LOS ANGELES

On weekends, downtown Los Angeles' Broadway is a teeming mass of Hispanic shoppers. Record-store loudspeakers blare Mexican hits: Juro que Nunca Volvere (I Swear I'll Never Return), Mi Fracaso (My Downfall). The Orpheum Theater, where Al Jolson once sang in blackface, screens Spanish-language dubbings of anglo hits. An archipelago of taco and burrito carts dots the street. Stores and merchandise stands tout their wares: vestidos, tocadiscos, muebles (clothing, phonographs, furniture). Farther east, on Whittier Boulevard, young Hispanics express themselves with a unique form of Saturday night fever known as "low riding"--cruising in ornately decorated autos equipped with hydraulic pumps that lower the chassis to within inches of the roadway so as to produce showers of sparks as the car bounces along the street.

The Spanish-speaking presence in sections of downtown Los Angeles is so pervasive that other Angelenos sometimes refer to the area, with an edge in their voices, as "Baja Hollywood." Yet a strong Hispanic flavor is hardly surprising in a city that was founded in 1781 as El Pueblo de Nuestra Senora la Reina de Los Angeles de Porciuncula. At a conservative estimate, some 1.6 million of the metropolitan area's 7 million residents are Hispanics, overwhelmingly of Mexican descent. That makes Los Angeles a magnet for the estimated 7 million legally resident Hispanics scattered across the southwestern U.S.

In 1970 Hispanics replaced blacks as the largest minority in Los Angeles. They are now overhauling whites, whose share of the city population has declined from 80.9% in 1950 to a projected 44.4% in 1980. Rapid demographic swings have brought racial edginess back to Los Angeles, where the Watts ghetto riots of 1965 are still remembered with fear. Says retired Los Angeles Police Captain Rudy de Leon: "There is more outward prejudice now against Mexican people than there has ever been." Los Angeles Times Publisher Otis Chandler did not help when he noted in an interview that his paper did not court the city's black and Hispanic readership because "it's not their kind of newspaper. It's too big. It's too stuffy, if you will. It's too complicated."

Activists such as Vilma Martinez, president of the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF), argue that chicanos have "a long way to go before we can use our collective muscle as a middle class." But, even with some 19% of chicano families below the poverty line, Martinez concedes that a middle class is "clearly emerging."

In the militant chicano rhetoric of the '60s, middle-class Hispanics were often criticized as "Tio Tacos" or "Tio Tomases"--the equivalent of the blacks' "Uncle Toms." Today businessmen like Gilbert Vasquez, 39, head of the largest Hispanic certified public accounting firm in the U.S. (five offices, 65 employees), feel that individual successes will be "stepping-stones" to lasting change. Vasquez, who has moved out of the barrio to suburban Alhambra, remains involved in ghetto issues and tries to get other Hispanic professionals to take part in politics. At one chicano fund-raising cocktail party, guests anted up $20,000 for Jerry Brown's re-election campaign.

Brown has appointed 27 Mexican' American judges and named MALDEF 's Martinez to the board of regents of the University of California (she replaced Mrs. William Randolph Hearst). A chicano, Mario Obledo, 46, is Brown's secretary of health and welfare, the highest ranking Mexican-American official in the state government. But while Hispanics make up 15.8% of California's population, they hold only 2% of the state's 20,000 elective posts, including only six seats of 120 in the California legislature. With less than 8% of the state's population, blacks boast eight seats. There are no chicanos on the Los Angeles city council or the Los Angeles County board of supervisors. The sole California Mexican-American representative in Congress is Los Angeles Democrat Roybal. (Roybal has admitted that he "probably" pocketed a $1,000 payment from South Korean Wheeler-Dealer Tongsun Park. The House ethics committee has officially censured Roybal for that involvement.)

Part of the problem has been chicano political passivity, which includes a hesitancy on the part of many longtime Mexican-American residents to become U.S. citizens, often because, no matter how permanent their ties to the U.S., those to Mexico are even stronger. State Assemblyman Art Torres' own mother could not vote for him in 1974 because she did not become naturalized until the next year. But now, says Ignacio Lozano, publisher of Los Angeles' Spanish-language daily La Opinion, there is "very clearly a political awakening." In 1976 members of Cesar Chavez's United Farm Workers registered an estimated 350,000 voters in the state, bringing total registration to 52% of eligible Hispanic voters. Los Angeles' United Neighborhood Organization (UNO) is mobilizing thousands of barrio citizens to improve their neighborhoods. Says Father Luis Olivares, an East Los Angeles priest and UNO organizer: "The people involved never did anything before because they thought that they couldn't change anything."

Like other Hispanic groups, chicanos strongly support the California law providing that students who speak little or no English should receive bilingual education if their parents want them to. Last year only half of the 120,000 students in Los Angeles schools who were eligible for that help were getting it. One reason: a mere 5.5% of the city's 30,000 public school teachers are Hispanic.

A 1978 nationwide survey showed that 23% of Mexican Americans had less than five years of schooling, compared with 3.6% for the rest of the population. The school dropout rate among chicanos is high (one informed estimate: 42%), and many of those who leave school enroll elsewhere--in youth gangs. An estimated 13,000 young Hispanics belong to such gangs in Los Angeles County alone. Last year there were 69 gang killings.

Hispanic leaders were upset by recent announcements of more stringent entrance requirements for the University of California. They also fear that the Supreme Court's decision in the Allan Bakke case will work against their admission to U.S. universities. Meanwhile, chicanos deeply resent the success of black colleges and universities in getting federal aid. Says Los Angeles School Board Member Julian Nava: "There are 120 black [U.S.] colleges and universities receiving multimillion-dollar subsidies from Congress, but there isn't a single, goddamned Mexican-American institution of higher education." Actually, there are five--all small, struggling colleges, and all receiving little or no federal aid. But the point is that Nava and other Mexican Americans resent the blacks' preponderance--and that resentment does not bode well for racial harmony on the West Coast.

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