Grandfather of Latino Politics Faults New Leaders

The patriarch of Latino politics in California is sick and tired but still holding forth, seated at the kitchen table of his bright Spanish stucco house in Pasadena.

Battling illness and old age, Edward R. Roybal, 84, sounds like a grandfather giving a scolding.

Sure, Roybal says, Latinos have come a long way. There are 30 times as many Latino lawmakers in California as when he first took office 50 years ago. The Assembly speaker is Mexican American. So is the lieutenant governor.

But problems remain. He ticks off a list--poor health care, high dropout rates, bad cops, dilapidated housing. Today’s politicians are failing, he says. They lack community spirit. They want to be kingmakers, he adds, not policymakers. Politics is now mostly about money.

That’s his humble opinion, “not that anybody gives a damn anymore about what I have to say,” said Roybal. “My kind of grass-roots politics is long gone.”

In 1949, Roybal became the first Mexican American this century elected to the Los Angeles City Council, facing down death threats and racism. He put in new sewers, paved over dirt roads, added traffic stop signs and parks in neglected neighborhoods on the Eastside, downtown and in Hollywood.

He later served as a congressman for 30 years, supporting civil rights, public health programs and help for the elderly before retiring in 1993.

Whether or not he approves of its evolution, Roybal is the man most responsible for Latino politics today--its role model emeritus.

Roybal’s career, like a rock thrown into a pond, created the ripples of a complex political world, stretching from the liberal politics of East Los Angeles to the conservative enclaves of Pomona and the Central Valley.

“Eddie Roybal is the first person in the modern era that Latinos have had who was a hero,” said Rodolfo Acuna, a Cal State Northridge Chicano studies professor.

His life’s work, Roybal said, was to give minorities and other underdogs equal footing in the world. The job now belongs to new Latino leaders, he said, including Roybal’s daughter, U.S. Rep. Lucille Roybal-Allard (D-Los Angeles).

Roybal-Allard, who represents parts of her father’s old district, said Roybal “paved the way for the next generation, just like we’re paving the way for the generation after us. But he was really the pioneer.”

Roybal said he almost didn’t start his career. “I didn’t want to do it, but I had no other choice.”

Family and neighborhood experiences pointed the way.

His family moved to the Eastside from Albuquerque, N.M., when Roybal was 5 and he learned early to be a role model. His mother, Eloisa, praised Roybal’s math and reading skills and expected her nine younger children to copy him.

From his father, Baudilio Sr., a carpenter, Roybal inherited a blue-collar ethic of hard work and humility. He worked at a dry cleaning plant as a teenager. “I learned how to clean, spot, press, all that,” he said. Years later, to relax after a rough day on Capitol Hill, Roybal said he would perform similar chores for friends in the business.

His first date with his future wife, Lucille, underscored his distrust of police. The teenage couple shared chili beans and crackers at a stand on 4th and Soto streets. A white officer came up, rifled through Roybal’s pockets, then dumped their dinner on the sidewalk.

Roybal studied accounting at UCLA, and after World War II he worked at 20th Century Fox. He was 31 and on his way up the corporate ladder. But in 1947, he left the studio to run a mobile X-ray unit for the California Tuberculosis Assn.

Roybal had grown up seeing the impact of illness on the poor. The 1922 flu epidemic killed two siblings less than 30 days apart. “It struck me early on as a boy how people could die from a cold,” he said.

Roybal said he was drawn by the idea of bringing medical help to his boyhood neighborhood. One of only a handful of Spanish-speaking health workers, Roybal became well known in Boyle Heights, which before World War II was a working-class neighborhood of Mexican, Jewish and Japanese immigrants.

His work impressed a group of politically active Mexican American doctors, as well as Frank Fouce, owner of a chain of Spanish-language movie theaters. They asked Roybal to run against City Councilman Parley Parker Christensen.

In his 80s, Christensen represented the 9th Council District, composed of Boyle Heights, Bunker Hill, the downtown Civic Center, Chinatown, Little Tokyo and parts of Central Avenue.

Roybal turned down the invitation. “I didn’t want the job,” he said. Los Angeles politics was an all-white club. But Fouce threatened to withdraw financial support from the tuberculosis association, which would have left thousands of Eastside residents without treatment.

Roybal agreed to run in the 1947 election against the longtime incumbent, whom he described as “senile and a heavy drinker.” Roybal lost.

He ran again in the next election, campaigning for more street lights, better housing and curbs on police abuse.

Saul Alinsky Ifluence

By then, he had trained under Chicago community organizer Saul Alinsky. Using new skills, Roybal forged the city’s first biracial coalition, linking Mexican Americans and Jews. The two groups shared common goals--greater equity and an end to racism.

Raising money at Eastside dances and picnics, Roybal ran a campaign that downplayed his ethnicity. Promises of Mexican American empowerment, he said, would alienate non-Latino voters. As a practical matter, the district was only one-third Latino.

The strategy worked. Roybal won with a two-thirds majority. Christensen’s campaign fliers included caricatures of Roybal in folkloric dress, plucking a guitar.

Coalition building has been a dynamic in Latino politics ever since, said Fernando Guerra, director of Loyola Marymount University’s Center for the Study of Los Angeles.

The lesson learned, Guerra said, is “you don’t have to be in a majority Latino district to win.”

At his first City Council meeting, Roybal recalled being introduced by a colleague as “our new Mexican-speaking councilman, representing the Mexican people in his district.”

Roybal put away a prepared speech, and lectured the council on California’s Mexican roots.

The impromptu history lesson, he said, started him off on the wrong foot. But Roybal soon broadened his political base by taking an interest in projects in other council members’ districts--and, when appropriate, giving his backing.

Politics, he said, is learning “if you’re fair to them, they’ll have a difficult time being unfair to you.” That is how he won improvements to sewers, streets and parks in his district.

Roybal had his share of losses. Despite his opposition, the council majority displaced thousands of families--mostly Latino and black--through the redevelopment of Bunker Hill, new freeways and the construction of Dodger Stadium in Chavez Ravine.

Undeterred, he found friends outside City Hall. He joined political organizations--including the Los Angeles County Democratic Central Committee and El Club Civico Americano.

Roybal used those groups during the 1950s to launch voter registration drives and as platforms against police brutality under Los Angeles Police Chief William Parker.

His criticism of the police brought anonymous threats. His phones were tapped, he said, and undercover officers followed him. He said he would lie awake convinced officers would abduct his children--Lucille, Lillian and Edward.

Roybal warned them to never get into a squad car, “even if the guy said I’d been taken to the hospital and that he would take them to my bedside.”

During the years-long fight, Parker publicly compared Mexican Americans to “the wild tribes of Mexico.”

Roybal took such treatment in stride. He kept calm when supporters say he was robbed of a seat on the Board of Supervisors in 1958.

Roybal had entered into a tight supervisorial race against City Councilman Ernest Debs. After the first recount, Roybal held a small lead. During the second recount, however, 12,000 pro-Debs votes mysteriously appeared in the county registrar’s office.

The election sparked a wave of Latino outrage, recalled former Los Angeles Deputy Mayor Grace Montanez Davis, who managed the 1958 campaign.

But Roybal was mostly silent, saying he had more to lose by complaining too loudly while working within a mostly white establishment.

“It’s not the first time we had a thief come into our neighborhood to steal something,” Roybal said.

Roybal instead helped register thousands of Latino voters, coining the phrase “sleeping giant,” referring to Latino political potential.

He and Henry Lopez--a Los Angeles attorney--became frustrated with the state Democratic Party so they founded the Mexican American Political Action Committee in 1959 to boost Latino candidates.

Through the next two decades, the committee provided a platform for candidates statewide.

In 1962, after state reapportionment created the 30th Congressional District around Boyle Heights, the activist group helped Roybal win a seat in the House of Representatives, becoming the first Mexican American congressman from California.

In Washington, Roybal and a handful of other Latino representatives from Texas and New Mexico formed the National Assn. of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials and the congressional Hispanic Caucus.

“Where are we going to hold our meetings, in a phone booth?” Texas Democrat Henry B. Gonzalez joked at the time.

Today, the Hispanic Caucus--chaired by Roybal-Allard--has 17 members. The National Assn. of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials has hundreds of members countrywide and trains thousands more in community organizing.

A member of the House Appropriations Committee, Roybal steered millions of federal dollars to bilingual education, health care and programs for the elderly.

Early Supporter of AIDS Research

During the 1960s, he spoke in support of the nation’s burgeoning civil rights movement, and later joined student rallies.

“He always followed his conscience,” said Harry Pachon, head of the Tomas Rivera Policy Institute at Claremont University and Roybal’s former congressional chief of staff. Returning to his public health roots, Roybal pioneered support of AIDS research in the early 1980s, angering many of his otherwise liberal constituents and colleagues.

“They saw it as a ‘gay disease’ and to hell with them,” he recalled. “When I proposed research, one of the congressmen blew a kiss toward me.”

Jeffrey Koplan, director of the national Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said Roybal played a key role in directing millions of dollars to AIDS research in 1982. The CDC this month renamed its main campus in Atlanta after Roybal, presenting him with a Champion of Prevention Award.

Roybal continues to raise money for the Edward R. Roybal Institute for Applied Gerontology at Cal State L.A. He started the nonprofit research agency in 1993 with leftover campaign funds.

These days, he spends most of his time at home with his wife, the drone of C-SPAN or local news echoing from a parlor near the kitchen.

After Roybal was elected to Congress, 23 years passed before the next Latino was elected to the Los Angeles City Council, the recently retired Richard Alatorre.

Last month, two Latinos, Alex Padilla, 26, and Nick Pacheco, 35, won seats on the City Council. Both vowed to improve their districts with better policing and more stop signs.

Roybal approves. But still he worries that younger generations will not learn the important lessons, show the same courage or find their own wisdom.

“I miss the old days,” he said. “I feel like I should be getting more done.”