Forging latino power, p.28
Forging Latino Power, page 28
Governor Davis would not condescend to campaign for the office he had been reelected to less than a year before, choosing instead a posture of being busy doing his job governing the state. But he could not ignore that he was down in the polls and losing support from Latino voters in particular. Latino legislators, led by Gilbert Cedillo, leaned on Davis to sign Cedillo’s bill restoring driver’s licenses to immigrant California residents without regard for their federal immigration status—a bill he had vetoed twice before. Now, when Davis signed this bill in September, in the middle of the recall campaign, Schwarzenegger—a heavily accented Austrian immigrant—pounced and turned his effort to oust Davis into an anti-immigrant backlash, promising to overturn the new law before it could take effect in January. Schwarzenegger’s success promptly ended Davis’s political career and effectively canceled Bustamante’s political future.
Nevertheless, the years of experience Gonzalez acquired while serving on Bustamante’s staff in Sacramento and running his Southern California office in LA provided her with exceptional training and a vast array of immensely valuable professional relationships. She was at the center of his 2002 election campaigns, as well as the recall, advised him on a wide array of issues, and staffed him at state and national conventions and official trips both in and beyond the state, including to Mexico. Toward the end, she established and ran his new office in San Diego and there made her own first bid for office, running for city council and losing narrowly.24 She left the lieutenant governor’s staff for good in 2006, when he reached the end of his two terms and chose to run for insurance commissioner. At that point, Lorena was recruited to serve as political director of the San Diego and Imperial Counties Labor Council, the state’s second-largest labor federation. She would go on from that position to become secretary-treasurer of the labor council and subsequently again run for office, which would send her back to Sacramento to begin another phase in her leadership journey.
Assembly Member Lorena Gonzalez speaks at press conference on April 18, 2018, in support of bill restricting mandatory arbitration clauses in employment contracts that block public disclosure of workplace misconduct in sexual harassment cases. Photo by Liz Hafalia/The San Francisco Chronicle/Hearst Newspapers via Getty Images.
La Opinión Goes to War
In 2000, Tribune Company executives cheerily told La Opinión’s leaders they planned to be more supportive of the Spanish-language paper than bad, old Times Mirror had been, but it did not take long for their designs for domination to become apparent. La Opinión management started getting to know the Tribune Company’s Spanish-language platforms Éxito in Chicago and Hoy in New York, sounding out possibilities for content sharing and other joint projects. As Tribune had four directors on La Opinión’s board, the media conglomerate had full access to the paper’s internal workings, books, and strategic planning. But by 2003, Tribune’s thinking became apparent when it converted Éxito into Hoy Chicago. Its model was to develop a national newspaper, in some ways like a tabloid version USA Today in Spanish, that essentially differed only in having a city name attached to the common Hoy brand—Hoy New York, Hoy Chicago, and so on—in each of the Latino-heavy markets in which Tribune had an English-language paper. It got around to presenting its plan to the Lozanos, who had a five-to-four majority on the La Opinión board. Tribune proposed to buy out the 50 percent share the family retained, liquidate the paper, and launch Hoy Los Angeles in its place. It offered to have Monica transfer over to the LA Times to direct its new Spanish-language division. The Hoy chain would be controlled by the publisher of the original New York property, Louis Sito.
Led by Monica, the Lozanos answered with a hard “no.” Tribune’s Hoy model was unacceptable to a family that had been proudly publishing newspapers for ninety years. They would have to find outside investors to help buy back the 50 percent share Tribune had acquired when it bought out Times Mirror, and that called for an alternative model and a plan to compete beyond LA with what Tribune was putting together. Hoy New York, selling at half the price, reported having rocketed past El Diario in circulation. Tribune was evidently out to raid La Opinión’s national advertisers with its multimarket product. Between its LA Times infrastructure and cookie-cutter tabloid, an LA Hoy could be cranked out as soon as its distribution was ready. A promising path forward materialized for La Opinión in July, when a group of investment firms announced its acquisition of El Diario La Prensa. Monica knew El Diario’s editor-turned-publisher, Rossana Rosado—they had parallel careers in the same business. Rosado welcomed her paper’s new owners, whom she described as “going to war” with Tribune’s Hoy. A national partnership with a model contrary to Hoy’s was the move for the two historic papers to make.
The investors agreed that a national network of distinct papers organic to metropolitan Spanish-language markets was the natural alternative to a fast-food chain of Hoys. Stressing heritage, identity, and deep community ties, a federation of existing newspapers could leverage demonstrated Latino brand loyalty and community relationships against the shiny new object with a cut-rate price. In a press conference on January 15, 2004—their father Nacho Lozano’s seventy-seventh birthday—Jose and Monica announced the birth of ImpreMedia, the first national Spanish-language newspaper company, which they would come to stress was, in fact, a multiplatform media corporation embarked on acquiring a native presence in the top-ten Latino cities. The occasion also marked the transfer of the position of publisher and CEO from Jose to Monica, with their dad looking on. The paper his own father had founded eight decades earlier would go on in the new century.
Monica Lozano announces launch of ImpreMedia, accompanied by Los Angeles Mayor James Hahn, City Council Member Antonio Villaraigosa, and City Council President Alex Padilla. Courtesy of Aurelia Ventura, photographer.
The Lozanos’ unveiling of ImpreMedia beat Tribune’s expected launch of its LA Hoy by over six weeks. On the very day of the latter, Monica led another news conference at which, as the Times reported, she “declared war” on Tribune’s upstart tabloid, “telling the publisher of . . . Hoy to ‘bring it on.’”25 She set up a campaign-style “war room” at the paper to monitor and gather intelligence on every move Tribune made in relation to Hoy, and she set out to renew contracts and agreements with advertisers and cross-promotional and community partners, wherever possible locking in exclusivity within the home market. The campaign included a new series of articles, radio and TV commercials, billboards, and ads on bus benches stressing La Opinión’s rootedness in and commitment to the community.
At the same time, increasingly loud rumors were circulating that both Tribune’s main New York property, Newsday, based in Long Island, and the original Hoy it printed and distributed, had been inflating their paid-circulation figures for years. Newsday reporters investigated, and that summer the paper ran an exposé on its own illicit business practices. Publishers of both the main paper and Hoy were sacked.26 The mastermind of Tribune’s Hoy model and others at the two papers eventually pled guilty to federal fraud charges originally brought by the Securities and Exchange Commission.27 Hoy Los Angeles was not required to report paid-circulation figures for the first six months of sales, but before the year was out, it tellingly announced that the cover price would be removed from the paper, which, starting in 2005, would be distributed free of charge.28 War over.
Parallel Careers
Starting with her appointment to the University of Southern California Board of Trustees in 1992, and extending to the 2020s, Monica Lozano pursued a virtual parallel career sharing her insights and judgment on the management and direction of education in Los Angeles and the state. Almost as soon as Gray Davis succeeded Pete Wilson as governor in 1999, he appointed Lozano to the State Board of Education, of which she eventually became president. At the time of her appointment, the biggest challenges the gargantuan Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) was struggling with were overcrowding in its high schools, an especially high Latino student dropout rate, and the particular problem of getting a major new high school built and opened that had been under construction for over a decade. Lozano and others founded the Alliance for a Better Community, a high-level Latino leadership organization in LA, to address the severely troubled school project that ultimately cost over $400 million to complete—the country’s most expensive.
When the high school finally opened in 2008, the project’s history of extreme dysfunction called for a rebranding.29 The school’s name was changed in honor of the late pioneer of Latina/o political empowerment in LA and the state, Edward R. Roybal. It took this huge new school’s completion, along with a number of others, to end decades of staggered, year-round schedules to accommodate the growth in the number of students in the LAUSD over the thirty-five years it had gone without a new high school. Meanwhile, Governor Davis effectively promoted Lozano to the University of California Board of Regents. Over a decade later, then-Governor Jerry Brown reappointed Monica to the UC Board for a second twelve-year term, which then elected her chair.
Along the way, Lozano compiled an extraordinary record of board directorships at other for- and nonprofit entities, including the National Council of La Raza (which she also chaired), The Walt Disney Company, Bank of America, the Rockefeller Foundation, Target, and Apple. After stepping away from her position as CEO of Impremedia, Monica capped her educational and executive careers by taking over the presidency of the San Francisco-based College Futures Foundation, which she led through the COVID-19 pandemic until her retirement, but she continued to serve on several corporate boards. Her successful leadership of what had been her family’s daily paper, and then saving it by fashioning the first US Spanish-language newspaper company, served as the basis for Monica Lozano’s appointment as the first Latina director on, and often chair of, one high-level board after another, well into the twenty-first century.
The State Latino Leadership Academy?
With the sudden growth of its Latino Legislative Caucus in the 1990s, capped with the election of its first two Latino Speakers from 1996 to 2000, and the election of one of them as lieutenant governor in 1998, the state Assembly seemed confirmed as California’s de facto academy for the development of Latina/o political leadership. But the collapse of Antonio Villaraigosa’s bid to become mayor of LA in 2001, followed by the abrupt derailing in 2003 of Cruz Bustamante’s plan to become the state’s first Latino governor, called into question whether perhaps their consecutive speakerships might have been a fluke, and whether California voters would elect Latino legislators to major executive positions.
The first question was answered early in 2004, when his colleagues made first-term member Fabián Núñez Speaker of the Assembly. This third Latino Speaker in a span of six years established a trend that was underscored by his serving over four years in the position—the longest tenure since Willie Brown, who still holds the all-time record. And there were other lessons in Fabián’s success. One was the critical importance at this time of his base in organized labor—LA-centered, immigrant-heavy, Latino-led labor. The other was the continuously increasing political weight of LA itself, beyond Latino empowerment. Fabián was not only the third Latino Assembly Speaker, but also the fourth consecutive Speaker from Los Angeles—and would be followed by four more from LA County. This unprecedented quarter-century domination of the state Assembly by LA Democrats was closely intertwined with rising Latina/o, immigrant, women’s, and LGBTQ+ empowerment in the post–African American civil rights era.30
Also in 2004, but in another LA-dominated arena, Eva Longoria graduated from starring in a daytime soap opera to a primetime, worldwide hit, with her role in Desperate Housewives on ABC. Longoria was already more than a star actor; she was emerging as a producer and director of both TV and film, and as a strategic bridge between the Latina/o-empowerment project and the top tier of the entertainment world. She was involved with national Latino advocacy organizations such as MALDEF and NCLR, and in 2006 played a critical role in reviving NCLR’s groundbreaking, nationally broadcast ALMA Awards, which she produced and hosted through 2014. In time, she would come to lead Latina/o support for Barack Obama’s 2012 reelection and the election of Latinas and Latinos to public office across the country. She also mobilized her fellow Latina actor colleagues to promote Latina/o voting in national elections.
The second question—whether voters would elect a Latino legislator to a major executive position—was answered the following year (2005), when in his second run, Antonio Villaraigosa was elected mayor of LA, besting the incumbent he had lost to in 2001. A range of factors contributed to this uncommon turnaround, as an incumbent executive is usually hard to dislodge. From a Latino-empowerment perspective, a factor of particular note is that Villaraigosa made a greater effort and invested more resources mobilizing his Latino base, instead of taking it for granted. In 2001, rather than running as a Latino aspiring to make history, he positioned himself as a mainstream candidate who happened to be Latino, and he worked tirelessly to assemble the most diverse coalition possible. This strategy, however, did not spare Antonio from being subjected to a late campaign attack smearing him with drug and gang associations, nor from being portrayed by a top African American leader as a mysterious stranger to the Black community.
In 2005, besides Villaraigosa’s greater outreach to Latino voters through Spanish-language media, through both paid advertising and “earned media,” some significant conditions had changed. Among them was Univision flagship TV station KMEX’s enhanced commitment to community empowerment. Since 2002, its news department had had a new director, Jorge Mettey. As the day of the runoff election approached, Mettey branded the station’s coverage of the mayoral rematch with notes of history and urgency, using the phrase Ahora Es Cuando (“The Time Is Now”). Regular programming carried promotional spots for the station’s enhanced electoral coverage. Without mentioning Villaraigosa by name, it featured familiar anchors and reporters urging the audience to vote, with each in turn giving a different reason, such as Para Que Te Respeten (“To Be Respected”), and ending with the Ahora Es Cuando mantra.31
The KMEX vote-promotion campaign culminated on election night with the 6:00 p.m. local newscast, which began when the polls would still be open for two more hours. The audience was greeted with the unheard-of message that they should leave their homes and go vote, or take someone else to the polls who had not yet voted. The entire broadcast was devoted to this message, including commercial breaks filled with promotional spots giving reasons for voting. Throughout the telethon-like thirty-minute program, the anchors theatrically glanced at a clock, stated the countdown of the diminishing time left to get to the polls, and intoned “The time is now.” The emotional payoff for this effort came later that night, when during its special electoral coverage, the station announced the news of Villaraigosa’s historic victory.
What remained to be seen, then, was if and when Latinas/os might again be elected to statewide office, or if the 1998 election of Bustamante as lieutenant governor—the only Latino elected statewide in the twentieth century—was the fluke. A decade would pass after Villaraigosa’s win before that question could be similarly answered, when Alex Padilla took office as secretary of state—only the second Latino elected to statewide office since the 1800s. But again, in retrospect, we can see how the pieces were falling into place for future advances. In 2006, Padilla graduated from the LA city council presidency to state Senate, and Kevin de León was elected to the Assembly. In far-off Redlands, in a first step in what would develop into a career of leadership on the national stage, young Pete Aguilar was selected among eleven candidates to fill an empty seat on the town’s city council.32 But as strategically significant and necessary as these political developments were for what was to come, and however intense the efforts of those involved in effecting them, insofar as scale and visibility are concerned, they paled in comparison to the huge numbers of immigrants who mobilized largely on their own in the spring of 2006, which revealed the vast growth and development of a distinct and parallel world of leaders, activists, organizations, and masses of participants.
Parallel Universes of Activism and Empowerment
In a span of eight weeks from March to May 2006, over 3.5 million mainly undocumented Mexican immigrants and their supporters marched in hundreds of protests across the country. They were demonstrating against a House bill passed the previous December that was intended to crack down on undocumented immigrants and immigration.33 The largest of the protests was in Los Angeles on May 1, with an estimated 650,000–700,000 protesters marching to and surrounding City Hall. Taken together, these marches constituted, to that point, the largest protest movement concentrated in a short period in US history. This phenomenal, if relatively short-lived, episode brought out several realities, in particular in the cases of the immense LA protests in March and May, and their contrast with the Chicago marches.
