Exclusionary Politics versus Multiracial-Coalition Building: What the L.A. City Council Racist Recordings Reveal about Latino Underrepresentation in Politics

Los Angeles City Hall, home of the Los Angeles City Council, during the daytime. Photo from Brion Vibber.

What does it mean to hold on to political power? And what does it take to get it? What is the value of representation, and how should a marginalized community react when its leaders start to embody the same racist power structure they were elected to challenge?

These are some of the questions being asked in the wake of the appalling anti-Black, anti-indigenous recording that rocked the Los Angeles City Council this past October. In the leaked tape of a secret meeting at the Los Angeles Federation of Labor, three Hispanic councilmembers and the head of a prominent labor group made racist remarks about a White councilman’s 3-year-old Black son, discussed how best to draw districts in order to maximize their political power at the expense of other minority communities, and disparaged Oaxacan Mexicans. The leaked recording led to the resignations of the now ex-City Council President Nury Martinez and ex-LA County Federation of Labor head Ron Herrera, put a nail in the coffin of now disgraced ex-councilmember Gil Cedillo, and destroyed the once-promising political career of Kevin De Leon. The recording is forcing Angelenos to take a hard look at the corruption embedded within our halls of power and is sparking discussions on reforming power structures in local government.

All but one of the officials involved in the recording have left their positions, and politicians across the political spectrum from local councilmembers to President Joe Biden have denounced the remarks, but one outstanding issue that Latino Angelenos must continue to grapple with is the future of Hispanic political representation in a city where almost half of its residents are Latino, but less than a third of the councilmembers are. This is the issue that Martinez, Cedillo, Herrera, and De Leon were purportedly attempting to solve when they met for their fateful meeting in October of 2021. Between calling a white councilmember’s Black son a “little monkey,” and saying of Cuban-American District Attorney George Gascon, “fuck that guy… he’s with the Blacks,” the solution they came up with was to draw district boundaries in a way that disenfranchised Black councilmembers in order to increase their own political foothold. 

They planned to do this by shifting powerful assets into districts of Hispanic councilmembers, including the University of Southern California, large public parks, and downtown Los Angeles, at the expense of Black councilmembers. Having these large assets in a Latino councilmember’s district would allow them to court campaign donations from powerful landowners and allow these politicians to grow their political network to include more influential connections—increasing their political clout and fundraising capabilities. They also attempted to undermine the political stability of more left-wing councilmembers who represent pro-tenant policies. Through gerrymandering, they proposed cutting renter-heavy neighborhoods such as Koreatown out of progressive city councilmember Nithya Raman’s district, further undermining the voices of poorer Angelenos who are disproportionately Black and Latino by diluting their votes in landlord-heavy districts.

Not only are these shortsighted, racist solutions to a severe problem in Angeleno politics a stain on the Latino political establishment, but these solutions are also the cause of the very problem they are trying to solve. In these councilmembers' minds, anyone who isn’t solely concerned with helping Latino communities in the specific manner in which they think Latino communities ought to be helped is anti-Latino and pro-Black. They mistakenly believe that the interests of Black and Hispanic communities are at odds with each other, and so people like George Gascon, who has lent his support to criminal justice reform, must be “with the Blacks” and therefore anti-Latino. They fail to see that by viewing other racial groups as foes to be excluded from their assets and separated from their constituents, the Latino political establishment misses out on the ability to form powerful alliances that would increase their clout in city politics.

The alliance these councilmembers are missing out on is built around common priorities. Black and Latino communities have fought together to increase the minimum wage, strengthen labor laws, establish gang intervention programs, improve public transit, and fight discrimination by law enforcement. Black political leaders’ ability to appeal to these shared interests has allowed them to gain power in the three city council districts represented by Black members, all of which have Latino pluralities. In Councilmember Curren Price’s district, for example, the community is 78% Latino and 13% Black, reflecting his ability to appeal across demographic lines. The same goes for Marqueece Harris Dawson, another Black city councilmember. Martinez, De Leon, and Cedillo miss out on opportunities to further our communities’ interests by attempting to disenfranchise the Black community instead of allying ourselves with them.

Powerful coalitions between minority communities have a long history of success in the city of Los Angeles and California as a whole. After a century of WASP (White-Anglo-Saxon-Protestant) control of the mayor’s office, Black and Jewish communities united in the early 1970s to bring the city’s first Black mayor Tom Bradley into power. This election redefined the city’s political landscape and ushered in a 2-decade long restructuring of political power in the city. At the same time, activist groups formed multiracial coalitions, such as the alliance between Cesar Chavez’s United Farm Workers and the Black Panther Party. The Panthers joined the UFW’s boycott against California-grown grapes and the Safeway grocery stores for selling them, and as the Black Panthers were targeted by the FBI, the UFW came to their aid. Together their political power grew, and as the Black Panther Party declined due to the meddling of the FBI, the UFW weakened due to the lack of such a powerful partnership. Coalition building gave them strength in numbers that wouldn’t have been possible otherwise, and the fact that the groups couldn’t survive without each other emphasizes the importance of such alliances.

Of course, coalition building will look different today than it did in the 60s and 70s, and strategies will look different for smaller Black communities and councilmembers than they will for relatively larger Latino ones. But there is still much Latinos must learn from the past and from our fellow Angelenos if we want to evolve past this ugly moment and develop truly sustainable and inclusive political power.

The most recent local elections in Los Angeles seem to reflect this new strategy for increasing the political representation of Latinos in Los Angeles. The progressive former head of the congressional black caucus, Karen Bass, was sworn into the mayor’s office on December 11th, and a new wave of progressive, Hispanic councilmembers joined her in city hall to push the city council to the left. Bass began her political advocacy by founding the now influential  Black-Latino advocacy organization Community Coalition. In the wake of the leaked tape scandal, she positioned herself as the candidate with the decades of experience needed to repair community relations. This strategy apparently paid off, as she was elected by a larger margin than polls anticipated, suggesting Hispanic voters voted for her in larger margins than polls predicted they would.

Hugo Soto-Martinez defeated incumbent councilmember Mitch O’Farrell, supported by the labor movement and the increasingly influential L.A. chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, whose strategy for electoral success relies on looking past racial demographics to unite around the shared challenges that minority communities face. Soto-Martinez said himself that he thinks the scandal will push the city towards a “multicultured, multi-gendered, multigenerational, movement built on shared interests and the uplift of working-class people.” 

Last June, self-proclaimed police abolitionist Eunisses Hernandez handily defeated the very same Gil Cedillo caught on the racist tapes several months later. She did this by uniting historically Latino communities with white ones, running on a platform of rejecting the interests of developers and strongly supporting tenants' rights. Before she ran for city council, she co-founded La Defensa, which focuses on uniting Black and Brown people to fight mass incarceration. By creating a multiracial coalition between different communities, Hernandez and Soto-Martinez are able to gain the number of votes necessary to give Latinos another vote on the city council while still representing the interests of other minorities. 

This strategy is proving effective outside of City Hall as well; in the California state senate, social worker, veteran, and LGBTQ activist Caroline Menjivar defeated the local Hertzberg political dynasty, a moderate, pro-business, white centrist political lineage. Menjivar’s election brings progressive, working-class Hispanic representation to a heavily Latino district that used to be represented by people who do not share the community’s interests.

These political victories could represent a temporary backlash to a racist audio clip before a reset into old habits of the Nury Martinezes and Kevin De Leons of our community that continues Latinos' long streak of political underrepresentation and isolation. Or they could signal a new era for Latino political power in Los Angeles, an era defined by multiracial, working-class solidarity that views Black Angelenos as allies in the fight for equity and social justice instead of adversaries. These victories could demonstrate the promise of a future that embraces empathy for those different than us and an understanding that we are stronger united than we are divided.

Max Edelstein (SEAS ‘25) is a staff writer for CPR studying Environmental Engineering and Political Science. A native Angeleno and member of the city’s vibrant Latino community, he has been involved in local politics throughout his life and cares deeply about the future of his home.