In Black-led Compton, a Latino majority fights for political power
The city known for its Black culture has flipped majority Latino, but its leadership remains all Black. A group of Latino vaqueros want to change that.
COMPTON, Calif. — The riders on horseback clopped past corner stores and barking dogs, through busy downtown streets and along a creek feeding the Los Angeles River, spurs on their boots, sombreros on their heads and chaps riding up their calves.“This is the forgotten Compton,” Rogelio Diaz said on a recent Sunday, while riding his 12-year-old horse, Yolie.
The city south of Los Angeles is known as one of the great hubs of Black culture, producing countless Black athletes, rap legends and other celebrities, including Serena and Venus Williams, N.W.A. and Kendrick Lamar.
But Compton is no longer a Black city. Forty years ago, the city’s population was 74 percent Black; now it is nearly 70 percent Latino.
On weekly rides, Diaz and other members of his nonprofit, Connecting Compton, want to remind the city’s 93,000 residents that vaqueros on horseback — a Mexican American tradition — are as representative of this community as the pop culture references for which it’s better known.
Public perception isn’t the biggest obstacle Compton’s Latino activists say they face to gaining greater recognition: The city’s leadership still reflects its demographic past, with an all-Black city council and school board. It has never had a Latino mayor. Its first and sole Latino council member was ousted last year after being accused of election fraud.
Latino activists attribute their lack of representation in Compton’s elected offices to a struggle to find candidates and traditionally low voter turnout, among other issues. In 2021, during the city’s last mayoral election, Latinos made up an estimated 38 percent of votes cast despite being 50 percent of registered voters, according to a Washington Post analysis of voter registration data from the political data firm L2. Black residents accounted for roughly 45 percent of votes cast, while making up only 32 percent of registered voters.
The entrenched Black leadership has also done little to engage with the Hispanic community, Latino activists say, while clashing over the need for Spanish-speaking government workers. That has resulted in a lack of murals and monuments dedicated to Latino heroes, they say.
“It’s a very pro-Black environment right now in the administration within Compton,” Diaz said. “It’s just constant events and movements that are pro-Black and not necessarily for all in Compton.”
Compton began voting in Black leaders, including its first Black mayor, in the 1960s after the civil rights movement and the passage of the Voting Rights Act.
In a statement, the city’s mayor, Emma Sharif, who is Black, said she is proud of Compton’s history “as one of the first and only cities in the region to have as much Black representation as we have had.” Being voted into public office “while Black Americans fought racial segregation and discrimination — that has a special significance for me,” she added.
She “cannot speak to why” there has never been a Latino mayor, Sharif said. “I hope there will be more Latino representation in our future.” In the meantime, she said, the city is doing “quite a bit to engage with the Latino community, but we know there is always more to do.”
Some Black residents say they fought too hard for political power to relinquish it just yet — and that Compton’s Black leaders are still battling racism from other racial groups.
“It’s like ‘Game of Thrones’ We have to keep this power. We have to keep the little bit that we have, which is all we have,” said Nina Childs, a Black local activist and filmmaker. “And we’re not giving it up.”
The story of people of color calling on White leaders to cede power for more diverse representation is deeply rooted in American history. But Compton reflects a newer power struggle, which experts say the nation may see more of in the years to come as traditional White and Black strongholds grow more Latino and the Latino community demands more political representation.
The tension is driven by the continued growth of the Latino population, already about one-fifth of the country, while the White population declines and the share of the Black population stagnates.
New York and Houston, two of the nation’s most populous and diverse cities, haven’t had a Latino mayor in more than 100 years. Neither has Chicago, the nation’s third-largest city, whose Black and Latino populations are nearly on par.
“Political power is probably always the slowest thing to change because you control the money and the resources that you don’t want to give up, especially if you fought for it for a very long time,” said Jennifer Jones, a University of Illinois at Chicago and author of “The Browning of the New South.” “That power is difficult to let go of and you still have some constituents that you want to make sure are not abandoned again.”
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Compton has been at the center of fights for power before. It was once a predominantly White, wealthy community where actor Kevin Costner was born in the 1950s.
Black people were kept out by racial covenants that prevented them from buying homes. As those restrictions were lifted, Black families moved in and White people left. In 1963, the city elected its first Black city council member, marking the start of Compton’s rise as an iconic Black stronghold.
But as the city’s crime rate exploded in the 1980s, some Black families began to leave for wealthier, safer communities. They were replaced by Mexican and Central American immigrants, some of them undocumented, seeking cheap rent and working-class jobs. The demographics of the city changed but it remained poor with a 17 percent poverty rate, compared to 11 percent nationwide. Only 9 percent of residents have a bachelor’s degree or higher.
Compton didn’t elect its first Hispanic city council member, Isaac Galvan, until 2013, after a lawsuit against the city argued that the at-large council positions discriminated against Latino voters. It led to single-district council seats, and Galvan served for nine years until being ousted after a judge ruled he had rigged votes to win his 2021 reelection campaign. Galvan denied the allegations.
In the years since, advocates say there has been little progress.
Although about 65 percent of residents speak a language other than English at home, some government documents are still not translated into Spanish, local events rarely incorporate Latino cultural touchstones — such as mariachi troupes or papel picado — and Latinos are not represented enough in the artwork across the city, local Hispanic advocates say.
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