Vote Seen as Litmus Test for Latinos

On a brilliant winter morning, underneath a silk American flag held by two Latinas, a small group of people gathered to tout their slate of candidates.

Two years ago, few would have paid attention to this gathering in front of Bell Gardens’ squat, white-brick City Hall. But this was the Latino-led group that stunned the political Establishment last December by dumping four Anglo council members from office. And now everybody is watching.

On March 10, Bell Gardens voters will replace the four recalled council members in a special election that political leaders and activists see as a litmus test of emerging Latino political power in a pocket of the county long controlled by Anglos.

Some Latino political activists, such as state Sen. Art Torres (D-Los Angeles) and former U.S. Ambassador to Mexico Julian Nava, have heralded the recall as a sign that Latinos in southeast Los Angeles County are finally wresting control of their destinies from the hands of aging Anglo leaders. “What will be significant is who gets elected,” said Rita Moreno, an official with the Southwest Voter Registration and Education Project. “If they are able to elect good people--people who represent the community--then who financed it (the recall) and who did the work really doesn’t matter.”

In the last two months, 10 candidates have begun campaigning for four seats on the council. Seven candidates are Latino--an un precedented number for Bell Gardens, which until last year had never had a Latino on the council. Some candidates supported the recall. Others did not. All are calling for a more open city government.

“The (recall committee) is alive and well now, have no doubt about it,” said Rodolfo Garcia, a City Council candidate who runs the Bell office of the League of United Latin American Citizens. “We are in high gear now.” The recall committee has endorsed four candidates, one of whom is an Anglo.

The ousted City Council members, however, are not giving up. Though they are prohibited from running in the March 10 special election to replace them, three of the four have announced that they will try to recapture three council seats that will be on the ballot again in the regular April 14 municipal election. The fourth, former mayor Robert Cunningham, has decided not to run again.

Former council members Allen Shelby, Letha Viles and Douglas O’Leary said that there was no good reason to recall them. The three argue that they were removed because a handful of wealthy but disgruntled landlords managed to stir up residents with threats and lies--a charge the recall committee vehemently denies.

In fact, what led to the success of the recall is being debated now in many circles. Critics and supporters of the ouster, including its leaders, say it is narrow-minded to view the removal of the four Anglo council members as some sort of Latino coup d’etat.

Even the recall leaders, who not long ago campaigned on a theme that city leaders were trying to drive Mexicans from the city, have done an about-face and say racial inequity was a minor cause behind the recall. They say the prime reason for the campaign was the council’s arrogant attitude toward all Bell Gardens residents.

“The reason it happened is because the council didn’t listen to the people and finally the people decided to make some changes, and it just happened that the majority was Hispanic,” said Marie Chacon, a recall committee leader.

Ramiro Morales, a member of the recall committee, moved to Bell Gardens 18 years ago when the city was on the verge of a transformation. In the mid-1970s, the city was a poor, white, rough-and-tumble place where the only minorities were American Indians.

“There were no meat markets, no one had tortillas, no Mexican delicacies,” the 43-year-old handyman said.

Morales was among the first of many Mexicans who immigrated to Bell Gardens, drawn, in part, by its cheap housing. Today, 88% of the people who live in the city are Latino, and Morales has no problem finding a carniceria or panaderia. “I feel like I’m at home in Mexico,” he said.

It seemed that only one place remained immune to the whirlwind changes that swept the community: City Hall. Until April, 1990, every person elected to the council was Anglo, and a majority of residents participating in city elections were Anglo senior citizens. For all of their numbers, Latinos in Bell Gardens were politically invisible. Many were not citizens, and of those who were, few registered to vote.

City officials operated in a vacuum, critics said, making little or no attempt to reach out to the community, a majority of whom did not speak English. Instead, the officials worked hard to transform Bell Gardens into a nice suburb with plenty of business, industry, sturdy homes and traffic islands. With that vision firmly in mind, city officials leveled neighborhoods to bring in business, and cracked down on property owners who failed to keep their homes and apartments safe and clean.

In late 1990, the city officials began a massive overhaul of the city’s Zoning Code to cut down on housing density. Under the initial draft, about one-third of the city’s 9,000 residential, commercial and industrial buildings would eventually have to be torn down or converted to other uses. Many residents became convinced that city leaders were trying to run the poor out of town. Because Latinos make up most of the population and are among the city’s poorest residents, they saw themselves as the plan’s primary target.

“We begged them not to do this,” Morales said. “We didn’t start with the idea of recalling them, we just didn’t want them to rezone, and they didn’t listen. They were too busy beautifying the city and they forgot about the people.”

After an emotional four-hour public hearing in December, 1990, the council passed the rezoning map with no explanation.

Angered by the council’s action, Morales became a citizen--26 years after he first came to this country--and signed a petition that led to the recall election.

Mexican-born Councilwoman Rosa Hernandez was the only council member not targeted by the recall. Although she praised the increasing participation of the Latino community, she was also one of the biggest critics of the recall. In turn, she was accused by Latino recall leaders of turning her back on her people. She responded by saying that she, in fact, was representing the community while the recall leaders were representing special interests.

The months that followed the council’s adoption of the zoning map were the most chaotic in city history. Council members accused absentee landlords, who provided a majority of the funding to the campaign, of orchestrating the recall because they feared the city’s notoriously strict housing rehabilitation program and the new zoning would cut into their profits. Recall committee leaders called the council members arrogant and racist.

Both sides accused each other of lying to the community and called for investigations by federal and county authorities. On Dec. 10, the four council members were recalled by a 60% majority.

“Essentially, what happened was that many different forces came together for their own reasons and for one goal: to knock off the council,” said Thomas Calderon, a government and community affairs consultant who was hired by the Bell Gardens council about a year ago to help improve communication between City Hall and the Latino community.

Whatever drove the recall, few question its effect on the Latino community. Sen. Torres, who supported the recall, and Josefina Macias, a council candidate, said they have been besieged with phone calls from Latinos in surrounding cities who want advice on how to get organized. Several voter registration drives were launched in late January in Southeast-area cities.

“I think it has sparked a Latino movement, and the heat of the spark will be felt in other cities surrounding Bell Gardens,” Torres said.

Not everyone is convinced. Rep. Matthew Martinez (D-Monterey Park) and the Southwest Voter Project’s Moreno have said they doubt the Bell Gardens recall alone will fan the flames of Latino political participation.

“I don’t think we are going to see a snowball effect,” Moreno said. “This is a real specific case, and although Bell Gardens is surrounded by similar communities, there were certain things at play there, aside from the fact that the council was white.”

The Candidates

Bell Gardens has a population of 43,000, and about 6,000 are registered to vote. Latinos who make up 88% of the population constitute just over half the city’s registered voters.

The candidates who are running in the March 10 special election are: Rodolfo Garcia, 54, a recall leader and official of the League of United Latin American Citizens; Josefina Macias, 40, also a recall leader and clerk for the Montebello Unified School District; John Sanchez, 30, a real estate agent and recall critic; Jesus Zuniga, 48, a quality-assurance inspector for McDonnell Douglas and recall critic; Yolanda Quintana, 41, a community volunteer and recall critic; Richard Webb, 47, a retired Bell Gardens police officer; Frank B. Duran, 56, a recall supporter and manager of a welding supply company; George T. Deitch, a recall leader and owner of more than a dozen Bell Gardens rental properties; Victor Vaillette, 43, a recall supporter, and Danny Rico, 34, a pest-control technician.

Macias, Sanchez and Zuniga are running for a two-year seat. The other seven candidates are vying for three seats, which will be occupied for only 30 days until the regular municipal election in April. All seven are expected to run again in April for terms that expire in 1994. Also planning to run in April are three of the four council members who were recalled in December: Allen Shelby, Letha Viles and Douglas O’Leary.