ANAHEIM — Anthony Rodriguez doesn't think much about his city government.

He's not sure who the mayor is, or any other council member for that matter. The few times he has tuned into the weekly City Council meetings on cable TV, he said, the politicians have reminded him of right-wing TV personality Wally George.

Out of work for the last six months, the body-shop worker is more concerned with the survival of his three children and a working wife than with politics.

Down the street, a 27-year-old Latino woman said she never has time for local politics. Instead, she dreams of one day moving out of Anaheim's Colonia neighborhood, "maybe to Irvine," so her four children will no longer have to duck when they mistake vehicle backfires for gunshots.

"I know that stuff (government) is important," said the woman, who declined to be identified. "But the first thing you think about is keeping the kids off the street."

New census counts show that Latinos make up more than 31% of Orange County's second-largest city--a 122% increase in the last decade--but local Latino leaders say Rodriguez and the young mother are emblematic of the minority community's struggle to transform population growth into political power in a city that has never had a Latino City Council member.

"We are a long way from there," Meliton (Mel) Lopez, superintendent of the Anaheim City School District, said about the City Council.

"I don't think the awareness is there," said Lopez, who heads a district in which 59% of the 15,000 elementary students are Latino. "When I talk to parents, they are more concerned with survival, how they are going to keep the kids in school.

"The demographics have changed drastically," he said. "That doesn't mean power, it means potential. We have not learned how the system works."

Mastery of the system, though, requires participation. Records show that just 10% of those registered to vote in Anaheim are Latino, according to the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund.

The reasons are old but very real. The traditional economic difficulties of a new immigrant population remain in place. And the recession has left an impact on the community's working poor and middle-class residents.

But perhaps most discouraging is the perception that Anaheim has not been enthusiastic about its recent demographic evolution. Mayor Fred Hunter said the census figures have jolted some longtime city residents.