Since the late 1960s, the city of Lynwood, like many other southeast Los Angeles communities, has been a window on the shifting demographics of Southern California.

Its population was first dominated by whites, then blacks and for the last decade, Latinos. But it wasn't until last week's municipal elections that Latinos fully exercised their power at the polls. When the ballots were counted, voters had elected a City Council with a Latino majority.

For black politicians in Compton and Inglewood, where the Latino population is growing dramatically, the Lynwood election may be a harbinger, analysts say.

"Everybody has been talking about this sleeping giant called the Latino community," said political analyst Kerman Maddox. "The way it works is people like to elect people who look like them. There's just going to be a shift in power. I think Latinos have been left out of power for a long, long time, and they're going to put on a full court press."

In the early 1990s, Latinos won control of a few small cities, such as Huntington Park, that had been dominated by whites.

But Lynwood appears to be the first city where one minority group--Latinos--seized control from another--blacks.

Four seats on Lynwood's five-member council were at stake in the election. Three members were up for reelection, and a fourth seat had been open since Councilman Louis Heine died in March.

Two Latino businessmen, Ricardo Sanchez and Arturo Reyes, won seats for the first time, and the city's first Latino councilman, Armando Rea, won reelection. The three men ran on a slate with a non-Latino candidate, and framed the election as a referendum on the ethics of two incumbents, Paul Richards II and Robert Henning.

Henning was defeated, but Richards hung on to his seat.

For Rea, a former sheriff's deputy who now works as a private investigator, the new majority is the result of sustained growth in the city's Latino population, which he courted assiduously in a registration drive.

"I'm overjoyed," said Rea, who was elected to the council in 1989. "It was worth the wait."

Few in the 1960s would have predicted the Latino rise to power. Whites so dominated the population that the city was known by some as "Lily White Lynwood."

But Lynwood was sliced in half by the planning and construction of the Century Freeway in the 1970s. More than 1,000 homes were demolished. Employers fled. Property values tumbled.