Cross-cultural coalitions have driven Los Angeles politics for decades, helping elect black and Latino politicians to leadership positions in the huge racially and ethnically diverse city.
But a shocking recording of racist comments from the city council president laid bare the tensions over political power that are quietly simmering between the Latino and black communities.
Nury Martinez, the first Latina elected president of the Los Angeles City Council, resigned from her leadership position last week and then from the council altogether, after a leaked recording surfaced of her making racist remarks and other rude comments in discussions with other Hispanic leaders.
Martinez said in the taped conversation, first reported by the Los Angeles Times, that white Council member Mike Bonin treated his young black son as if he were a “prop” and described the son as behaving “because changuito”, or like a monkey. She also made disparaging comments about other groups, including indigenous Mexicans in the southern state of Oaxaca, whom she called “feos” or ugly.
The recording, released anonymously a year after it was made, stunned and hurt many members of the black community, which makes up just under 9% of the city’s approximately four million people. Concerns among this group, which has long relied on council seats and other civic positions in heavily African-American neighborhoods, have grown in recent years as the Latino share of the population has swelled to nearly half and that Hispanic politicians began to assume higher-ranking roles.
Danny J. Bakewell, Sr., the executive publisher of the Los Angeles Sentinel, a black-run newspaper, wrote afterwards about “the cancerous division that has secretly hindered our progress.”
“Finding out that these conversations are part of the dialogue of the very people charged with running the city of Los Angeles and realizing that there is a conspiracy between them to minimize the voice and political power of the black community makes this even more reprehensible. . “, added Bakewell.
Los Angeles is no stranger to racial and ethnic tensions.
The Watts riots claimed 34 lives in 1965 after violence erupted following the arrest of an African-American man arrested for drunk driving.
The filmed beating of black motorist Rodney King by white Los Angeles police officers in 1991 following a high-speed chase sparked international fury.
Riots broke out in the city the following year when three of the officers were acquitted of excessive force and the jury failed to return a verdict on the fourth. The riots lasted six days and killed 63 people, underscoring racial tensions in the city, particularly between the black community and Korean Americans, whose businesses were often targeted.
But Los Angeles also has a history of cooperation between racial and ethnic groups dating back to the 1930s, said Manuel Pastor, professor of sociology and American and ethnicity studies at the University of Southern California.
He said various groups, working together, helped elect Black Mayor Tom Bradley, who served two decades ending in 1993, and Hispanic Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa in 2005.
“The kind of sentiments expressed in this conversation exist more broadly in the Latino community,” Pastor said of the racist comments on the recording. But he said most Hispanics in the city reject that way of thinking.
Pastor called for a moment of reflection, saying “there’s an interesting opportunity here for the Latino community to look at anti-blackness and colorism, in the Latino community.”
The now infamous conversation about frustrations over redistricting maps produced by a city commission was recorded in October 2021. Others present were council members Gil Cedillo and Kevin de León and the president of the Labor Federation of Los Angeles County, Ron Herrera.
Martinez called Bonin, who is gay, a “little bitch” and De León called Bonin the “fourth black member” of the council.
“Mike Bonin will never say anything about Latinos. He will never say a word about us,” De León said.
It is not known who recorded the exchange.
For Reverend Eddie Anderson, the senior black pastor of the McCarty Memorial Christian Church in Los Angeles, the “horrifying statements from top local government officials” were just part of a “plan to dilute the vote and black power in our community”. .”
“There was a real plan to erase black people, people who have been here a long time building this city,” Anderson said.
The pastor, among those who last year served on the Los Angeles City Council’s redistricting commission that helped draw the map, noted that the taped conversation was only weeks before final approval.
He said much of the redistricting quibbles centered on a district that includes parts of South Los Angeles, Koreatown and Baldwin Hills and elected Tom Bradley, the grandson of a slave, to the council. before he was mayor.
Latino leaders in the United States denounced the taped remarks and called on Martinez and the others to step down.
“At a time when our country is grappling with a recent increase in hate speech and hate crime, these comments have compounded the pain our communities are enduring,” said Sen. Alex Padilla, who was previously the youngest president advice.
Clarissa Martinez, vice president of the Latino Vote Initiative for UnidosUS, a leading national civil rights organization, said: “Our community was deeply offended by the racist and dehumanizing comments made by these four elected and appointed Los Angeles.”
“Their being Latino is especially painful because our community understands what it’s like to be abused and tries to lower our voice,” she added. But she insisted: “We know we’re building on something much stronger than the backward behavior of these four people because our communities have a strong trajectory of working together.”
Tanya Kateri Hernandez, a professor at Fordham University School of Law, said the idea that people of color are always united ignores colonialism and racial baggage from many different places and generations.
The issue of anti-Blackness in Latino communities in the United States and around the world is much broader than this one case, extending to Afro-Latinos, Africans and West Indians, said Hernandez, who wrote the book “Racial Innocence: Unmasking Latino Anti-Black Bias and the Struggle for Equality.
The Los Angeles City Council’s redistricting commission hinted at feuds between various groups when it submitted its final map a year ago.
“It was not our job to protect elected officials, their jobs or their political future,” commission chairman Fred Ali said in a statement. “We hope that the Council will conduct its deliberations with the same degree of transparency and commitment to fairness as this Commission.”
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Anita Snow reported from Phoenix. AP writer Deepti Hajela contributed from New York.
Anita Snow, l’Associated Press