CA Latino activist group facing demise

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http://www.dailynews.com/news/ci_14910495

Politics: Latino group finds itself supplanted by newer organizations.
By Tony Castro
The Los Angeles Daily News, April 18, 2010


California's oldest Latino political organization may be facing its last hurrah, having become a victim of its own success.

In recent years, the Mexican American Political Association has seen the dismantling of many of its chapters, in part due to the enormous success Latinos have had over the past several decades entering political office.

'MAPA was an important organization that was formed when there were hardly any Latino elected officials,' said James Acevedo, regarded by many as the godfather of Latino politics in the San Fernando Valley.

MAPA's reputation in California is also suffering as its controversial state president fights to stay out of jail for alleged voter registration fraud.

But even before its leader's legal troubles, the half-century-old group known as MAPA had long ago been supplanted in political importance by an array of newer Latino organizations with far greater memberships.

When the late Edward R. Royal and others organized MAPA in 1960, he was the only Latino elected official in Southern California, serving at that time on the Los Angeles City Council. In 1962, Roybal became the first Latino elected to Congress from California.

In the 50 years since, the rise of Latino elected officials has been dramatic. Today, Los Angeles has a Latino mayor, five Latinos sit on the City Council, one on the county Board of Supervisors, 16 in the state Assembly, eight in the state Senate and six in Congress from California alone.

'As Latinos have met many of the goals MAPA set out,' said Acevedo, 'the role of MAPA began diminishing. The needs of the community have evolved - to education, unemployment, hunger - and other organizations have filled that need.'

But according to experts, as more Latinos were elected to office, MAPA was unable to maintain its hold over them - in part because the group never developed a major fundraising apparatus necessary for staying in office and also because of the rise of other more politically attuned organizations.

In the Valley, the rise of locally elected Latinos whose success stemmed from their own independent organizing kept MAPA from ever fully developing in the area, according to Jorge Garcia, Chicano Studies professor at California State University and a longtime observer of Valley politics.

'The politicians who came to power in the Valley - from (City Councilman) Richard Alarc n to (state Sen.) Alex Padilla - each were their own men with their own groups that they built and groomed,' said Garcia.

MAPA lost the thunder, say experts, to national organizations like the Mexican American Legal Defense & Educational Fund and the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials and local groups springing up around the San Fernando Valley and Los Angeles.

'To us, MAPA is such an old school Chicano organization that my parents belonged to but which isn't very relevant to my generation today,' said Jose Sandoval of Panorama City, president of the Young Latino Democrats of the San Fernando Valley.

MAPA state president Nativo Lopez, who is working out questions over his official residence, disagrees with characterizations of the group's decline. Lopez said the organization has redirected its mission and that the negative assessment, especially among former members, stems from their disagreement with the new course.

But next month's MAPA endorsement convention, which used to draw hundreds of members from around the state, is expected to attract only 50 to 70 delegates to the May 20 meeting in Los Angeles, according to Lopez.

For years, the major importance of MAPA, in addition to organizing around Latino political empowerment, was its endorsement of political candidates - symbolic of a candidate having the consensus support of the Latino vote, say experts.

Moreover, the number of MAPA chapters in California, which Garcia recalled once had at least one per each of the state's Assembly Districts, have by Lopez's own account diminished to about 50 nationally - among them only two identifiable chapters in Los Angeles, including one in the San Fernando-Pacoima area.

'It was a helluva organization in the old days,' said former MAPA member Joe Barrajas of Los Angeles, 'and to think of what it's become ...'

Some former members say the decline was accelerated in the last six years by the 2004 election to the presidency of Lopez, an Orange County immigrants rights activist who has steered MAPA heavily toward immigration reform advocacy.

'MAPA became too `Mexican' for me - supporting and protecting illegals - and that's why I dropped my membership,' said Joe Lozano of Mission Hills, who formerly belonged to the MAPA chapter of San Fernando.

Lopez, 58, for years a resident of Orange County, is also blamed by some former MAPA members for blemishing the once revered organization's name by actions that led to felony criminal charges brought against him by the L.A. District Attorney's Office for alleged voter fraud.

A preliminary hearing is scheduled May 15 in Los Angeles Superior Court in the case in which Lopez faces eight felony counts that he registered to vote in Los Angeles while actually living in Santa Ana.

Last year, Lopez alienated traditional Latino advocacy groups who were preparing for an unprecedented 2010 Census participation campaign when he announced that he and MAPA would support a boycott of the decennial count to protest, among other issues, the slowness of the Obama administration move on immigration reform legislation.

Lopez defends the immigrants right advocacy of MAPA as a responsibility of the organization on behalf of the disenfranchised.

But most Latino officials and leaders have criticized efforts to boycott the census. They point out that the census is used to determine federal funding allocations to cities and local officials estimate that an undercount of about 76,000 people in the 2000 census has cost the area more than $200 million.

'To say no to the census is to say no the future,' said Sandoval. 'It's saying no to what we've been fighting for for years.'