San Mateo’s Asian and Hispanic Voters Speak Up
Like many residents in this corner of San Mateo County, Violeta Ortega can name the exact intersection on Middlefield Road where sun-blanched taquerías and car repair shops fade into leafy oaks and 10-foot-high walls that circle some of the most expensive houses in the United States.
“The border is Eighth Avenue,” said Ms. Ortega, 67, who immigrated from Guatemala to Redwood City in 1970. “You come down Middlefield and the view is completely different all of a sudden. It’s like two societies.”
In many ways, the juxtaposition of the heavily Latino, working-class North Fair Oaks neighborhood and the largely white city of Atherton — home to the likes of the Apple C.E.O., Steven P. Jobs, and the executive chairman of Google, Eric E. Schmidt — captures the disparities in class and race found all over the Bay Area.
But some say that gulf also underscores a gap in political representation for ethnic and racial minorities in San Mateo County that is unique in California.
San Mateo is the only county in California that still elects its Board of Supervisors through at-large elections in which all candidates run countywide. In the past three decades, all 57 other counties in the state have moved to a district system, whereby the county is split into districts and each elects its own representative.
Last month, Ms. Ortega and eight other plaintiffs sued San Mateo County in an effort to change the way voters elect the powerful Board of Supervisors. Latinos and Asians make up half of the county’s population, yet they rarely hold high-ranking elected offices.
Ms. Ortega and her fellow plaintiffs in the lawsuit argue that the county is in violation of the California Voting Rights Act of 2001, which outlawed at-large voting in places with histories of racially polarized voting or where minority groups are “too geographically dispersed to elect their candidate of choice from a single member district.”
Since 1995, only one Latino — and not a single Asian — has won countywide office in San Mateo, said Robert Rubin, a lawyer at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, which represents the plaintiffs. Although the 2010 census showed that for the first time in San Mateo County history, non-Hispanic whites — who are now 42.9 percent of the population — fell out of the majority, four out of five current supervisors are white. The fifth, who is African-American, was appointed to a vacant seat by the board in 1999.
A district voting system would yield at least one Asian and one Latino supervisor, Mr. Rubin predicted. “The white community votes as a bloc that defeats the electoral choices of the minority,” he said.
The lawsuit — and its implied suggestion of racism — has struck a nerve in a county that considers itself solidly liberal. County officials say going to a district system would promote provincialism, while others point to San Francisco’s polarized Board of Supervisors.
Residents say that despite the income disparity, signs of racial tension are almost nonexistent and that local governments spend heavily on social services for immigrants. As long ago as 1974, for instance, San Mateo County built a community center to provide health services and English and citizenship classes for North Fair Oaks.
“San Mateo County has always been reaching out to the underserved and welcoming its immigrants,” said Sister Christina Heltsley, the executive director of the St. Francis Center, a nonprofit in Redwood City.
County Counsel John C. Beiers said it had been the dearth of Asian and Latino candidates, rather than racially tinged voting patterns, that had led to a mostly white Board of Supervisors. “We looked at our races and haven’t found any conclusion of racially polarized voting,” said Mr. Beiers. “Our supervisors are very proud of the fact that they represent all of the constituents countywide.”
Ms. Ortega, a translator for the local school district, said she had joined the lawsuit after trying for years to convey to elected officials the concerns of her non-English-speaking friends and neighbors. She rarely got a response, Ms. Ortega said.
“It’s because we’re not the same race; that’s my feeling,” said Ms. Ortega, who called the county’s voting system a violation of her rights. “If we had someone that is really sensitive about the needs of the community, about the rights of the community, maybe it would be better.”
Mike Nevin, a former supervisor and mayor of Daly City, said the best way to increase diversity would be through appointments. He sat on the Board of Supervisors that in 1999 appointed Rose Jacobs Gibson, a black councilwoman in East Palo Alto at the time, to its ranks.
“We accomplished much more, much faster than district elections ever would,” said Mr. Nevin. “With one stroke, we empowered that city. We empowered that community.”
Mr. Rubin dismissed that notion as the product of a “plantation mentality.”
People familiar with the local political scene say San Mateo’s growing immigrant populations have struggled to put forward viable candidates for office. The Peninsula lacks the networks of nonprofit groups and religious organizations that have been a breeding ground for minority politicians in dense urban areas.
“There hasn’t been the kind of political breakthrough for people of color as there has been in San Francisco or San Jose or the East Bay,” said Richard A. Walker, a geographer at the University of California, Berkeley, who has written extensively about the Bay Area. “In San Mateo, it’s always been a very professionalized ruling class.”
The dispute over the voting system, Mr. Walker added, points “partly to older power structures who want to hold on and partly to immigrants who are not mobilized, who don’t vote and so on.”
For decades, the northern part of the county has served as a bedroom community for San Francisco and for workers at San Francisco International Airport and its nearby hotels. Farther south, old-money enclaves like Woodside and Hillsborough occupied the foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains, while working-class whites populated the flatlands.
Since the 1970s, Asian and Latino immigrants have arrived in droves. Daly City today has the largest population of Filipinos outside the Philippines. And since 1970, generations of villagers from the Mexican state of Michoacán have streamed into North Fair Oaks. Many of its residents work as gardeners and housekeepers in Atherton.
In this kaleidoscopic political landscape, district elections would be “the worst thing we could do,” said Mr. Nevin. He envisioned supervisors representing disparate constituencies deadlocking the board.
Mr. Nevin cited touchy issues like California’s ambitious plans for a high-speed rail system. The project could bring hundreds of jobs to the county, but it has also come under fierce opposition because the proposed route grazes some of the Peninsula’s wealthiest neighborhoods.
Some San Mateo residents have similarly blocked BART from adding stations for the past four decades, even though the county’s relatively limited public transportation system is a source of frequent complaints among its immigrant population.
“People are already too worried about themselves,” said Mr. Nevin. “You need regionalism, not parochialism.”
Other political insiders point to San Francisco’s experience with district elections, which, since 2000, have allowed anti-establishment candidates and the city’s deep pool of neighborhood advocates to mount competitive campaigns — with the result being a polarized and sometimes dysfunctional Board of Supervisors.
“We tend to look at San Francisco and realize we seem to behave, well, a little more sanely and collegially,” Shelley Kessler, the executive secretary of the San Mateo County Central Labor Council, said with a chuckle.