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Ms. Dolores Huerta
Going into the last seven weeks of the campaign to succeed Jan Perry in the Los Angeles City Council’s culturally split 9th District, Culver City’s state senator may have emerged from a messy flap last week bearing a perfumed scent.
Competing in a South Los Angeles district that has flipped from mostly black to mostly brown in recent years, the favorite, Curren Price, had hot water splashed on him for criticizing his Latino opponent.
Not to worry – for two reasons.
- Depending on who is consulted, his remarks may have been exactly in the bosom of the bullseye.
- By plain old coincidence, on the morning of Cesar Chavez Day in California, Mr. Price won the endorsement of Mr. Chavez’s main living legacy, Dolores Huerta.
Whether the aging Ms. Huerta, who turns 83 years old next week, still commands enough of an audience to substantively swing the South L.A. neighborhoods, still is to be decided.
As long as civil rights activist Ms. Huerta – who, along with Mr. Chavez, co-founded today’s powerful United Farm Workers union – lines up with Mr. Price, and brings the right people, rookie rival Ana Cubas’s chances on May 21 could be harmed.
[img]1776|left|Senator Curren Price||no_popup[/img]Two weeks ago before the Baptist Ministers Conference of Los Angeles and Southern California, Mr. Price excoriated Ms. Cubas for emphasizing her culture over his.
“Even in this campaign” Mr. Price said, “we have an opponent who is committed to dividing the 9th along racial lines.”
The rustle of skirts shortly was heard. Occasionally bombastic, or at least outspoken, Rita Walters, former City Councilwoman who led the 9th in the old days when she was younger, exploded. You see, she is black and is supporting Ms. Cubas.
You need a scorecard to identify the crisscrossing players.
“I am disturbed that a candidate…in a district where Latinos and African Americans have lived side by side for decades, would utter remarks so clearly aimed at inciting friction between both groups of voters,” Ms. Walters told the Los Angeles Times.
Herb Wesson, the Los Angeles City Council president who is not unfamiliar with racial controversy, supposedly supervised a cease fire, possibly with the accent on the latter syllable.
In her Soulvine column, Betty Pleasant, who has a clearer perspective on the black community than almost anyone, recently saw it this way:
“Ana Cubas, a candidate out of East Los Angeles who is embarked on a race-baiting campaign on steroids which has been hyped up by stupid sex-baiting on her part. Cubas, who is facing a runoff with state Sen. Curren Price for the 9th District seat, has been and continues to tell residents to “vote for me because I'm from El Salvador and because I am a woman.” She is so firm in her feminine qualifications that she is reported on the USC newssite, thus: “If elected, I'll establish a women's caucus within the Council, even if I'm the only one on that caucus. And when I'm termed out … I will not endorse a man. I don't care how good he is…” Really?
“Cubas stresses her irrelevant El Salvadoran birthplace at every opportunity, but ignores the fact that she grew up in Santa Monica and lives in the tony Solano Canyon village in the Mount Washington area of Northeast L.A. She was chief of staff to 14th District Councilman Jose Huizar, who is pushing her to represent the 9th District, an area she knows nothing about and had never even been in until she decided to put her female El Salvadoran-born self on the City Council simply because she's a Hispanic woman.
“Not only that, but South L.A. activists tell me Cubas has become so reprehensible in her tactics that she now speaks untranslated Spanish at candidates' meetings. I'm told that she delivers lengthy passages in Spanish that go untranslated, thus enraging her overwhelmingly English-speaking audiences which feel she is talking only to Hispanics and therefore is telling them something she does not want English speakers to know.”
Ms. Huerta says that Mr. Price “is the one who can bring South Los Angeles together to make real improvements in people's lives.”
