Blacks, Latinos Begin to Shape a Delicate Coalition

As a made-for-television event depicting racial harmony, it was perfect, Tracy Robinson recalls.

The mayor was there. So were eight city councilmen and an audience of several hundred, all telegenically arrayed on the steps of Los Angeles City Hall. The dignitaries and the diverse crowd made a perfect backdrop to pitch the 1990 census drive to the city’s African-American and Latino communities.

But that well-covered kick-off last spring also lingers in Robinson’s memory as an exercise in cross-cultural diplomacy and damage control.

“The day before, this event almost fell apart,” he says, referring to the backstage bargaining between black and Latino organizers over protocol and fund-raising. Among other things, the ceremony required religious balance, Robinson notes. “They wanted a Hispanic Catholic priest, we had a Baptist minister in there. So we had two invocations, we had two benedictions.”

“We had to meet for breakfast and for lunch and iron it all out.”

Today, Robinson, an employee of the city attorney’s office, uses this lesson to illustrate the sometimes delicate nature of coalition-building between the city’s two largest minorities, who have not had a long history of cooperation--or confrontation. And the joint census drive mirrors other pragmatic, private steps that are being taken in Los Angeles to build inter-ethnic relationships. In general, these projects are in their early stages, but they are based on the shared perception that power in Los Angeles will belong to groups that can forge a working majority to influence economic and social policy.

Indeed, the census stakes are high for minorities. Nationally, new population figures will be used to decide how about $28 billion in federal funding is spent as well as determine political representation. Early figures from the 1990 Census indicate that most of California’s population growth in the last 10 years stemmed from immigration, much of that from Mexico and Central America, pushing the state’s total to nearly 30 million people.

Final figures won’t be available for months, but observers agree that massive population shifts have taken place within the city and county. (The most recent estimates are that 15% of the county’s population is black; 37%, Latino). And these shifts will dramatically influence relationships between blacks and Latinos in this decade. For example, South-Central Los Angeles, once a largely black enclave, is now thought to contain a Latino majority, sparking fears in the black community that the political clout of blacks in the city will inevitably diminish.

So, Robinson, who wants to run for political office someday, is building bridges to the Latino community.

“One of the main reasons I’m doing bridge-building in the Hispanic community,” he says, “is that I truly believe there’s going to be a great deal of political opportunity for young politicians in the future who are strong in the black community or strong in the Hispanic community--and can operate in the other community.”

In fact, this practical view is being adopted on a larger scale.

“People need to have, in my view, some concrete economic or political interest that they share, that leads them to come together. Then they begin to work together and that achieves the human relations part of it,” says Manuel Pastor Jr., one of the organizers of the New Majority Task Force, a group of Asians, African-Americans, Latinos and Anglos formed in 1989 to develop economic opportunities in minority neighborhoods in Los Angeles.

Meanwhile, a group named the Ethnic Coalition was founded recently to seek a bigger voice for minorities on the economic impact of regional environmental and water planning. And California Tomorrow, another multi-ethnic organization, has begun a pilot project in the Compton Unified School District that “uses education as the linchpin to draw blacks and Latinos together,” says executive director Linda Wong.

“There hasn’t been much opportunity for leaders in (the black and Latino) community to work together until very recently,” Wong says, adding that cooperation between each community’s leaders is still an exception.

“Part of the problem is that so many of our organizations are ethnic-specific and very few are willing to cross the line,” Wong explains.

Historically, Wong adds, there has been less tension between blacks and Latinos in Los Angeles than elsewhere in the country. In the early 1980s during the last major recession, black-Latino relations in industrial states such as Michigan were tense. “Blacks felt very threatened, particularly in the economic sector,” Wong says.

Like Wong and others, Robinson pointed out that even when cooperation between racial groups takes place, it is almost always episodic rather than sustained.

“It’s not the type of problem people give attention to until there’s a crisis,” he says of black-Latino relations. “The issues in our respective communities are survival issues. When you’re busy trying to feed the kids and get on the bus to get to work, you don’t have time to worry about it. On a daily basis or even on a weekly basis I don’t see that happening.”

On the personal level, however, bridge-building alliances are being formed. Robinson and his co-worker and friend Julio Ramirez are a case in point. Robinson and Ramirez, a special assistant to city attorney James K. Hahn, say they often coordinate their extracurricular and official activities with an eye toward cross-cultural relations. They have worked together, off and on, since meeting as workers in Democrat Walter Mondale’s 1984 campaign.

In that time the two have forged a working relationship that relies on mutual trust.

“We can sit down and we both can compromise because of our relationship,” says Ramirez. “He knows I’m not going to fight him and I know he’s not going to fight me. . . . We’ve worked with each other for what, six years now? We were laughing right from the beginning. We never officially formed a coalition but just naturally through our work we tend to overlap a great deal.”

Partly because of his relationship with Ramirez, Robinson, who works in the gang enforcement unit, often speaks to Latino groups about the city’s gang problem.

“I’ve been surprised at how receptive the Hispanic community is when I’ve gone out to speak,” Robinson says.

Meanwhile, there is intense awareness that cooperation of another sort is necessary, especially in a year when redistricting at state and local levels promises to usher in major change. Later this month, for instance, voters are expected to elect the first Latino to serve on the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors in more than 100 years. The election comes after courts found that the county’s old supervisorial district boundaries discriminate against Latinos.

Richard Fajardo, a Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund attorney involved in state and local redistricting strategies, believes that political power for one group doesn’t have to come at the expense of another.

“I don’t necessarily want to diminish their (blacks’) political influence,” he explains. “My goal is enhancing the the Hispanic-American community’s influence, their right to representation. And I’m not sure those two goals are mutually exclusive.”

Nonetheless, many agree with California Tomorrow’s Wong that the current recession will “increase inter-ethnic competition for resources.”

The New Majority’s Pastor sums it up this way: A recession “makes the political task more difficult because organizing people around sharing burdens is a lot more difficult that organizing people around sharing benefits.”