Latino Power Shakes Up L.A.

By Sylvester Monroe/Los Angeles

In its 115-year history, the powerful Los Angeles County board of supervisors has never had an elected member who was not a white male. This fact has long rankled members of the Hispanic community, who constitute one- third of the county's 9 million residents -- the largest concentration of Latinos in any U.S. urban area. Now a coalition of Hispanic groups, together with the Justice Department and the American Civil Liberties Union, is challenging the white board members' monopoly in federal court. Their lawsuit charges that the five-man board intentionally gerrymandered election districts to keep Latinos out of office. Hispanic activists across the nation regard the case as a key part of their strategy for achieving "number power" -- political representation that is commensurate with the group's burgeoning population.

With each supervisor representing approximately 1.5 million people -- more than the combined size of three congressional districts -- the Los Angeles County board is the most powerful local-government body in the country, wielding broad executive and legislative powers. The suit asserts that in order to preserve their political bases the five white supervisors, in violation of the federal Voting Rights Act, drafted a redistricting plan in 1981 that deliberately diluted Latino voting strength by splitting the county's then 2 million Hispanics among three districts. The board, charges A.C.L.U. attorney Mark Rosenbaum, is "the most powerful and enduring all- whites club of local government ever in this nation." J. Morgan Kousser, a political-science professor at Caltech, testified that "it was not possible to protect five Anglo incumbents without discriminating against the Hispanic population." The steps the board took to exclude Hispanics, he said, closely resemble those used to prevent blacks from voting in the Jim Crow South.

The supervisors have adamantly denied any racial jiggering of district boundaries. They refuse to consider expanding the board to seven members, as their critics have suggested. And they resist the idea of creating a new, predominantly Latino district, which is what the plaintiffs are asking U.S. District Judge David V. Kenyon to do. Such a plan, says Supervisor Peter Schabarum, would be "fundamentally un-American" and "racist." He adds, "I have real trouble with a Voting Rights Act that says ethnic groups ought to have a district fashioned just so they can have one of theirs representing them."

But recent legal history is on the plaintiffs' side. Ever since the 1980 census pointed up the disparity between Hispanics' growing numbers in the U.S. and their lack of political representation, Latino groups have pushed the Justice Department to bring -- and win -- a series of cases similar to the L.A. County suit. Such actions have prompted the redrawing of state and congressional districts in Illinois and Texas. "Should we win this case, our community will get a big psychological boost," says Antonia Hernandez, president and general counsel of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, a party to the suit. "It goes beyond voting for one of our own. It's the psychological feeling that we're now part of the process."