AMERICA:Obama is still popular with California's Latino community – one-third of the state's population, writes LARA MARLOWE
LATINO POLICEMEN hold visitors back so they will not interrupt the evening ceremony in the pedestrian zone of Olvera Street. Women in face paint and Mexican costume wave burning incense on to the clothes of participants, to purify them. The priestesses, like those they cleanse of evil spirits, are grave-faced. This is not a show for tourists, but a part of the nine-day ritual that will culminate on Monday and Tuesday with the Day of the Dead.
The incense wafts into La Golondrina (“the Swallow”) restaurant, where the manager, Eduardo Serrano, explains its significance to me: “This tradition began before Catholicism, before the Conquistadors, with the Aztecs.” Inside the restaurant stands an altar honouring Consuelo de Bonzo, who founded La Golondrina in 1924. Mexican sweets, orange flowers, a bottle of tequila and skulls decorated with painted moustaches, sequined eyes and sombreros decorate a table beneath the sepia portrait of the grandmother of the present-day owner.
“Our ancestors knew the deceased had to pass through the underworld, so they put their favourite food and drink out for them,” Serrano says.
This is the birthplace of Los Angeles, to which the Spanish governor Felipe de Neve led a group of soldiers, friars and 11 families in September 1781, nine miles through the sage and mesquite bushes from the San Gabriel mission. He christened the settlement “El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de Los Angeles.”
Christine Sterling, the aristocratic American who enlisted the help of the Los Angeles Times and its then owners, the Chandler family, to save Olvera Street from destruction in the 1920s, romanticised life in Los Angeles before the arrival of the gringos. It was “an almost ideal existence . . . The men owned and rode magnificent horses. The women were flower-like in silk and laces. There were picnics into the hills, dancing at night, moonlight serenades, romance and real happiness,” she wrote in a little book published in 1947.
Like the English immigrants far to the east, the Spaniards on the west coast revolted against their European masters. In 1846, the US declared war on Mexico, and the following year the Americans marched into Olvera Street, led by Commodore Robert Stockton, Gen Stephen Kearny, who had been wounded at the battle of San Pascual, and their scout Kit Carson.
“The leisurely, picturesque life disappeared. Ugly, three-storey frame houses were built farther and farther away from the old plaza,” Sterling wrote.
“The adobes, once the pride of the pueblo, crumbled or were torn down. The railroads came and the smoke and rumble of traffic marked the passing of an era.”
Sterling’s book is a reminder that the Spanish got here first, and a nod towards California’s Hispanic future.
“Yes, we need to be courted. We know we can turn a tide,” says Serrano, a genteel, middle-aged Mexican from Acupulco who first came to the US as crew on an ocean-liner in the 1980s.
Seven of his nine siblings are American now.
Still a permanent resident, Serrano cannot vote in Tuesday’s midterm election.
But he will soon become a citizen, and is confident in the knowledge that Latinos, already one-third of California’s population, will be a majority in the not too distant future.
Los Angeles’s mayor, Antonio Villaraigosa, is a rising star in the Democratic party and the third Mexican-American to lead the city.
California used to swing back and forth between Democrats and Republicans. But in 1994, Pete Wilson, now the campaign manager for the Republican gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman, stood for governor on a vehemently anti-immigrant platform.
Wilson won.
“But he saddled the GOP with an image they’ve been trying to live down ever since,” says David Lauter of the Los Angeles Times.
“Wilson bought victory at a very steep price. Latinos have 16 per cent of the vote now. The Republicans have a problem, because a substantial percentage of their base resent the fact that whites are no longer a majority. They’re saying, ‘No, we don’t welcome you into our party. We don’t even welcome you into our country’.”
President Barack Obama has given several interviews to Hispanic media during the midterm campaign, most recently to Eddie “Piolin” Sotelo, a popular radio personality in southern California.
When Piolin reproached Obama for failing to keep his promise to pass immigration reform, the president responded sharply that “if the Latino community decides to sit out this election . . . [reform] will be less likely to get done.”
Back in Olvera Street, Eduardo Serrano tells me that “Obama is still immensely popular” in the Hispanic community. He understands the president’s predicament.
“The timing was bad. There were hardly any jobs for citizens and legal residents, let alone for 10 million legalised people.”
Serrano senses the anxiety of some white Americans.
“They think Mexicans are taking it back, slowly. These [southwestern] states are getting browner.”
They needn’t fear, the restaurant manager adds.
“We may keep our traditions, but we don’t want to live under Mexican rule.
“We want the best of both worlds.”