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| Exemplary Echo Park census tract from data compiled by LA Eastsider. |
"The participation of the Los Angeles Latino community in the process of redistricting has been extremely low,"
this editorial at La Opinion says--with a straight face.
Indeed, Latino community participation has been low--because as the drafts have been drawn, Latinos have nothing to complain about.
In fact, the people who draw the lines have drawn them all in such a way that Latino districts absorb more gringos without threatening their existing demographic tilt at all.
From
Sunland-Tujunga to
Hollywood to
Downtown, small but sizable communities that skew more Anglo than Latino have been annexed into Latino-dominated districts. It's the same kind of
La Raza redistricting that has given Latinos an over-representation in the State Assembly.
There's good reason for the pro-Latino bias in redistricting: the Mayor's nominee to head the commission,
Arturo Vargas. Vargas is Executive Director of
the
National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials (NALEO). But there's far more to the story than that.
Many Anglo Councilmembers, such as
Paul Krekorian and
Paul Koretz, appointed weak commission members who were much absorbed with other things--Krekorian's, in fact, barely knew the district at all, and Koretz's,
David Roberti, has spent his entire political career involved with State-level rather than City-level politics. Conversely, Latino Councilmembers appointed Latino-centric sharks like
Mike Trujillo (by Alarcon) and
Jose Cornejo (by Cardenas), longtime Villaraigosa order-takers who still believe in
the Eastside Latino Machine, despite its recent failures.
How did we get here, when LA's population isn't really changing all that much?
The interests of balanced, affinity-based
representation no longer carve up the City of Los Angeles, the County of
Los Angeles, or the State of California after a census.
This ProPublica piece, published in late December, proves as much.
But the truth is that affinity-based representation hasn't been a part
of the view of most our best-known politicians for some time. Instead,
the
interests of a peculiar kind of redistricting not found elsewhere in
America--call it
La Raza Redistricting--dominates
the local redistricting zeitgeist at State and City level within the
bailiwick of Los Angeles. The practitioners, drawing mostly from
partisan, agenda-driven materials provided to them by
MALDEF and the
William C. Velasquez Institute,
are by no means exclusively Latino; but they do use shopworn, outmoded
Latino political and demographic myths to advance their cause, which is
closely wed to Democratic Party gaming of the process in the City and
the State.
The myths the
La Raza Redistricters use to advance their cause
are two: they insist that the City of Los Angeles is growing, and they
insist that as it grows, it is becoming more Latino-multicultural all
the time.
Neither premise is true at our civic level. The City is not growing in
any
appreciable way whatsoever, in fact; it is more like a kaleidoscope,
shifting patterns but not colors, and generally displacing low rentals
for pricey ones, while giving lip-service to affordable housing efforts
that are more of a lottery for the remaining poor than a policy for
all. The City's ethnic saturation point has long ago been
reached--likely around 2003 and 2004. But the
La Raza
Redistricters at MALDEF and WCVI who ply and play the redistricting
appointments at both the City and State level pretend these things are
true for the sake of extending Latino-tilting Democratic power.
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| LAUSD Enrollments by year |
How far off base are these myths, so readily swallowed as conventional wisdom even by Valley Republicans?
Consider this: even with more Mexicans here than any city outside of
Mexico City, with more Salvadorans here than in any city outside of El
Salvador, &c., Los Angeles still
didn't appreciably grow in population in any way over the past decade.
Two and six-tenths percent growth over the past decade is almost exactly
a quarter of one percent
a year. Of course, had the Mayor not pushed the census count up so
aggressively with a big PR campaign in 2009--which was, in fact,
cheating--LA would have actually shown
population loss from 2000 to 2010.
And the institution that most widely services all these people who are not arriving--the
LAUSD--has been
shrinking in enrollment numbers since 2003--this year dropping to 1999 levels--despite building 160 new schools over the past decade.
So where's all this Latino growth in this pueblo? If the City isn't
growing in population--and if the local public school district is
shrinking in size--
where are all these booming Latino communities?
Despite all this, top Democratic Party officials and the
La Raza
Redistricters continue to dominate the process of drawing our lines, as
they did in 2001 with tools provided them by WCVI and MALDEF in hand.
They're able to do this in part because every other Democratic group
from Labor to local chambers of commerce hopes to meld the Latinos into
whatever they're selling themselves, and hand them half the keys to
their own shrinking pueblos for the sake of hanging onto majority party
power.
This doesn't work, is not working, hasn't
worked, will not work for the city, as now people of all cultures leave
Los Angeles in parallel numbers. Not only that, the maps generate the
kind of representation that prioritizes government services over job
creation--hurting us all.
At the heart of the sleight-of-hand is the fuzziness surrounding the
definition of "Latino" itself. All the studies WCVI and MALDEF issue
suggest that Latino populations are exploding everywhere. It's good for
Democrats and it's good for Univision--but is it true?
Defining what constitutes a "Latino" or a "Hispanic" is not even reliably done by the U.S. Census--and there is
no other measure.
The 2010 Census lists "Persons of Hispanic or Latino origin" and "White
persons" and "White persons not Hispanic" categories. Simply trying to
identify the "difference" between ethnicities (Filipino? German-Mexican?
Mestizo-American?) let alone track reliable numbers in a city that
offers sanctuary to immigrants is all but impossible.
But our hardcore myth panderers continue to herd people by their
likelihood to vote for people with diacritical marks in their surnames
rather than the affinities found in their neighborhoods.
As a consequence, we're not even losing white-flight Anglo talent to
Seattle and Portland and Irvine anymore; those middle managers have
mostly long gone pursuing their opportunities elsewhere. With a crop of
legislators more interested in baseline services than securing better
jobs, now we're losing top Latino talent too--to Colorado, North
Carolina and Massachusetts--even as
La Raza Redistricters continue to promote the false case that Latinos form a consistent, amorphous, ever-growing underclass here.
La Raza Redistricters do not only include
the Mayor, his cousin
John Perez,
Richard Alarcon,
Maria Elena Durazo,
Monica Garcia,
Jose Huizar, &c. They include
Nancy Pelosi,
Eric Garcetti,
Madeline Janis,
Julie Butcher,
Janice Hahn.
These redistricters are, in short, devoting all of LA's potentially
transformational redistricting energy to planning for a more
Latino-dominated, more multicultural future--a future that gives no
demographic evidence of ever arriving.
NOTE: A significant part of this post originally appeared here.
