Op-Ed: L.A.’s history of Latino-Black political conflict? It’s a curiously short tale
By Patrick ReardonSpecial to the Free Press
Posted: 12/31/2012 10:51:49 PM MST
Ana Cárdenas
LA Weekly. In the summer of 1968, the young and outspoken poet was the first person arrested in the Watts uprising that year. His poems, which appeared in a newly minted magazine called Ramparts, became an immediate sensation.
L.A.’s history of Latino-Black political conflict? It’s a curiously short tale
By Patrick ReardonSpecial to the Free Press
Posted: 12/31/2012 10:51:49 PM MST
It’s a curiously short tale that may explain how a tiny city of only about 600,000 people became the scene of one of the largest political explosions of the 20th century.
LA is small enough to host a single-party government and has been governed by one party for more than 70 years. The city’s Spanish and Mexican American populations have been largely ignored by the city government, even though their numbers remain large. In the 1960s, Mexican Americans were excluded from the city’s political power elite, along with other minorities. But in 2011, Mexican American voters elected the nation’s first mixed-race mayor.
I had dinner with Cárdenas last week in his family home in Boyle Heights, a working-class neighborhood of Los Angeles, overlooking the Mexican American community of Monterey Park. He told me his story.
Cárdenas was born in the U.S.A. and lived in New York City for most of his 20s. He spent his 30s in Mexico — first in Oaxaca, the home of the oldest and biggest Mayan civilization in the Western hemisphere, and then in Cárdenas, the city of ancient Aztec ruins that stretches from the state of Morelos in the north to Laredo in the south.
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Today, Cárdenas is the only person living on El Camino Real — the ancient road running through the ancient city of Tenochtitlan, the mythical capital of the Aztecs. It’s also the only place where two of the oldest Native American civilizations exist. His family has ties to both cultures. His maternal grandfather, Juan Cárdenas, was