Candidate Would Be 1st Latino on Compton Council

COMPTON —  This city’s first settler was a Latino--Don Jose Dominguez, who in 1794 received a land grant from the Spanish king. But after a century of cityhood and rapid Latino population growth during the last decade, Compton has yet to elect a Latino City Council member.

It is a record that Latino leaders say they want to change starting this year as they rally around the candidacy of Martin D. Chavez, 29, a third-generation Compton resident who is running in Council District 3 against incumbent Robert L. Adams and six other candidates.

“We have a good, viable candidate and he is very qualified,” said Pedro Pallan, president of the Latino Chamber of Commerce and owner of the San Antonio Bakery on Rosecrans Avenue.

Chavez, an affirmative action and equal opportunity employment analyst for the Los Angeles City Department of Water and Power, graduated from Cal State Dominguez Hill and also earned a master’s degree there.

Latino Community Unhappy

Chavez’s candidacy, though, is about more than competency and electing the first Latino council member. It is the most vocal message to date from the Latino community that it is unhappy with the black leadership that has dominated public affairs in Compton for about 20 years.

“I think they believe that they are the advocates of civil rights,” Chavez said of Compton’s political leaders, “but in reality they are the keepers of their civil rights, not the civil rights of the minority community.”

Compton’s political leaders, Chavez said, are trying to ignore the rapid growth of the Latino community and denying it an equal share of city services. Latinos, he said, are being treated “like an invisible minority and nobody pays attention to them.”

Compton politicians, according to Chavez and his backers, have not given Latinos enough public sector jobs, have ignored cries for more bilingual personnel in City Hall and the schools, and have failed to deliver needed improvements such as road repair and street lighting to the north side of the city, where much of the poorest Latino population is concentrated.

City Manager James Goins acknowledged that the city has failed to hire as many Latinos or bilingual personnel as it should have. But he said Compton is trying to rectify that.

“We definitely are concerned about it,” he said, “because it’s important to our future that we be an integrated city.”

Chavez said his main goal in running for office is to help the Latino and black communities avoid what he says will be an inevitable confrontation if black leaders do not begin sharing power with Latinos and heeding their demands for better services.

‘City Under Microscope’

“This city is under a microscope right now,” Chavez said. “It’s small enough for people to study to get an idea of how black and brown people are going to get along.”

Latino leaders, though, are growing impatient and increasingly divided over how best to get the attention of decision-makers in the school district and in City Hall. Although they declined to speak publicly about it, Latino leaders privately acknowledge that some among their ranks advocate a more confrontational stance, such as filing discrimination lawsuits against the school district and the city.

Other leaders favor a lower profile, urging that Latinos continue working through city and school administrative channels and make greater use of the ballot. Chavez places himself in the second category.

“The real issue is voice. (Latinos) have no voice in the city,” he said. “The city representatives don’t represent them.”

Getting elected, though, is not going to be easy. Chavez and his backers acknowledge that in Compton, Latino power at the polls is weak. Latinos account for a third of the city’s approximately 94,000 residents but only about 5% of the voters. Out of the city’s 40,000 registered voters, only 1,800 are Latino, Chavez estimates.

Councilman Adams said he believes many Latino residents are not voters because they are in this country illegally. That is one explanation, agreed Gregorio Sanchez, a Latino activist and member of Our Lady of Victory Catholic Church, a center of Latino life in Compton. But there are other explanations, too, Sanchez says.

The non-voters “may be legal people who have never voted in their lives and they are scared,” he said. “We have a lot of people here who have never become citizens and therefore their children (who are citizens) have never had the experience through their parents of the importance of the vote.”

Even if they increase their voter participation, Latinos still face the problem of convincing some Compton political leaders that they should share their power.

“You got to remember Latinos were here before we were,” said Councilman Maxcy D. Filer, who is black. “They were running faster than whites (fleeing the city) when I moved to Compton (in 1952). Now they just come back and say ‘Give it to me.’ ”

Bitter Memories

Filer points out with some bitterness that Manual Correa, the only Latino member of the Compton Unified School District board, was on the city police force when blacks were trying to get jobs there, that Joe Ochoa, a Compton Latino leader, was on the city Personnel Board when blacks were fighting for government jobs, and that the late Ray Gonzales was a school board member when blacks were fighting to be hired as teachers.

“I don’t remember any of them fighting for blacks,” Filer said. “Where were they when I was walking a picket line in Compton?”

And Latinos, not blacks, Filer continued, are the ones getting hired at the industrial parks the city has developed at the south end of town along the 91 Freeway.

“Go out on the Artesia Freeway and see how many blacks are working out there,” he said.

Councilman Adams, Chavez’s opponent, says that Latino residents lack influence at City Hall because they have not voiced their sentiments loudly enough and have not organized as a political force.

“If you want something, the squeaky wheel gets the oil,” Adams said. “I don’t see a great percentage of them attending our council meetings.”

The Latino voice, though, is likely to get a lot louder given Compton’s growing--some say soaring--Latino population.

In 1980, the last year a federal census was done, there were 17,587 Latinos in Compton, making up 21.6% of the total population. The black population was 59,530 or 73.2%. According to the National Planning Data Corp., a private research firm that updates federal census material, the Latino population in the city rose 65% between 1980 and 1988.

The firm estimates that in 1988 the Latino population was 29,093 or 32.2%. By 1993, the firm predicts, it will be 37,400 or 38.8%.

Clearest Picture

School enrollment figures paint the clearest picture of the city’s changing racial makeup. The percentage of Latino enrollment is growing at such a fast rate, officials in the Compton Unified School District say, that it is expected to overtake the black majority within a year or two.

Between 1984 and 1989, for example, the percentage of Latino enrollment rose from 30% of the student population to 47%. During the same period, according to ethnic census data that every school district must compile annually for the state, the percentage of black enrollment went down from 67% to 51%.

Only 3.6% of the district’s 1,385 teachers and administrators, however, are Latino, while almost 77% are black. In City Hall, Filer insists, the story is different. City administrators “are recruiting (Latinos) and they’ve done a tremendous job as far as recruiting goes.”

Latinos think otherwise. They point to city personnel records as evidence of what some call “systematic discrimination.” Records show that only 50--about 9.7%--of the 514 full-time city jobs are held by Latinos. Blacks on the other hand, hold 401--or 78%--of the jobs.

Chavez credits the Police Department as being the only city branch that he believes has made a concerted effort to recruit and hire Latinos. According to the department’s records, 18 of the 143 police officers are Latino. Of the city’s 98 firefighters, seven are Latino.

When Compton leaders debate the issue of Latino representation, the name of Assistant City Manager Edmundo Sotelo is frequently mentioned. City officials use Sotelo--the highest-ranking Latino in city government--to underscore their assertion that Latinos already hold important jobs. But Latino leaders counter that Sotelo is the exception: of the city’s 38 top administrators, he is the lone Latino.

‘Not Very Aggressive’

Gregorio Sanchez charges that neither the city nor the school district has very aggressive affirmative action programs for Latino recruiting and hiring.

“I think we’re not going to get our fair share until we get them to have an affirmative action plan. . . . They’re beginning to cooperate but not as fully as they should,” he said.

Elisa L. Sanchez, deputy school superintendent (not related to Gregorio Sanchez), acknowledges that Compton’s Latino community has been pressing the school district to adopt an affirmative action plan and step up recruiting of more Spanish-speaking teachers.

“That certainly is a need in this district, as in many districts outside Compton,” said the deputy superintendent, pointing out that there is a statewide shortage of Spanish-speaking teachers.

Compton has only about 30 teachers who are credentialed as bilingual, though, it has about 7,500 Spanish-speaking students who are classified as having such limited skills in English that they must be taught in Spanish. That is a ratio of 250 to 1. In the same classification, Long Beach has 8,140 students and 71 teachers with bilingual credentials, a ratio of 114.6 to one.

There is a crying need, too, say Chavez and other Latino leaders, for bilingual personnel in various city departments.

“Just recently, the police force hired two bilingual service representatives,” Chavez said. “We were without any bilingual service representatives for over two years. Imagine how a Spanish-speaking person felt when he called in to report a crime and nobody knew what he was talking about,” Chavez said. “There was nobody there to communicate with him.”

Norma Garcia, the city’s personnel specialist in charge of affirmative action, says that a total of four bilingual dispatchers have recently been hired in the Police Department.

Chavez has nothing but praise for what he says are City Manager Goins’ efforts to bring bilingual personnel into City Hall. “He has recognized (the need) but he still has the resistance of individuals on the City Council and in City Hall,” Chavez said.

Goins meets regularly with a Latino task force that was set up last year after a group of Latino police officers charged that they and other Compton residents felt discriminated against.

The biggest problem that Latinos face in trying to gain equal rights, Gregorio Sanchez said, comes back to the lack of elected Latino officials. “We’ve got like a barrier right there and we have to jump or go over that barrier.”

Strategically, chamber president Pallan said, chances are good that Chavez will make a strong showing because there are seven other candidates in the District 3 contest and the vote is expected to be thinly spread among them. Pallan says Chavez supporters are already planning to set up a phone bank to help win votes for their candidate.

ETHNIC TREND IN COMPTON SCHOOLS

Enrollment Latino Black Other 1984-85 26,856 30% 67% 3% 1985-86 27,102 34 63 3 1986-87 27,565 39 59 2 1987-88 26,205 42 56 2 1988-89 26,367 47 51 2

Source: Compton Unified School District.