Essay 1511

From The Los Angeles Times…

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White, but his heart is Latino

By Hector Becerra, Times Staff Writer

When George Cole moved to southeast Los Angeles County looking for factory work in the early 1970s, the mostly white and working-class area was being transformed by waves of Latino immigration.

Cole applied for an apartment and the landlady bestowed her approval.

“It will be nice to rent to a good white boy,” he recalled her saying. “We’ve been doing a good job of keeping the blacks out, but the Mexicans are like cockroaches. They’re hard to keep out.”

Soon, he got a job — $3 an hour at a plastic bag factory. He was the only white worker in a plant full of illegal immigrants. He got the job by tricking the white owner into thinking he spoke fluent Spanish by reciting lines he remembered from high school Spanish. He received 50 cents an hour more than the immigrants on the line.

Back then, Cole only knew enough Spanish to trick a gullible businessman. But from the moment he began working alongside the immigrants, he began to learn — and never looked back. It would help forge his identity.

Over the next 35 years, his adopted town of Bell — along with surrounding cities such as Huntington Park, Bell Gardens South Gate and Maywood — were transformed from mostly white to more than 90% Latino. Most of the manufacturing plants, such as Bethlehem Steel, Firestone Tire and General Motors, disappeared.

Cole remained.

He was elected to the Bell City Council when it was still all-white and now is its only white member.

Cole has emerged as a leader for southeast Los Angeles County. He took a prominent role in making sure overwhelmingly Latino cities served by the Los Angeles Unified School District have a voice in Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s takeover plan, which a judge threw out last month.

“George Cole is a Latino leader,” Supervisor Gloria Molina said, “even though he is not Latino.”

Consider a community meeting last year where state Sen. Martha Escutia (D-Whittier) introduced her Democratic successor, Ron Calderon.

Calderon spoke in English. Escutia translated. A few people got annoyed.

South Gate Councilman Henry Gonzalez said one woman in the crowd referred to Cole and cracked, “Here’s a white man who can speak better than you can!”

Cole, 56, is not embracing another culture as much as trying to fit into the world around him. It was a lesson he learned from his father, a Presbyterian preacher and activist who ministered to Latino farmworkers in Arizona in the late 1950s.

“My father taught me to embrace change,” Cole said. “A lot of people were afraid of the changes that were taking place, but I just accepted it.”

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