Southeast L.A. County Gets a Civics Lesson

By any modern measure, what has gone on in the name of politics in southeast Los Angeles County has been extreme.

In less than a decade, local officials and rivals in such cities as Bell, Bell Gardens, Cudahy, Huntington Park, Lynwood, Maywood and South Gate have been indicted, jailed, wire-tapped, bribed, recalled, threatened, firebombed and shot. In January, the recalled mayor of South Gate whacked a fellow council member in the face.

Troubles continue farther south. Last week, the majority of Compton’s City Council was arrested on corruption charges.

The spectacle of wrongdoing and ineptitude offers a civics demonstration on what happens when democracy is practiced with too few checks and balances, according to those who have studied local government.

“There is a convergence of major forces that have created this environment, almost like a perfect storm,” said Fernando Guerra, director of the Center for the Study of Los Angeles at Loyola Marymount University.

First, a nearly complete demographic shift took place within a generation, with an overwhelmingly white population becoming more than 90% Latino, with many of the newcomers immigrants. Second, thousands of high-paying blue-collar jobs were lost as manufacturing industries shut down.

Alone, the changes might only have made the southeast county a much poorer area. But another factor also was at play.

As the area changed, the growing number of noncitizens meant fewer eligible voters. The result: “You ended up with cities of over 100,000 residents where the next mayor gets elected with 2,000 votes,” Guerra said.

At the same time, a once-vibrant local press almost vanished. By the early 1990s, all the neighborhood daily newspapers that had served southeast county cities for decades had folded. The combination of factors appears to have been combustible: inexperienced and brash politicians taking over cities where residents either failed, or were unable, to keep an eye on their elected officials.

Antonio Gonzalez, president of the Southwest Voter Registration Project, said lack of citizen oversight is a chronic problem in poor communities.

“When you find populations that under-participate,” he said, “you have the necessary conditions for robber barons and crooks and good-old-boy networks to conduct activity that is illegal.”

Political scientists say it is an old story in America. And despite easy comparisons to chaotic Latin American politics, it is far from unique to Latinos. “East Coast and Midwest ethnic politics has often been like this,” said Joel Aberbach, founding director of UCLA’s Center for American Politics and Public Policy. Politicians “could utilize people’s feelings of deprivation and anger at previous leaders to manipulate the system.”

There is no question that the process can be ugly when power changes hands.

But southeast county politicians have been particularly brazen about getting their way -- whether shoulder-slamming a rival’s 16-year-old cheerleader daughter (Bell Gardens, 1994), steering a no-bid city contract for more than $1 million to the mayor’s sister (Lynwood, 2001) or draining the city coffers of more than $2 million even as voters were recalling a majority of the City Council (South Gate, in January).

Residents have seen city treasuries squandered on attorney’s fees and low-cost federal loans handed out to the friends and business partners of council members.

In retrospect, the conditions leading up to the current problems existed when these cities rose out of cauliflower and beet fields between the two world wars. Places such as Bell Gardens, Cudahy and South Gate were sold to the working man as suburbs to raise families and grow gardens. For decades, restrictive housing covenants kept many of the cities all white while nearby communities became predominantly minority.

Still, the area never kept out the poor or working class, and after the covenants were declared illegal, a large pool of affordable housing lured immigrants from Mexico and other Latin American countries.

Even as the population was changing in the 1980s, many of the cities along the Long Beach Freeway lived up to their welcome signs that still boast of “All-American City” honors and civic pride. Just seven years ago, South Gate was praised in a Rand Corp. study for a “history of well-performing and responsive city government.”

But the report went on to note a dramatic rise in the Latino population, from 58% in 1980 to 87% in 1996, creating an estrangement from City Hall’s white leaders.

However well run or responsive city government appeared to business interests, Latino residents were growing sick of a City Hall that looked nothing like them. The Rand report warned that, unless elected officials reached out to the new residents -- and found a way to bulk up a shrinking tax base -- they risked wasting considerable time and resources.

Neighboring cities already had suffered that fate.

“Here you had tremendous change. The job base disappeared. Churches just fell apart. The social infrastructure disintegrated,” said Bell Councilman George Cole.

The revolution began in earnest in 1991, when Latinos forced a recall election in Bell Gardens that swept into power the first all-Latino city hall in Southern California. At the swearing-in ceremony, with a mariachi band entertaining the crowd, many of the state’s most prominent Latino leaders, as well as the Mexican consul, heralded the day as historic.

A decade later, some of those who celebrated the Bell Gardens recall say it may have engendered a destructive style of politics. Since that recall, Bell Gardens has had at least 47 recall attempts, two of them current. “Power is taken; it is not given,” Guerra said, adding that the area’s problems can be traced to the white leaders who long resisted sharing power with Latinos.

Though Guerra does not excuse current officeholders, he said white resistance to change prevented two generations of Latino activists from learning to lead. It took aggressive young Latino politicians -- not all suited to hold office -- to force change.

Others disagree with Guerra. South Gate Mayor Hector De La Torre watched as experienced Latino activists ready to lead were pushed aside by a new generation of Latinos.

His city, the mayor said, fell victim to Albert Robles -- whose successful defense last year on charges that he had threatened to rape and kill people was: Everybody here talks like that. De La Torre called Robles a “political hustler” elected within a year of moving there. In South Gate, the mayor said, Robles found a place ripe for the picking.

“Once you adopt the notion that, to the victor goes the spoils, and you’re in it for the spoils, you start to see the types of problems plaguing these cities,” said Raphael Sonenshein, a professor of political science at Cal State Fullerton.

In any case, some of the new officeholders, having had to fight to obtain power, kept fighting. Cole, one of the last remaining officeholders from the earlier era, watched old community-based watchdogs, such as senior citizens, die or leave town. The city of Los Angeles soaked up the bulk of media attention and county oversight.

“Because of that,” he said, the area’s politicians “could get away with things.”

But if the conditions for misdeeds existed, so did the conditions for tattling. Unstable local politics, observers say, has ensured that backroom dealings and dirty tricks in the southeast county became public more often than elsewhere.

“When you have a city that changes councilmen all the time, whoever loses -- whoever isn’t getting their pieces of the pie anymore -- starts snitching people out,” said David Demerjian, head of the district attorney’s Public Integrity Division, which is conducting numerous investigations in southeast cities.

Will the situation stabilize any time soon?

The overthrow of South Gate’s discredited council majority has been cheered as a turning point for democracy. On the other hand, politicians elected last year in Lynwood on an anti-corruption platform already face claims of nepotism.

A key case to watch will be that of Bell Gardens’ Maria Chacon, charged with engineering her appointment as city manager while still on the council. The case was dismissed in January. But county prosecutors have appealed a judge’s ruling, which held that Chacon could raise as a defense the fact she had cleared the move with the city attorney.

If Chacon’s defense is allowed, Demerjian said, City Council members could defend illegal acts by claiming they had received bad legal advice.

“All you’d need then would be a corrupt politician to hire a corrupt city attorney; that’s a big concern,” he said.

Maybe the lesson of the southeast county is that the public must remain vigilant.

“In some cases, you could say the voters got what they deserved,” said Huntington Park Mayor Richard Loya, who wore a recording device last year in a federal investigation after a businessman tried to bribe him in exchange for backing for a $110-million shopping center.

What voters got, Loya said, were “kingdoms.” “I think voters have to examine when people are running for office: Who is paying for their elections? What strings are attached? Are we electing a bunch of puppets?”