Ringo H.W. Chiu/AP Photo
Protesters hold signs and shout slogans before the start of a Los Angeles City Council meeting, October 11, 2022, in Los Angeles.
The history of the great American cities is the history of ethnic succession. Cities in the Northeast and Midwest were governed by white Protestants until Irish immigrants and their children, whom the Protestant civic establishments largely despised, surged to the polls in sufficient numbers to wrest control. The Irish then became a civic establishment of their own, until, in some cities, later waves of immigrants ousted them. Fiorello La Guardia booted Tammany from New York’s City Hall with the votes of Italians, Jews, and the occasional WASP. In assembling a coalition of out-groups, La Guardia set a template for future urban regimes—including that in Los Angeles.
Perched at the other end of the country, L.A. had different in- and out-groups, different waves of foreign and internal immigrants. Its civic establishment was largely white Protestant until the 1960s and ’70s. Then, a liberal coalition of Jews (who’d begun coming to L.A. in sizable numbers in the 1930s, in part to work for Hollywood) and Blacks (who’d begun their mass migration when World War II arms factories were compelled by civil rights activists and the Roosevelt administration to hire Blacks) deposed right-wing demagogue Sam Yorty from the mayor’s office in favor of Black city councilmember Tom Bradley in the 1973 mayoral election. Bradley, subsequently re-elected four times, served as mayor until 1993.
The rise of Tom Bradley is almost a parable of rainbow politics. In the mid-1950s, L.A.’s one and only Latino city councilmember, Ed Roybal, ran for county supervisor (he lost, but went on to become the first Latino in Congress). Volunteering on his campaign, Bradley—then an LAPD officer—met Maury Weiner, a Jewish left-wing activist. Over the next 15 years, Weiner helped Bradley establish a crosstown base in liberal and Democratic organizations. This was an essential prerequisite to Bradley’s rise to citywide prominence. At the same time, civic coalitions of Black and Jewish civil rights activists arose, independent of but also essential to Bradley’s march to power.
Latinos had been the city’s 18th-century founders, of course, but their numbers didn’t start swelling until the latter half of Bradley’s mayoral tenure. It was not until the late 1980s that any efforts to start a Latino-Jewish leadership dialogue began, and not until the early 1990s that Latinos began winning elections in city council and state legislative districts. This often involved ousting white incumbents on L.A.’s Eastside and, later, the eastern San Fernando Valley, but term limits on state legislators also kicked in during the early ’90s, which led to a surge of Latino representation in the state Capitol. Antonio Villaraigosa became Speaker of the state Assembly in 1998, replacing Cruz Bustamante, the first Latino Speaker ever. When Villaraigosa won the L.A. mayor’s race over James Hahn in his second try in 2005, he was the first Latino mayor in the city in over 130 years.
Winning Latino representation in districts closer to home than Sacramento, however—in the L.A. City Council and the County Board of Supervisors, neither of which was then term-limited—proved more challenging. On the east side of the city and the county, which were rapidly becoming overwhelmingly Latino, representation was eventually assured, but the great migrations from Mexico and Central America also overflowed to the San Fernando Valley and South Central L.A., which was home to the vast majority of L.A.’s African Americans.
Beginning with the redistricting following the 1990 census, every ten years saw a modus vivendi established between the city’s Black and Latino political leaders.
A delicate dance ensued. Beginning with the redistricting following the 1990 census, every ten years saw a modus vivendi established between the city’s Black and Latino political leaders. Since the 1960s, the three of the city’s 15 council districts located in and around heavily Black South Central had been informally designated as Black seats, and Latino political leaders agreed not to contest them, even as the Black share of the city’s population shrank from 15 percent in the 1970 census to 8 percent in the 2020 census, and even as the city’s share of Latinos rose to 48 percent in 2020. By that time, every L.A. district represented by Blacks on the city council, in the legislature, and in Congress had a Latino plurality, and for most, a Latino majority.
By 2020, drawing the post-census boundaries of legislative and congressional districts had become the work of a nonpartisan commission. In the city of Los Angeles, however, setting the new lines for the city’s 15 council districts remained the work of the city’s sitting councilmembers. They alone would determine the makeup of their constituents. They alone would determine whether they or their colleagues could place into their new districts, even when largely working-class, such pockets of influence and affluence as universities like USC, or a suddenly gentrified downtown. Those voters would become their constituents, and possibly donors, or door-openers to other donors, for current or future campaigns.
All of this is the backstory to the disgrace now rocking Los Angeles.
ON MONDAY, THE LOS ANGELES TIMES AND KNOCK LA reported on and made public a recording of an unofficial meeting of three city councilmembers and the head of the L.A. County Federation of Labor, the 800,000-member local branch of the AFL-CIO. The meeting was held last year, as the council was shaping the city’s new districts. All four of the participants were Latinos.
Redistricting is seldom if ever a pristine process. In Los Angeles, where the government, as in all California cities, is nonpartisan, party affiliation has nothing to do with it. Even if it was partisan, it wouldn’t matter: At least 14 of the city’s 15 districts are overwhelmingly Democratic.
But ethnic representation has a great deal to do with it. Just four of the city’s 15 districts are currently represented by Latinos, though Latinos make up almost half of L.A.’s population, while three are still represented by Blacks, whom Latinos now outnumber by a 6-to-1 ratio in the population at large. That was the subtext of that year-ago meeting.
Had it just remained the subtext, L.A. would not be undergoing its current civic crisis. Two of the meeting’s participants, however, descended into vile and racist hate speech. Council President Nury Martinez lashed out at a white Westside councilmember, Mike Bonin, who had aligned himself with a range of Black causes. She denigrated his adopted Black son. Apparently on a roll, she also dismissed with obscenities the county’s Cuban American district attorney George Gascón (“Fuck that guy, he’s with the Blacks”), and for good measure, scorned Mexican immigrants from Oaxaca.
Still warming to her topic, she also singled out a Jewish member of the council-appointed redistricting committee for perpetuating the Jewish community’s supposed tilt in favor of Black representation, and expressed frustration with the fact that an Asian American, Nithya Raman, represented a council district centered in the city’s Koreatown, which long has been home to innumerable Korean-owned and -run establishments, but whose residential areas are overwhelmingly Latino.
Ringo H.W. Chiu/AP Photo/Wikimedia Commons
From left: Los Angeles City Councilmembers Gilbert Cedillo, Nury Martinez (who stepped down this week), and Kevin de León
Kevin de León, a former president of the state Senate and a failed mayoral candidate now serving as a councilmember, added a couple of similarly denigrating characterizations. The two others in attendance—outgoing councilmember Gil Cedillo and County Fed leader Ron Herrera—sat by mostly in silence, though Cedillo added to the denigration of Oaxacans in Koreatown (“Oaxacan Koreans. Not even like Kevin, little ones.”).
Within hours of the audio being released, demands for all four to resign rolled in from every quadrant of the California body politic, on up to even the president of the United States (who is in Los Angeles on a fundraising tour this week). All four have issued public apologies; Herrera has resigned; Martinez first stepped down from the council’s presidency, then took a leave of absence from her seat, and finally resigned on Wednesday afternoon. But the calls for the other councilmembers to resign have not just persisted but grown steadily louder.
Ironies abound. The policy and programmatic differences between L.A.’s Black and Latino elected officials, whether in the council, the legislature, or the congressional delegation, are few and far between. Miguel Contreras, the onetime leader of the County Fed, which hosted last year’s meeting, told me in the late 1990s that the federation would promote the legislative candidacies of two political novices for whom he saw a bright future: the Latino De León and the African American Karen Bass, currently a member of Congress and the leading candidate to win the city’s mayoralty in November’s election. L.A.’s outgoing, term-limited mayor, Eric Garcetti, is something of a rainbow unto himself, coming as he does from Italian, Jewish, and Mexican stock (though he failed to make much of an impact in any of those communities, or in the city at large). Garcetti’s predecessor, Villaraigosa, first dipped his toe into racial politics while still in his almost entirely Latino high school, where he formed a club with the handful of otherwise beleaguered Black students.
At the street level, while L.A. has certainly had its share of crime and gang violence over the past half-century, it’s seldom been Black vs. Latino. Black gangs have chiefly fought each other, as have Latino gangs. While Latino and Black neighborhoods have existed side by side in South L.A. for decades, they’ve done so largely peaceably, though tensions have certainly existed and ethnic conflicts have occasionally erupted at high schools.
Indeed, one might have anticipated more disharmony over the past 35 years. When immigrants began to flow into the city from Latin America, the racial composition of the workforces in several L.A. industries switched from Black to Latino. Hotels largely discharged their Black workers and hired new immigrants at a fraction of the cost; the same pattern prevailed among janitorial companies. While the shuttering of the region’s auto factories in the 1980s had spawned racially diverse plant closure protests, the swapping out of workforces along racial lines in these service industries produced little in the way of Black protest (though it played a role in the acceleration of Black migration out of the city). One register of Black discontent was the community’s vote on 1994’s Proposition 187, the Republican-sponsored ballot measure that sought to deny all public services—including the right to attend K-12 schools—to undocumented immigrants. The proposition (which won statewide but was immediately struck down by the courts) passed overwhelmingly in the white and somewhat conservative San Fernando Valley, and also passed, though by a very small margin, in the almost entirely Black neighborhoods of South Central. Fortunately, no prominent Black organizations had campaigned for the measure, and as the media largely ignored the meaning of South Central’s vote, it didn’t become a bone of contention between the Black and Latino leaderships.
So it’s come as something of a thunderbolt to Angelenos over the past couple of days that it’s within the city’s leadership—at least among its elected officials—that racial rivalries simmer and hatreds are casually expressed.
Ted Soqui/SIPA USA via AP Images
Councilmember Mike Bonin, whose son was the target of some of the recently released comments, addresses the council chambers, October 11, 2022, in Los Angeles.
THE L.A. OUTBURSTS ALSO COME AT A TIME when the politics of Latinos have come under unprecedented scrutiny. While the Latino electorate generally, and certainly in California, has maintained clear majority support for Democratic candidates and policies, the last couple of elections have shown a drift among some subgroups toward Republicans (working-class men most prominently). This has raised yet again a question that students of American politics have long mulled over: Would Latinos, a group historically looked down upon by the white majority, as well as a group that was and is overwhelmingly working-class, continue to support the civil rights and economic policies that the Black community supports and Democrats generally advance? Or would they grow more conservative as they entered more easily into “mainstream” (that is, white) American society than Blacks could, and as their economic fortunes rose? Would they move rightward, as previous immigrant groups like the Irish and Italians had done?
Some of the variables in this calculation offset others. In economic matters, Latinos remain distinctly progressive, overwhelmingly favoring unions, higher minimum wages, child tax credits, and a range of social benefits. On civil rights policies that have benefited both Latinos and Blacks, like affirmative action, their support, unsurprisingly, remains constant.
But the political path of non-Black out-groups, of immigrant groups denigrated by more established white America, has never been smooth or necessarily bent toward racial egalitarianism. The Irish immigrants whom the white Protestant civic establishments treated like filth throughout much of the 19th century also saw that civic establishment—embodied in the Northern Republican Party—inclined to help Southern Blacks until the mid-1870s. And while many in the civic establishment bought their way out, the Irish were drafted into the Union Army during the Civil War. Their fury reached a peak in 1863 with the great New York draft riot, in which Irish mobs killed at least 100 Blacks and trashed upper-class white neighborhoods as well. Despised as they were, they felt, at least, they were above the Blacks in America’s racial pecking order, and the efforts to bring Blacks closer to their own status had to be resisted.
Much the same was the case among numerous Italian Americans, whose claim to whiteness was actually contested by some of the same civic establishments. In 1891, 11 Italian immigrants were taken from jail and lynched by a New Orleans mob replete with some of the city’s elected leaders. That came as close to experiencing what Blacks all too commonly experienced as Italian Americans ever wished to get. As the politics of Greater New York (and Spike Lee movies) make clear even to this day, many Italian Americans’ fear and loathing of African Americans is with us still.
It’s come as something of a thunderbolt to Angelenos that it’s within the city’s leadership that racial rivalries simmer and hatreds are casually expressed.
The level of Latino anti-Black animosity doesn’t appear to have reached the levels that have characterized that exhibited by many in other, earlier immigrant groupings. But it does exist, as a new book reviewed in the Prospect just last week attests. While thousands of Latinos, particularly among the young, participated in the Black Lives Matter demonstrations following George Floyd’s murder and called for an end to systemically racist police practices, such positions were clearly anathema to the third of Latino voters who cast their ballots for Donald Trump. It’s a safe bet that many, perhaps most, pro-Trump Latinos have come to the same realization that many predecessor groups of immigrants, immigrant descendants, and other out-groups have realized: that in America, one path into the white mainstream requires (or at minimum, involves) an embrace of anti-Black racism.
What Los Angeles is suddenly encountering, however, isn’t an outburst from pro-Trumpists. De León, Cedillo, and Herrera each played key roles in some of the city’s defining progressive battles of the past 30 years: Herrera’s decades-long advocacy for the city’s beleaguered port truckers; Cedillo’s often solitary and ultimately successful battle to secure driver’s licenses for undocumented Californians; De León’s organizing of the historic anti–Prop 187 rally in 1994, which gave rise to the statewide immigrant rights movement. Martinez can claim no such pedigree, but she’s a mainstream center-left Democrat nonetheless.
But city politicos are inherently involved in battles of ethnic succession, and never more so than when they’re reshaping representation, and their own careers, through the decennial rite of redistricting. That’s when racialized politics become personal, and may become vicious as well. So long as these hatreds are confined to private meetings in private rooms, we may not fully grasp their existence, but that doesn’t mean they don’t shape policy decisions. Today more than ever, with a Republican Party and a Republican Court bent on winnowing America down to a white person’s nation, we need elected officials who can balance support for their own group with genuine support for others. Public officials who can’t do that have no business governing, particularly in our increasingly diverse cities, where multiracial coalitions are the sine qua non of progressive advances and set the template for national liberal regimes. Those who manifestly can’t do that—as Nury Martinez and her ilk clearly can’t—should have no place in government, or in the struggle to build a more just and humane society.
