LOS ANGELES - The war of words against racially charged Proposition 187 took on a different tone Wednesday as opponents urged residents to channel their anger into the courts - not the streets.
School officials blanketed the air waves - from rock stations to Spanish media. Actor and activist Edward James Olmos asked parents to keep children in school. Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan urged pregnant women to go to health clinics "without fear."
But outrage sparked by the huge ballot victory of Proposition 187 - which denies illegal immigrants public education, most health care and requires teachers and doctors to turn them in - is palpable.
Votes were cast largely along racial lines, with Hispanics opposed and whites overwhelmingly favoring the measure. Blacks and Asians supported the measure but by smaller margins.
Wednesday afternoon, police in riot gear and on horseback patrolled streets around the Ronald Reagan State Office Building as about 200 angry protesters - most of them students - waved red flags and chanted, "Hey hey, ho ho, 187 has got to go." Some carried signs reading, "187 equals racism, Nazism and xenophobia."
"We want to become a real force in the streets," said Alvaro Maldonado of Pro-Immigration Mobilization Coalition, which organized the protest.
In Los Angeles, a city still reeling from racial rioting three years ago, people were ready for the worst.
"It may be the calm before the storm," says Catherine Carey of the teachers' union. "The children are fighting. They're afraid that somebody is going to finger their parents as illegal aliens."
Proposition 187 was approved by a wide margin - 59% of voters. The measure hit right at the heart of economic angst in battered California.
A Los Angeles Times poll shows 78% of those who voted for 187 did so mainly to send a message to the federal government; only 2% thought it would yank children from schools.
"I'm totally aware it's going to be caught up in the courts, but I'm hoping if nothing else, it will inspire the Feds to start allocating resources at the border," says Russ Core, 40, a personnel analyst.
H. Eric Schockman, urban politics expert at the University of Southern California, says 187 may spark more sophisticated reactions than street protests. "What we want to see is some visual explosion because we're used to that," he says. "But there's a critical mass that's going to form . . . rational, broad-based, multi-ethnic."
Wednesday, activists from religious, Hispanic, Asian-American and civil rights groups joined forces to file lawsuits and won restraining orders on some key provisions.
"They don't know they awoke a sleeping giant," says Juan Font, 34, a messenger and Guatemalan immigrant. "Before, we were all kinds of nationalities from Mexico all the way down to Chile, but this has brought everybody together. . . . You're going to see a great, great political change in California and the Southwest."
