HKS Case.No Prison in East LA (Case)

Kennedy School of GovernmentCase Program

C14-00-1541.0

This case was written by Pamela Varley for Anna Greenberg, Assistant Professor of Public Policy at the John F.Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. (0399)

Copyright © 2000 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. To order copies or request permissionto reproduce materials, call 617-495-9523, fax 617-495-8878, email [email protected], or write the CaseProgram Sales Office, John F. Kennedy School of Government, 79 John F. Kennedy Street, Cambridge,Mass. 02138. No part of this publication may be reproduced, revised, translated, stored in a retrievalsystem, used in a spreadsheet, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical,photocopying, recording, or otherwise—without the written permission of the Case Program Sales Office atthe John F. Kennedy School of Government

“No Prison in East L.A.!”

Birth of a Grassroots Movement

Introduction

When the State of California decided to site an unpopular prison on the edge of aresidential neighborhood in East Los Angeles, community residents responded with a surge ofanger. Too often in the past, Eastsiders believed, their community had become a repository forundesirable public works projects—from highways to junkyards—because East Los Angeles was apredominantly low income, Mexican American area without much pull in Sacramento.

Now, a coalition of Eastside businessmen and residents wanted to draw a line in the sandand block construction of the prison. But the project was a top priority of California’s popularRepublican Governor, and to most political observers—even to grassroots organizers in thecommunity—the Coalition Against the Prison was tilting at windmills. The Coalition tried—through strategies conventional and unconventional—to persuade the state legislature to buck theGovernor. Most originally, several members of the Coalition launched a series of protest marchesand rallies that featured Eastside women. Marching under the name, “the Mothers of East LosAngeles,” the women used their extensive and overlapping family, church, school, andneighborhood networks to mobilize large groups of protesters—sometimes with very little notice.The results were dramatic enough to win the attention of the press and, eventually, the legislature.But would the Mothers and their protests be enough to stop the prison?

Prelude to Battle: Siting a Prison in Los Angeles County

For Republican Gov. Deukmejian and for most of the political establishment in bothparties, the need for new state prison facilities in California in the mid-1980s was critical. Over theprevious few years, the state legislature had adopted tough sentencing requirements that had

“No Prison in East L.A.!” ______________________________________________________ C14-00-1541.0

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increased the number of felons sentenced to prison from 14 percent in 1974 to 35 percent in 1984. Inaddition, convicts were receiving longer prison sentences than they had in the recent past. Theresult was a rapid increase in the state prison population from 21,000 in 1976 to 55,000 in 1986, withprojections of an increase to 95,000 prisoners over the succeeding five years.1 With capacity tohouse 26,668 prisoners, the system was seriously overcrowded. Corrections officials worried aboutthe potential for prison riots. The California Correctional Peace Officers Association, whichrepresented the interests of California prison guards, warned that assaults on guards were on therise and declared that working conditions for its members were unreasonable and unsafe. TheAssociation wanted new prison facilities up and ready for business as soon as possible.

In 1982, the California state legislature authorized the California Department ofCorrections to build six new prisons. This ambitious program raised a question about where thenew prisons were to be located, however. Although a few rural, economically-depressedcommunities in the state welcomed and even recruited prisons as a source of clean and recession-proof jobs, most communities resisted the arrival of a prison, perceived as dangerous, unsavoryand unattractive. In the past, state prisons had been disproportionately located in the northern halfof the state. Sixty percent of all state prisoners originated in southern California, but 60 percent ofall state prisons were located in the north—an imbalance that legislators from the northern districtsregarded as unfair. Especially glaring, 35 percent of inmates were from Los Angeles County—which included metropolitan Los Angeles and rural and suburban communities north of the city—yet no state prisons had been built in Los Angeles County. The legislature therefore required that atleast one of the six new state prisons be located in Los Angeles County. To give teeth to thisrequirement, the legislature adopted measures that specifically barred the state from opening newstate prisons under construction near San Diego and Stockton until the Corrections Departmenthad selected the Los Angeles County prison site.

After passage of this 1982 law, the CDC embarked on a study of more than 100 potentialsites in Los Angeles County alone. In a bid for statesmanlike cooperation, the CorrectionsDepartment requested site suggestions from the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, and theboard eventually provided a list of five—one from each supervisor’s district. Critics charged thatthe supervisors suggested patently inappropriate sites in order to keep the prison out of theirjurisdictions, however, and in the end, the CDC dismissed all five recommendations.

Corrections officials have said that, at this early stage, they did consider the site that wouldlater become so controversial—an eight acre parcel at the corner of Santa Fe Avenue and 12th Street,near the Santa Monica Freeway, two miles southeast of the downtown Civic Center and across theLos Angeles River from the Eastside Los Angeles neighborhood of Boyle Heights. [See Exhibits 1and 2] The CDC rapidly dismissed this so-called “Crown Coach” site—property once used by a buscompany—because it was too small. The site did not appear on a CDC list of 45 potential sites, 1 “A Review of the Department of Corrections’ Selection of a Prison Site in Los Angeles County,” by the Auditor

General of California, December 1986.


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released in November 1983, nor was it listed as one of the “top 10” sites recommended by theDepartment of Corrections the following month.2

When the CDC released its top ten list, elected officials engaged in a spirited scramble tokeep the prison out of their own districts, sometimes suggesting alternative locations in the districtsof their political rivals. Within a few weeks, the CDC had been persuaded to abandon all of its topten recommendations. In February 1984, the CDC tried again, announcing that its new number onechoice was on Sierra Highway near the Edwards Air Force Base in the northern part of the county.This site, however, fell within the jurisdiction of Los Angeles County Supervisor Mike Antonovich,who was also the chair of the state Republican Party, close to Deukmejian, and, it soon becameclear, firmly set against the Sierra Highway site.3 In April 1984, the CDC announced that it hadabandoned the Sierra Highway site after conducting a study of noise from the Edwards Air ForceBase and after learning of national defense concerns, which, the department said, revealed that thesite was inappropriate after all.4

Meantime, through a real estate consultant, Antonovich had urged the CDC to reconsiderthe Crown Coach site. The owner of the site—reportedly a personal friend to Antonovich—wasactively trying to sell the parcel.5 In September 1984, the CDC announced that it was consideringfive new sites, including the Crown Coach property.6 Although too small for a full-scale prison, thesite was deemed sufficient for a badly needed “reception center,” or intake facility for new inmates.To the CDC, the location of the Crown Coach site had two important advantages: it was close todowntown courts and to the Los Angeles County jail which would reduce transportation costs, andit was “close to population centers where families of inmates reside” and thus made familyvisitation easier.

On November 1, the CDC held a public meeting to hear public comments on erecting sucha facility at the Crown Coach site. The hearing was lightly attended—12 people reportedly came.7

Though Corrections officials said they followed the usual notification protocols, political, businessand civic leaders in the community all later insisted they had been unaware that the site was underserious consideration.

It came as a shock to Eastsiders when, on March 21, 1985, the Department of Correctionsannounced to the press that a final selection had been made: the new state prison would be built onthe Crown Coach site. By this point, the CDC was no longer considering a small reception center.The Department had discovered that, in addition to the original property, the state could purchase

2 “Chronology,” by the Coalition Against the Prison, July 1986, and CDC report, December 6, 1983.3 Los Angeles Times, August 13, 1986.4 CDC “Background Report,” September 1994.5 Daily News, September 26, 1986.6 CDC “Background Report,” September 1994.7 This attendance figure was supplied at the time by the office of then-Assemblywoman Gloria Molina.


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additional land within a 23-acre parcel adjacent to the Crown Coach site, and now envisioned alarger facility—a 1700-bed medium security facility—to house a reception center, work-basedprison, medical prison or some combination of the three. On behalf of the Corrections Department,Democratic Sen. Robert Presley of Riverside immediately introduced a bill in the Senate thatratified the CDC’s selection of the Crown Coach site and—to hasten the process and ensure that thestate would not lose the opportunity to buy the Crown Coach property from the current owner—permitted the department to buy the site without first conducting an Environmental Impact Report(EIR), normally required under state law.

The Corrections Department announcement drew an immediate response from the stateAssemblywoman who represented the area, Gloria Molina. Molina was an energetic and outspokennewcomer to the Assembly. Three years earlier, in the Democratic primary, she had bucked the LosAngeles Latino political establishment to become the state’s first Mexican AmericanAssemblywoman. A self-styled populist outsider, Molina did not shy away from a fight, and assoon as she learned of the state’s plan to site a prison in her district—a plan for which she said shehad received no advanced warning from the Administration—Molina flung herself headlong intobattle. She and her staff sent a mass mailing to residents and contacted her key supporters andother prominent residents on the Eastside—those who headed up business organizations, servicegroups, social clubs, and neighborhood associations—to inform them about the prison and to take areading of community feeling on the issue. As she had predicted, community feeling on the issuewas not only uniformly negative—it was angry.

East Los Angeles and the Reaction to the Prison

The traditional dividing line between downtown Los Angeles and the Eastside is the LosAngeles River. Technically, neighborhoods east of the river but west of the Los Angeles city limitare known as “Eastside Los Angeles,” and neighborhoods just east of the city limit are part of anunincorporated area called “East Los Angeles.” In common usage, however, both Eastside and EastLos Angeles refer to a geographically vague region east of downtown that encompasses the wholeof the large Latino community in the Los Angeles urban area, a region larger in land area thanManhattan or Washington D.C. Given the uncertainty of the boundaries, Delfino Varela, statepresident of the Latino Agenda Coalition, has suggested that East Los Angeles is best understoodnot as a specific place but as a “state of mind.”8 9

8 Los Angeles Times, September 19, 1986.9 This issue became a feature of the prison battle because, although the Eastsiders regarded the proposed site, just

west of the Los Angeles River, as part of East Los Angeles, proponents of the prison insisted that the site was indowntown Los Angeles. For purposes of this case, the distinction is immaterial, but in the interest of simplicity,this case refers to the site as part of East Los Angeles.


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In the mid 1980s, the population of East Los Angeles was estimated at about two million10,almost entirely Latino and about 75 percent Mexican American—down from 80 percent in the mid1970s owing to an influx of immigrants from Central America and the Caribbean. The communitywas home to several hundred thousand immigrants in the mid 1980s, but most Eastsiders had beenborn in the United States, and a small cohort traced their family roots in the area as far back as thelate 19th century.

When Molina and her aides called on Eastside residents and civic leaders to tell them of thenew state prison project, there were many reasons for the near-unanimous anger about the project,but chief among them was the sense that for too long, East Los Angeles had been an easy dumpingground for undesirable projects. A number of prominent Eastside residents had, as children, livedthrough forced relocations of their families to make way for these projects; some had been forced tomove more than once. The most egregious examples had occurred in the 1950s and 1960s,Eastsiders said, with the construction of the Dodger Stadium sports arena, the Bunker Hill highrises and five major highways—projects that together displaced some 10,000 residents.11 Thestadium and high rises each wiped out a long-standing Mexican American neighborhood, and thehighways—expansive, six-lane structures with high overpasses—left East Los Angeles with apermanent legacy of noise, dirt and pollution. Once-cohesive neighborhoods were scarred anddivided by the freeways, with residents separated from extended family, churches separated fromparishioners, and community businesses separated from patrons. This legacy left residents with asharp distrust of government and a vivid understanding of the cost of staying quiet. According toLucy Ramos, who would become a spokesperson for the anti-prison movement and whose ownfamily had been displaced by the highway construction when she was a child, “In the old days, ifthe government said, ‘Move on,’ people moved on. It’s not that way any more. There’s a limit tohow much junk they can dump on people—and this community has reached it.”12

In addition to these disruptive mega-projects, East Los Angeles residents complained thattheir community had been saddled with numerous unpleasant public works facilities—equipmentyards, junkyards, landfills, and, in particular, prisons. Los Angeles County, as a whole, might notbe carrying its fair share of the state prison burden, they argued, but within a four mile radius ofthe Crown Coach site were five other federal or county prison facilities, including the nation’slargest men’s jail with nearly 7000 inmates. Collectively these facilities housed about 12,000inmates, which constituted three quarters of the Los Angeles County prison population and overone third of the total California prison population.13 “Part of life includes freeways and jails—

10 East Los Angeles: History of a Barrio, by Ricardo Romo, University of Texas Press, Austin, 1983, pp. 163-171.11 New York Times, December 5, 1989.12 Los Angeles Times, August 13, 1989.13 The Hall of Justice, with 1500 inmates, was 2.5 miles from the Crown Coach site, according to data obtained by

the Coalition Against the Prison. The Sybil Brand Institute for Women, with 1650 inmates, was 2.5 miles from theCrown Coach site. The county Men’s Central Jail, with 6881 inmates, was less than 3 miles from the Crown Coachsite. The Baiscaluz Center for Adult Detention, with 1100 inmates, was less than 4 miles from the Crown Coach


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except that in East Los Angeles, we have all the freeways and all the jails already,” remarked FrankVillalobos, president of an urban design firm and an early leader in the prison movement.14

Villalobos’ family, too, had been forced to move, much against its wishes, when he was a child—tomake way for the fast lane on the Pomona Freeway, as he put it.15

There were several reasons Eastsiders specifically opposed the new state prison slated forthe Crown Coach site, but primary among them was the specter of inmate escapes. TheDepartment of Corrections insisted that jailbreaks from its facilities were rare and declining innumber, despite the increase in the prison population. In 1973, there had been 86 escapes from stateprisons; in 1983, there were 64 and in 1984, there were 38.16 These statistics did not strike the EastLos Angeles community as comforting, however. In a widely publicized incident in 1983, an inmatefrom a minimum-security area of the state prison in Chino, a town 37 miles east of Los Angeles,had escaped and, two days later, killed a couple, their 10-year-old daughter and the 11-year-oldson of a neighboring family in a residential area near the prison. Though the CDC characterized theCrown Coach site as a self-contained industrial area two miles from the residential community,Eastsiders said that, in fact, the site was less than a mile from two densely settled low incomehousing developments in the Boyle Heights neighborhood, and less than three miles from 26 publicand parochial schools serving 30,000 students, the majority in Boyle Heights.

Already struggling to revitalize their neighborhood in a number of ways, the residents ofBoyle Heights argued that a prison was the last thing the community needed. Villalobos, who livedwithin six blocks of two county detention facilities—and about two miles from the Crown Coachsite—worried not just about the physical safety of his children, but about the broader impact ofgrowing up in the shadow of these lockups. “Twice a day, I see the inmates and visitors andeverybody else going into those places. My kids ask, ‘Who are these people?’ It projects a negativeimage on the neighborhood. Instead of looking to a positive future, our kids see a negative aspectof society.”17 Eastsiders also worried about the impact of spin-off enterprises such as bailbondsmen, pawn shops and bars. What was needed, they said, were new schools and the kind ofeconomic development that would build the aspirations of neighborhood children. Businessleaders in several local chambers of commerce, in particular, were frustrated because the proposedsite was part of an area they had been working for two years to designate as an EmpowermentZone to spur economic development. While Corrections officials estimated that the prison wouldprovide 700 jobs altogether, industrial development on the site could generate 3000 to 5000 jobs,they claimed.18

site. And a new federal reception center, to serve an estimated 500 inmates, was under construction less than 3miles from the Crown Coach site.

14 Los Angeles Times, September 19, 1986.15 Los Angeles Times, September 7, 1992.16 “Questions and Answers About Prisons,” CDC, September 1985.17 Los Angeles Times, September 19, 1986.18 Lincoln Heights Chamber of Commerce press release, July 22, 1986.


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The Eastside residents were also fed up with the negative attitude so many outsiders heldof their community—“what the media portray as a gang-infested and economically blighted areamostly populated by ‘illegal aliens,’” according to Chicano Studies Professor Rodolfo Acuña.19 Thegulf between insider and outsider perceptions of East Los Angeles was often astonishing. Forexample, while the Eastside Lincoln Heights Chamber of Commerce regarded the Crown Coachsite as “prime industrial real estate,” local Channel 7 commentator Bill Press called the area“sleazy” and so blighted that a prison represented an upgrade:

When it’s built, nobody will even notice it’s there. Nobodyexcept the inmates, who will one day gaze out of thewindows of their cells and say, “What a godforsakendump. Why couldn’t they have built this prison someplacenice?”

In a similar vein, a cartoonist for the Los Angeles Herald depicted two hypotheticalprisoners in a newly constructed East Los Angeles prison. One says, “Let’s make a break for it,” towhich his partner replies, “Are you nuts? It’s dangerous out there!” [See Exhibit 3]

Perhaps most offensive to Eastsiders was the oft-repeated state rationale that the newlocation would be a great convenience to the families of inmates, because they would not have totravel far to visit their relatives in jail. The argument seemed to imply that a large share of Eastsidefamilies had relatives in jail, they thought—and that was insulting.

Finally, the residents of East Los Angeles were angry that their community was notaccorded the same kinds of consideration and treatment as other California communities. Whywere plans to site the new prison in other communities dropped when residents and their politicalrepresentatives objected, while similar complaints in East Los Angeles fell on deaf ears? Why wasthe routine environmental impact report to be postponed in the case of the East Los Angeles prisonsite until after the Department of Corrections had purchased the property? Wasn’t that a baldindication that the CDC did not take the review seriously, and had already made up its mind? In aLos Angeles Times op-ed column, a landowner involved in the prison controversy confirmedEastsiders’ worst fears of how they were perceived when he quoted an unnamed California statelegislator speculating that it would be easy to site the prison in East Los Angeles: “After all, they’reso disorganized that we’ll have it built before they wake up.”20

As Villalobos would later comment to a reporter, the strong community reaction to theprison in East Los Angeles came out of anger accumulated over many years: “The cause could havebeen anything. The prison was the straw that broke the camel’s back.”21

19 Los Angeles Times, January 22, 1990.20 Op Ed column by Llewellyn Werner, Los Angeles Times, July 24, 1987.21 Los Angeles Times, September 28, 1986.


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The Coalition Against the Prison

Assemblywoman Molina believed that if East Los Angeles was going to fight the stateprison, the first order of business was to demonstrate that the community was not—as theCorrections Department had claimed—“moderately supportive” of the plan, but was unalterablyopposed. Molina’s staff asked leading businessmen, the presidents of clubs and organizations, theprincipals of schools, the pastors of churches—to write letters to the CDC expressing theiropposition to the plan and asked prominent residents to circulate petitions and collect signatures.One of these was Juana Gutierrez, a neighborhood watch leader in Boyle Heights, who would laterbecome a leading voice in the anti-prison movement. On a single Sunday, Gutierrez with herhusband and a few friends collected 900 signatures from two local churches after mass—perhapsthe earliest concrete indication of the depth of neighborhood feeling on the prison matter.

Working closely with Molina, a group of prominent Eastsiders—mostly businessmen—spearheaded an organization called the Coalition Against the Prison. The effort was, in part, alogical extension of a role the business community had been playing for several years. Villalobos,an architect with expertise in environmental planning, was an early Coalition stalwart. Heunderstood how a community could benefit from environmental protection laws, and, in the past,his firm had challenged several Eastside development projects on environmental grounds. In theprevious two years, Eastside businessmen had also bonded together to stop the siting of a junkyardacross the street from a school for the mentally retarded and had led a protest against cuts in busservice to the area.22 In addition to Villalobos, Coalition leaders included real estate broker SteveKasten, president of the Lincoln Heights Chamber of Commerce; Giant Dollar Store proprietorCarmine Baffo, president of the Boyle Heights Chamber of Commerce; furniture store owner JoséLuis García; and Carlos Barrón, director of the Mexican American Education Committee. Their firstorder of business, in line with Molina’s effort to show widespread community opposition to theprison, was to recruit as many organizations as possible to join. Ultimately, the coalition would bemade up of 47 groups, but in the early days, about 20 signed on, including local chambers ofcommerce, education organizations, neighborhood associations, and local chapters of Kiwanis,Lions, Optimists, Rotary and Boys and Girls clubs.

Ironically, the largest activist group in East Los Angeles at the time—the UnitedNeighborhood Organization (UNO), a grassroots group sponsored by the Catholic Church andtrained by organizers from Saul Alinsky’s Industrial Areas Foundation23—decided not take on theprison battle. UNO, established in 1976, had fought for such community improvements as better

22 Mexican American Women Activists: Identity and Resistance in Two Los Angeles Communities, by Mary S. Pardo,

Temple University Press, Philadelphia, 1998, p. 108.

23 Founded in Chicago in 1940, the influential Industrial Areas Foundation urged community organizers to helpincrease the power of poor communities by working with established community institutions such as churches andlabor unions.


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street lighting, reduced auto insurance rates and improved relations with the Los Angeles police.One of Alinsky’s principles, however, was to avoid taking on “unwinnable” battles, and the UNOleadership believed the prison fight was unwinnable.24

In fact, UNO’s blunt appraisal was shared by many politicians, journalists, and politicalobservers. Popular and strong-willed Governor Deukmejian—nicknamed the “Iron Duke” for hisunwillingness to bend on critical issues—had made the prison a key priority of his Administration.Though Democrats held a majority in both the state Senate and state Assembly, party leaders werenot inclined to cross the Governor on the issue, especially given the political difficulties of findingan acceptable prison site anywhere in Los Angeles County. The business establishment ofdowntown Los Angeles—also in close proximity to the Crown Coach site—had decided not tooppose the facility. The Los Angeles Times editorialized several times in favor of the Crown Coachlocation for the prison. Even Eastside state Sen. Art Torres thought the cause was hopeless. To thedismay of the Coalition, Torres very early abandoned the idea of killing the prison proposal andinstead set about winning certain concessions for the neighborhood in exchange for the prison’sconstruction. From every quarter, Coalition leaders heard that they were wasting their time; theprison was a done deal.

1985: An Uphill Struggle

Despite such discouragement, the small group of business and civic leaders at the forefrontof the Coalition gamely pressed on, taking their cause to the state Senate. They followed theprogress of Presley’s prison bill in and out of committee hearings, bird-dogging the process andmaintaining a steady presence. Suspecting the Senators held stereotypes of Eastsiders asuneducated or unsophisticated, they presented themselves as suit-wearing, well-educated andprofessional. They produced a briefing book on the prison, carefully designed at Villalobos’ urbandesign firm, Barrio Planners, to resemble the issue summaries produced by high priced politicalconsultants. The Coalition and Molina’s staff also gathered data. For instance, they discovered thenumber and location of public and parochial schools within a three-mile radius of the CrownCoach site and provided legislators with a map showing them. They collected information aboutthe number and size of prison facilities already in downtown and East Los Angeles, within a five-mile radius of the proposed site.25

In addition, the Coalition Against the Prison challenged the Department of Corrections onprocedural grounds, raising questions about whether East Los Angeles was being accorded equalprotection under the law. The public hearing held in November 1984 could not be taken to satisfy

24 Once the movement was more established, UNO did become a signatory to the Coalition, however.25 Based on this data, Assemblywoman Molina introduced a bill in the Assembly in March 1985 that would have

required that no site be chosen for a new state prison if it was in an area with an existing “overconcentration” ofprison facilities. This bill was killed nearly a year later in the Senate Finance Committee.


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the department’s public hearing requirement, they argued. The CDC had not notified local media.Even businesses across the street from the proposed site had not known of the hearing until sixmonths after the fact. And what’s more, the CDC proposal up for discussion at the time of theNovember hearing—a reception center located on eight acres of the parcel—was far different fromthe one announced in March 1985—a full-blown 1700-bed prison located on 30 acres.

The Coalition criticized the CDC and the legislature for its intention to shortcut theenvironmental review process. The Presley bill would not only permit the Department to purchasethe Crown Coach site in advance of the environmental review process, it would also allow theDepartment to omit a time-consuming aspect of a standard environmental review—theconsideration of other possible sites for the prison.

The state’s rebuttals to these arguments were several: California was experiencing acuteovercrowding in its existing prison facilities—then operating at 150 percent of capacity—and thus itwas important to site and construct the new prison with all possible haste; the owners of the parcelwere eager to sell it—which was an advantage, but held the risk that the owners might sell it tosomeone else if the state did not act quickly. Also, in the course of two years of reviewing some 100possible Los Angeles County sites, the CDC argued that it had clearly fulfilled the intention of theenvironmental review process already and did not want to waste time repeating the exercise.

Several Coalition leaders, including Kasten and Villalobos, journeyed repeatedly toSacramento at their own personal expense to testify before various legislative committees. Molinaurged them to bring a greater cross section of the East Los Angeles community to Sacramento,and—noting that the Coalition spokesmen were all businessmen—urged them to bring someEastside women to testify. In response, recalls Villalobos, one or two of the businessmen broughttheir secretaries along on the next trip, but that, Molina insisted, was not what she had meant.Gradually, the Coalition began to include one or two Eastside professional women—a younglawyer, for instance, a state administrator and the director of a child care center—when they wentto Sacramento.

The efforts were to no avail. Presley’s bill continued to enjoy overwhelming support in thestate Senate. Torres, for his part, did succeed in his effort to amend Presley’s bill to provide certainbenefits and protections for the Eastsiders. These included a provision that at least 60 percent ofprison employees live within 15 miles of the prison, and that half of them be Hispanic. Anotherprovision called for participation of local businesses in the design, construction and maintenance ofthe structure. A third required placement of a green belt adjacent to the prison facility anddevelopment of a separate off-site green for community use. The bill also stipulated that no otherstate prison could be sited within 15 miles of the Crown Coach property in the future.

With these amendments, the bill won unanimous support in the Senate in September 1985.To supporters and opponents alike, it appeared unassailable. But later in the fall of 1985—to the


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amazement of all concerned—the bill hit a snag. Eager to push the measure through before thelegislature recessed, Gov. Deukmejian urged Assembly Speaker Willie Brown to “fast track” thebill past the usual committee hearings to a full vote of the Assembly. For reasons that were neverentirely clear, Brown was unwilling to do this and—arguing the importance of appropriatelegislative process—insisted that the bill’s fate would have to wait until the following year, whenthere would be time for full committee hearings.

1986: Pulling Out the Stops

Brown’s decision to push debate of the prison bill into the 1986 legislative session gaveMolina and the Coalition Against the Prison more time to mount a campaign against the measure,and they took advantage of this opening. After more than a year of pushing the CorrectionsDepartment to hold a bona fide public hearing on the prison proposal, the Coalition finally won acompromise: CDC officials agreed to attend an information forum sponsored by the LincolnHeights Chamber of Commerce and eight other service organizations to answer questions aboutthe prison. On April 9, 1986, they faced an angry crowd of 400. Molina and City CouncilmanRichard Alatorre, the Eastside’s Democratic political boss, featured prominently at the meeting. OnApril 19, the CDC announced it would hold its own public meeting at the Crown Coach site twoweeks later. This second meeting attracted even a bigger crowd—more than 600 according to pressestimates—and it, too, received television coverage.

Molina, meanwhile, was working the legislative angle. Having breezed through the Senatewith a unanimous vote just a few months earlier, the prison bill, reintroduced by Presley, wasexpected to win Senate approval easily in 1986. If the bill came to a vote of the full Assembly, themeasure was likely to win approval there as well. Molina thought there was a good chance,however, that she could arrange to have the bill killed in committee. To reach a vote of the fullAssembly, the bill had to first clear two committees—the Public Safety Committee and the Waysand Means Committee. Molina trained her sights on the Public Safety Committee. She lobbied thecommittee members and eventually persuaded a majority to vote against the prison bill and tofavor, instead, her own counter proposal to site the Los Angeles County prison near an existingcounty prison in the rural Castaic Lake region. It was a close call—a single vote margin—butMolina was confident that she had lined up the votes she needed.

To this day, many Eastsiders believe that if the vote had gone as planned, the East LosAngeles prison would have died then and there. Instead, Molina’s well-laid plan was foiled—notby any maneuver of Gov. Deukmejian, but by infighting among the California Democrats andEastside Latino politicians.


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The Infamous Polanco Vote

The 1986 prison maneuvers took place against a backdrop of change in the Eastsidepolitical landscape. For one, redistricting battles were gradually increasing the level of politicalrepresentation for East Los Angeles. In 1986, for the first time in 20 years, a Latino politician,Assemblyman Alatorre, was elected to the Los Angeles City Council.26 At the same time, however,the election of Molina to the Assembly in 1982 had marked the deepening of a new guard-oldguard split in East Los Angeles politics. The old guard politicians—a small, all male group of pro-labor Democrats led by Alatorre—were pragmatic “players” within the party. Molina, by contrast,did not hesitate to challenge the leadership of either the party or the traditional Latino politicalestablishment. While her outspoken independence had galvanized the electorate and won her loyalsupporters, it also came at a cost. In her four years in the Assembly, Molina—a one-time deputy forAssembly Speaker Brown—had crossed Brown on several occasions. Brown ran the Assembly witha strong hand and had “the reputation of assigning broom closets as offices to those who did not dohis bidding,” in the words of one political observer.27

In the spring and summer of 1986, the clash between Molina and the party bosses came to ahead. With the backing of Brown, Alatorre and Torres, a candidate named Richard Polanco ran in aspecial election for Alatorre’s old Assembly seat (vacated when Alatorre took his place on the LosAngeles City Council). Polanco was the candidate Molina, herself, had defeated in the primary ofthe 1982 Assembly race. Now, four years later, Molina vigorously supported Polanco’s opponent inthe primary, Mike Hernandez. Polanco won the contest, but narrowly and at considerable expense.

At this juncture, Assembly Speaker Brown suddenly swung into action. On June 5, 1986,the same day Polanco was sworn into office, Brown appointed him to the Public Safety Committee,replacing a known opponent of the downtown prison. Though Polanco, too, had declared hisopposition to the prison during his campaign, he did, on his first day in the Assembly, cast thecrucial committee vote that kept the prison proposal alive, paving the way for a vote of the fullAssembly. Brown announced his support for the measure, and, with his support, it was virtuallyensured a positive vote.

In political circles, the maneuver was seen as a move by Brown to “discipline” Molina forher failure to be a “team player.” “I never thought Willie would go this far,” Molina told the Los

Angeles Times at the time.28 29 Both Brown and Polanco denied the imputation, and Polanco himself

26 Eight years later, Latinos would hold three City Council seats, 10 state legislative seats, a seat on the powerful five

member Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors and four seats in the California Congressional delegation.27 Anything But Mexican: Chicanos in Contemporary Los Angeles, by Rodolfo F. Acuña, Verso, NY, NY, 1996, p.

69.28 Los Angeles Times, August 13, 1986.29 Another factor may have been the fact that Brown and Deukmejian were negotiating over one of Brown’s own pet

issues—divesting state pension and university funds of stock in businesses with operations in South Africa


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tried, with a dismal lack of success, to cast his Public Safety Committee vote as procedural ratherthan substantive, insisting that he would still vote against the measure a few weeks later when itwas scheduled to come before the full Assembly. Within East Los Angeles, Polanco’s vote was seenas a profound betrayal. “Vendido,” or sell-out, was the common cry. As 24-year-old Eastside lawyerand activist Veronica Gutierrez angrily told the Los Angeles Times, “What Polanco has done to thiscommunity is totally unforgivable. I’d much rather forgive a rapist.”30

Father John Moretta and the Resurrection Parish

With outrage at the Polanco vote sweeping like a brush fire through East Los Angeles, anenergetic Boyle Heights priest who had come to the Eastside parish just two years earlier, jumpedinto the fray. At the time of the Polanco vote in June, Msgr. John Moretta of the ResurrectionChurch was a recent newcomer to the Coalition. Early on, Moretta had been approached by theCorrections Department, in hopes that he would lend his support to the prison proposal, but hehad declined. When public meetings were scheduled on the issue in April 1986, Moretta and someof his parishioners attended. There he met Molina and members of the Coalition Against thePrison, including Villalobos. They invited him to join the Coalition, and he readily agreed. Morettaapproached other parish priests in the community and persuaded a group of about 20 to sign aletter expressing opposition to the East Los Angeles Prison. As the spokesman for this group ofclergymen, he swiftly became a prominent member of the Coalition.

The Catholic Church in Los Angeles had traditionally tended to steer clear of politicalactivism, especially of the left-leaning variety, but the prison issue—which united liberals andconservatives alike on the Eastside—was not seen as a political issue so much as a question ofcommunity control. For his part, Moretta was drawn to community-based causes, and hadencouraged his parishioners to stand up for their rights in the past. In his prior church in Pasadena,for example, Moretta had encouraged women in his parish to wage a protest against the particularsof a city contract with Planned Parenthood—and they had won. 31

As he witnessed anger and frustration over the Polanco vote, and as local talk turned to theidea of staging a major protest, Moretta struggled with mixed feelings. On the one hand, he wasinclined to encourage his parishioners and their neighbors to stand and be heard. On the otherhand, he worried about the possibility that a protest march might grow violent. The Eastside wasstill haunted by the memory of a Chicano anti-war protest in 1970 that had drawn 20,000 protesters

(operating at the time under a system of racial segregation and discrimination known as apartheid). Deukmejian hasopposed divestment in the past, but made a dramatic switch in his position on July 16, 1986.

30 Los Angeles Times, August 13, 198631 Pasadena had contracted with Planned Parenthood to conduct post partum health exams for eligible residents.

According to Moretta, Planned Parenthood required patients to sign a statement promising to use birth control, apractice contrary to the teachings of the Catholic Church. Thus, Moretta and the women convinced the city toprovide them with an alternative clinic that favored natural family planning.


14

and had ended in a violent clash with sheriff’s deputies that left three people dead, 60 injured, 200in jail, and caused $1 million in property damage. The fault of that riot was still disputed, but, withemotions running high, Moretta wanted the Coalition to steer clear of a situation that might fly outof hand. As he thought about the problem, he recalled his experience in Pasadena and was struckwith an idea—a protest made up of the wives and mothers of the Eastside would make a strongstatement yet “the women would be respected—hopefully you wouldn’t have a riot.” What’s more,anti-prison feeling in the neighborhood revolved around concerns about the safety of thethousands of children who lived within a mile or two of the site. A protest made up of motherswould serve to emphasize the protection of children. The image of mothers would appeal to thesympathy of the press and public, as well, Moretta believed.

Shortly after the Polanco vote, therefore, Moretta and other Coalition members put out theword—through the Resurrection Parish (home to more than 4000 families), through phone calls toother local parish priests, through phone calls to neighborhood women who had already voicedopposition to the prison—inviting Eastside women who wanted to take action against the prisonplan to attend a rally at the rectory of the Resurrection Church. About 200 women came. Morettatold the curious group that he would like to create an ongoing group of Eastside women opposedto the prison, and he wanted to call it, the “Mothers of East Los Angeles.” As Moretta was not anative Spanish speaker, he consulted with parishioners who knew street Spanish to make sure theacronym “MELA” was not vulgar. They gave him the all-clear. Noting to the assembled group thathe was “not a mother,” Moretta also asked one of his active parishioners, Lucy Ramos, an energeticmother of five, to be the group’s spokesperson. Teri Griffin, Villalobos’ secretary at Barrio Planners,agreed to send out notices to the press to alert them to MELA protests. Barrio Planners hadcomputers, copy machines, telephones, and faxes, which Villalobos was already using to producemany of the Coalition’s lobbying materials. Barrio Planners could support MELA as well, heoffered.

Moretta had another idea as well, intended to highlight the maternal image of the women,and drawn, again, from his experience in Pasadena. In that protest, he had encouraged hisparishioners to attend a demonstration wearing their mantillas, or white lace shawls. The quiet, oldworld dignity of the mantillas had helped set the right tone for their protest, he believed, andperhaps had been partly responsible for the city’s haste in granting the women’s request. The EastLos Angeles prison protest was too large to contemplate elegant lace mantillas for each participant,but he thought large white scarves would have a similar effect. Thus, in advance of the meeting, hehad purchased a large bolt of white fabric, and had asked church volunteers to cut it into scarf-sized squares that the women could tie over their hair.32 At the end of the meeting, the women

32 The Mothers of East Los Angeles would eventually go down in legend and lore, and different stories developed to

explain why Moretta called the group the Mothers of East Los Angeles and why he encouraged them to wear thewhite scarves. According to one much-retold version, for instance, the priest had been inspired by the womenwearing white mantillas and protesting their “disappeared” children under a brutal regime in Argentina, as depictedin the motion picture, “The Official Story.” Moretta, however, says that this story, however colorful, is notaccurate.


15

took their scarves and piled onto two waiting buses—which Moretta had rented with parishfunds—to stage their first protest march in front of Polanco’s district office. This march was amodest success, and received brief newspaper coverage, though Polanco himself had not beenthere.

Meanwhile, Villalobos had been looking for a way that the Coalition could demonstrate theproximity of the Crown Coach site to Eastside neighborhoods, to counter persistent argumentsfrom state officials, reflected in the mainstream press, that the prison was in “downtown LosAngeles” and not directly the Eastside’s concern. Villalobos envisioned the Mothers of East LosAngeles marching along the Olympic Boulevard bridge that stretched above the proposed prisonsite. Moretta liked the idea. He, other Coalition leaders and the Mothers themselves began tospread the word that there would be a candlelight march and press conference on the evening ofMonday, July 21, on the bridge.

Several hundred women came to the Monday night march, many wearing their whitescarves, carrying torches or candles or carrying placards bearing such slogans as “Build Schools,Not Prisons,” “Polanco’s a Traitor,” and “Duke barks, ELA bites.” They chanted what wouldbecome the signature slogan for the anti-prison movement, “No prison in East L.A.!” This time,reporters from a local Channel 9 television news program arrived on the scene. Motorists crossingthe bridge slowed and peered curiously at the marchers. The march was so successful and soexhilarating to the participants that Moretta and the Mothers decided to make it a weekly event—acounterpoint to the legislature’s July and August deliberations over the prison bill several hundredmiles north in Sacramento.

The Mothers of East Los Angeles

The “Mothers of East Los Angeles” was not a formal organization so much as a nameloosely attached to the growing group of women who massed on the Olympic Boulevard bridgeeach Monday night in August and early September. Over time, the protest attracted a wide rangeof marchers. Some were young, some old, some were second generation, some were immigrants.Some were mothers or grandmothers and some had no children. Some worked as homemakers andsome worked outside the home. Some lived on the Eastside and some were sympathizers frommiles away. The group also included men who helped do the driving and directed traffic on thebridge. (The marchers walked in a large circle up one side of the bridge and down the other, aroute which entailed crossing four lanes of traffic.)

The core of the Mothers of East Los Angeles, however, were women in their 30s and older,at least half of them second generation Mexican Americans. Women who emerged as prominentmembers of the group included the appointed spokesperson, Ramos, a second generation MexicanAmerican woman in her 30s, with five children including a baby—sometimes in her arms when shefaced the television cameras. Marylou Trevis, also in her 30s, was captain of a neighborhood block


16

watch program in the Hollembeck neighborhood. Juana Gutierrez, in her 50s, was the daughter ofMexican farm worker who had immigrated to the United States with her family at the age of 15.She had nine children, all of whom attended college—unusual in Boyle Heights—and had beenactive for many years in various community projects—her parish school, a neighborhood blockwatch program, a park improvement effort. She became spokesperson for the Mothers to theSpanish language press. Aurora Castillo, in her 70s, was a fourth generation Mexican Americanwoman—a retired secretary and one-time professional dancer, who had never married or hadchildren, but was a self-described “lioness” in fighting for the children of East Los Angeles.

For the women who marched as the Mothers of East Los Angeles, many of whomdescribed themselves as shy housewives, participating in the marches was a new and unusuallypublic role, especially for those interviewed by the press. Ramos says that she was extremelynervous about talking to reporters. Early on, when she agreed to allow a Channel 13 reporter tointerview her at her home, she recalls her fear at opening her front door and having six men, allstrangers, troop into her house while her husband was not at home. Gradually, though, she andothers in the group became more comfortable speaking out, she says.

Despite the novelty of the weekly marches and press attention, Chicana Studies ProfessorMary Pardo has noted that participating in the prison protest was also in some sense a naturalextension of a role the Eastside women were used to playing. In the traditional division of labor inLatino families, the men were providers and the women took care of family and children—but alsoof neighborhood and community. To participate with other women in activities to benefit familyand neighborhood, therefore, was quite familiar. In addition, by casting the protest activity,fundamentally, as an act of protecting children and neighborhood, Pardo says, and by making surethey continued to fulfill their usual domestic tasks, the women were able to participate in themarches and talk to reporters without arousing the antagonism of their husbands, who, by andlarge, supported the effort.

The Mothers’ Marches Catch Fire

The protest marches of the Mothers of East Los Angeles proved a terrific success. Over thenext six weeks, the ranks of the marchers ballooned from several hundred to an estimated 3000. Inpart, this was because the prison issue struck a chord with so many Eastsiders, and with Latinosliving elsewhere in the Los Angeles area, for whom the Eastside was, in Pardo’s words, “a symbolof an ‘ethnic heartland.’”33 In part, the high turnout was testament to the power of the extensiveand overlapping networks of Eastside families, churches, schools and neighborhoods. FatherMoretta continued to announce the protest marches in the Resurrection Parish, and other parishpriests made similar announcements in their own churches, or permitted visiting MELAparticipants to make announcements. Coalition leaders spread the word through their own

33 Pardo, p. 107.


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personal and professional networks. They also put up flyers and placed notices in the local Eastsidepapers. Individual women also spread the word to one another. Family networks, alone, drewhundreds of marchers. For example, one Eastside woman told Pardo that she had convinced hermother, her brother, and all six of her sisters to come to the marches, even though four of her sistersno longer lived on the Eastside. Later, her sisters began to bring their daughters, as well. Somewomen used their phone lists from other activities—parent-teacher organizations, neighborhoodblock watches, social clubs, church voluntary groups—to spread the word. Women also heardabout the march incidentally, in the course of day to day activities, such as shopping or taking theirchildren to school.

Castillo gradually assembled a master phone list with 400 names, which she guardedfiercely and kept out of the hands of local politicians. In fact, the success of the phone networks,coupled with the relatively flexible schedules of many women who were homemakers or retirees,meant that later in the campaign, the Mothers were able to turn on a dime, like a strike force, tostage embarrassing mini-protests with very little notice. For example, when the father of one MELAparticipant discovered that Gov. Deukmejian was attending a $1000-a-plate fund-raiser in adowntown Los Angeles hotel, he called his daughter, who called Villalobos, who called Ramos,and the Mothers quickly pulled together an impromptu protest outside the hotel. In another case, afriend of Villalobos spotted a top Corrections official attending the Rose Bowl parade in Pasadena,and in short order, a van of protesters was dispatched to the scene. “He had to pick up his blanketand go home,” recalls Villalobos with satisfaction. According to Villalbos, Castillo, who died in1998, was especially good at rounding up such impromptu groups. “Within ten minutes, Auroracan get ladies together for a protest,” he told the Los Angeles Times admiringly in 1995. “I drive a 14-passenger van, and at a moment’s notice, she can have 15 ladies on the bus ‘and one more on a littlestool,’ she always says.”34

Once the marches received television coverage, other people, inside and outside East LosAngeles, joined the group out of solidarity or curiosity. Hollywood actor Robert Blake arrived tolend support to the cause at one point. At another march, Father Moretta was horrified to see that agroup from the Communist Party had arrived to show solidarity—and to pass out its ownliterature. Was the homespun image of the Mothers about to be tainted by reports of infiltration byradical Communists? he worried. But several of the Mothers handled the awkward moment byapproaching the Communists in a firm but friendly manner, taking their literature from them,saying they would distribute it themselves, and then discreetly dumping it. As for the presence ofthe Communists in the march, one participant reassured Moretta with the observation that theCommunists added bodies to the crowd, and, that in terms of television coverage, the bigger thecrowd, the better.

34 Los Angeles Times, April 24, 1995.


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Another factor in the popularity of the marches was the fact that the protest became “anevent—people didn’t want to miss it,” explains one participant. After the first two marches, inwhich Moretta rented buses to pick up marchers at different neighborhood churches, the Mothersdecided they did not need the buses and began marching together through Boyle Heights to thebridge. Many enjoyed walking with their friends, and enjoyed catching up with people they hadonce known but had not seen in months or years. One Boyle Heights pharmacy employee told aresearcher, “I have lived in this parish all my life, and I have gotten to know so many peoplethrough my work in the pharmacy. But it was nothing until this prison march. If there would be aday I didn’t go, they would call me at work and tell me they missed me. Everyone got so close.”35

Slugging it Out in Sacramento

However successful the protest marches down in East Los Angeles, up in the state capitol,the prospects for prison opponents still appeared bleak. The leaders of the Coalition Against thePrison made repeated trips to Sacramento to testify against the prison in July, when the Assemblymet to deliberate and vote on the matter. The Assemblymen were pointedly disinterested inhearing the appeal from the Eastside, says Villalobos: “They show their discontent by reading thenewspaper—upside down—while we’re spilling out our hearts at the podium.” Sometimes theyplayed cards or watched pint-sized televisions, he added. It was intended to be intimidating andrude, Coalition members believed, but they were determined not to be cowed into retreat. TheAssemblymen did not want to listen, but the Coalition members enforced their right to be heardanyway, attending every hearing, using every possible opportunity to speak against the prison,repeating their arguments again and again.

There were even occasional moments when they thought they might be getting through, atleast a little. Moretta and Villalobos recall the time that—to the surprise of the Coalition leaders—Carlos Garcia, an Eastside resident and Vietnam vet who had been injured in the war, rose totestify that he was a Republican, that he had a deep and abiding commitment to the American flag,that he had made a personal sacrifice to that flag, and that he felt a person sense of betrayal at theidea of putting another prison in East Los Angeles. Unlike the more staid presentations of theCoalition stalwarts, with their facts and figures and logical arguments, his words were unvarnishedand came from the heart. Villalobos believed he even saw tears in the eyes of an Assemblywomanwho had been, to that point, implacably unsympathetic to the Coalition. After the hearing,Moretta—who had himself felt proud and moved by the testimony—told his Coalition colleaguesthat even if they lost the fight, they should take heart that they had won a moral victory at thathearing.

The Assembly approved the prison bill by a vote of 60 to 16 on July 10, 1986, and the billwas scheduled for Senate action in mid August. While Assembly Speaker Brown had not been

35 Pardo, p. 111.


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willing to meet with the Coalition, the Eastsiders had better luck with Senate President Pro TemDavid Roberti, a liberal Los Angeles Democrat who had backed the prison bill in the precedinglegislative session. Roberti was not overly encouraging to the Coalition members, but neither didhe declare their cause hopeless. Instead, he offered advice, Villalobos says. What the Coalitionneeded to do was line up some high profile support, he recommended—convince the Los Angeles

Times to reverse its editorial position, for example, and get the backing of the head of the LosAngeles Roman Catholic Diocese, Roger Mahoney.

The Coalition took these suggestions to heart. Molina met with the editors at the Los

Angeles Times. In addition, Villalobos discovered that a one-time rookie reporter for the Times,Frank del Olmo, who had interviewed him years before, had since been promoted to the paper’seditorial board, so he gave del Olmo a call. The Coalition also began efforts to reach ArchbishopMahoney. At the same time, however, the Coalition pursued a slightly different strategy—to bringa substantial contingent of the Mothers of East Los Angeles to Sacramento for the Senate hearings.

The Mothers Go to Sacramento

The task of bringing several hundred Eastside women to Sacramento was challenginglogistically and financially. When Coalition leaders had gone back and forth to Sacramento totestify, they had gone by plane and at their own expense, but the Mothers of East Los Angelescould not afford plane fare and the Coalition could not afford to make up the cost. Thus, theCoalition leaders decided to charter six buses to transport 324 women. Once there, they wouldhave to stay over two nights in a motel, and because some of the women had to bring theirchildren, the group decided they needed a motel with a pool. They also needed food. Theseexpenses were significant, and were ultimately covered in several different ways: donations fromthe chambers of commerce and individual businessmen in the Coalition, fundraising spaghettidinners and pancake breakfasts organized by the Mothers, and donations of food from individualsthat the Mothers could take with them on the bus.

For the women who went to Sacramento, the trip was a nerve-wracking and exhilaratingadventure. Some of the women had never been outside East Los Angeles before. Many had neverbeen anywhere without their husbands, and were thrilled, in fact, that their husbands had let themgo. One participant, Mary Lou Trevis, recalls that the group sang one song after another on theseven-hour trip to Sacramento. Spirits were high, and it reminded Trevis of stories she had heard ofthe Mexican Revolution. Castillo told a reporter of the group’s arrival in Sacramento: “Weapproached the first news conference on the Capitol steps, hungry and worn out. Then one of ourLatin legislators turned to us and said, ‘This is your state capitol. You have every right to be here.’ Icried.”36

36 Los Angeles Times, September 16, 1992.


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Participants vividly recall the reaction of the state Senators when the Mothers of East LosAngeles initially began filing into the Senate chamber. Eastside Sen. Art Torres, who had by thispoint abandoned his prior support for the prison bill, made an introduction for the group: “Theseare the Mothers of East Los Angeles.” At first the Senators continued talking among themselvesand took no notice. But as hundreds of anxious and angry Mexican American women continued tostream in the door, the Senators stopped what they were doing and stared, frozen in amazement.

Over the next two days, the Mothers, with press kits supplied by the Coalition leaders,went from office to office to lobby the state Assemblymen and Senators. They attended severalhearings and—though they were not allowed to bring in banners or placards—they did wear T-shirts and buttons and, in choreographed fashion, held up masks depicting a child behind bars—animage drawn for the Coalition by a local artist. [See Exhibit 4]

Nervous Administration aides worried that given the extraordinary environment, withdoor to door lobbying from the women, with heartfelt testimony on the floor of the Senate, withattention-grabbing rallies and clambering television cameras, the Senate might buckle. They triedto persuade Senate leaders to postpone voting on the bill, but Roberti convinced the bill’s sponsor,Sen. Presley, to proceed with the vote.

Right up until the vote was cast, it was uncertain which way it would go. Still, it came as asurprise to supporters and opponents, alike, when the Senate, on August 14, actually did fail toapprove the prison bill. Although the Senators voted 23-12 in favor of the measure, the bill requireda two thirds vote of 27 to pass. Roberti and 11 others had changed their position, at least for themoment, in what the Los Angeles Times characterized as a “stunning setback” for the Governor.Eastsiders were so jubilant at this unforeseen victory that they greeted leaders of the CoalitionAgainst the Prison, returning from Sacramento, with a celebratory mariachi band in the Burbankairport.

What provoked the turnaround for the crucial handful of Senators was not entirely clear. Itmay have been a matter of election-year politics. The Democratic-controlled Senate may not havewanted to hand the Republican Governor an election-year victory at the expense of a traditionalDemocratic constituency. After all, the issue was no longer simply a one-neighborhood concern.Latinos across the state were rising up against the prison, and statewide polls showed thatDeukmejian’s standing among Latinos had plummeted. A Los Angeles Times poll revealed that inMarch, Latinos preferred Deukmejian to Bradley by a 46 to 38 percent margin. By May, theyfavored Bradley over Deukmejian, 41 to 32 percent. And by early September, they favored Bradleyover Deukmejian 46 to 23 percent. Altogether, that represented a loss of 31 percentage pointsamong Latino voters in a period of six months. In fact, as he traversed the state making campaignappearances, Deukmejian encountered small bands of protesters in unlikely spots, chanting, “Noprison in East L.A.!” As Los Angeles Times’ del Olmo wrote at the time, “California Latinos are so


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opposed to Deukmejian’s prison that he couldn’t make them any madder if he suggested buildingit in the Vatican.”37

In addition, from distant Sacramento, it had been easy to see the issue through a certainlens: the state was in critical need of prison space; Los Angeles County had been absurdlyuncooperative in identifying a site, dragging the decision out four years; every proposed sitearoused a not-in-my-back-yard reaction and, ultimately, the Department of Corrections had to beallowed to take action. But the Eastsiders clearly saw the issue through a different lens. The SenateDemocrats may simply have wanted to take some action to show East Los Angeles that theyunderstood the community’s anger and took their concerns seriously.

A Fever Pitch

In any event, the August 14 Senate vote was hardly the last word on the East Los Angelesprison. The Senate adopted an alternate prison bill that would have required a full environmentalreview before the site could be purchased and that mandated consideration of at least two otheralternative locations in Los Angeles County. At that point, the matter went to the legislature’s jointConference Committee, which ignored the Senate measure and approved the original Presley bill.Roberti refused to allow the full Senate to vote on this bill a second time, however, and, accordingto the Los Angeles Times, “invoked a rarely used parliamentary procedure” by recessing the Senateand appointing a new Senate Conference Committee. Deukmejian called the move “an outrageousand irresponsible abuse of the legislative process.”38 Behind the scenes, Roberti and Deukmejianbegan frenzied negotiations. The fate of the bill was still anyone’s guess.

The next few weeks were marked by the escalation of anti-prison protest activity to a feverpitch. Prominent Latino leaders from around the state added their voices to the campaign.Legendary United Farm Workers founder Cesar Chavez made a special trip from the Midwest tolend his support to the cause. The Coalition had finally gotten through to Archbishop Mahoney, aswell (after getting his home phone number from Villalobos’ secretary’s father, a ranking member ofthe Knights of Columbus). Mahoney agreed to stand with the Coalition. He attended an anti-prisonmarch and spoke out against the prison. The Los Angeles Times, which had editorialized in favor ofthe East Los Angeles prison several times during the preceding year, did not actually reverse itself,but significantly modified its tone and emphasis in an editorial published a week after the Senate’ssurprise vote. “We still think the downtown site is the most appropriate for a new Los Angelesprison,” the editorial stated, but the paper went on to sharply deride Deukmejian for insisting thatthe prison site be purchased without an environmental review.39

37 Los Angeles Times, September 22, 1986.38 Los Angeles Times, September 17, 1986.39 Los Angeles Times, August 22, 1986.


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The matter of the environmental review became pivotal, too, in the negotiations betweenRoberti and Deukmejian. Though not prepared—and perhaps not able—to kill the East LosAngeles prison project outright, Roberti seized on the fact that in no other circumstance had theAdministration proposed buying a prison site without first conducting an environmental review. Itwas a legitimate question of equal protection under the law, he argued: Surely the Governor wouldat least be willing to give East Los Angeles that concession?

Deukmejian, however, would not budge. He was furious at what he saw as a bald-faceddouble cross. He had already been through a negotiation with the Senate over the bill in theprevious legislative session. A set of concessions to East Los Angeles—jobs, parks and so forth—had been included in the bill. To appease Torres, he had reportedly signed off on two unrelatedbills, sponsored by the Eastside Senator, as well. He was not in a mood to make furthercompromises. An environmental review was potentially time-consuming, and the state wouldlikely lose a good opportunity to buy the land from a willing seller, he argued.40

What’s more, much as he wanted approval for the East Los Angeles prison, the Governorbelieved that, win or lose, the politics of the prison issue worked in his favor and against theDemocrats. “It’s a win-win situation. It affords an opportunity to be highly visible and highly vocalon one of his strength issues,” an associate of the Governor told a reporter.41 Deukmejian hardenedhis resolve. He made the prison question a prime campaign issue, traveling to the nearly-completed Otay Mesa state prison facility south of San Diego for a press conference where hestressed that, until the Los Angeles County site was approved, the facility could not be used. Hesternly warned that the badly crowded state prisons posed a severe danger of riots. To vote downthe Los Angeles prison in this context was almost criminally irresponsible, he said. He also wentout of his way to campaign personally against the Democratic Senators facing re-election inNovember who failed to support the prison.42

Roberti, for his part, continued his defiance and marched in an anti-prison rally. Nor didhe believe the issue would threaten the 16 Democrat-held Senate seats up for election. “I suspectthe average man or woman on the street asks, ‘Why not put [the prison] in the boonies? Why put itwhere people live?’”43 In addition, Democrats hoped the issue might galvanize Latinos and otherDemocratic sympathizers—who might otherwise stay home—to come to the polls and vote.

Over the next few weeks, the prison controversy solidified into a test of wills between theGovernor and the Senate President. Deukmejian called the Senate into special session, despite theusual election-year practice of releasing legislators to attend to their campaigns. Roberti, however,defied the order with a procedural maneuver, and refused to convene the Senate to discuss the

40 Los Angeles Times, September 9, 1986 and September 17, 1986.41 Los Angeles Times, September 19, 1986.42 Los Angeles Times, September 19, 1986.43 Los Angeles Times, September 19, 1986.


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measure without concessions from the Governor. Sen. Presley, sponsor of the prison bill, made alast ditch effort to mediate between the two. He proposed that the legislature approve a packagedeal: two Los Angeles County prisons, one in East Los Angeles and one in a northern, Republicanarea of the county. Deukmejian, however, dismissed the idea out of hand, and the 1986 legislativesession ended without a resolution of the matter.44

1987: Enough Already

To the Coalition, the success at blocking passage of the prison bill was exciting, but wastempered by the knowledge that the issue would be back on the table again in 1987. In December1986, however, two more developments seemed to bolster their Eastsiders’ position. For one, thestate Auditor General released a report that criticized some of the CDC’s procedures in selectingthe Crown Coach site, and that criticized some of the Department of General Services’ proceduresin appraising the parcel. The report stated that the site might well be contaminated by hazardouswaste since such wastes had been discovered on a bordering parcel, and suggested that, as a result,the state might have overestimated the value of the property.

A further boon for prison opponents was the announcement from the owners of the CrownCoach site that they had sold their property to a private industrial developer—a move partly basedon business considerations, but, according to an op-ed column later written by one of the twoowners, a move that also reflected a political choice to side with the neighborhood against theprison plan.45

Many Eastsiders assumed that with the sale of the property, the prison idea was finallydead. But Deukmejian, who had won re-election in a landslide, was not about to let the matterdrop. Directly after the announcement that the Crown Coach property had been sold, heannounced that the state would either buy it from the new owner, condemn the land and take it byforce, or find a way to build a high-rise prison on the remaining part of the parcel. One way oranother, the state still planned to put a prison on the site. This determination, suggested the Times’del Olmo, was beginning to seem extreme. “No one can figure out why Deukmejian is sodetermined to continue his political mano-a-mano with Eastside,” he wrote. “A condemnationprocess, asserting the right of eminent domain, could take at least two years.”46

Within the Senate, however, there was a strong desire to arrive at a compromise on theprison matter. The Coalition Against the Prison and the Mothers of East Los Angeles maintained apersistent presence at all the significant legislative hearings throughout this process, but in the end,to the great disappointment of Coalition leaders, the legislature approved—and the Governor

44 Los Angeles Times, October 3, 1986.45 Op Ed column by Llewellyn Werner, Los Angeles Times, July 24, 1987.46 Los Angeles Times, January 15, 1987.


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signed—a measure that became known as the “pain for pain” bill. This measure reflected thecompromise Presley had suggested in late 1986. It linked the construction of a 1450-bed prison inEast Los Angeles to a 2200-bed prison in Lancaster, a Republican area in the northern part of LosAngeles County, part of Los Angeles County Supervisor Antonovich’s district. Neither prisoncould be occupied until construction was underway on the other. The bill did not require that anenvironmental review be conducted before the purchase of the East Los Angeles site, though areview was required before construction could begin. Roberti told Coalition members privatelythat, if they played their cards right, the environmental review would give them the leverage to killthe project.

Coalition members alternately pleaded and screamed at Roberti. Bitterly angry, EastsideSen. Art Torres declared, “I have not received support in this house, when I have given to theDemocratic Party for 14 years.” But ultimately, the Eastsiders could not dissuade Roberti frombacking the pain-for-pain deal. "This isn’t a glorious day, it’s an unhappy day,” Roberti told thempublicly on July 13, 1987, as the Senate overwhelmingly approved the bill, 29-6. “But it’s a daywhen we legislators have to discharge our duties.” 47

47 Los Angeles Times, July 14, 1987.


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Exhibit 148

48 Source: Mexican American Women Activists: Identity and Resistance in Two Los Angeles Communities, by Mary

S. Pardo, Temple University Press, Philadelphia, 1998.


26

Exhibit 2

Eastside Los Angeles


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Exhibit 349

49 Source: Los Angeles Herald, October 14, 1986.


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Exhibit 4

Mask used in Mothers of East Los Angeles protests

HKS Case.No Prison in East LA (Case)

Documents

Transcript of HKS Case.No Prison in East LA (Case)