Group Regards Latino Vote as Sleeping Giant to Be Awakened

In William Velasquez’s mind, America’s future is one in which senators and presidents cannot afford to ignore Latino voters.

Instead of token appeals on the campaign trail, candidates will have to address issues of importance to one of the fastest-growing minority groups or face defeat at the polls.

For now, Velasquez concedes, the Latino vote remains a sleeping giant in most of the United States. But as head of the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project, a Texas-based organization dedicated to improving political rights for Latinos, he is determined to awaken that giant.

With significant victories to date in Texas and surrounding states, Southwest Voters now has turned its attention to California. Last week, Velasquez said the organization will study Santa Ana’s system of elections and decide within three months whether to file a lawsuit seeking to change it.

Turning California’s 5.7 million Latinos into an aggressive voting group will be the final piece in a complex puzzle his group has helped piece together since its formation in 1975, Velasquez said from San Antonio in an interview by phone.

“Frankly, we’re not going to be taken seriously (on a national level) until Hispanics in California become a force commensurate with their numbers,” Velasquez said.

In 1986, the group spent about $300,000 in the state, much of it on lawsuits challenging election systems in Pomona and Watsonville and on voter-registration drives in southwest Los Angeles County. The same amount will be spent in 1987, Velasquez said, with the emphasis on local elections.

He predicted that high turnout among Latino voters now seen in many areas of Texas will soon be duplicated in California.

In several Texas counties targeted for registration drives in the 1970s, Velasquez said, more than 80% of the eligible Latinos are now registered to vote.

He said Southwest Voters research shows that the percentage of eligible Latinos now registered is 81% in Starr County, 81% in San Patricio County, 87% in Jim Wells County, 93% in Wilson County and 94% in La Salle County.

By contrast, he said, research on several southwest Los Angeles County cities is evidence of a lack of Latino political involvement. Only 12.3% of the eligible Latinos were registered to vote in Bell Gardens, 19.2% in Compton, 20.8% in Huntington Park, 24.8% in Long Beach and 24.8% in Cudahy.

“Generally speaking, the point is that this is among the lowest registration of Hispanics in the Southwest,” Velasquez said. Figures for Santa Ana, which is about 44.5% Latino, were not available.

The bulk of Southwest Voters’ work is in registration drives. The efforts in southwest Los Angeles County this year, with results not yet in, have employed the same techniques that have been successful in 12 other states.

About 1,000 volunteers representing about 350 organizations are drawn together into planning committees for the various targeted cities, then chairmen or chairwomen and other officers are elected. Research is done to identify heavily Latino residential areas and then a methodical door-to-door campaign is begun. Velasquez stressed that anyone who wants to register is offered the necessary materials, regardless of race.

Beyond registration drives, Southwest Voters has filed legal challenges to political systems viewed as inequitable. Pending lawsuits in Pomona and Watsonville challenge the cities’ methods of electing city councils, which are identical to the one in Santa Ana, where all council members are elected by citywide vote but must live in the wards they represent.

Southwest Voters’ argument in the Pomona and Watsonville cases is that council members should be elected strictly by voters in the specific wards, he said; otherwise the voters’ impact is diluted.

Velasquez said much research already has been done in Santa Ana, but the group decided to wait until after the Nov. 4 election to continue. In that election, voters rejected a proposition that would have provided for ward elections. Had that plan been approved, the organization would not be considering a legal challenge, he said.

‘At-Large Scheme’

“The at-large election scheme . . . has the most devastating effect on Hispanic turnout by far. When people cannot win locally they choose not to register to vote,” Velasquez said, explaining that minority voters in a ward can opt for a candidate who loses based on the votes of residents of other areas of the city.

“It is as close to West Texas voting as I’ve seen in any case. It’s classic. You’ve got the at-large election system, a large number of (Latinos) and very little political influence,” he said, adding that the recent Santa Ana City Council campaign was rife with mailers about the threat posed by illegal aliens.

“It seems like they’ve got the same PR guy that they use here in Texas, you couldn’t tell the difference.”

But some city residents argue that there has been no pattern of discrimination here and that there are now two Latino council members. In addition, many of the city’s Latino residents are believed to be illegal aliens and therefore unable to vote.

Hector Godinez, a regional director for the postal service who is active in local politics, said, “We have a lot of brown faces, but those brown faces are a long way from participating in the process.”

Santa Ana City Councilman John Acosta said he opposes ward elections but believes there has been some unfair treatment of minorities.

“I don’t think, based on the ethnic makeup, that there are enough minorities appointed to commissions,” he said, adding, “I don’t think there’re any minorities that want something for nothing. We are asking for an opportunity to be a part of the system.”

Santa Ana City Atty. Edward J. Cooper noted that a legal challenge by Sadie Reid, a black woman who lost her race for a council seat even though she won a majority of the votes in her ward, was rejected by the courts in 1978. But Reid, who said she still vigorously supports the concept of ward elections, said she believes she would have won her fight if she hadn’t run out of money during appeals.

Money Was Lacking

“Had we had enough money to really take it to the (state) Supreme Court and pursue it or go back to the Superior Court, I think we could have won it,” said Reid, who now serves on the local school board. “I didn’t leave the court thinking that it was a defeat.”

However, in ruling against Reid, U.S. District Judge Irving Hill said she had failed to prove any of several factors that would have warranted a different decision, including a problem with a minority member getting on the ballot, a history of discrimination in registration or voting rights, gerrymandering of districts to divide minorities or a council that wasn’t responsive to minority issues. “There is ample Supreme Court authority that an at-large electoral system like this is not per se unconstitutional,” Hill said.

The Pomona system is identical although the minority population isn’t the same, said attorney John McDermott, who has been hired by the City of Pomona to argue that case. McDermott, who has moved for dismissal, said the organization would only have a case if it could prove deprivation of voting rights.

McDermott said he believes at-large elections actually could be more beneficial to Latino voters in a city such as Santa Ana, because their large numbers would eventually give them the ability to control the entire council rather than one or two wards.

At-large systems give everyone a chance to run and California has historically been eager to extend voting privileges to minorities, McDermott said.

California ‘Different Case’

“I think California, frankly, is a very different case than the South or Southwest where these cases have typically occurred,” he said. “I don’t question their legitimacy although I don’t think the Pomona case should ever have been filed.

“That’s not an attack on their legitimacy as an organization. They’re a civil rights organization with a commitment to increasing minority representation that is worthy of respect, but I do have my problems with the rigidity of their view that all at-large elections are somehow always harmful to minorities.”

But Velasquez said he doesn’t see the Southwest Voters position as dogmatic.

“He can call it dogmatism,” he said of McDermott’s comments. “I call it dogged determinism. I can call it trying to make the American Democratic system really work. It is unstable; it is destabilizing to have large groups of people shut out from the American Democratic process.”

But McDermott believes tactics that were successful in Texas won’t work in California. “What made eminent logic in the South and Southwest they have assumed they can just willy-nilly apply to California. I think there are substantial differences in the issues they have confronted. . . . That’s the flaw in their analysis.

“They’ve done this enough times so they assume that every city is like the one before it and the basic research has been done.”

Southwest Voters was formed in San Antonio in 1975 by members of the National Council of La Raza, a Latino civil rights group whose members became alarmed by an apparent decrease in the number of voters. Latino votes actually decreased by 1,000 in the 1976 presidential election and a book published by a University of Texas professor theorized that Latinos might be the first minority to fail to integrate into American society.

So the organization was formed and began to collect funds from a variety of sources. Velasquez said that about 40% of the group’s $900,000 annual budget comes from individuals and small businesses, another 20% to 25% from churches and the rest from corporations, including grants from the Bank of America and Levi Strauss.

At first, the obstacles were formidable, he said, and not just from the Establishment but from within as well.

“The main thing was that, frankly, I think people thought, and we ourselves somehow thought, that Mexicans consistently weren’t going to register to vote. Some Mexicans thought it was just in our genes that we weren’t going to get registered,” Velasquez said. “But we found that if they see they have a chance to win, they will get registered and vote in numbers larger than Anglos.”

Now, flushed with success in the Southwest, the organization is poised for the big jump into California. Next January, they plan to open an office in Los Angeles.

“It’s history repeating itself; I anticipate having a lot of problems with the first few cases, nine months from now we will have less problems and by 1988, we will file large numbers of cases and the vast majority will be settled out of court,” Velasquez predicted.