Hispanics In L.A.'S Melting Pot -- In East L.A., Gangs Take To The Streets To Defend Stores

LOS ANGELES - On the evening of the Rodney King beating verdicts, Oscar Rodriguez stood watch at the corner of Whittier Boulevard and McBride Avenue in East Los Angeles.

As his radio blared news of riots and looting in South Central Los Angeles, he waited, wondering when the violence would come to his neighborhood.

It never did.

But Rodriguez, 18 and a member of the Maravilla gang, had been ready if it had.

He and his homeboys have roamed the streets these past few days, standing in front of Lucky Market - the only store in his neighborhood - to discourage potential looters.

"Yeah, you could feel a sense that people were thinking, `Should we go in and take whatever?' " Rodriguez said as he drank beer on the badly cracked concrete porch at his home.

"We may not have much, but what we do have we want to keep. What are those people going to have now?"

Not unlike residents in embattled South Central Los Angeles, many of the 100,000 people in this unincorporated, predominately Hispanic, low-income community toil daily amid poverty and high unemployment.

Yet almost all of these barrios resisted the infectious rampage spreading through much of the Los Angeles area.

Community leaders frantically called parents appealing to them to keep their children inside. Armed Hispanic gang members organized, ready to protect businesses if the mobs reached their streets. Nervous merchants handed out leaflets urging passers-by

not to burn and loot the stores in their neighborhoods.

It worked.

`NEW' HISPANICS LOOTED

At least 40 percent of the city's 3.7 million residents are Hispanic. And while many looters in the ravaged areas of Los Angeles were Hispanic, church and civic leaders from both sides of downtown agree that the key difference is that the east side is home to long-established residents.

The east side has recognized leaders and established organizations. It has neighborhoods where generations of families - primarily Mexican Americans and Mexicans - feel they have a stake in their largely working-class and poor communities.

In contrast, the Hispanic neighborhoods and businesses that bore the brunt of the devastation were largely communities of recent immigrants living in South Central Los Angeles, Koreatown and Hollywood.

Gloria Molina, the only Hispanic county supervisor, said that while the media tends to lump Latinos together, "Latinos are very diverse." On the east side, "we didn't have the kind of unrest that you had in South Central," she said. "Latinos were very visible" looting in the less stable neighborhoods of recent immigrants. "But they weren't people who were protesting the King verdict."

Most of people in those impoverished areas are newly arrived Central Americans who do not have the deep roots and cohesiveness of the east side population. Also, most of them have been living here illegally and have not acquired any political clout.

CENTRAL-AMERICAN FACTOR

Carlos Ardon, head of a Salvadoran organization trying to extend an immigration amnesty for Salvadorans here, said the Central-American immigrants do not have the organization and political leadership of the Mexican-American establishment. "We are being ignored," Ardon said. "The city doesn't care about the problems of the Central-American community."

Scores, if not hundreds, of Central-American businesses were gutted in the rioting. "This is not a black- or white- or Korean-only problem," said Carlos Vaquerano, an official with the Central American Refugee Center. "We are in the middle of it and more affected than anyone else," he said.

Los Angeles City Councilman Richard Alatorre, who represents the east-side neighborhoods that were largely unscathed, said the Hispanics who made off with televisions, stereos and other high-priced items were primarily young men, many of them gang members, from Central America.

MOMS TURN SONS IN

On the other side of town, most of the youths and young men, including gang members, in the east-side neighborhoods of Boyle Heights, Highland Park, El Sereno and East Los Angeles refrained from violence.

In one instance, youths who had looted a small grocery store in a housing project were brought back the next day by their mothers to return what they had stolen, Alatorre said.

Jose "Sinner" Quintanar and Arnold "Bandit" Torres, two members of the gang TMC (The Mob Crew), said they disagreed with the verdicts in the Rodney King beating trial, but thought it was stupid for people to rampage through their own neighborhoods in protest.

"It would be better to break in somewhere far from here - Beverly Hills, some place where it's nice and people have money," Quintanar said. "That's where you're going to get attention.

"We see them burning up all their stores over there. Over here, we've got to eat. We've got to live over here."

Quintanar and Torres said they and many of their fellow gang members were prepared to defend neighborhood businesses. "If they came over here, we were gonna shoot," Quintanar said.