SAN DIEGO – When I was a student at UCLA in the 1960s, one of the most pressing concerns was where to park. Many students commuted from their homes elsewhere in Los Angeles, but there were not enough parking lots on campus to accommodate us all. The Holmby Hills neighborhood next door was festooned with “No Parking” signs. We contended that the “No Parking” signs had been erected at the behest of wealthy homeowners, with no relation whatsoever to the regulation of traffic flow.
When our city councilwoman, Rosalind “Roz” Wiener Wyman, showed no sympathy for the students’ plight, a campaign was commenced in 1965 urging students who lived in dormitories, fraternities, sororities, and off-campus apartment to register to vote in the Westwood area so they could dump Roz in the coming election. The campaign, which I as a student editor on the UCLA Daily Bruin, enthusiastically supported, was successful. Wyman was defeated by Ed Edelman. We were a small factor in that defeat.
Now, having read Beyond Alliances, I wish that I hadn’t been so myopic. While probably I still would have supported Edelman, I can see now that Wyman, though controversial, had much in her record that was praiseworthy. Elected at age 22, she was a trailblazer both for Jewish and women candidates.
During her service on the Los Angeles City Council, she was a voice for major civic improvements in Los Angeles. She advocated for the construction of a major Zoo and for facilities for professional sports teams including the Los Angeles Dodgers, which relocated cross country from Brooklyn, New York.
The construction of Dodger Stadium at Chavez Ravine was controversial – so much so that it tore at a traditional alliance between the Mexican-American community and the Jewish community who, between the two World Wars, lived side by side the Los Angeles neighborhood of Boyle Heights..
Beyond Alliances contains four biographical essays in rough chronological order. Genevieve Carpio wrote the first one about Jewish attorney David C. Marcus, one of whose most important clients was the Mexican Consulate in Los Angeles and whose second wife, Yrma, was a political refugee from Mexico and a devout Catholic. In 1943, he successfully defended the Bernals, a Mexican-American family whose Orange County neighbors wanted them evicted because their presence violated a racially restrictive housing covenant that stated that property should not be “used, leased, owned or occupied by any Mexicans or persons other than of the Caucasian race.” Five years before the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed racially restrictive covenants in Shelley v. Kraemer, Marcus was able to persuade the court that there was no such thing as a “Mexican race,” and that therefore the restriction was (in words that sounded like television’s Perry Mason objecting to D.A. Hamilton Berger’s question) “incompetent, irrelevant, and immaterial.” Marcus noted that the status of Mexicans as Caucasians had permitted him to marry Yrma, notwithstanding California’s laws that at that time had prohibited miscegenation. Furthermore, the restrictions went contrary to President Franklin Roosevelt’s “Good Neighbor Policy” with Latin America, which was part of the nation’s wartime defense fabric. The judge ruled in favor of the Bernals.
In a second 1943 case, Marcus was able to persuade a court that the policy of the Perris Hill Plunge in San Bernardino restricting Mexican-Americans to swimming only once a week on the day before the pool was drained for cleaning was discriminatory against Latinos and unconstitutional under the 5th and 14th Amendments. The judge issued an injunction in 1944 requiring equal access to the Plunge.
Next came Marcus’s most important victory in Mendez v. Westminster, in which he successfully sued to end the practice of many school districts (including one in Solana Beach) to send students of Mexican parentage to a separate Mexican school, with inferior facilities, regardless of how fluent in English the students might be.
The era of good feelings between the Mexican-American and Jewish communities was augmented by the success of William “Bill” Phillips in creating a music business that helped launch the careers of many Mexican-American musicians, according to essayist Anthony Macias in the second biography. At his Boyle Heights store, Phillips sold 78 rpm records, musical instruments, and sheet music. He also instructed students on drums, clarinet and trumpet. Mexican-American big bands practiced in the back of his music store, later performing in the dance halls of Los Angeles.
Besides the Big Band sound that we equate with names like Benny Goodman and Tommy Dorsey, the Mexican-American bands would spice up their performances with bolero, ranchera, conga or rumba. After World War II, the Phillips Music Company grew and grew so much that Phillips was unable to accept occasional gigs playing with the Big Bands.
Out of the milieu that Phillips helped to create came many Mexican-American artists including Ritchie Valens, whose agent had persuaded him to shorten his name from Richard Valenzuela. I can remember dancing at sock hops in the 1950s to his songs “Donna” and of course “La Bomba” and being devastated in 1959 on what singer Don McLean termed “The Day the Music Died” in his song “American Pie.” Valens was killed in a plane crash along with Buddy Holly and the Big Bopper, J.P. Richardson.
People like the Jewish lawyer and Jewish music store owner provided the yin in the story of relations in Southern California between the Mexican-American and Jewish communities. Later, however, politician Rosalind Wyman and labor leader Max Mont represented the yang of the two communities’ interests pulling them apart.
After World War II, many Jews who had lived in Boyle Heights moved to more prestigious neighborhoods on the westside of Los Angeles and in the San Fernando Valley. Jews from other parts of the country, especially those who had experienced California’s weather while awaiting shipment to the Pacific theatre of World War II, joined the influx. These new arrivals wanted Los Angeles to offer more than just palm trees, beaches and sunshine. They wanted what they had in big cities back east: theater, sports teams, and a zoo. Councilwoman Wyman responded to those desires.
In the third biographical piece, Barbara K. Soliz noted the praise that Wyman showered in the form of City Council resolutions on the developers of the Huntington Hartford Theater in Hollywood and the Carthay Circle Theater in her own district. She and her husband, Eugene Wyman, a powerhouse in the state Democratic party, invested in the Biltmore Theatre downtown and advocated for the remodeling of the Greek Theatre.
Wyman pushed for the development of a new Zoo in Elysian Park to replace the one in Griffith Park, but delays and opposition from Mayor Sam Yorty instead spurred refurbishment and modernization of the Griffith Park Zoo. She also sought to create a 20-acre park on property owned by the Veterans Administration in West Los Angeles, but a proposed land swap in which the VA would build its hospital on parkland in Boyle Heights was criticized as “Robin Hood in reverse” by opponents who saw the trade as an effort to move parkland from a poor neighborhood to a wealthier one.
Wyman was a booster of professional sports, commending Coach Sid Gillman in 1955 for the Los Angeles Rams’ winning season in the National Football League, though she was less enthusiastic about his winning record after he jumped to the American Football League’s Los Angeles Chargers, which team owner Barron Hilton subsequently moved to San Diego. Her militating for a baseball stadium to be constructed in the Elysian Park neighborhood at Chavez Ravine won her affection from baseball fans, but also alienated former residents who remembered their homes had been removed to make way for what was supposed to have been 10,000 public housing units. Opponents of public housing won a referendum, leaving the land vacant. Former residents, most of whom were Mexican-Americans, felt that their need for housing at Chavez Ravine had been steamrolled over, pitting Wyman and her former council ally Ed Roybal against each other. “In leading the baseball fight, Wyman effectively turned away from a liberal form of politics rooted in ideas of metropolitan equality in favor of one that prioritized metropolitan growth and progress as a benefit to all,” biographer Soliz summarized.
The divergence in interests between the Westside Jewish community and the Mexican-American community was further exacerbated in a political campaign in which the two communities agreed upon the desired election result but sharply differed on strategy, according to biographer Max Felker-Kantor, who wrote about the life of labor leader Max Mont, the West Coast Executive Director of the Jewish Labor Committee.
In 1963, the California Legislature adopted Assemblyman Byron Rumford’s bill making discrimination in the sale or rental of housing illegal in California. The California Real Estate Association immediately launched a movement to repeal that legislation, which found expression as Proposition 14 on the November 1964 ballot.
Max Mont was chosen by Gov. Edmund G. “Pat” Brown to lead the fight in Southern California to retain the Rumford Act and defat Proposition 14. Whereas leaders in the Mexican-American and African-American communities wanted to portray the battle as a campaign to allow their constituents to move wherever they could financially afford, Mont decided a better way to win allegiance from the majority White community, including Jews, was to campaign against the bias and prejudice underlying the initiative.
He wanted, in other words, to appeal to the White community’s sense of fairness, rather than to the aspirations of minority communities for upward mobility. That decision was reflected in how campaign funds were spent. African-American journalist Louis Lomax complained that Mont was neglecting the African-American community, including among his complaints that “I have arranged for Negro social clubs to stage fund raising events only to be informed by the CAP 14 (Californians Against Proposition 14) office that these events did not deserve Hollywood stars to spark the occasion.”
The Mexican-American community had other difficulties with Mont. Various candidates to head up the committees Mexican-American division failed to win his approval until late in the campaign. He was wrongly advised to refrain from advertising on Spanish-language radio, a mistake that the initiative’s backers did not make.
Nor did Mont accede to requests from the Mexican American Political Association (MAPA) to support other aspirations of their community, including the election of a Mexican-American to the California Assembly from the Imperial Valley and opposition to Bracero programs that brought agricultural workers from Mexico to compete with Mexican-American farmworkers.
California voters by a 2-1 margin approved the repeal of the Rumford Fair Housing Act, but the victory of the California Real Estate Association was only temporary; the Supreme Court overturned Proposition 14 in 1967.
Nevertheless, the political rift between the Mexican-American community and the Jewish community had grown. The bonds of trust and affection forged by Marcus and Phillips when the two communities lived side by side were fractured and stretched farther apart by Wyman and Mont whose political priorities reflected those of White liberals living on the Westside of Los Angeles rather than those of other minority groups.
For those interested in intergroup alliances, this book is well worth reading.
Beyond Alliances: The Jewish Role in Reshaping the Racial Landscape of Southern California, Vol. 9 of The Jewish Role in American Life edited by Bruce Zuckerman, George J. Sanchez, and Lisa Ansell; Purdue University Press for the USC Casen Institute for the Study of the Jewish Role in American Life © 2012; ISBN 9781612-498805; 146 pages including extensive bibliographies and endnotes; $21.86 on Amazon.
Republished from San Diego Jewish World