A Latino Politician Who Could Rewrite the Eastside Playbook

When he was running for the Eastside council seat, Nick Pacheco could do little more than bite his lip each time a powerful Latino politician or labor group endorsed one of his opponents. Pacheco overcame those endorsements to win, and six months into his first term, what was seen as his major weakness in last spring’s campaign has turned into his biggest asset: his independence from major Eastside political powers. “No special interests have knocked on the door to collect on any debts,� says Pacheco.

Precisely because he is not beholden to special interests, Pacheco has an opportunity to break the Eastside-politician mold, one synonymous with insider politics only slightly less corrupt than Mexico’s ruling party. He may also be on the threshold of changing the political culture of the Latino Eastside, from one of a homeboy turf mentality dressed up in business suits to that of an information-age public servant placing substance over style.

“The old rules of political control have been broken on the Eastside, which most would say is healthy,� says veteran Eastside political observer and activist Alex Jacinto. “It’s a new game with a new paradigm, and the way of doing politics on the Eastside is changing.�

“There’s definitely a new mood in the community,� says Pacheco, “and part of it is about style. . . . I think constituents are tired of the old school telling them what they wanted to hear. And that’s one of the things we’re changing.�

Pacheco has made a point of sitting in on almost every meeting with constituent groups his office arranges, and it has paid big dividends. In settling the long-standing El Mercado dispute between Boyle Heights residents and vendors at a landmark Eastside market, the councilman surprised both sides by personally taking charge and forging an acceptable compromise that had eluded previous mediation attempts. In another instance, Pacheco intervened to eliminate bureaucratic red tape that had been holding up completion of a new youth-baseball facility in the Garvanza area of his district.

“Pacheco personally came out to inspect that everything was being taken care of on the baseball field,� recalls Garvanza Park Little League official Joe Molina. “When he saw that it was, he asked, ‘Do you think you could use a golf driving range for kids at your park?’ Now we’re getting a golf program for our kids.�

But Pacheco has been different from the start, and the distinctions not only made him his own man but also may have ensured his independence.

No one personified the traditional Eastside politician better than the man Pacheco succeeded on the City Council, Richard Alatorre. Over the last quarter century, Alatorre’s backroom-deal approach to power galvanized Latino politics in California but also conditioned the way non-Latinos view Latino politicians, most of them a chip off Alatorre’s style: political insiders networking in a manner often reminiscent of Mayor Richard J. Daley’s old Chicago machine.

Their world was all politics. Although some Alatorre clones were lawyers, few practiced law. Instead, they practiced being politicians as field deputies and political aides, many of them, at one point or another, working directly for Alatorre.

It was also a jealously guarded closed club. Alatorre and his cohort usually shunned ambitious political neophytes who happened to be young professionals, as they did in 1983, when city planner Steve Rodriguez challenged then-Councilman Art Snyder. Rodriguez, a USC graduate who gained notoriety in 1979 when President Jimmy Carter spent a night with him and his family at their El Sereno home, threw a political scare into Snyder and might have unseated him except that Alatorre and the Latino Eastside establishment threw their support to Snyder.

Rodriguez and his band of Muppies (“Mexican American Yuppies,� a derisive term coined by California Democratic Chairman Art Torres) threatened the Latino Eastside establishment in style as well as politics. Alatorre’s bunch favored expensive Italian suits and shoes. Muppies leaned toward Brooks Brothers and Bass Weejuns. Alatorre loved pulling strings behind closed doors. Muppies preferred democracy with a lowercase “d.�

It’s not too much of a stretch to classify Pacheco as a political descendant of Rodriguez’s movement, as is Pacheco’s ally Rep. Xavier Becerra, whose congressional district overlaps Pacheco’s council district and who was one of the few elected Latino leaders to endorse Pacheco. Before politics, the two practiced law, Becerra as a deputy attorney general, Pacheco as a deputy district attorney. Both say they went into politics as an exercise in public service.

In examining how Pacheco is changing Eastside political leadership, it may be helpful to see it as an instance of the “radicalization of modernity,� as the British sociologist Anthony Giddens described the contemporary phase of development in “The Consequences of Modernity.� For it now appears that mounting challenges to Alatorre, the traditional Eastside leadership and the storm of scandal and controversy that brought Alatorre down “deconstructed� the establishment’s supportive institutions, assumptions, ideologies and environments that long existed on the Eastside and among Latinos in the city. After all, the endorsements by elected Latino officials, major labor unions headed by Latinos and even La Opinion of Pacheco’s top opponent proved meaningless in the runoff election and succeeded, instead, in making Pacheco’s victory that much sweeter for him.

But Pacheco’s independence makes him far more vulnerable to the whims of his constituency and compels him to solidify and broaden his own political base to survive. Pacheco’s extended political honeymoon may also be a result of the Alatorre scandal, which has helped insulate him from criticism.

To the extent that Pacheco’s success presages a new direction for Eastside communities and possibly the city’s Latinos, it should be regarded as positive, important and poignant. The larger question is whether he can inspire a new Latino political movement that seeks a truer representation of Latino aspirations, hopes and differences that have historically made them faithful dreamers of the American Dream but scandalously hampered in their efforts to turn that dream into reality.

Ultimately, the way Latinos, particularly on the Eastside, respond to him and other similarly motivated Latino politicians will redefine what kind of community the Eastside really is. How the city’s Latino political establishment manages the challenges presented by Pacheco will show it to be either selfish, power hungry and corrupt, as its detractors charge, or as individuals troubled but holding on to a sense of moral purpose and promise, as its defenders believe. *