head of Los Amigos of Orange County, a Latino-rights group. “You don’t stay neutral, not with him.”

Yet some didn’t take sides in the recall campaign, including several local politicians whom Lopez supported and helped get elected. More notably, voters in central Santa Ana who had strongly supported Lopez in two previous elections turned out in lower numbers for the recall than did voters elsewhere in town.

Opinions differ about why. Some voters said they were swayed by Lopez’s support for bilingual education. Others wanted to stop a controversial elementary school planned in an upscale neighborhood. But with every issue, Lopez -- who has not ruled out running for office again -- characterized it as rich against poor, white against brown.

“He is out there flailing away with the same message, and it is not relevant anymore,” said Art Pedroza, a former Republican Party Latino outreach official. Pedroza believes Lopez could have been a more effective politician if he had toned down the rhetoric. “Nativo had a golden opportunity to be a hero, but he fumbled it.”

Part of Large Family

Lopez was born Larry Vigil Lopez, the second of six children, who were joined by five adopted siblings. His mother, Beatrice Lopez-Vigil, divorced her husband, he said, and raised the children by herself, putting most of them through college.

Lopez was a precocious activist. At 13, he picketed Time magazine for an article that he said disparaged Latinos. Demanding better education for Latino children, he organized student walkouts at Excelsior High School in Norwalk, where he grew up.

At 17, he dropped his first name and adopted “Nativo,” meaning “native” in Spanish.

Lopez and his wife, Maria Rosa Ibarra, have named their three daughters Hayme, Spanish for Amy; Tayna, after the Taino tribe of Native Americans; and Xel-ha, Mayan for “crystal water running.”

“He was always very intense,” said Jill Furrillo, who attended Cerritos College with Lopez and recalls the young activist organizing a campus rally for Latino studies. “I’ve known visionaries, but he is also a doer.”

Joins Rights Group

In 1971, Lopez met Bert Corona, who has often been called the urban equivalent of Cesar Chavez in the Latino civil rights movement. A few years later, Lopez joined Corona’s Hermandad Mexicana Nacional, an immigrant-rights group, and helped expand the Los Angeles organization to Orange County and elsewhere.

The organization grew exponentially after 1986, when the U.S. government granted amnesty for some illegal immigrants. Government grants poured into Hermandad to help those foreigners, mostly Mexicans, legalize their status. Later, millions of dollars more went toward helping them learn English and eventually become citizens. At one point, Hermandad claimed 200,000 members nationwide. And in Orange County, “Nativo,” as he is known, was the face of Hermandad.

But the empire began to fade in the late 1990s. Shortly after Loretta Sanchez’s congressional victory in 1996, the loser, conservative stalwart Robert K. Dornan, accused Hermandad of rigging the outcome by registering noncitizens to vote. The inquisition ended with no criminal indictments or evidence of fraud, but Lopez, who first won the Santa Ana school board seat in 1996, saw his reputation clouded.

The image was further tainted by government allegations that Hermandad diverted millions of the dollars meant for citizenship and English classes. A federal grand jury indicted Hermandad, and the probe is continuing. Separately, the California Department of Education, which managed the program, sued Lopez and Hermandad to recoup the money. The trial is scheduled for March.

Lopez has maintained that the Santa Ana office of Hermandad acted properly, but has declined to vouch for the Los Angeles group.

Since Corona’s death in 2001, Lopez has severed ties with Hermandad, which is now controlled by Corona’s widow, Angelina Casillas.

“In spite of the bombardment he has endured, he is standing tall,” said David, of Los Amigos. “He just gets up and gets going. It is incredible.... No one has caused more change in Orange County, especially in Santa Ana, than Nativo.”

Lopez is about 6 feet tall, but looks taller in the sharp suits he favors. His graying hair is always slicked back, a style he hasn’t changed in decades. At board meetings, he would often lean back in his chair, head in hand, a finger resting across his wispy mustache, staring down his critics.

Their numbers multiplied early last year when the Lopez-led school board voted at a rancorous meeting to declare eminent domain on a 9-acre lot in north Santa Ana for a new elementary school. Many nearby residents favored a city-approved plan for a development of luxury homes on the lot.

Lopez describes the conflict as a clash between the Latino students, who make up the overwhelming majority of Santa Ana Unified School District’s 61,000 students, and well-to-do residents backed by the city’s establishment.

That offended many neighbors, who say all they wanted was to learn more about the project.

“What we witnessed was a disgusting and unjust racist attack vilifying every homeowner,” said Dave Hoen, who attended the board meeting.

Hoen and his partner, Darren Shippen, like many of their neighbors, later joined the recall movement, begun by a small group of Latino parents who blamed Lopez and his support of bilingual education for the district’s low test scores. From there, the recall quickly caught on. Campaign donations eventually topped $400,000, more than 25 times the average for a school race.

Couldn’t Rally Backers

Lopez was outspent about 3 to 1. But in the end, it was more than money. He was unable to rally his most loyal supporters or persuade non-Latinos who may share his views.

“If I had one failing in my short six years” on the school board, Lopez told a group of supporters at a fund-raiser a few days before the election, “it was my inability to articulate my message to our Anglo brothers and sisters.”

His constituents want the same things the whites do, he said: “For our children to go to college, to have opportunities.”

If Lopez’s message is little changed, it’s because he believes circumstances have not improved much for poor Latinos. Santa Ana is a Latino-majority city with a Latino-majority city council, but City Hall’s vision of the city is a stark contrast to Lopez’s.

In recent years, the city’s concern has been more with gentrification than accommodating the immigrants who come to the city for cheap housing and access to jobs, critics of the city say.

The Latino leaders in City Hall, in Lopez’s view, have lost their identity, said Howard O. Kieffer, a political consultant to Lopez. “They have become too assimilated. Some people assume Nativo is just for Latinos.... He does advocate for his people, but that does not mean he advocates against other constituencies.”

State Sen. Gilbert Cedillo (D-Los Angeles) said Lopez will remain relevant as long as there are immigrants.

“What people have a problem with is his assertiveness,” Cedillo said. “The problem is those people who have difficulty acknowledging the virtue of California as a dynamic and diverse state.”

Still, Lopez’s style clearly makes even sometime allies uncomfortable. Sanchez (D-Garden Grove), state Sen. Joe Dunn (D-Garden Grove), and Assemblyman Lou Correa (D-Anaheim) have all supported Lopez in the past, but stayed out of the recall campaign.

“He can be uncompromising,” Correa said. “He is an activist. At the end of the day, the basic concerns of individuals cross ethnic and geographic lines.”

Lopez declined several requests to discuss the election outcome and his future plans.

“I’m still not interested,” he said in an e-mail. “My profile will be written in the future by my actions, not by anything published in the [Los Angeles Times].”