To maintain this block, “a delicate dance ensued,” Myerson continues.
Since the 1960s, three of the city’s 15 council districts in and around black South Central have been unofficially designated black seats, and Latinx political leaders have been the dominant force in the city’s population. agreed not to challenge them even though the proportion of blacks in .
We asked Rafael Sonnenschein, executive director of the Pat Brown Institute of Public Affairs in Los Angeles, California, about the history and current state of race and ethnic politics in Los Angeles. “From 1900 to 1949, there was not a single African-American, Latino-American, Jewish, or Asian-American member of the City Council.” Sonnenschein said he became a member and held the seat until he ran for the House of Representatives in 1962. But “then there was a long hiatus with no Latino members until 1985. It was all the heyday of the Bradley Black Jewish Coalition.”
Currently, according to Sonnenschein, “the council has three African-American seats and four Latino-American seats,” and, depending on the results of the November 8 runoff, the fifth Hispanic seat. is likely to occur. Black Democrats have won three seats in every rotation since 1963, despite a steep decline in the proportion of African-American voters in the city since 1963. This, he writes Sonenshein, is the result of “a long period of detente and sometimes strong alliances between blacks and Latinos.”
When I asked Sonenshein about the all-or-nothing factor in Los Angeles’ borough restructuring, he said the city council has unusually powerful powers, making competition for seats particularly fierce. .
The conflict is reinforced by the unique nature of the LA Council. It is certainly the most powerful council in any city with a mayor council system. The relatively small size of the Council and its prominence as the most publicly facing body of city government make each seat highly valuable. With LA’s rising status as a key political force in California, and even national Democratic politics, state legislators will consider giving up their seats when the legislative office opens. It looks like (Can you imagine what’s happening in New York or Chicago?)
Conversely, Sonnenschein argued that there are two factors that mitigate the conflict. “Based on the Tom Bradley model, strong community incentives to build and maintain progressive coalitions across races and ethnicities, and cross-cutting elite political alliances that unite members of diverse communities”.
Sonenshein describes the current situation in Los Angeles as follows:
A mirror image of the 1990s. During the 1980s and 1990s, the growing Latino population in what was then known as South Central Los Angeles created considerable intergroup tensions at the street level. Work, housing, services, all played a role. It took some time for these tensions to reach the political level.
David Sears, emeritus professor of psychology and political science at UCLA, emailed me an answer to my question about race and ethnic politics in Los Angeles.
The zero-sum nature of redistricting certainly exacerbates conflicts between groups. In LA, there is generally little of this kind of conflict under the surface. Especially black-brown. Latinos have moved in large numbers into LA’s historically black neighborhoods and now generally outnumber blacks. City council members have not been adjusted to reflect that change. Black-brown political coalitions do form, but tensions are generally subbrosa rather than publicly displayed and can be temporary.
In peaceful times, Sears wrote: One example is the Democrats in the California Legislature, where “a lot of pressure is being put on to hold the coalition together. For example, maintaining a supermajority.”
However, Sears warns: The current controversy is a textbook example of these dynamics. ”
Sears pointed to potential future deployments. On the one hand, he again referred to “a lot of pressure to bring the coalition together”. But at the same time, Sears also said:
Centrifugal pressures include aspirations among Latinos who are rapidly shifting to small business entrepreneurship. Younger generations are getting better education. For example, the number of Latinos admitted to UCLA is growing rapidly. Also, in the post-immigrant generation, marriage to white people is very common.
“We expect more ethnic conflict,” Sears concluded.
Despite the incentives for coalition building. Regional division leads to school division. Many light-skinned Latinos have an easier path than African Americans in terms of upward mobility. I believe it is common.
Reorganization is the redistribution of political power, and political power determines the distribution of critical resources. UCLA sociology professor Cecilia Menjívar emailed me her analysis on the role of scarcity in power struggles.
Because ethnic conflicts vary considerably from place to place, other social forces, especially material resources such as income, especially absolute and relative inequalities in personal income, but also resources such as housing and school funds, It does not happen in the vacuum of other social forces. , neighborhood, etc. This is important. Because it is not only about income and material resources, but also increasing inequality. The unequal distribution of resources shapes group (and individual) perceptions of scarcity.
Access to income, resources and benefits are all important, continued Menjívar. It’s not just income distribution. ”
Similarly, Bettina Wilkinson, a political scientist at Wake Forest University, emailed me and said from her research and focus group data, “For some Black and Latinx people, the social, economic and political social opportunities have been revealed to be zero-sum: socio-political power and struggle are on par with those of other poses a threat to them.