THE SOCIAL ORIGINS OF THE REFERENDUM
Prop. 187 first attained critical mass in the suburbs of Los Angeles. Rising middle-class insecurity, deindustrialization and changing demographics have opened up a Pandora’s box of bigotry and white anger
By Mike Davis
Southern California seems to have a special destiny for transmuting middle-class anxieties into terrifying political firestorms. 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 ensuing victory of Proposition 14 in November, 1964–supported by two thirds of California’s white voters–emboldened racist forces across the country to intensity their resistance to civil rights demands. 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.
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. 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. It also provided Ronald Reagan’s crusade against urban social programs with the figleaf legitimation of “fiscal populism.”
Proposition 187 (“Save Our State” or “SOS”) is the newest, and potentially most toxic, of southern California’s exports to national politics. It recapitulates the explicit bigotry of Proposition 14 with the anti-tax fervor of Proposition 13. 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. And, even if Proposition 187 is eventually struck down in court as Proposition 14 was, its sponsors will still have achieved their strategic goal of polarizing the state and, perhaps, the nation.
Understanding the social forces that produced Proposition 187 is an urgent task, given that similar anti-mmigrant initiatives have since emerged in a number of other states. Although the mean-spiritedness of Proposition 187 is more explicit than its predecessors, its social origins are similarly opaque. Was the “Save Our State” initiative the spontaneous combustion of suburban populisin, or cynical arson by a handful of powerful conservative politicians’? How has the post-Cold War restructuring of the southern Californian economy reinforced nativism and racism? And to what extent does immigrant-bashing reflect actual “zero-sum competition between an emergent Latino plurality and a declining Anglo majority’?
There are, of course, a variety of perspectives from which to examine these issues. 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. The national press, on the other hand, has stressed the opportunistic role of Governor Wilson. Political scientists, searching for more general explanations, have focused on the broader electoral trends revealed in the November 1994 vote. None of these approaches, however, illuminates much about the actual social landscape that produced Proposition 187.
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. What follows are brief case studies of two communities that were early strongholds of the new nativism. First there are the aging, but still affluent communities of the San Gabriel Valley foothills, located to the northeast of Los Angeles. The deep historical structures of Anglo-versus-Mexican ethnic conflict are especially visible in the former garden cities such as Arcadia and Covina that once comprised southern California’s “Citrus Empire.” Second, there is the Anglo laager in the west end of the rapidly diversifying San Fernando Valley just northwest of Los Angeles, as well as the staunchly conservative new towns, like Simi Valley in Ventura County and Santa Clarita in northern Los Angeles County, which have been cloned from the San Fernando Valley’s white flight.
The freeway exit to the famed Santa Anita Racetrack, 15 miles east of downtown Los Angeles, is also the off-ramp to Arcadia (population:48,290). Its oak-shaded streets and handsome ranch-style homes belie its dubious origins. Arcadia–referred to by the Los Angeles Times in 1909 as a “tough little debauched municipality”–was incorporated in 1903 by robber baron Lucky Baldwin to protect his racing, brothel and liquor interests. Perhaps because of its checkered past, Arcadia has for generations tried to imitate the suburban idyll of a Norman Rockwell painting, from its sparkling church steeples to the new Buicks and Cadillacs parked in its driveways.
Scrubbing Arcadia white meant expelling its residents of color, beginning in the 1920s with the eviction of Baldwin’s veteran African-American and Japanese employees, whose votes had incorporated the city in the first place. Arcadia even broke tradition with other wealthy towns in the San Gabriel Valley citrus belt by refusing to tolerate the usual other-side-of-the-tracks colonia for its Mexican laborers. In February, 1939, 99% of Arcadians signed a unique “covenant,” organized by a local escrow company, which promised to keep their little chunk of paradise “Caucasian forever.” Despite the Supreme Court’s overturning of de jure residential segregation in California in 1948, Arcadia managed to exclude even a token African-American population through the 1980 Census.
Yet people of color have always been essential to Arcadia’s domestic economy. 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. Meanwhile, inside the homes (median value: $375,000), women, collectively known to their employers as “Maria,” are vacuuming carpets or changing diapers.
As 50 years before, almost none of the town’s Latino workers live in Arcadia. Nor has the community’s continued slavish dependence on Latino labor mollified any of its traditional intolerance. The hometown hero, for example, remains Republican State Senator Richard Mountjoy, who in recent years has sponsored 30 different anti-immigrant bills in the California legislature, including proposals to strip funding from schools and hospitals that admit undocumented immigrants. Barbara Coe, one of the co-founders of SOS, has praised him as “our godfather” for fertilizing the initial 187 campaign with his own funds. His decisive role has also been recognized by pro-immigrant activists who have singled out his headquarters in Arcadia for sitins and demonstrations.
Mountjoy’s anti-immigrant diatribes are saturated with nostalgic references to the San Gabriel Valley’s “golden past.” Indeed, the weight of history is oppressive in Arcadia and in the other garden cities of the former Citrus Empire. Although the orchards are long gone, the social relations of the ancien regime–when Mexicans were peons in a segregated rural society–are still fossilized in the politics and consciousness of the local elites. This white supremacist tradition, in turn, amplifies current grievances, one of which is simply the innocuous presence of Latinos in public space.
In essence, Arcadians want a silent, invisible army of servants who vanish the minute their chores are completed. It has been easy enough for affluent suburbs like Arcadia to use zoning laws to restrict apartment construction that might attract working-class Latinos (and, indeed, for landlords to selectively discriminate against their tenants). But Lainos still remain uncomfortably visible. Day laborers, for example, solicit work in front of hardware stores, teenagers from nearby Chicano-majority towns sometimes cruise local drive-ins, and large Latino families flock on weekends to foothill parks
Each of these innocent activities has provoked hysterical and repressive responses. Day laborers have been harassed and sometimes arrested. 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. A former Arcadia police officer testified that she was “shocked to find that Asians, Latinos and African Americans were targeted for extra field interrogations, searches and traffic stops to discourage them from entering the City.”
When Arcadia’s Wilderness Park, built with federal funds during the 1930s, became popular with Spanish-speaking families, anti-immigrant sentiment reared its ugly head once again. One leader of the neighboring Highland Oaks Homeowners Association complained: “I’ve seen their graffiti. I’ve heard their ghetto blasters…I do not want any riffraff coming into our city.” Mayor Joseph Ciraulo agreed: “The park has been overrun with these people.” As a result, Arcadia has restricted use of the park (now a “wildemess center”) to residents. 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.
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. It has been one thing to minimize the bluecollar Latino or Aftican-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. 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.
The Chinese persisted, however, and now constitute nearly a quarter of Arcadia’s population. They have been harassed with vandalism, cross-burnings and incessant anti-Asian epithets. Last January, the police occupied Arcadia High School after a wild melee between Chinese and white students. After the minor political earthquake that elected the first Chinese-American to the city council, vindictive white members prevented him from assuming the mayoralty in normal rotation. 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 this part of the San Gabriel Valley at least, support for Proposition 187 decodes into “yellow peril” as well as “brown menace.”
Another hotbed of pro-187 organizing, the San Fernando Valley was North America’s most famous 1950s suburb. In those supposedly halcyon days, tens of thousands of fathers–embodied by television characters such as Ozzie Nelson of “Ozzie and Hariet” 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. 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.
The Vietnam War industrialized and urbanized L.A.’s master bedroom. In Burbank, for example, the Lockheed company grew into a huge sprawl of war-inspired assembly plants and subcontract shops that lined San Fernando Road for miles. Software and electronic firms created a major high-tech complex in the northwest Valley around Chatsworth. Warner Ranch, with its bank highrises and corporate headquarters, was developed as the Valley’s own alternative “downtown.” This dramatic growth in the employment base reversed the traditional outflow of commuters, and by the late 1970s there was a net influx. The postsuburban Valley perfectly fit urban theorists’ definition of an “outer” or “edge” City: “a self-acting urban system independent of the parent central city and increasingly duplicate in function.”
The urbanization of the San Fernando Valley also drastically reshaped its class and ethnic structures. 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. Working-class whites, such as aerospace workers and lawenforcement officials, moved northward across the Santa Susana Mountains to Simi Valley or Santa Clarita–the new suburbs of the suburbs. Others steeled themselves to the long commute from Palmdale and Lancaster in the high desert up north where home prices were $100,000 cheaper.
The neighborhoods that they abandoned in North Hollywood, Sepulveda, Van Nuys and Burbank were quickly occupied by tens of thousands of new inimigrants from Mexico and Central America. 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. Latinos, less than a fifth of the population in 1980, are now more than a third, possibly even 40%. 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. The east Valley now has a larger Mexican population than east Los Angeles.
Latinization of the Valley coincided with sudden deindustrialization and catastrophic job loss. 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. Other major defense contractors, like Rocketdyne and Litton, slashed employment or transferred operations out of the Valley. As a consequence, the clusters of smaller aerospace subcontractors in Chatsworth and along San Fernando Road were devastated. (Interestingly, the only major local business that was not downsized or dismantled was the adult film industry, an estimated 80% of whose worldwide production originates in the Valley.)
The collapse of the Valley’s high-wage manufacturing base had grim multiplier effects on low-wage jobs in light industry, construction and services. As a result, poverty exploded. In the 18-month period following the closure of Lockheed, for instance, 80,000 new welfare cases were added, mainly in the east Valley. 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. 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.
Not surprisingly, crime and gang violence have soared in tandem with unemployment and welfare rates. 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. The Valley has ceased to be the golden mean between Beverly Hills and Watts. The old distinction between the white-collar and blue-collar valleys has been overlaid by a neo-Dickensian class structure of princes and paupers. If gated communities are the rage in the tony west Valley, homelessness and massive overcrowding are depressingly common in the multiethnic east Valley.
The San Fernando Valley’s political establishment claims that this social crisis is a result of the “brown invasion.” Latinization of the Valley has been equated with economic decline and rising crime. 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. Local politicians of both parties have played the immigrant-baiting card.
Few were surprised, for example, when Republican Congressman Elton Galleghy–who represents part of the wealthy northwest Valley as well as its white-flight offspring, the city of Simi Valley (notorious home of the first Rodney King trial)–proposed a constitutional amendment stripping U.S. born children of undocumented immigrants of their right to citizenship. But Latino groups felt betrayed when another Valley congressman, Anthony Bielenson (D-Woodland Hills)–much admired as a “traditional fighting liberal”–unexpeciedly polevaulted to the right and became the Galleghy amendment’s co-sponsor.
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 United School District. 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. In scorning Woo, they essentially put a stake through the heart of multiracial coalition politics. They preferred to spoon, instead, with Republican millionaire Richard Riordan, whose election as mayor was based on massive support in the west Valley. 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 dramatic increase in the Valley’s clout at Los Angeles City Hall seems paradoxical in face of its relative economic decline. The secret is simply that the west Valley, unified by bipartisan white solidarity, is now the most powerful bloc vote in the entire city. 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. In the Valley itself, for example, two-thirds of Latino adults are reckoned to be non-citizens, ineligible to vote. 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).
Not surprisingly, Valley politicians pander to this white vote. And with “liberals” like Bielenson engaging in immigrant bushing, it has been easier for pro-187 grassroots groups to openly advocate race war. Local pro-187 newsletters spew Himmlerian complaints about the “stench of urination, defecation, narcotics, savagery and death” supposedly associated with Latino and Asian immigration. But the real, door-to-door jihad against immigrants has been carried out by dozens of powerful homeowners’ associations. For example, the Sherman Oaks Homeowners’ Association (SOHA), which organized the virulent anti-immigrant group Voice of Citizens Together, has been leading the battle for the full and immediate implementation of Proposition 187. As Voice leader Glenn Spencer put it: “This is part of a reconquest of the American Southwest by foreign Hispanics [sic!]–sorneone is going to be leaving the state. It will either be them or us.” Not surprisingly, SOHA was not only a pioneer of the Jarvis tax initiative, but also an aggressive opponent of school busing during the 1970s.
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. 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. In the view of some Latino leaders, they veer dangerously close to becoming an anti-immigrant militia movement.
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. Rene Arce, 18, died immediately, and David Hilo, 20, was wounded. Neither of the young men had a criminal record. The Los Angeles Times reported that police “were overwhelmed by dozens of calls from graffiti-haters supporting Masters. Attorneys volunteered to represent him, while other residents offered money for a possible defense fund. One man showed up at the jail, saying that he wanted to take Masters to dinner for performing a “profound service to the community.”‘ Outraged Latino community leaders demanded Masters’ indictment for manslaughter, but District Attorney Gil Garcetti let him go and arrested Hilo instead. As Masters snarled after his release “Where are you going to find 12 citizens to convict me?”
Proposition 187 has opened a Pandora’s box of bigotry and white anger. As the Masters’ shooting demonstrates, once racism becomes legitimate public discourse, racist acts are sure to follow. Some have gone so far as to describe post-riot Los Angeles, with its declining economy and troubled suburbs, as the “sunshine Weimar.” In this scheme of things, Latino and Asian immigrants have no difficulty figuring out who has been allotted the functional role of German Jews.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Mike Davis is a contributing editor to The Nation and a regular columnist for LA Weekly. He is currently writing a book on Southem California’s trial by riot, fire and earthquake.
