Latino Voters Bring A Si! Change To California

ERIC ELLIS, Orange County

John Howard might find some common ground with Californian politician Robert Dornan. Pauline Hanson certainly would. Dornan is your common or garden white-bread, white-skinned conservative Republican redneck. And until last November he was a very popular one with the voters of Orange County, the Grand Old Party's heartland which delivered a handful of elections to Southern California locals Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan.

But firebrand Dornan was toppled from his inflammatory perch in Congress by a woman who thought it politically astute to change her surname back from the Anglicised one she adopted to the Hispanic one she was born with. It proved to be a smart move in an electorate full of Hispanic maids and drivers, working for rich white folk.

But in taking the Orange County seat for Bill Clinton's Democrats, Loretta Sanchez taught a lesson that mainstream politicians such as Howard would do well to heed - that immigrants are often natural conservatives and not to be shunned.

Immigrants migrate for a reason, usually to make a better life for themselves in a new land of opportunity like the US, Canada or Australia.

It's generally a given that they work hard, they save hard, and once they make it they want to hang on to it. If offensive politics is the compelling reason to leave a country, recent history suggests that it is left-wing governments' people who are escaping.

Witness the flight from China, Vietnam, Eastern Europe and Cuba in recent years. But in Australia, as in the US and Canada, immigrants have usually found a warmer welcome in the left-of-centre parties. That may be changing.

In California, Loretta Sanchez' shock victory may have started a ball rolling, right into the heart of a political theatre of national import last week - the Los Angeles mayoral election.

For the first time in the history of the second-largest city in the US, more Latinos than blacks cast ballots and helped re-elect Mayor Richard Riordan, as dyed-in-the-wool a Republican as there is one. Moreover, the Latino landslide to Riordan came despite Riordan's Democrat opponent Tom Hayden's fluency in Spanish. In the event, Hayden was left with a black vote that favoured him 3-to-1, but he was left with less than 40 per cent of the total vote. Loretta Sanchez' earlier victory may have helped Riordan.

Despite Dornan's sour-grapes claims of vote-rigging and fraud, Republicans are going through a ritualistic inquiry into the process, while moving behind the scenes to recapture the seat next time around.

Says Gary Jacobson, a political scientist at the University of California: "Not many Republicans are greatly in love with Bob Dornan. They may end up recapturing the seat (in the event that electoral fraud is discovered), but at the cost of losing the Latino community in the long run."

Dornan could have done worse than to study recent statistics from the US Census Bureau, which showed that the number of Latin-owned businesses in the US rose 76 per cent between 1987 and 1992 and are believed to have doubled again since then. California boasts the biggest concentration of Hispanic business, with an estimated 300,000 Latino businesses, a third of the national total, with as much as $US30 billion in sales, according to the US Hispanic Chamber of Commerce.

LA is the hotspot within a hotspot and, anecdotally, it is perfectly possible to conduct a normal day's activities in this city and not speak English at all. The census bureau study showed that in 1992 LA had 110,000 Latino-owned firms, with total sales of $US1.6 billion. The chamber says those figures may have doubled again since then. The US Hispanic community is tallied at about 10-12 per cent of the national population. But it is the fastest-growing, expanding 3-5 times more rapidly than the national population growth.

Some 27 per cent of Californians are of Hispanic descent and in LA the figure is around 45 per cent, and near 100 per cent in vast East Los Angeles. In LA's minor political races, such as the district school elections, the Latinos voted even more vigorously for candidates who promised increased funding -further evidence of the immigrant zeal to better oneself and one's family in the adopted land.

It should be a conservative manifesto's dream constituency - good at making money, working hard, solid family values and emphasis on education. Luis Dicipio, Latino community sociologist of the University of Illinois, says Latinos supported Riordan because he was clever enough to step away from the Republicans' "draconian" noises made last November at curtailing immigration.

"He's very clearly distinguished himself from (State) Governor Peter Wilson and the harder line of the Washington wing to incorporate Latinos into Los Angeles politics," Dicipio said.

"He was paid back for that support in this election."

Dicipio says this election showed that modern US politicians can no longer be content to count on Latinos voting as a bloc just because they are of a common ethnic background. They are becoming mature to US political issues, just like any active voter.

He says Latinos now have become more "acclimatised" to politics, and that their newfound business clout has given the grouping the resources to fight and make themselves heard.

"Immigrant Latinos are naturalising at more rapid rates than ever before," Dicipio notes. "Over the next 10-20 years they will become the big voting bloc in the key States, Florida, California, Texas and New York."