Where will Latino political power in Los Angeles go?

Gustavo Arellano, Tribune News Service

On a Tuesday morning in the fall of 1998, I waited in line at a polling precinct at Manzanita Park in Anaheim. I was 19, voting for the first time, and motivated by ethnic pride to do so. Four years earlier, Californians had overwhelmingly passed Proposition 187, which sought to make life miserable for undocumented immigrants. It spurred my era of Latinos to get involved in local politics and fight for a democracy where people who looked like us would represent “us.” I admired from afar what was going on in Los Angeles, where crusading politicians with last names like Molina, Polanco, Alatorre, and Alarcón fought for their working class constituents and inspired Latinos across the state. They were on my mind at Manzanita Park as I leafed through an election guide, searching for a Latino candidate — any Latino candidate — to vote for.

That person was Alexandria Coronado. She became the first Latina elected to the Anaheim Union High School District board of trustees. A year later, she voted alongside the board’s Republican majority to pass a resolution that sought to sue Mexico for $50 million for educating the children of illegal immigrants. I was there at the meeting, disgusted with her vote on the resolution and my vote that helped her get on the board. Then came a surprise: The sole dissenting trustee was LaFrance “Slim” Terrell, a Missouri native and my former principal at Sycamore Junior High. From the dais, he ripped up the resolution and said to cheers from the room, “There’s no reason for it, no need... to come up with something this divisive.” That lesson about the limits of identity politics immediately came to mind the morning of Oct. 9 last year, when my editor asked if I could listen to a secretly recorded conversation. I heard four of the biggest names in LA politics, names I had once held in esteem as Latino champions, use racist and demeaning language to disparage just about everyone in the name of defending and expanding Latino political power.

City Council President Nury Martinez, Councilmembers Kevin de León and Gil Cedillo, and LA County Labor Federation head Ron Herrera griped that Latinos — who make up about half of the residents in LA and LA County — didn’t have enough representation in government, while other groups — especially Black voters — had too much of it. They cursed about this. They disparaged colleagues who they felt stood in the way of Latinos. They whined about perceived affronts to “us.” They laughed at the expense of Black children and Oaxacans. Mostly, they plotted how to game 2021’s council district redistricting process and recruit candidates so that Latinos could get more council members and right what they perceived were historical wrongs.

“Look back, and what have any of them done for Latinos?” Herrera said, referring to non-Latino politicians. “And what are they going to do moving forward in the city?... The way I see it, all of the seats are Latino.” “We’re in a different spot now than we were 25 years ago,” Cedillo replied. “The thing for us is to exercise our power.” “Why are people playing dirty with us?” Martinez said later in the recording. “It’s always the case. We don’t get involved in anybody else’s neighborhoods.” “It’s not (about) us,” De León claimed, talking about their planned machinations. “It’s for Latino strength for the foreseeable future.” A year later, the hour-plus conversation still shocks with its nastiness and continues to cast a noxious cloud over Los Angeles and beyond. Martinez and Herrera stepped down soon after its release; Cedillo served out his term after losing to Eunisses Hernandez; De León is running for reelection in 2024. The four remain political pariahs in large swaths of the city for their role in the scandal.

Yet the main issue that drove their discussion — where does Latino political power stand in Los Angeles? — remains as vital and vexing to the future of LA as ever. It has loomed over the city ever since Edward R. Roybal became the first Latino council member in modern times in 1947 and planted the seeds that turned the Eastside into a model for Latino political power. It fueled the politicians who came of age in the cauldron of the Proposition 187 years, like Cedillo and De León, that turned California and Los Angeles into the deep-blue political havens they are today. A Latino political identity helped people like Martinez to win elections in areas like the eastern San Fernando Valley, which became majority Latino long before its elected officials looked like the population that they served.

But this representation-as-salvation strategy is increasingly rejected by the newest wave of Latino leaders as not just imperfect to push LA forward, but also antiquated and even dangerous — and the leaked tape served as proof. For Councilmember Hugo Soto-Martínez, they “showed the poison of identity politics and how it could be weaponised, and its many shortcomings.” He won in a majority-Latino district last year by following Hernandez’s example and running a class-conscious campaign that didn’t shy away from his Mexican background but never put it in the forefront. “If we don’t recognise that in order to change our economic system in a positive way, we’re going to continue to fight each other on a sinking ship,” he said. “We’ve become so infatuated with numbers that demography becomes an anchor,” said Alberto Retana, head of Community Coalition. The South LA-based nonprofit counts Mayor Karen Bass and Councilmember Marqueece Harris-Dawson as former leaders. In the tape, De León said the group — commonly referred to as CoCo — was trying to abuse him politically. “It was never meant to be the end goal,” Retana said. “If we focus on that, we’ll just continue to circle the wagons and not advance anywhere.” Fernando Guerra, director for the Center for the Study of Los Angeles at Loyola Marymount University, has tracked the rise of Latino political power for decades. He thinks the leak sounded like the participants “were talking 20 years ago, instead of talking about how LA should be for the next 20 years.” “This is tough to comprehend, but Latinos are overrepresented in LA politics,” he continued, pointing to the liberal-progressive compass that has governed LA politics over the last generation. “There is no exclusion of Latinos in LA politics because the Latino agenda is LA’s agenda.” But Guerra also acknowledged that saying Latinos don’t need Latinos to represent them isn’t a message many Latinos want to hear.

“Oftentimes, many Latino activists think that creating space for others come at their expense. They’ll say, ‘Hey, that’s great, that’s beautiful. But what about our representation? We agree with that, but not here.’ “That,” he concluded, “is an ethnic pitfall.” I didn’t pay close attention to LA’s Latino political scene until last year, when I covered the downfall of Sheriff Alex Villanueva and the leak fiasco. Seeing it up close has been a revelation — and mostly a dispiriting one.