No Strength in Numbers for L.A.’s Divided Latinos : Minorities: In riots’ wake, leaders realize they have not kept pace with the community’s growth and diversity.

Three miles away, across the river, a barrio was self-destructing.

In a community crowded with hundreds of thousands of immigrants from El Salvador, Guatemala and Mexico, businesses were being torched and looted. People were being shot and killed as lawlessness cut a riotous swath thorough South Los Angeles, the city’s fastest-growing Latino area.

On the Eastside, in Los Angeles’ oldest Mexican-American enclave, a network of community leaders moved into action--not to help quell the neighboring violence, but to protect their own community, one that has struggled to assimilate into the city’s political and economic life.

During the first 48 hours of the civil unrest, they convened neighborhood meetings, issued countless appeals for calm and organized street patrols, hoping to keep the chaos from spreading across the old bridges that span the concrete banks of the Los Angeles River, providing entry into the Eastside.

“We knew that if we lost the river we would lose everything we’ve worked for all these years,” said Frank Villalobos of Barrio Planners, an East Los Angeles community planning group.

In the end, East Los Angeles remained virtually unscathed by the violence that ripped through South Los Angeles and the heavily Latino Pico-Union district--a dramatic illustration of the importance of community organization and of the separate nature of the city’s Latino communities.

The months since the riots have been a time of reflection and reassessment among Latino activists throughout Los Angeles, many of whom say the absence of broad-based, cohesive leadership has left the city’s dominant ethnic group unable to realize its potential clout and have its special needs addressed.

“Who is organizing the Latino underclass?” asked longtime civil rights activist Richard Fajardo, who unsuccessfully ran for an Eastside state Assembly seat in June. “Nobody.”

In the city of Los Angeles, although Latinos are the largest ethnic group, they hold only two of 15 City Council seats. “Power is supposed to be in the numbers,” said Villalobos. “We have the numbers but we don’t have the power.”

Why hasn’t the Latino population explosion translated into political power?

At the heart of the problem is the rapid growth itself, its splintered demographics and a small voter turnout.

Today, the Latino community is a mix of Salvadorans, Guatemalans, Mexican immigrants, Cubans and Puerto Ricans--along with Mexican-American families who have lived in Southern California three generations or longer. At best, there has been only limited networking between these diverse groups to advance a common agenda and present a powerful voice at City Hall.

Further diminishing their political muscle is the fact that in such new barrios as South Los Angeles, Latinos make up the majority of the population but only 5% to 7% of the registered voters. Although many are legal residents, they are prevented from voting because they are not citizens. Others are here illegally and cannot get on a track toward citizenship.

For the most part, the only effective source of Latino leadership has been in the deeply rooted neighborhoods of East Los Angeles, geographically and culturally distant from many of the city’s fastest-growing barrios.

This political reality became apparent in the waning hours of the rioting, when elected Latino officials distanced themselves from residents of the immigrant enclaves hit hardest by the violence.

“I try my best to be an advocate for (immigrants’) concerns,” Los Angeles City Councilman Richard Alatorre said in the days after the rioting. “But I didn’t get elected to represent them.”

Most Eastside leaders--including Alatorre and Los Angeles County Supervisor Gloria Molina--can trace their political roots to the Chicano Power movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Two decades later, the Chicano movement has spawned a tight network of politicians and activists who have edged their way into the circles of power. It is a cozy fraternity, some Latino activists say, that has lost touch with the concerns that once gave the movement its impetus.

“When I think of a movement, I think of people in the streets, organized and with a certain level of political consciousness,” said one Pico-Union community organizer. “What we have now is a lot of people and institutions, in positions of some power, who have benefited from a movement in the ‘60s and ‘70s. And while possessing that power, they’ve forgotten to develop a movement to create new leaders.”

The Pico-Union activist was unwilling to be quoted by name because, he contended, East Los Angeles officials control valuable resources and his organization might be hurt if he were to criticize them publicly.

The struggle over limited resources determines much of what Latino groups can and cannot do to empower their community.

Because funding is hard to come by, for example, many Latino voter registration efforts have focused on areas where Latinos are most likely to achieve electoral success, to the detriment of newer barrios.

“If I spend 100 hours trying to register voters in the San Gabriel Valley, I might get somebody elected,” activist Fajardo pointed out. “But if I go to South-Central, I might just be spinning my wheels.”

The political debates within Los Angeles’ Latino communities mean little to the newly arrived immigrants who live in the city’s most overcrowded and run-down neighborhoods and work the region’s lowest-paying jobs. Not surprisingly, these were the neighborhoods hardest hit by looting during the riots.

“The one thing that everybody should be working for is to enfranchise the Hispanic here,” said David Herrera, pastor at the Nativity Catholic Church in South Los Angeles. “The presence of the Hispanic in South-Central has yet to be accepted in the minds of the media and the city and also the Chicano leadership.”

One organization that admittedly has failed to address the needs of South Los Angeles Latinos is the powerful and entrenched East Los Angeles Community Union, commonly called TELACU. Born in the 1970s as a grass-roots organization, TELACU has become a corporation with $300 million in assets and leaders who are regarded as consummate City Hall insiders.

In the words of TELACU spokesman Rudy Garza: “We’ve learned how to use the system.”

TELACU, like many Eastside groups, has rarely worked on a project in South Los Angeles, despite the fact that the community is home to 340,000 Latinos.

Dozens of legal aid clinics, women’s health centers and job training offices catering to Spanish speakers line Atlantic Boulevard, Brooklyn Avenue and the other major Eastside thoroughfares. By contrast, it is possible to drive for miles along Slauson or Florence avenues in South Los Angeles without encountering a single clinica or centro legal nestled among dozens of Latino-run taquerias and furniture stores .

“You’re talking about a transient community,” Garza said in response to criticisms that his organization has failed to reach out to South Los Angeles immigrants. “I’m not sure that a lot of these people have an interest in being part of the system.”

TELACU President David Lizarraga said he realizes that his group has neglected the economic and social needs of the city’s newly arrived immigrants, especially in South Los Angeles. “There is not at this time a Latino social service infrastructure within that community,” Lizarraga said. “That’s our fault. . . . Where can we point the finger but to ourselves?”

Lizarraga said that, in the near future, his group will reach into South Los Angeles for the first time in its two-decade history.

Similarly, Central American activists say that for the past 10 years they have been so overwhelmed by the struggle against U.S. foreign policy and U.S. immigration authorities that they did not address the deepening economic crisis in the city’s Central American barrios.

Now that the riots have brought leadership problems into the open, there have been numerous calls for unity.

“We’re all one people, regardless of where we come from--the Rio Grande Valley, Chihuahua or El Salvador,” said Villalobos, who recently became a member of the Latino Unity Coalition, a group formed with the support of Molina and other leaders. “We (Mexican-Americans) have the obligation to teach what we’ve learned over the last 20 years to the newcomers.”

Many people in immigrant communities are so removed from the political process that a key part of the Unity Coalition’s work has been to explain to people in immigrant communities simply how local government works in the U.S., Villalobos said. “We have to go and tell them things like, ‘This is City Hall, here’s the police station, this is where you go to complain.’ ”

The Unity Coalition recently joined two dozen groups in forming a Latino Unity Caucus, an umbrella organization that held its first meeting in June. In addition to those efforts, many Latino groups are meeting with agencies from groups outside the community, in an effort to forge inter-ethnic alliances.

At the Central American Refugee Center in the Pico-Union area, Salvadoran and Guatemalan organizers have been meeting with Korean and African-American groups in the days since the riots in an effort to start joint employment and development programs.

“We just woke up and started building these coalitions in the progressive community we’ve been talking about for 10 years,” said Roberto Lovato of the Central American Refugee Center. “We have to learn to work together, or we’ll end up at each other’s throats.”

For Lovato and other Angeleno activists of Salvadoran descent, the last year has seen a sharp turn in the focus of their efforts. Not long ago, Salvadoran activists in the United States organized most of their protests around U.S. foreign policy in Central America. Now, they are beginning to study urban redevelopment issues, learning more about the intricacies of City Hall.

“We need to evolve,” said Carlos Vaquerano, a 31-year-old Salvadoran immigrant and community relations director at the Central American Refugee Center. “Before, our main concern was to end the war in El Salvador and to stop the illegal deportations. Now, our community wants to establish itself in this country.”

In a move that symbolized the growing involvement of Salvadorans in city politics, Vaquerano was recently appointed to the board of Rebuild L.A.

“Most politicians don’t see us as a political force because we don’t have the right to vote,” Vaquerano said of the Central-American community in Los Angeles. “But once they see we are an organized force, fighting for our rights, they will support us.”

Once a political refugee who longed only to return to his country, Vaquerano now likes to speculate about the day a Salvadoran-American or Guatemalan-American is elected to the Los Angeles City Council.

Others argue, however, that the true lesson of the riots is that change will come only with unconventional actions, outside the daily orbit of a political system where the odds are stacked against Latinos.

Lisa Duran, an organizer for the Labor Community Watchdog, says the riots point to Latinos’ frustration with a political system in which a relatively small number of elected Latinos serve.

Duran and others are calling for a return to grass-roots organizing efforts that bring large numbers of Latino working people into the political process.

“I think we’re seeing the limits of what policy-makers can do without a mass base of support in the community,” Duran said. “Time and again we see in the Legislature that our representatives are the lone voice in the wilderness. You can’t go out on a limb if there’s no one to back you up.”

Duran, 31, and a handful of activists have begun a campaign in Wilmington to organize the mostly Latino community around environmental issues in an area of refineries and other industries. Organizers go door-to-door trying to persuade residents to attend meetings of the Air Quality Management District. It is difficult work, Duran says, and the type of organizing effort that many Latino groups have disdained in recent years.

“We know that if we can work at the grass roots, that’s a process of empowerment in itself,” Duran said. “People begin to change the way they look at the world.”

Rodolfo Acuna goes a step further, calling for the creation of new political and cultural organizations that bring together the disparate elements of the Latino community. Latinos, Acuna points out, have never had large organizations like the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People to advocate their interests.

“There has been a certain cohesive bonding between the middle-class black community and the working class,” Acuna said. “In the Chicano community, there isn’t one institution that bonds middle-class Mexicans to the poor. There is an institutional weakness in the community.

“Instead of just talking about unity, we’re going to have to start talking about building institutions of our own.”