Latinos Face Civil Rights Crisis, Panel Told

The civil rights movement of the 1960s provides inspiration but cannot serve as a prototype for a fast-growing Latino population that today faces its own “civil rights crisis,” according to experts who gathered in Los Angeles on Wednesday for a conference co-sponsored by Harvard University.

Organizers called the daylong session a first-of-a-kind forum to examine the social and political ramifications of an ongoing demographic shift that is most dramatic in California, where Latinos now represent almost a third of the residents.

“The rest of the country doesn’t have a clue about what’s going on here,” said Gary Orfield, a Harvard professor who served as co-chairman of the conference, entitled “The Latino Civil Rights Crises.” “California is important to Latinos in the way the South was to blacks in the 1960s.”

The conference examined issues from the “resegregation” of public schools to interracial political coalitions to what speakers called growing anti-immigrant sentiment. But the experts--mostly Latino academics but including African American and non-Latino white professors--offered few solutions during a somber overview of the predicament facing contemporary Latinos. Participants are scheduled to hold a second session Friday in Washington.

There was wide agreement that the increasing complexity of the nation’s racial and ethnic tableau has rendered the black-white model of the 1960s virtually meaningless in places like California. Moreover, many said that new, multiethnic strategies are needed to fight what panelists called a resurgent segregation of schools and communities and growing discrimination against Latinos.

“The whole dialogue about civil rights has to move beyond the black-white model of the past,” said Fernando J. Guerra of Loyola Marymount University.

While some participants disputed the notion of a Latino civil rights “crisis,” others insisted that there was sufficient evidence, from increasing acts of discrimination against Latinos to reduced educational opportunities for the young.

“When it comes to education for our youth, we are very definitely facing a crisis,” said Harry Pachon, director of the Tomas Rivera Policy Institute, a Latino think tank that co-sponsored the event along with Harvard’s Civil Rights Project.

Speakers from California and Texas lamented declines in Latino enrollment at elite institutions after recent rollbacks in affirmative action, including the drops after passage last year of Proposition 209 in California. Many viewed the pending initiative that would outlaw bilingual education in public schools as another attack on Latinos, though sponsors dispute any such motive.

Several speakers warned of dire circumstances if governments do not open up educational access for multitudes of young Latinos--many the U.S.-born children of immigrants--at a time when a global economy tied to high technology has made schooling more important than ever.

“I think L.A. could blow up in 25 years if something is not done,” warned Rodolfo de la Garza of the University of Texas at Austin.

While Latinos are an emerging majority in places like Los Angeles County, they are still heavily underrepresented among the voting population, speakers said. Fully 79% of Californians who cast ballots in last year’s national elections were white, said Bruce Cain of UC Berkeley. Adding some balance was the rise of Latino elected officials in local governments--long the stronghold of non-Latinos--as well as in the California Legislature.

In fact, Latinos now control more than a dozen city councils in Los Angles County, said Fernando J. Guerra of Loyola Marymount University. But Guerra and others bemoaned what they called the often uncompromising attitude of entrenched African American political leaders in places like Compton and Lynwood with large populations of new Latino immigrants.

“Blacks are going to have to share power with Latinos, and later on with Asians,” said Michael Preston of the University of Southern California.

Despite the overall mood of pessimism, many voiced hope for the future of a population that studies have shown has a high work force participation and typically lives in nuclear families--the opposite of the largely welfare-dependent, single-parent households of the nation’s poor underclass.

“I don’t see crisis, I see opportunity,” said Antonia Hernandez of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, who stressed the importance of English-language instruction and coalition-building with other groups.

“I see a general civil rights crisis,” she said. “Does this country really care about civil rights anymore? Unfortunately, from what we’ve seen in the last 10 years, I think not.”