Heavily Asian Town’s Mayor Holds Tight to Controversial Views

The outgoing mayor of Monterey Park, Barry L. Hatch, was holding forth Saturday at the California Yacht Club in Marina del Rey to a roomful of conservative men and women.

This was his kind of crowd: receptive, admiring and like-minded. Best of all, they were all ears to what Hatch had to say about halting immigration and declaring English the official language.

“Come across the borders illegally and you have education free, housing free, all the things you need free,” he told the 60 people attending a reception for Hatch that was hosted by the American Assn. of Women, a Santa Monica-based conservative activist group.

“If there is one thing Mayor Hatch is not, he is not a racist,” said Leslie Dutton, the association’s president, as she introduced the mayor as “a patriotic American.”

Plenty of people disagree with Dutton. In fact, Hatch--who leaves his mayoral post on Monday--has attracted many critics in his 10 months as ceremonial head of what has become known as America’s first suburban Chinatown.

In the course of parlaying a small town mayor’s post into a forum for international issues, this Bell Gardens junior high school social studies teacher has angered a wide range of liberal opponents who will be pleased to see him leave office.

But even as he returns to the status of city councilman and faces a reelection campaign next April, he shows signs of neither moderation nor retreat.

“If I have awakened people with my rhetoric, then that’s what I set out to do,” said Hatch, 52, recently. “I will talk like this until the day I pass on.”

On Hatch’s penultimate day in the mayor’s seat, which rotates among council members, he said, “When someone calls me a racist, I don’t have time to listen.”

Hatch once suggested, at some length during a council meeting, that Los Angeles County’s landfill problems could be easily solved: Halt immigration, he told his amazed colleagues, so there would be fewer people to generate trash.

Survived Recall Election

During a bitter recall campaign which he easily survived in 1987, Hatch was accused of being a racist after he supported resolutions saying first that illegal aliens were not welcome in Monterey Park and, secondly, that English should be the nation’s official language.

AsiaWeek, a San Francisco-based newspaper, once wrote that Hatch “may rank as one of the most hated men in Chinese America.”

First elected to the council on a slow-growth ticket in 1986, Hatch has used his mayor’s post to spread his views on television shows and in newspapers and magazines throughout the country.

Again on Saturday, as he often does during City Council meetings, Hatch made sweeping connections between immigration and the overburdened streets, schools, jails and hospitals of Southern California. “Blacks, Latinos, Asians, Anglos--everybody wants the borders under control,” Hatch said.

Has Broad Support

Despite Monterey Park’s ethnic makeup--over half the 63,500 residents are of Asian ancestry and another third are Latino--Hatch maintained that he still has broad support, especially among Latinos.

But the council’s only member of Asian ancestry, Judy Chu, has complained about Hatch, saying she never thought she “was going on the City Council to discuss foreign policy.”

Now that Hatch’s term in office is drawing to a close, even some supporters are raising questions about how effective Hatch has been as mayor.

Joseph Rubin, a leader of a slow-growth political group that helped Hatch get elected, said this week: “The problem with Barry is that he divides the community into ‘newcomers/bad guys’ and ‘us good-old Americans.’ His pressing the point on these social issues and taking advantage of being mayor to gain national notoriety is harmful. We need peaceful reconciliation on all fronts.”

During the reception before his talk, Hatch heard from La Vonne Gordon of Los Angeles. Gordon, who is black, complained that illegal aliens from Mexico were “taking over jobs from poor blacks.” She said she supported Hatch’s views 100%.

Wants ‘a Mixture’

In his talk, Hatch complained: “The entire San Gabriel Valley is becoming entirely Chinese. I like to see a mixture.” He claimed that new Asian immigrants have told him, “ ‘We don’t care about your culture, your traditions and your history. We’re here to make money.’ “The American people have to be awakened,” Hatch said.