http://www.mercurynews.com/politics/ci_8137257?nclick_check=1LOS ANGELES - King Taco on Cesar Chavez Avenue, across from the tattoo parlor and pawn shop, is Hillary Clinton country.
As first lady, she met with locals at a church a couple blocks down the street. As presidential candidate, she stopped in for a taco last month. And while Spanish is the language of this street, nearly all know what Clinton means.
"When I talk to my friends, we all say we're going to vote for her," said Sal Arciga, a 25-year-old phone operator having a carne asada burrito a table away from where the senator from New York sat.
What does he think about Barack Obama, running against Clinton for the Democratic nomination?
"O-who?" he asked, putting his burrito down, thinking about it. "I think he needs to come and eat here."
And that's essentially what Obama will have to do if he expects to break the Clinton stronghold on the huge and influential Latino vote here in California. He's got five days to do it, and he made an dramatic attempt Thursday with a rally at a Los Angeles trade college just hours before the final Democratic debate before Tuesday's primary. The event was billed as an outreach to Latino voters.
The only glitch? Most of the crowd was black.
"Sí se puede!" Obama shouted out to the crowd filling the campus plaza. "Yes we can!"
When the crowd responded to the Latino rallying cry, they did so in English.
Obama, a senator from Illinois, has a lot of work to do
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in five days.
An appearance today at East Los Angeles College by Sen. Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts - whose endorsement of Obama has been viewed as a help to the campaign's Latino outreach effort - is expected to be more on target.
The Latino vote is critical for Obama if he is to beat front-runner Clinton in the California primary on Super Tuesday, when more than 20 states will hold party contests. A quarter of Tuesday's Democratic primary voters will likely be Latino. Two-thirds of the state's Latino voters live in Southern California, and more than 60 percent are registered Democrats.
The Obama campaign boasts that it launched the first Spanish-language TV ad, and for the past three months he has been sending foot soldiers into L.A.'s Latino neighborhoods with bilingual campaign fliers. This week, the campaign opened a field office in heavily Latino East Los Angeles. And when Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts comes to San Jose on Saturday to stump for Obama, he will do it at the Mexican Heritage Plaza.
But so far, Obama has been losing California Latinos to Clinton by a 3-to-1 ratio, the latest California Field Poll shows.
"It's not necessarily a negative view of Obama that's preventing him from winning it," said Mark DiCamillo of California's Field Poll. "It's that Hillary is already family."
Some say, however, a hostile undercurrent between some Latinos and blacks - especially in urban Los Angeles - is yet another hurdle for Obama.
Carmelo Garcia, a 20-year-old student in the crowd at the trade college Thursday, acknowledged those resentments between the two groups. He experiences them routinely, he said, in name-calling alone. Watching Obama deliver his "Sí se puede" speech in front of mostly blacks, "I worry that he might give a little bit more to the black people instead of the Latino community."
While he appreciated Obama's message Thursday of unity and shared struggle among all races, he's still voting for Clinton - a name spoken in his house since childhood. With that loyalty, he said, "I wasn't even paying attention to Barack Obama."
Dolores Huerta, 77-year-old co-founder with the late and legendary Cesar Chavez of the United Farm Workers union, is not worried. She is confident the Latino voters will stay with Clinton.
Obama, she said, "doesn't really have a relationship with the Latino community." His use of the term "sí se puede" in speeches and on campaign signs handed out at Thursday's rally is just a "little shortcut" for Obama to make inroads.
Inroads she believes are dead ends.
She pointed out that while Obama earned the endorsement of the heavily Latino Culinary Workers Union in Nevada, many of the dishwashers and cooks defected to Clinton and created for themselves a term of endearment: "Los Hillarios." It's quite a tribute to Clinton, who had trouble pronouncing "sí se puede" at a Salinas rally last week with the United Farm Workers. And Clinton scored perhaps the biggest prize. She was in Salinas - to accept the endorsement of the United Farm Workers - where the slogan began.
At the Obama headquarters in Los Angeles, where handpainted signs that say "Sí se puede" are taped to the walls, one of Obama's chief Latino endorsers acknowledges the challenge.
"There's no doubt it's uphill politically," said Maria Elena Durazo, the executive secretary of the Los Angeles Federation of Workers, which represents 80,000 workers.
What matters to Durazo, and to Latinos like her, she said, is "character and roots."
"He's the son of an immigrant and single mother," she said of his father's Kenyan roots and his mother's Kansas upbringing. "He went through and felt what it's like for people without work every day. Being of mixed ethnic family, he had a taste of the bias people have and how that can hurt someone's opportunities."
Obama had great prospects after college, she said, "but he chose to be a community organizer for mostly people of color. When we tell the Senator Obama story, it fits."
The campaign just needs to spread that story effectively - and fast.
He still has a few days to grab a taco.
Contact Julia Prodis Sulek at jsulek@mercurynews.com or (408) 278-3409.
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