A New Tide of Latino Activism

The political awakening of the new immigrant barrios of Southern California began with the enduring dreams of an exiled Mexican college student whose travels took him to a crowded town hall meeting in Watts.

It began, too, with a small group of former Salvadoran revolutionaries who one day found themselves, against all expectations, pledging allegiance to a country they had once despised.

And it began with an anti-Proposition 187 leaflet placed in the hand of a 15-year-old girl.

Those events, and countless more during the past several years, have led to a slow but steady march forward for American democratic institutions in communities where Spanish is still the dominant language.

Behind this profound change are hundreds of individuals who have formed or joined fledgling grass-roots organizations and political action committees, often despite economic, cultural and personal obstacles.

The fruit of their labor is a 30% increase in voter registration in the Latino communities of central Los Angeles County since 1994--a rate six times higher than the countywide increase.

Many of these organizers are giving voice to a new civic consciousness that combines Latin American traditions of collective action with Jeffersonian ideas about participatory democracy--opening a window on what the political life of Southern California may feel like in the next century.

On a Sunday last month, a group of local Salvadoran activists did something that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago: They held a fund-raiser for an American political candidate, Assemblywoman Liz Figueroa (D-Fremont), the Legislature’s only Salvadoran American, now running for the state Senate.

It was a seminal event among men and women whose concerns had traditionally been focused almost solely on their homeland, in a part of Los Angeles where so few people were U.S. citizens that, politically speaking, their neighborhoods were in another country.

“I’m proud to be a Centroamericano,” said Carlos Vaquerano, one of the activists behind the effort. “Our people are assertive. We don’t want to depend on anyone. That’s why we have to win political representation.”

A group of Guatemalans have launched a similar effort, led by Julio Villasenor, a real estate agent and building contractor who is president of the recently formed Guatemalan Unity Information Agency (GUIA), a new civic organization.

“In the long term, the role of GUIA is to build and guarantee a place for Guatemalans within the democratic institutions of the United States,” the organization’s World Wide Web site proclaims in Spanish.

New Plans for Funds

GUIA was an outgrowth of local clubs, called fraternidades, that for decades have raised funds for humanitarian needs in Guatemala.

Typically the fraternidades--formed by expatriates from a given town or province--would help build medical clinics, schools and fire stations back in Guatemala. Now, GUIA is channeling at least some of those resources to community empowerment in Los Angeles.

“I am an American citizen, all of us [in GUIA] are,” says Villasenor, 46. “Personally, my goal is that the Guatemalan community grow and become active in civic matters.”

Along the same lines, Vaquerano and others have formed the fledgling Salvadoran Leadership and Education Fund (SALEF), a group whose origins lie in the end of El Salvador’s long civil war in 1992.

The signing of that peace treaty coincided with the riots that ravaged Pico-Union and other Los Angeles neighborhoods that are home to Central Americans. Together, the two events led many Salvadoran activists to reassess the focus of their work.

“We did a complete about-face,” says Vaquerano, 37. “We were always thinking of going back home. Then all of a sudden, the nightmare of the war was over. We started thinking of channeling our energies to domestic matters.”

It was emotionally difficult for Vaquerano to apply for citizenship when he came to the United States as a teenager in 1980. Back in El Salvador, he had lost three brothers to a violent dictatorship whose chief ally was the U.S. government. Like many Salvadoran radicals, he had once known America’s stars and stripes as a symbol of injustice.

Years later, he found himself pledging allegiance to that flag. Today, stacked on a table in SALEF’s sparsely furnished one-room office in Pico-Union is a pile of photocopied voter-registration forms--about 100 in all--from Salvadorans who, like Vaquerano, completed them just moments after taking the oath.

Many participants in the new civic activism can trace their political consciousness to other struggles that are part of the long and rich history of Latin American and Chicano radicalism.

Arturo Ybarra, 54, was exiled from his native Mexico after being detained and tortured during the 1968 student protests against the government, then a de facto one-party dictatorship. Eventually, the student movement was crushed by a Tiananmen-style massacre.

Traumatized by his experiences, Ybarra lived quietly in the neighborhoods in and around South-Central Los Angeles for many years, working in a factory and becoming a union shop steward.

In 1989, he heard that the Los Angeles Community Redevelopment Agency would hold a public meeting to discuss a controversial plan to revitalize nearby Watts. He noticed a few other Latinos in the mostly African American audience, despite the fact that Latinos by then made up more than a third of South-Central.

“We were a group so small that we would look at each other with kind of a hunger to communicate with someone who could relate to us,” Ybarra says.

Soon afterward, the Watts Century Latino Organization was formed. Since then, the organization has done everything from filing class-action lawsuits claiming racist practices by the housing authority to staging boisterous protests for improved water service. Its goal: to pressure legislators to take note of South Los Angeles’ new Latino majority.

“In this country, it’s easier to have a meeting with a congressman or a high elected official than it is to meet with some petty bureaucrat in Mexico,” Ybarra says. “We’re beginning to realize that our vote can really be the difference between living oppressed and having an opportunity for our children.”

Ybarra and others who are building organizations in what has been, until now, the undeveloped hinterland of local politics, face many difficulties. Distrust of government and authority remains widespread, and poverty feeds a deep apathy.

“All these decades of repressive and corrupt governments [in Latin America] have contributed to a trauma that prevents our people from participating in civic activities,” Ybarra says. “People are frustrated, they’re skeptical of governments and organizations.”

And yet, the new activists have been presented in recent years with the perfect antidote to such attitudes: the anti-immigration policies championed by Gov. Pete Wilson.

The 1994 campaign to pass Proposition 187, which made many government services off-limits to undocumented immigrants, is almost universally described as a watershed moment in Latino political history. The initiative sparked a sharper interest in the political process among many Latinos, who saw Proposition 187 as an assault not merely on illegal immigrants, but on their entire community.

Although Latinos did not vote in dramatically larger numbers in 1994, the legacy of the anti-187 movement can be felt today in the increasing number of young people growing into new roles as community advocates.

Ana Soto was a ninth-grader at Jefferson High School when teenage activists slipped through the halls and classrooms, passing out leaflets urging students to join a protest against the voter initiative. The “walkouts,” which took place throughout Southern California, were an echo of the 1968 demonstrations at Eastside schools during the height of the “Chicano Power” movement.

Soto found herself walking out of Jefferson High with hundreds of others, so many students that they barely fit though the open gates. They marched north toward City Hall, a moment of collective power unlike anything she’d felt before. It would change her life.

“You feel pride, you’re standing up for it,” says Soto, the daughter of Mexican immigrants whose mother is a seamstress. “You’re doing something about it. You’re not the person that’s sitting there waiting for the decision to be made.”

Despite working a part-time job to help support her five siblings, Soto was elected student body president at Jefferson last July and became a vocal critic of conditions at the South-Central campus. She wants to be “like Gloria Molina,” the Los Angeles County supervisor who is California’s most recognizable Latina politician.

Another veteran of the marches, 17-year-old Marvin Rodas, is now a member of a South-Central youth empowerment committee that seeks to channel more Los Angeles school district repair bond funds to inner-city schools.

His optimism, like Soto’s, is tempered by another, more pragmatic lesson learned on the fall day in 1994 when most of Jefferson High took to the streets.

“We were walking toward City Hall, but some of [the marchers] decided to go home,” Rodas says. “That walkout wasn’t organized.”

Immigrants Still Facing Hurdles

The image of protesters deserting a march that’s hardly begun remains something of a metaphor for the perils and pitfalls that face Latino activists trying to build political and civic institutions in the barrio.

Language barriers still prevent meaningful political participation among legions of Latino immigrants. In the barrios of central Los Angeles and Orange counties, high poverty rates and significantly lower rates of education do not bode well for future political development.

Despite such obstacles, for Latino activists the worst years of voter apathy may be behind them.

A Times analysis of voter registration patterns in Los Angeles County shows that the local Assembly districts that are home to the largest numbers of immigrants have shown the fastest rise in registration, fueled by increased naturalization, opposition to Proposition 187 and strong Latino support last year for the Los Angeles school repair bond, Proposition BB.

In Democrat Martha M. Escutia’s 50th Assembly District, centered in the southeast county cities of Huntington Park, Bell and Bell Gardens, voter registration has increased 28% since 1994, about six times the rate of increase for the county as a whole. In the unincorporated Florence district, just east of South-Central Los Angeles, registration has increased 47% during the same time period. (The rates of increase are high, in part, because before the recent surge, the number of voters in inner-city barrios was abysmally low).

Whether political parties and candidates will intensify their efforts to court the new Latino voters remains to be seen. In the past, California politicians have rarely put substantial resources into voter registration and other efforts aimed at expanding the number of immigrant voters.

Still, there is little doubt that the surge in Latino registration is good news for Democrats--Latinos voted more than 3 to 1 for the party’s candidates in 1996, according to exit polls.

The increased number of Latino citizens and voters also bodes well for organizations hoping to build a long-term presence in communities where “the voter” has been something of an endangered species.

At the Watts Century Latino Organization, Ybarra estimates that a third of the group’s 600 registered members are U.S. citizens.

Under Ybarra’s leadership, WCLO has taken a holistic approach to the idea of community empowerment.

It has helped needy Watts residents find work. It stages the annual Watts Cinco de Mayo parade. At this week’s quarterly town meeting, group members will discuss, among other things, the implications of the Alameda Corridor project. At WCLO events, Ybarra says, organizers provide free child care because most members bring their children. (“You know how Latinos are, when we go to an event, we have to bring the whole family, even the parrot and the dog,” he quips in Spanish.)

Indeed, there is much about the group that is a cultural hybrid, like the patchwork of posters and notes that cover the wall of Ybarra’s office. There is an Aztec calendar and an American flag next to the exhortation to “pledge allegiance, become a U.S. citizen now.” On a chalkboard, there is a scribbled reminder to “Call [Mayor] Riordan for gardeners,” a reference to the recent controversy over the City Council’s decision to ban gas-operated leaf blowers.

When Ybarra talks about the history of the organization, Latin American political terms like “organizaciones de base” pepper his speech. Mexican residents of Watts call the group “Wacelo,” following the Spanish-language custom of transforming acronyms into pronounceable words.

And yet, the goals of “Wacelo” are little different from those of Irish and Italian immigrant groups in the first half of this century, groups that eventually completed a total assimilation into the American political process.

“Our children are American citizens,” Ybarra says. “We can’t tell them to hate their country. But we can’t tell them to hate Spanish either. On the contrary, we feel obliged to teach them the history of the two cultures, the true history of their two countries.”

About This Series

The most dramatic change in Southern California’s political landscape is sharply increased participation by Latino immigrants. During this election year, Times staff writer Hector Tobar will examine how this trend will play out at the grass-roots level. Future stories will describe how the interaction between Latino culture and American civic institutions may help shape the region’s future.