Latinos take lead on environmental issues
VOTING SHOWS EMPHASIS SHIFTING TO INNER-CITY NEEDS
By Paul Rogers Mercury News

 

Every week, Mirna Bonales and hundreds of children ages 9 to 14 crowd into a gym in East San Jose to play soccer.

Running in bright jerseys while parents cheer, the boys and girls only have enough room to play on teams of five, rather than the standard 11 per side. The game is indoors because there are no outdoor fields in the neighborhood.

"It's a real struggle," said Bonales, who coaches in the Mexican American Community Services Agency's Futsal League. "We've had to turn away about 400 teens because there's a lack of space for outdoor activities."

White suburban bird-watchers zooming to weekend cabins at Lake Tahoe may not realize it yet, but from Silicon Valley to Los Angeles, a major green shift is taking place. The future of California's environmental movement is not wearing a backpack or hiking in the woods. It is running back and forth in hundreds of crowded inner-city gyms.

Driven by a yearning for clean water, reduced smog and more places for kids to play, Latino voters are turning out to be the most devoted environmentalists in California. The latest illustration came last week, when exit polls showed that 74 percent of Latino voters approved Proposition 40, a $2.6 billion parks and open space bond measure on the statewide ballot that won by 57 to 43 percent.

In contrast, just 56 percent of white voters approved it.

Latino voters also have proved crucial in passing at least four other open-space and clean-water measures statewide and in Los Angeles County since 1996. And in the state Legislature, Latino leaders have emerged as major advocates for clean air, clean water and open space measures since the mid-1990s.

Reshaping a movement

"There is a myth that parks are a luxury and that lower income communities don't care about the environment," said Robert Garcia, an activist with the Center for Law and the Public Interest, based in Los Angeles.

"But Latinos are like everybody else. Nobody wants to live surrounded by warehouses where they can't see trees or grass or clean water. They want livable communities. And they are willing to pay to create those communities."

Parks leaders recommend cities have 10 acres of parks per 1,000 residents. But the figure is 0.3 acres per 1,000 in East Los Angeles, Garcia said. In San Jose, it is 6.8 acres; in Fresno, 2.7 acres, according to a study by the Trust for Public Land.

"Latinos aren't against saving the spotted owl, they just want some open space for their kids to play in too," said Leo Briones, president of Centaur North, a Los Angeles political consulting firm. "The environmental movement became an elitist movement. This is a breakthrough back to common folks."

The key to Latino support, he said, has been measures that share money between forests and mountains in Northern California, and city parks in Southern California and the Central Valley.

Two years ago, after a major campaign directed at Latino neighborhoods, voters passed Proposition 12, a $2.1 billion parks measure. Much of that money has since funded city projects like the San Joaquin River Parkway in Fresno and the $36 million Cornfields project in Los Angeles, where industrial lots were converted into a 32-acre park.

"Six years ago, a lot of Latino leaders would have said environmentalists are tree huggers who don't care about their issues," said Briones. "But things have changed."

Most notably, state leaders such as Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante and former Assembly Speaker Antonio Villaraigosa have pushed hard to include clean water and city parks issues in ballot measures and legislation. And then they have campaigned hard for them in Latino neighborhoods.

New kind of campaign

"You are watching an evolution," said Michael Fischer, former national executive director of the Sierra Club. "Some environmental leaders have been motivated a sense of equity of justice, others have been motivated by a survival instinct. But the trend is very heartening."

They have little choice.

In 1970, Latinos represented 12 percent of California residents. Now they are 32 percent. And because of immigration and high birth rates, in the next 40 years, Latinos will become a majority, with 50 percent of the population, according to state estimates.

"We're looking now at lead poisoning, public transit, urban air quality. If environmentalists stick with wilderness only we are going to become less and less relevant," said Gerald Meral, executive director of the Planning and Conservation League, a Sacramento environmental group.

Supporters of Proposition 40, the largest parks bond in U.S. history, mailed 500,000 fliers urging VOTE SI EN LA PROP 40 to Latino households in Fresno, Los Angeles, San Jose and other cities. The fliers listed the top supporter of the measure, Los Angeles Cardinal Roger Mahony, and featured Un Arbol de la Vida, the "Tree of Life," a traditional Mexican symbol of the Garden of Eden.

"It wasn't about protecting owls vs. jobs," said pollster John Fairbank, a partner in the polling firm Fairbank, Maslin & Maullin. "It was about cleaning up drinking water and toxic areas. They are health issues for urban voters. A more affluent voter can go to a cleaner beach or can afford bottled water."

The strongest support for the parks measure -- 75 percent -- came from households earning less than $20,000 a year, exit polls showed.

Understanding the issues

A survey done in 1999 by the Latino Issues Forum, a San Francisco public policy organization, found that Latinos felt cut off from the mainstream environmental movement.

But support for clean air, water and parks was clear.

A staggering 96 percent said that preserving the environment was important, compared with 89 percent who said preserving immigrant rights was important, and 80 percent who said preserving bilingual education was important.

"If many Latino voters get a mailer from the Sierra Club, it is meaningless," said Luis Arteaga, associate director Latino Issues Forum. "But they understand the issues. They are on the front lines."

Some Latinos still have a bad taste about a Sierra Club debate four years ago, in which the club's members voted on whether to support reductions in immigration, deciding ultimately against it.

"Environmentalists are starting to get wise," said Esther Medina, director of the Mexican American Community Services Agency (MACSA) in San Jose. "They are starting to understand our needs."

In the Latino Issues Forum survey, 72 percent of Latino voters said it was an "excellent" or "good" idea to increase housing by making use of previously developed land rather than building on new open space.

"We want a place for our children to grow up and have a better life like anybody else," said Gil Hernandez, a former fruit picker who now is president of South Bay Bronze Aluminum Foundry, in San Jose.

"My father wouldn't allow us to pick prunes when school started. He wanted a better life for us. Voting for parks and clean water is the same thing. It's about the future."

Copyright (c) 2002, Mercury News. Paul Rogers, Latinos take lead on environmental justice 3-10-2002