From the Ground Up

As my final blog for the semester, I would like to draw attention to this article that I found today from the Christian Science Monitor. I don't normally read this publication, but its message is hard to ignore given the topic of our last paper. The mostly Latino residents of East L.A. are working from the ground up to establish their community as its own city. Consider this:

"We're gathering signatures to make East L.A. into a city of its own," he tells one woman at a small house just off Cesar Chavez Blvd., named for the leader of the Chicano rights movement of the early 1960s. "We don't have a mayor or city council, so when the community goes to the state capital or Washington to bring back money, nobody is out there fighting for us."

Sound familiar? Of course, they are not taking an us vs. them approach to reaching their goal.

"Latinos are finding they need to rethink city and regional government because they finally have a seat at the table and have realized the table only has three legs," says Antonio Gonzalez, president of the William C. Velasquez Institute, an L.A.-based Latino policy think tank, and of the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project. "California is the test tube of America at the leading edge of demographic change. It's like a teaching college for the rest of the country."

By working with policy makers that have an eye for their interests, the East L.A. residents finally feel that their time is due. But they aren't trying to do it alone.

"If East L.A. decides to go ahead and incorporate, it would be a great model for many historically underserved communities," says Phoebe Seaton, program director of the Community Equity Initiative of California Rural Legal Assistance, a project examining infrastructure inequality among 220 unincorporated Latino communities in the state's Central Valley.

"More than 33 years after the last attempt, the political path for East Los Angeles cityhood appears to be more favorable," says Hogen-Esch. "It may be that this time around, widespread community and political support will finally trump economic fears. If so, look out Harlem – here comes East L.A."

It's a great model for showing that change can be effected from the ground up. And for the first time, community residents don't feel like federal policy is holding them back. Power to the people!