Today we'll take a look at why there's a shortage of women on LA's City Council. Then, what's the possible fallout from the failure of Measure A? A new study says pessimism is good for your health, declining interest in Chicano Studies in US universities reflects a Latino identify shift, Asian Americans have their own priorities for immigration reform and much more.
Why are there so few women on LA's City Council?
In the wake of Tuesday’s election, Los Angeles could soon be without any women on its 15-member city council. The balance hangs on Council District 9, where Ana Cubas is in the runoff against State Sen. Curren Price.
In 2000, nearly a third of the L.A. City Council seats were held by women. Nine years later and there were just three women on the council. Today there is one, councilwoman Jan Perry.
The number of women on the L.A. City Council has slowly declined over the past decade as councilwomen have termed out or moved on to new posts. For example, former councilwoman Janice Hahn moved on to Congress, councilwoman Wendy Greuel became city controller and is now running for mayor. Perry will be termed out at the end of June.
"Ana Cubas could be the only woman come July. If she loses there would be no women on the city council," said KPCC's political reporter Alice Walton.
For some historical context, the first woman elected to the L.A. City Council was Estelle Lindsey in 1915. The city wouldn't elect another female to the council for decades, until Roz Wyman's election in 1953. Since then women have made great strides and have become a larger voice in city politics, but that seems to be changing.
Walton says one theory is that there are no longer groups dedicated to encouraging women to enter the male-dominated world of city politics.
"Women really aren't grooming other women to take on these roles," said Walton. "Traditionally we would have seen women's groups filling that, looking for female candidates that they can run in certain races. They just don't seem to have the resources anymore to do that."
For example, in 1984 when Geraldine Ferraro became the first woman nominated for vice president, the federal Hollywood Women's Political Action Committee was formed to support the effort of progressive women in politics. The group, which was very active in the city and was made up of powerful and influential people, disbanded in 1997 to protest the role of money in politics.
Another theory Walton mentions is that women generally have a more difficult time raising the large amounts of money that their male counterparts do.
"This is something I've heard Wendy Greuel talk about. She spoke at UCLA a year or two ago. She said when a male politician needs to raise money, he'll call a top funder and say 'Look, I need $10,000,' whereas a woman might say 'Hey how's it going? How are the wife and kids? I know its a bad time, but I really need some help.'" said Walton."
However, Walton points out that Greuel has been very successful in raising money for her mayoral campaign, so this theory isn't. So far she's raised $4.4 million, slightly surpassing the funds of her opponent Eric Garcetti.
"I think making it to the runoff in that district was a victory I think it can probably only help her," said Walton of Ana Cubas's run for the 9th district seat. "Wendy Greuel has talked a lot about being the first female mayor, the first mom who's a mayor, she has a women for Wendy committee, and even on election night she had all sorts of swag pointing out that she's a woman and that is important to certain voters. So I think there will be some momentum there that Ana can probably benefit from."
The possible fallout of Measure A's failure
Now that voters have rejected Measure A's a half-cent sales tax increase, city officials are faced with trying to close a budget gap estimated to be at least $200 million. Had the measure passed, it would have provided enough revenue to close the shortfall.
Supporters warned of dire consequences: Cutbacks in everything from libraries and after-school programs, to fire and police services. City workers' unions and the mayor also pressed for passage, but voters apparently think more revenue won't solve the city's problems.
Here to discuss what might be ahead, Bob Stern, former president of the LA-based Center for Governmental Studies, and a long-time public policy analyst.
Study: Pessimism is good for your health
We’re always told that a cheery outlook is the path to long life, but a new German study published in this month’s journal Psychology and Aging finds that pessimism leads to positive health benefits because Debby Downers tend to take more precautions, fewer risks.
The Dinner Party: Early memes, uphill skiing, space mannequins
Every week we get your weekend conversation starters with Rico Gagliano and Brendan Newnam, the hosts of the Dinner Party radio show.
On tap this week, now that we’re all done with the Harlem Shake videos, we’ll look back 25 years ago to one one of the first video memes, a re-edited VHS tape of President Ronald Reagan and his wife Nancy seemingly extolling the virtues of drug use. It was of course, a fake.
Also, the rise of a new sport, uphill skiing and the history of Ivan Ivanovitch, the first mannequin in space.
California sees spike in parolees unlawfully removing GPS devices
Outside the jails, there's been a spike in the number of parolees going rogue. Data released yesterday shows that more than 2,000 paroled sex offenders have gone missing after they removed their GPS tracking devices. That's a 15 percent jump since California's re-alignment law took effect.
Recent statistics on sex offender parolees who escaped:
--California Corrections Department
KPCC's Julie Small joins the show with more.
Declining interest in 'Chicano Studies' reflects a Latino identify shift
Children of Mexican immigrants are going to college in record numbers, but they see themselves differently from earlier generations of Mexican-Americans. That’s posing a recruitment challenge to university programs that were established to meet the needs of an earlier generation. From the Fronteras Desk, Adrian Florido reports.
On the campus of San Diego State University recently, Sandy Chavez, the daughter of Mexican immigrants, said, without hesitation, that she thinks of herself primarily as American.
Yes, she is Latina, of Mexican heritage. She’s visited family in Mexico, and on weekends as a child she woke up to her parents playing Mexican music on the stereo. But she’s never described herself principally as Mexican or Latina, much less Chicana, a term preferred by many young Mexican-Americans in the 1960s and 70s.
“A lot of people say Latina, Chicana. I don’t even really know the distinction between them,” Chavez said.
By official projections, next year, Latinos will surpass whites as California’s largest ethnic group. This is due in large part to young people like Chavez, the children of immigrants from Mexico, who are also landing on college campuses in record numbers.
But these students see themselves differently than earlier generations of Mexican-Americans.
And on campuses like San Diego State University and others, that shifting sense of identity is posing a recruitment challenge to Chicano Studies programs that grew out of the Chicano political movement of the Civil Rights era.
Last semester marked a milestone at San Diego State University. The Chicano Studies Department failed to meet its enrollment target. It’s falling short this semester, too, having enrolled just two-thirds of its target of roughly 1,300 students.
“It’s a small crisis, in terms of the department’s history,” said Isidro Ortiz, a longtime professor of Chicano Studies.
Ironically, the drop in enrollment coincides with record numbers of Latino students on campus, a large proportion Mexican-American. Last year the university was recognized as a Hispanic Serving Institution by the federal government, a designation that qualifies it for grant funding because its undergraduate student body is at least 25 percent Latino.
Professors and administrators are trying to figure out why the record number of Latinos on campus hasn’t translated into more interest in Chicano Studies courses. One theory is that a growing number of them think of themselves like Sandy Chavez does.
“Students in many cases don’t identify as Chicanos, as did the generation that created this department,” Ortiz said. Many more identify as Mexican, Mexican-American, or simply American.
Chicano Studies departments at San Diego State and across the West grew out of the Mexican-American Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. Its members rejected the term Mexican-American and instead adopted the term “Chicano,” which is thought to derive from the indigenous pronunciation of Mexicano.
Identifying as Chicano symbolized solidarity with a proud, sometimes even militant, struggle against second-class status — a struggle by Mexican-Americans to be recognized by politicians, employers, and by academia.
That led a group of Chicano academics to call a summit at the University of California at Santa Barbara in 1969. There, they drafted a plan to begin establishing university Chicano Studies curricula and departments. Within a few years, they were established at universities in California, Arizona, and Texas.
At San Diego State University, the department flourished well into the 1990s, and even the last decade. But in recent years, Ortiz said, the declining enrollment became apparent, and last year, the missed target. That has forced a conversation within the department about how relevant the term Chicano — with its political, even radical, connotations — is to young Mexican-Americans today.
Continued, even unprecedented, civic engagement by Latinos suggests it’s not mere apathy driving them away from an interest in studying the Mexican-American community in an academic context. Take the ongoing movement in support of immigration reform, driven in large part by young Mexican-Americans, and voter turnout in the last election.
“But maybe that term,” – Chicano – “is not what’s appropriate for unifying a mobilization of young people in 2013,” said Jorge Mariscal, a professor of Chicano arts and humanities at UC San Diego.
He said understanding the community’s demographic evolution is key. The Latinos on university campuses today are the children of the large wave of immigrants who came to the U.S. in the 1980s and 90s, well after the Chicano movement’s heyday.
“It means that many of these young people don’t know what the term Chicano means in the U.S. context,” Mariscal said. “So it’s really the demographic change, and the culture that those new young people bring, that is slowly moving off center stage the term Chicano, and therefore Chicano Studies.”
Unlike the Chicano generation, which saw itself outside the mainstream and was clearly a minority, today’s young Mexican-Americans increasingly are the mainstream. Many are voting, participating in the political system from within. The four-decade-old Chicano movement is increasingly a vague memory, the term imbued with nebulous meaning.
“I don’t know, when I think of a Chicano I think of somebody who grew up in the streets of East LA,” said Ernesto Limón, an undergraduate at San Diego State.
The declining enrollment is not true everywhere. At San Diego City College, a community college, the Chicano Studies department is requesting more capacity for its courses because of saturation, professor Elva Salinas said in an email.
Mariscal, of UC San Diego, said the decline in interest tends to magnify as an institution becomes more selective and elite. There is even less interest in Chicano Studies among students at UC San Diego than at San Diego State, he said.
At San Diego State, Ortiz said Chicano Studies faculty recently held a first meeting to discuss the decline in enrollment and how the department might address it. Chicano Studies departments at other universities have retooled the curriculum to include classes reflective of the greater diversity within Latino communities.
Several university departments have changed their names to include "Latino" or "Hispanic," in an effort to give the department broader appeal among the large and still growing Latino student population.
“We should be in a position to be able to capitalize on those numbers,” Ortiz said. “And I think we will be able to, provided we can solve this puzzle.”
Asian-Americans have their own priorities for immigration reform
When you think about immigration reform and the undocumented, especially here in Southern California, it's likely that you think Latino and you hear Spanish. But there are other voices are vying to make themselves heard as President Obama gears up to take on immigration reform. KPCC's Charlie Castaldi reports.
It’s inevitable, especially here in Southern California, that when one thinks about immigration reform and the undocumented, one hears Latino voices.
In fact, it was President Obama’s promise to fix the nation's immigration system that helped him win 71 percent of the Latino vote and a second term in the White House. Republicans have taken note and recently stepped up with their own proposals: ex-Florida Governor Jeb Bush joined the fray earlier this week with a book that includes his own immigration reform proposals.
Many observers on Capitol Hill believe that after the sequestration showdown, the White House and Congress will actually make an effort to compromise and pass immigration reform laws this year. And among the voices wanting to make themselves heard in the immigration debate are some who are definitely not speaking Spanish.
The variety of those voices can be heard at the downtown L.A. headquarters of the Asian Pacific American Legal Center (APALC). Inside their offices, a multitude of languages are spoken: Korean, Vietnamese, Tagalog, Mandarin, Cantonese, Khmer, Thai, Hindi, Punjabi. It’s a long list that reflects the changing demographics of the L.A. area.
“Between 2000 and 2010, more Asian-Americans became legal permanent residents in California than people from any other ethnic group," says Betty Hung, APALC’s policy director. "More than folks from Mexico. And there are more immigrants coming from Asia to California than from anywhere else in the world.”
California has a long history of Asian immigration, starting with the Chinese who first arrived during the Gold Rush in the mid-19th century. Today, there are about 5 million Asians in California – and APALC is on a mission to make sure their varied voices are heard.
“We have huge stakes in this debate,” Hung says. "Millions of our families are affected and that’s why the Asian American and Pacific Islander community is mobilizing to lift up our voices and ensure that our family’s concerns and needs are also reflected in an immigration reform bill.”
Hung points out that of the estimated 11 million undocumented individuals in the U.S., about 1.3 million are Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders – and almost one-third of those live here in the L.A. area.
Last week, Asian-American organizations launched a nationwide campaign pushing for a change in immigration laws. The campaign centers on a petition asking Congress for immigration reform that includes a path to legalization. That’s also something Latinos have been calling for, but Hung emphasizes that, for Asian-Americans, reuniting families is also a top priority.
“There are almost 2 million Asians who are waiting in backlogs, waiting in line for their family visas to be processed, so millions of families also are separated," Hung says. "These backlogs can last as long as 23 years for countries such as the Philippines. And actually four of the five countries with the longest backlogs are in Asia. That’s China, India, the Philippines, Vietnam, in addition to Mexico.”
Another area of concern for Asian-Americans is the so-called “96 law,” a bill signed in 1996 by President Clinton making it easier to deport individuals who have committed minor crimes. According to Hung, the change took away the ability of judges to consider factors such as family ties and rehabilitation in deportation proceedings.
Southeast Asians and Pacific Islanders in particular have been particularly hard hit by the change: they’re deported at a rate three times higher than immigrants as a whole.
Connie Choi, an attorney at APALC, has represented a number of Asian immigrants here in L.A. whose lives have been upended by this change. She says an immigrant’s minor offense can come back to haunt them as long as 20 years later.
“People who had gotten involved as youth committing minor offenses, who had families, who had children that are U.S. citizens that were born here, were suddenly getting picked up and placed into deportation proceedings,” Choi says.
The other issue that has many in the Asian community concerned is the failure of Congress to pass the DREAM Act, a reform that would allow undocumented students who were brought to the U.S. as children to gain legal status.
Anthony Ng, 22, falls into that category. He comes from the Philippines, which places him in the largest ethnic group of Asian-Americans here in L.A. He didn’t realize he was here illegally until the 10th grade. Undocumented was a new term for him.
“I didn’t even know what it meant,” Ng says. “I mean, there’s a term in Tagalog called 't and t,' which means 'tago and tago,' which is 'hide and hide,' 'cause you’re hiding from [immigration agents], or from being deported.”
Ng did manage to graduate from high school and UC Irvine. He’s now an organizer for Dream Team LA, a group that's advocating for passage of the DREAM Act. For the moment, Ng doesn’t have to worry about deportation: a deferred action policy was put in place last year by the Obama administration, essentially freezing deportation in cases like his.
Ng is optimistic, and not just about the DREAM Act’s chances. He believes politicians will actually tackle immigration reform.
“It’s something they want to fix this time around, given that they know the consequences of it if they don’t fix it,” he says. “We know the power of our community as a whole. We know that we can mobilize our community to register voters and to make sure they vote for a candidate that really reflect our needs.”
Betty Hung is also optimistic about comprehensive reform. She believes there’s a real chance Congress is starting to listen. And now they’re hearing more than just Latino voices.
“We are mobilizing our community alongside other immigrant communities, and partners like labor, to make sure that an immigration bill is passed and signed,” Hung says. “But not just any bill, but a bill that really offers a path to citizenship as well as clears out the backlogs and reunites families.”
The hope is, of course, that politicians in Washington are more inclined to make a deal on immigration than they were on sequestration.
California's homeless going cellular
California's homeless are cutting the cord.
The Lifeline program gives discounted landline phone service to nearly 1.5 million poor people in the state, but starting this week, cell phones are now an option, too. That's good news for a specific segment of the population: the homeless.
Jennifer Freidenbach is the executive director of the San Francisco Coalition on Homelessness, and she explains that cells are increasing important "for folks to keep in contact with their employer or looking for a jobs."
To qualify, you must earn less than $14,702 a year. Then you're eligible for a free phone plus a plan with 250 minutes and 250 texts.
"If someone's outside and they witness an emergency situation or some kind of violence," says Freidenbach, "they're unable to call for help. So it's really important that folks have access to telecommunications whether you're housed or not."
LA County undersheriff Paul Tanaka retires amid prisoner abuse probe
The once powerful number two in the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department is retiring. Embattled Undersheriff Paul Tanaka will step down August first, amid allegations he condoned deputy violence against inmates inside LA County jails.
That alleged abuse sparked a widespread FBI investigation. For more on Tanaka's departure, we turn to KPCC's Frank Stoltze.