The Social Origins of the Referendum

...The postsuburban Valley perfectly fit urban theorists' definition of an "outer" or 26NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS NACIA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 26REPORT ON IMMIGRATION Simi Valley _ __j...

...Second, there is any of its track the Anglo laager in the west end of the rapidly diversi- for example, r fying San Fernando Valley just northwest of Los Mountjoy, wh Angeles, as well as the staunchly conservative new ent anti-immi towns, like Simi Valley in Ventura County and Santa including pro Clarita in northern Los Angeles County, which have hospitals th been cloned from the San Fernando Valley's white Barbara Coe...

...It recapitulates the explicit bigotry of Proposition 14 with the anti-tax fervor of Proposition 13...

...In scorning Woo, they essentially put a stake through the heart of multiracial coalition politics...

...Other major defense contractors, like Rocketdyne and Litton, slashed employment or transferred operations out of the Valley...

...He is currently writing a book on Southern California's trial by riot, fire and earthquake...

...It will either be them or us...

...court as Proposition 14 was, its sponsors will still have achieved their strategic goal of polarizing the state and, perhaps, the nation...

...Not surprisingly, SOHA was not only a pioneer of the Jarvis tax initiative, but also an aggressive opponent of school busing during the 1970s...

...And, even if Proposition 187 is eventually struck down in Mike Davis is a contributing editor to The Nation and a regular columnist for LA Weekly...

...In the early 1960s, for example, violent opposition to residential integration in the suburbs of southeastern Los Angeles County became the nucleus of a statewide movement to repeal fair-housing legislation...

...The stunning success of Proposition 13 in 1978 produced a wave of copy-cat initiatives in other states which, as in California, were adroitly manipulated to the advantage of corporate taxpayers...

...Other prominent Valley Democrats, led by State Senator David Roberti, have recently joined with the right-wing Republicans and foes of school integration to advocate the secession of the Valley from the majority non-white Los Angeles Unifed School District...

...I've hear their ghetto blasters...I do not want any riffraff coming into our city...

...Latinos, less than a fifth of the population in 1980, are now more than a third, possibly even 40...

...The collapse of the Valley's olds of the new nativism...

...praised him a 187 campaign The freeway exit to the famed Santa Anita also been rec Racetrack, 15 miles east of downtown Los have singled Angeles, is also the off-ramp to Arcadia (popula- and demonstr tion: 48,290...

...by ChicanoDespite the Supreme Court's overturning of dejure residential segregation in California in 1948, Arcadia managed to exclude even a token AfricanAmerican population through the 1980 Census...

...The local media, for example, have tended to concentrate on the lurid personalities of the initiative's original organizers, such as Orange County businessman Ron Prince or former INS commissioner Harold Ezell...

...First there are the aging, but still affluent communities of the San Gabriel Valley 24NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS NACIA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 24REPORT ON IMMIGRATION Pro- and anti-187 graffiti on a wall in Berkeley California days before the election...

...A look at the social dynamics of two local communities will help illustrate how Proposition 187 first attained critical mass in the great suburban valleys of southern California...

...The secret is simply that the west Valley, unified by bipartisan white solidarity, is now the most powerful bloc vote in the entire city...

...But crime...

...Clad in black ninja gear, and equipped with night-vision binoculars and video cameras, they stake out locations-almost always in Latino areas-where graffiti and drug dealing are supposedly taking place...

...The hometown hero, emains Republican State Senator Richard o in recent years has sponsored 30 differgrant bills in the California legislature, posals to strip funding from schools and at admit undocumented immigrants...

...But Latinos still remain uncomble...

...Last January, the police occupied Arcadia High School after a wild melee between Chinese and white students...

...The Valley has ceased to be the golden mean between Beverly Hills and Watts...

...tough little debauched municipality"-was incorpo- sive in Arcadj rated in 1903 by robber baron Lucky Baldwin to protect mer Citrus I his racing, brothel and liquor interests...

...None of these approaches, however, illuminates much about the actual social landscape that produced Proposition 187...

...Warner Ranch, with its bank highrises and corporate headquarters, was developed as the Valley's own alternative "downtown...

...Nor has the community's condependence on Latino labor mollified ditional intolerance...

...The old distinction between the white-collar and blue-collar valleys has been overlaid by a neo-Dickensian class structure of princes and paupers...

...The Valley's white/Anglo majority, which had been 92% in 1960, fell to 58% in 1990, only to decline further into minority status over recent years...

...Arcadia- with nostalgi referred to by the Los Angeles Times in 1909 as a "golden past...

...Although the orchards are long ial relations of the ancien regime-when re peons in a segregated rural society-are d in the politics and consciousness of the This white supremacist tradition, in turn, rent grievances, one of which is simply the esence of Latinos in public space...

...before, almost none of the town's Latino n Arcadia...

...When a local hamburger restaurant sponsored a "classic-car night," the Arcadia police organized a special task force and gave out 300 tickets to customers, mainly young Latinos from nearby neighborhoods...

...This is part of a larger trend amongst white San Gabriel Valley communities to reinforce spatial apartheid by imposing prohibitive weekend park fees or blocking streets that connect them to poorer communities...

...Latinos and African Americans were targeted for extra field interrogations, searches and traffic stops to discourage them from entering the city...

...They preferred to spoon, instead, with Republican millionaire Richard Riordan, whose election as mayor was based on massive support in the west Valley...

...Buicks and Cadillacs parked in its driveways, amplifies cur Scrubbing Arcadia white meant expelling its resi- innocuous pr dents of color, beginning in the 1920s with the eviction In essence, of Baldwin's veteran African-American and Japanese servants who employees, whose votes had incorporated the city in the pleted...

...Political scientists, searching for more general explanations, have focused on the broader electoral trends revealed in the November 1994 vote...

...Attorneys volunteered to represented him, while other residents offered money for a possible defense fund...

...Not surprisingly, crime and gang violence have soared in tandem with unemployment and welfare rates...

...The east Valley now has a larger Mexican population than east Los Angeles...

...VOL XXIX, No 3NovlDsc 1995 27 - VOL XXIX, No 3 Nov/DEc 1995 27REPORT ON IMMIGRATION Few were surprised, for example, when Republican Congressman Elton Latinizal Galleghy-who represents part of the wealthy northwest Valley as well as its San Ferns white-flight offspring, the city of Simi Valley (notorious home of the first has bee Rodney King trial)-proposed a con- with e stitutional amendment stripping U.S.born children of undocumented immi- decline grants of their right to citizenship...

...Yet people of color have always been essential to Arcadia's domestic economy...

...It has been one thing to minimize the bluecollar Latino or African-American populations through control of apartment construction, and another to prevent affluent Chinese professionals, often with cash in hand, from buying their way into an Arcadian lifestyle...

...The white Valley's traditional fear of urban disorder on the other side of the Hollywood Hills has been replaced by an obsession with ethnic change in its own backyard...

...From 1989 to 1993, like victims of a deadly economic virus, the Valley's largest employers-Lockheed (Burbank), Hughes (Canoga Park) and General Motors (Van Nuys)-shut their gates forever...

...With the exception of the traditional Chicano neighborhoods of San Fernando and a tiny African-American public-housing enclave in Pacoima, the Valley was strictly monochromatic...

...But the issue that most deeply agitates the souls of white folk in Arcadia and neighboring communities has been the arrival of a large Asian (mainly Chinese) middle class...

...But the real, door-toon of the door jihad against immigrants has been carried out by dozens of powerndo Valley ful homeowners' associations...

...Perhaps because gone, the soc of its checkered past, Arcadia has for generations tried Mexicans wei to imitate the suburban idyll of a Norman Rockwell still fossilize painting, from its sparkling church steeples to the new local elites...

...In the 18month period following the closure of Lockheed, for instance, 80,000 new welfare cases were added, mainly in the east Valley...

...Rene Arce, 18, died immediately, and David Hilo, 20, was wounded...

...Arcadia even broke tradition with other like Arcadia wealthy towns in the San Gabriel Valley citrus belt by construction refusing to tolerate the usual other-side-of-the-tracks (and, indeed, colonia for its Mexican laborers...

...Meanwhile, inside the homes (median value: $375,000), women, collectively known to their employers as "Maria," are vacuuming carpets or ers...

...When Arcadia's Wilderness Park, built with federal funds during the 1930s, became popular with Spanishspeaking families, anti-immigrant sentiment reared its ugly head once again...

...What follows are brief case studies of two communities that were early strongholds of the new nativism [see map, p. 27...

...nother hotbed of pro-187 organizing, the San Fernando Valley was North America's most famous 1950s suburb...

...Was the "Save Our State" initiative the spontaneous combustion of suburban populism, or cynical arson by a handful of powerful conservative politicians...

...Ethnic recomposition, moreover, has been expressed as spatial polarization: the wealthier west Valley remains 70% white/Anglo, while the poorer and more populous east Valley has a Latino plurality...

...As a result, Valley business and homeowner groups have won unprecedented influence within the Riordan Administration, while veteran African-American leaders have been pushed out into the cold...

...The changing diap deep historical structures of Anglo-versus-Mexican eth- As 50 years nic conflict are especially visible in the former garden workers live i cities such as Arcadia and Covina that once comprised tinued slavist southern California's "Citrus Empire...

...The most notorious street in Los Angeles, following a sensational series of murders and robberies, is no longer in a Southcentral ghetto or the MacArthur Park tenement district: it is Blythe Street near the abandoned General Motors assembly plant in Van Nuys...

...one of the co-founders of SOS, has s "our godfather" for fertilizing the initial with his own funds...

...Economic forecasters at the University of California at Los Angeles have searched in vain for some evidence that insurance payments and federal disaster relief have produced the predicted "Keynesian rebound" in the area's battered economy...

...The ensuing victory of Proposition 14 in November, 1964-supported by twothirds of California's white voters-emboldened racist forces across the country to intensify their resistance to civil rights demands...

...In this scheme of things, Latino and Asian immigrants have no difficulty figuring out who has been allotted the functional role of German Jews...

...Proposition 187 has opened a Pandora's box of bigotry and white anger...

...Mayor Joseph Ciraulo agreed: "The park has been overrun with these people...

...Although the mean-spiritedness of Proposition 187 is more explicit than its predecessors, its social origins are similarly opaque...

...In the Valley itself, for example, two-thirds of Latino adults are reckoned to be noncitizens, ineligible to vote...

...Like the tax rebellion, the current anti-immigrant backlash also served as a springboard for the presidential ambitions of a California governor: Ronald Reagan then, Pete Wilson now...

...The dramatic increase in the Valley's clout at Los Angeles City Hall seems paradoxical in face of its relative economic decline...

...anti-immigrant diatribes are saturated c references to the San Gabriel Valley's " Indeed, the weight of history is oppresia and in the other garden cities of the forEmpire...

...Picture contemporary Arcadia, for example, on any busy weekday: a veritable army of Latino gardeners and landscape laborers are trimming hedges, blowdrying lawns, and skimming leaves from the surface of pools throughout the city...

...Not surprisingly, Valley politicians pander to this white vote...

...Southern California seems to have a special destiny for transmuting middle-class anxieties into terrifying political firestorms...

...If gated communities are the rage in the tony west Valley, homelessness and massive overcrowding are depressingly common in the multiethnic east Valley...

...There are, of course, a variety of perspectives from which to examine these issues...

...The supply of affordable rental housing, already tight, was devastated by the January 1994 earthquake, which also produced a new round of business failures and layoffs...

...These unlikely allies also openly sabotaged the 1993 mayoral campaign of council member Michael Woo, who ran with the endorsement of Los Angeles' Latino and African-American community leaders...

...It ha, first place...

...They have been harassed with vandalism, cross-burnings and incessant anti-Asian epithets...

...Each of these innocent activities has provoked hysterical and repressive responses...

...Even though most Chinese residents remain loyal to national Republican politics, their new assertiveness in local politics has whipped white Arcadia into a frenzy...

...In the view of some Latino leaders, they veer dangerously close to becoming an anti-immigrant militia movement...

...And with "liberals" like Bielenson engaging in immigrant bashing, it has been easier for pro-187 grassroots groups to openly advocate race war...

...Outraged Latino community leaders demanded Masters' indictment for manslaughter, but District Attorney Gil Garcetti let him go and arrested Hilo instead...

...Last January, for example, a self-appointed Valley vigilante, William Masters II, shot two youth-he described them as "skinhead Mexicans"-whom he discovered painting graffiti on a Hollywood freeway overpass...

...Latinization of the Valley has been equated with economic decline and rising crime...

...Local pro-187 newsletters spew Himmlerian complaints about the "stench of urination, defecation, narcotics, savagery and death" supposedly associated with Latino and Asian ti n c a lI 1c immigration...

...The tide of demographic change that has eroded the relative numerical positions of both Anglos and African Americans has not translated into a stronger electoral position for Latinos...

...The neighborhoods that they abandoned in North Hollywood, Sepulveda, Van Nuys and Burbank were quickly occupied by tens of thousands of new immigrants from Mexico and Central America...

...One leader of the neighboring Highland Oaks Homeowners Association complained: "I've seen their graffiti...

...As Voice *ties play leader Glenn Spencer put it: "This is part of a reconquest of the American nigrant- Southwest by foreign Hispanics g card...

...InterestArcadia ingly, the only major local "e "Covina business that was not downalley sized or dismantled was the adult film industry, an estigeles mated 80% of whose worldL wide production originates -- / U Toyl \ in the Valley...

...The Los Angeles Times reported that police "were overwhelmed by dozens of calls from graffiti-haters supporting Masters...

...This dramatic growth in the employment base reversed the traditional outflow of commuters, and by the late 1970s there was a net influx...

...Its oak-shaded streets and handsome Mountjoy's ranch-style homes belie its dubious origins...

...he San Fernando Valley's political establishment claims that this social crisis is a result of the "brown invasion...

...As Masters snarled after his release: "Where are you going to find 12 citizens to convict me...

...Although it was eventually ruled unconstitutional, Proposition 14 helped spark the Watts riot the following spring, and it was an important catalyst for George Wallace's "northern strategy" appeal to northern white voters during the 1968 presidential primaries...

...flight...

...The urbanization of the San Fernando Valley also drastically reshaped its class and ethnic structures...

...Arcadians want a silent, invisible army of vanish the minute their chores are coms been easy enough for affluent suburbs to use zoning laws to restrict apartment that might attract working-class Latinos for landlords to selectively discriminate tenants...

...Neither of the young men had a criminal record...

...As a result, Arcadia has restricted use of the park (now a "wilderness center") to residents...

...A decade later, another of Los Angeles' major suburban regions, the San Fernando Valley, emerged as the epicenter of Howard Jarvis' crusade to reduce property taxes...

...As a result, the active electorate (still 75% white/Anglo) remains dramatically out-of-step with the city's population (approximately 62% Latino, Asian and African American...

...sic!]-someone is going to be leaving the state...

...Some have gone so far as to describe post-riot Los Angeles, with its declining economy and troubled suburbs, as the "sunshine Weimar...

...Proposition 187 ("Save Our State" or "SOS") is the newest, and potentially most toxic, of southern California's exports to national politics...

...The referendum exemplifies that area's special destiny for transmuting middle-class anxieties into terrifying political firestorms...

...After the minor political earthquake that elected the first ChineseAmerican to the city council, vindictive white members prevented him from assuming the mayoralty in normal rotation...

...At various times, the hamhanded city council tried to deter Asian homebuyers with "English Only" resolutions and a bizarre anti-tree-cutting ordinance based on a rumor that Chinese would not live in neighborhoods with trees in the frontyards...

...In those supposedly halcyon days, tens of thousands of fathers-embodied by television characters such as Ozzie Nelson of "Ozzie and Harriet" fame-commuted every morning over the Hollywood Hills to their jobs in Los Angeles, and then returned at night to their nuclear families in the Valley...

...Others steeled themselves to the long commute from Palmdale and Lancaster in the high desert up north where home prices were $100,000 cheaper...

...Some of these activists have also become involved in the burgeoning "citizen surveillance" movement that supposedly aids the police in uncovering crime in the Valley...

...The national press, on the other hand, has stressed the opportunistic role of Governor Wilson...

...As a 0o consequence, the clusters of "\/ s smaller aerospace subcontractors in Chatsworth and along San Fernando Road were devastated...

...The Chinese persisted, however, and now constitute nearly a quarter of Arcadia's population...

...It also provided Ronald Reagan's crusade against urban social programs with the figleaf legitimation of "fiscal populism...

...A former Arcadia police officer testified that she was "shocked to find that Asians, A Guatemalan immigrant mows the lawn in front of a suburban home in North Hollywood...

...As a result, poverty exploded...

...One man showed up at the jail, saying that he wanted to take Masters to dinner for performing a 'profound service to the community...

...high-wage manufacturing base had grim multiplier effects on low-wage jobs in light industry, construction and services...

...The Vietnam War industrialized and urbanized L.A.'s master bedroom...

...anta larita S Sa A n r nando *Pacoima S: Sepulveda San Fernando Valley Burbank Caoga Park *Van Nuys *Wodl and * O North Htlls Sherman Oaks Hollywood abrie c' G' 06, Beverly Hills *West Hollywood Pacific Ocean East Los An Los Angeles The San Fernando and San Gabriel valleys were early stronghc "edge" city: "a self-acting urban system independent of the parent central city and increasingly duplicate in function...

...Pc Latino groups felt betrayed when another Valley congressman, Anthony both pz Bielenson (D-Woodland Hills)-much admired as a "traditional fighting liber- the im al"-unexpectedly polevaulted to the baitir right and became the Galleghy amendment's co-sponsor...

...Day laborers, for example, solicit t of hardware stores, teenagers from nearmajority towns sometimes cruise local VOL XXIX, No 3 Nov/Drc 199525 25 VOL XXIX, NO 3 Nov/DEC 1995REPORT ON IMMIGRATION drive-ins, and large Latino families flock on weekends to foothill parks...

...Understanding the social forces that produced Proposition 187 is an urgent task, given that similar anti-immigrant initiatives have since emerged in a number of other states...

...Local politicians of both parties have played the immigrant-baiting card...

...Working-class whites, such as aerospace workers and law-enforcement officials, moved northward across the Santa Susana Mountains to Simi Valley or Santa Clarita-the new suburbs of the suburbs...

...In Burbank, for example, the Lockheed company grew into a huge sprawl of warinspired assembly plants and subcontract shops that lined San Fernando Road for miles...

...How has the postCold War restructuring of the southern Californian economy reinforced nativism and racism...

...Software and electronic firms created a major high-tech complex in the northwest Valley around Chatsworth...

...And to what extent does immigrant-bashing reflect actual "zerosum" competition between an emergent Latino plurality and a declining Anglo majority...

...Day laborers have been harassed and sometimes arrested...

...In this part of the San Gabriel Valley at least, support for Proposition 187 decodes into "yellow peril" as well as "brown menace...

...For example, the Sherman Oaks equated Homeowners' Association (SOHA), onomic which organized the virulent antiimmigrant group Voice of Citizens nd rising Together, has been leading the battle iticians of for the full and immediate implemen- tation of Proposition 187...

...Affluent whites, their net worth leveraged by the fantastic inflation in real-estate values in the 1970s, abandoned the central Valley for larger homes in the Chatsworth-Porter Ranch area, or for gated communities in eastern Ventura County...

...Latinization of the Valley coincided with sudden deindustrialization and catastrophic job loss...

...In February, 1939, against their 99% of Arcadians signed a unique "covenant," orga- fortably visi nized by a local escrow company, which promised to work in froni keep their little chunk of paradise "Caucasian forever...

...His decisive role has ognized by pro-immigrant activists who out his headquarters in Arcadia for sit-ins ations...

...foothills, located to the northeast of Los Angeles...

...As the Masters' shooting demonstrates, once racism becomes legitimate public discourse, racist acts are sure to follow...