As late as 1990, the Latino political class was a small club, dominated by a handful of men. Now both the city and county of Los Angeles have Latino pluralities, and there's a robust Latino caucus in all levels of government.
That's why Judy Chu's victory in the barrios of El Monte, Temple City and other places isn't a sign of the Latino community's weakness, but rather a statement of its strength and self-confidence.
"A lot of things are better, we've made a lot of progress," said Grace Montanez Davis, who was there at the beginning of the Latino community's modern political history.
Chu's victory in the primary marked the end of an era, so I went to talk to Montanez for a bit of historical perspective. Most L.A. Latinos don't know her story, even though their debt to Montanez and her generation is huge.
She's is a frail but sharp 82-year-old now, with a brand new Stars and Stripes hanging over the front porch of her small home in Highland Park.
The daughter of Mexican immigrants, Montanez was born in Los Angeles and grew up in 1930s Lincoln Heights. She remembers the immigration raids that took place on her street as a girl, and wondering "if they would come for us next."
There were no Latino elected officials in Los Angeles until Edward Roybal was elected to the City Council in 1949. Montanez worked with the Community Service Organization in the historic Eastside voter registration drives that helped make the Latino vote a force in the city.
There was a deep hunger for political representation in Latino Los Angeles then. "We needed people who understood our community," she said. "They had to be people who came from our community."
She taught citizenship classes to Eastside residents, including her own father. In 1958, she worked on Roybal's campaign for Los Angeles County supervisor, which many historians believe he lost through fraud. Montanez and other activists gathered evidence of intimidation against Latino voters but failed in their efforts to have the results overturned.
Thirty years later, she got a call from attorneys for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund. They wondered if Montanez still had her records from the 1958 election. She had saved everything, and the old papers became essential to MALDEF's court victory that redrew the Los Angeles County supervisor districts.
Every Latino elected official in Los Angeles owes Montanez a debt of gratitude, though only a few recognize it.
