Family Ties May Falter in Fierce Race

By Scott Gold

April 29, 2006 12 AM PT

Times Staff Writer

To the east, in Lincoln Heights and City Terrace, the neighbors have been known to glare if your dog isn’t vicious enough to scare off the graffiti taggers, and there are so few parks that joggers run through the cemeteries. To the west, past downtown Los Angeles and Dodger Stadium, pricey lofts are pushing out immigrants, but you can still find Soujouk sausage in Little Armenia and Kare-Kare stew in Historic Filipinotown.

Home to 400,000 people, diverse even by the standards of Los Angeles, the 45th Assembly District has come to exemplify the city. Winning an election here requires a delicate dance across the city’s east-west divide, one that appeals to the hipsters of Hollywood, the opulence atop Mt. Washington and the debilitating poverty of East L.A.

It is no simple task and, perhaps as a result, has produced a string of winners who have become political powers, including Richard Polanco, who was instrumental in the political ascendancy of Latinos in the state Legislature; Antonio Villaraigosa, mayor of Los Angeles; and, most recently, Jackie Goldberg, who must leave the post because of term limits.

Today, a young Latina is fighting to claim that legacy. She would seem uniquely prepared, if not by virtue of her politics -- she has fought for workers rights, gay rights and to ban foie gras -- then for her pedigree. Christine Chavez, as her campaign literature makes abundantly clear, is the granddaughter of labor and civil rights leader Cesar E. Chavez.

But with the primary less than six weeks away, Chavez, 34, who has worked as the California political director of the United Farm Workers for the last eight years, has learned that becoming the first member of her storied family to win state office is not going to be easy. Like her grandfather, who saw politicians turn their backs when he walked into the state Capitol, she has not been embraced by California’s political establishment.

Goldberg has handpicked Elena Popp as her successor. Popp, 48, an attorney and an activist, has long worked as an advocate for social and economic causes, helping tenants establish cooperatives and helping small businesses get started.

Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez has anointed Kevin de Leon, a friend since their youth in Logan Heights, a poor neighborhood of San Diego. De Leon, 39, is a top official with the California Teachers Assn. who has long worked on behalf of public schools, crafting teachers’ collective bargaining agreements and lobbying for increased education funding, the construction of new schools and health insurance for children.

Although the race will be fiercely contested, those endorsements have brought with them enormous cachet, a stream of contributions and a political apparatus that threatens to bury challengers to Popp and De Leon, including Chavez.

“If she has this great story and the voter doesn’t hear it, it doesn’t matter how great the story is. That’s just the way it is in American elections,” said Victor Griego, a political strategist whose consulting firm is based in Eagle Rock, just north of the 45th District. “She has very good credentials on paper. But how do you lift it from the paper to the voters’ living rooms?”

All 80 Assembly seats are up for grabs in November, and the race in the 45th embodies another aspect of California politics: Nearly every district favors one party to the exclusion of the other. Because the 45th is overwhelmingly Democratic, the June 6 primary, not the general election, will determine the winner.

The district stretches across Los Angeles north of the downtown area, from eastern portions of Hollywood through the southern pocket of Silver Lake, then through Echo Park, Chinatown, Boyle Heights, Cypress Park, Monterey Hills and other neighborhoods, stretching east into El Sereno and portions of East L.A.

Two other Democratic candidates round out a crowded field: Gabriel Buelna, executive director of Proyecto Pastoral at Dolores Mission in Boyle Heights, where he oversees two child-care centers and other public assistance programs, and Oscar A. Gutierrez, who has worked in radio as an audio engineer and producer and who lost this race as a Republican in 2004.

Samantha E. Allen-Newman, a paralegal and mediator, is a newcomer to politics and the only Republican in the race this time.

Popp and De Leon bristle at the suggestion that they have been gilded by the establishment.

“I have earned every single one of my endorsements,” Popp said.

Her work, she said -- and the fact that she moved into the district from Mexico at age 8 -- allows her to connect with residents in the many poor pockets of the district.

“I grew up in the poorest family in a very poor neighborhood,” she said. “I understand what it is to live in slum housing. I understand what it is to be ashamed of where you live. I understand what it takes to move people out of poverty.”

De Leon, similarly, says his front-runner status has brought him no comfort.

“I am under no illusion,” he said. “This is going to be a tough race.”

De Leon said his work on behalf of public schools -- not the backing of Nunez -- has brought him some success in the race, because access to good education is widely seen as the region’s seminal civil rights struggle.

“It’s easy to say that a door opens from the ceiling and cash falls out,” he said. “It’s not true. It’s extremely hard work.”

Still, De Leon has built a large lead in fundraising. At the end of the latest reporting period, in March, his campaign had $384,684 in the bank, more than $300,000 ahead of any other candidate. Chavez had $31,171.

Overall, she has raised about $175,000, according to her husband, Oscar Gonzales, a close advisor to the campaign and the state director of the National Hispanic Environmental Council, a nonprofit group that advocates for environmental protection and sustainable develop ment on behalf of Latinos.

Gonzales said the campaign believes it needs about $250,000 to compete. But Griego, the strategist, said Chavez would likely need twice that. And fundraising is just one arena where Chavez has struggled.

She has been conflicted, for instance, about using her grandfather’s image.

After a campaign rally last weekend, supporters were dispatched into the district to drop off boxes of note cards featuring a photograph of Chavez, as a little girl, riding on her grandfather’s shoulders, a metaphor that was difficult to miss.

On the other hand, on a recent night at her campaign office in Lincoln Heights, she ordered a campaign coordinator to eliminate a reference to Cesar Chavez in a script that was being prepared for volunteers who would carry her message to voters.

“It becomes a crutch,” Christine Chavez told her.

In an awkward development for the campaign, labor movement icon Dolores Huerta -- who co-founded the United Farm Workers with Cesar Chavez and is, by marriage, Christine Chavez’s great aunt -- endorsed Popp.

“I was honored and thrilled,” Popp said. “It was completely unexpected because of Christine.”

Huerta said she did not know in early 2005 that Chavez was running, though Chavez’s pending candidacy was already known in some political circles. Huerta has since clarified her position with a “dual endorsement” of Popp and Chavez, but she reiterated, in an interview, that she “still believes” that Popp is the most qualified candidate.

It would be apocryphal to say that Chavez has devoted her entire life to civil rights and the labor movement, but she’s come pretty close. After all, she was first “arrested” -- taken into custody by police -- at age 4, when she refused to leave the entrance to a supermarket during the United Farm Workers grape boycott in 1975.

She has since helped organize a series of labor protests at Los Angeles International Airport and against supermarkets and hotels (one of her dogs is named “Boycott”). She has done extensive work on political campaigns, including those of Villaraigosa and Nunez, as well as the successful fight against Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s slate of propositions last year.

And she has lobbied for legal recognition of same-sex marriages, presiding over commitment ceremonies next to the California Supreme Court building and working with civil rights leaders on a national marriage rights campaign.

That work has picked up a controversial mantle once held by Cesar Chavez. The elder Chavez had determined that the immigrant rights and gay rights movements shared many principles, largely because if same-sex couples cannot marry, one partner cannot sponsor the other into citizenship, a common path to American citizenship among heterosexual couples.

Chavez’s resume would seem unusually attuned to the 45th District, appealing to liberals and gays in Silver Lake and Hollywood and poor, more socially conservative Latinos to the east. But she remains a decided underdog.

Undaunted, she said she is reveling in the role and has responded by retreating, in many ways, to the grass-roots organizing and the volunteer corralling that were hallmarks of the early days of her grandfather’s labor movement.

“This is what I do,” she said. “It’s the politics of activism.”

She is, for example, running her own field campaign, a step that is virtually unheard of at this level of politics.

She has devoured demographic figures, coming up with her own estimates of the number of votes she needs in each community to win, and she knows precisely how many phone calls she can make in an average hour to persuade supporters to join her for events (87).

On a recent night in her campaign office, she checked to see whether the weather would be pleasant for an upcoming rally and placed her own order for precinct-by-precinct maps.

Her campaign website, www.actionimpact.org, is a sophisticated specimen of electronic political activism that has been in vogue over the last 10 years or so, popularized by such organizations as the liberal political group MoveOn.org.

Visitors who click on a page titled “change the world” are led to a series of activities that are only ostensibly related to the campaign. One allows a computer user to sign a form letter that will be automatically routed to the White House, encouraging President Bush to reject attempts to criminalize illegal immigrants. Another allows users to sign a petition demanding an increase in the minimum wage.

Inside her bustling headquarters, one small face has come to embody the spirit of the campaign. In late March, Chavez was the keynote speaker at a dinner marking the Cesar Chavez Week of Service and honoring 10 students who had turned their grades around. After the ceremony, 12-year-old Fidel Pedroza tugged on Chavez’s arm.

They had forgotten to read his name at the ceremony, he told her. Chavez said she feared that the perceived slight would cause a setback in his schoolwork. She told him that she had something even better planned for him.

The next day, she placed him at the front of the annual Cesar Chavez march through downtown Los Angeles. Villaraigosa spent much of the march with his arm resting on Fidel’s shoulders.

Fidel was so captivated by the hullabaloo that he asked Christine Chavez to attend his birthday party last week. Absolutely not, her aides told her, not with fewer than 60 days to go before the election. Chavez decided to go, after asking Fidel’s father to take 10 people to a campaign rally, all of whom would be expected to deliver campaign literature to 40 voters’ houses, and all of whom, presumably, will vote for her.

Gonzales, Chavez’s husband, smiled as he recounted the story one night in her campaign office.

“There are certain teams that do well in the fourth quarter,” he said. “This is one of them.”