COLUMN ONE : After Oath, a Scramble for Votes : Parties woo new citizens, who are generally eager to exercise their franchise. But their backgrounds can be a deterrent to casting ballots, and their allegiances are often fluid.

The strains of Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the U.S.A.” filled the auditorium as more than 2,000 new Americans watched a film clip of what it means to be an American: Air Force fighters streaking across the sky, wheat fields glistening in the sun, the Hollywood sign soaring above the horizon.

Minutes later, these men and women from 88 countries concluded the emotional ceremony that bestowed U.S. citizenship upon them. Smiling and weeping, they filed outside the Carson Civic Center auditorium and immediately faced the next step in this new nationality: registering to vote.

Like hawkers at a carnival, political activists, union organizers and local officials stood at registration tables lined up along a walkway and called out to the new citizens. Join the California electorate, the activists urged. It’s your right, they coaxed. It won’t take long.

Similar citizenship ceremonies are taking place in cities across the country every month. And at many such oath-takings, Democratic and Republican party operatives are also in attendance, hoping to fill membership lists with the names of enthusiastic men and women eager to exercise their new-found civic duty.

Emerging from the Carson event was Hector Sandoval, a native of El Salvador. For him, becoming an American citizen and, then, a registered Democrat was an easy decision: His life, business and hopes are here. For Veronica Tello, a Mexican matron, exchanging nationalities was a step taken only after repeated pleas from her children--all of whom were born in Los Angeles. Becoming a voter, though, was a much simpler choice.

“It is very necessary to be able to change the things the government does that I don’t like,” she said.

Political participation by immigrants is a question key to the future of a rapidly changing California. With immigrants comprising perhaps a quarter of the state’s population, California gains more new naturalized citizens annually than anywhere else in the nation. Yet citizenship--especially among Latino and Asian groups--still lags and, with it, political clout.

Last week’s devastating riots in Los Angeles underscored the alienation felt by many ethnic groups who gaze across a wide abyss toward any kind of political leadership. As the rebuilding began, talk turned anew to ways to reach into disenfranchised communities and to give them a voice.

Conventional wisdom suggests naturalized citizens are often among the most dedicated voters in the land, but efforts by the established political parties to tap into this potential gold mine have been spotty. And only gradually, in fits and starts, are the organizations that historically sponsor voter-registration drives including citizenship programs.

The Times will follow Sandoval, Tello and two other new citizens--a Filipina nurse and a Polish engineer--throughout the year to examine whether they become involved in the political process and how they decide to vote in their first election.

The four registered to vote after becoming U.S. citizens and said at the time that they intend to cast a ballot in California’s June primary and again in the November election.

Many of the influences and events that shape their opinions are not unlike those of native-born Americans. Republican and Democrat alike, they want leaders who will salvage the national economy and focus attention on a litany of domestic ills.

But immigrants often bring the experiences of their native country to bear on their lives here. Foreign policy issues sometimes rank as a more pressing concern for those new citizens still worried about events in their birthplaces. Someone who fled communism may embrace extremely conservative politics, while someone fleeing a U.S.-financed war may look to more liberal politics. Still others who lived in a totalitarian, one-party system may fear politics altogether.

Nevertheless, in an election year marked by profound frustration and anger among voters disgusted with the system, the idealism of many new immigrant-citizens makes for a remarkable contrast.

Josef Baran, a computer engineer, defected from Poland 10 years ago. As he pledged new allegiance to an American flag, he was adamant about signing up as a Republican. For three decades he had lived under a repressive system that called itself “social democratic.”

“Democrat!” He nearly scowled in an interview. “I had enough of this word! I do not want to know any more this word. . . . My choice was I would never be under that word.”

Baran’s strong, emotional feelings about labels outweigh the details of what the parties stand for. As a successful businessman in Riverside County’s Moreno Valley, he tends to favor the principles of free enterprise espoused by the Republican Party. But when it comes to voting, he said, he intends to examine the issues and policies of all candidates before making a decision.

Political scientists who study ethnic voting patterns in California say new citizens are usually eager to participate in the electoral process but are tenuous in their identification with a particular party. Their political affiliations tend to be evolving.

“We find a tremendous amount of independence and non-preference,” said Harry P. Pachon, a political scientist at Claremont Colleges who studies Latin American immigrants.

“In a way,” he said, party identification “is up for grabs.”

Nevertheless, some patterns have emerged. Especially among immigrants from Communist countries, Eastern Europe and Vietnam, and among many who arrived in the last decade, a notable preference for the Republican Party can be seen. Many perceive the GOP to be tougher on communism, that they’ve benefited from Republican administrations or, like Baran, they simply admire Ronald Reagan.

In addition, Republican operatives have been especially diligent in targeting immigrants and pitching the GOP line. Republicans, in fact, have been much more active in this field than Democrats, recruiting new citizens at ethnic festivals and publishing newsletters in a variety of foreign languages. The Cambodian version, for example, proudly displays a picture of Richard M. Nixon.

Baran, a man of thinning white hair and angular facial features, sought political asylum while he was on a business trip in Austria, just a few days before Christmas, 1982. It was an agonizing move to make: He left his wife and two small sons behind in his native Poland.

Martial law ruled Baran’s homeland that year. The Communist government had violently put down the Solidarity labor movement, and Baran’s future seemed bleak.

Baran was granted asylum, moved to New York and soon began the long process of trying to gain permission for his wife and children to join him. Two and a half years later, as a Polish Pope mounted pressure on the Warsaw government, the Baran family was reunited. The next year, 1986, they moved to Southern California.

Josef Baran has been fortunate. Skilled and well-educated, he prospered. After he took the citizenship oath, he watched, in a later ceremony, as his two sons similarly became Americans. And several weeks later, his wife, Anna, would also be naturalized in a patriotic ritual at the Los Angeles Convention Center.

“This country gave me self-esteem,” said Baran, 46. “In Poland, I was like a gray guy. In (a) communistic system, everyone is repressed. Here, I have real success. I am feeling my value here in this country. . . . I have (a) feeling (of being) part of this nation.”

Changing one’s citizenship, relinquishing one nationality for another, can be a wrenching break with the past. It is the ultimate closing of one door, the hopeful opening of another, a leap-of-faith wager on the future.

For many who do take that step, registering to vote and then voting are natural, almost automatic extensions of the same process. Most experts agree that there tends to be a higher rate of registration and participation among some groups of new citizens than among the native-born--although many believe such dedication wanes with time.

To become a citizen, a foreign-born national must have resided legally in the United States for five years (three years if married to an American) and usually must take lessons in U.S. history, civics and the English language to pass tests administered by the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Because of this long process of indoctrination, many new citizens emerge viewing the right to vote as an expected, if not required, part of the package.

“Like all of our ancestors,” said David Lopez-Lee, a public administration professor at USC who specializes in voter registration, “they came here with the American dream in mind . . . to participate in the democratic process . . . to exercise something they never had.”

In fact, the ability to vote was cited by 95% of Latino immigrants as their chief reason for wanting to become a citizen in a survey conducted in 1989 by the National Alliance of Latino Elected Officials.

However, in a UCLA study of Asian immigrants, voting was cited less frequently as a reason for becoming a citizen, after other forms of participation such as access to business loans and certain jobs. Another leading reason cited was the ability to bring relatives to the United States, a right enhanced with citizenship.

Voter registration among Asian immigrants remains substantially lower than among Latinos and some other ethnic groups. Part of the explanation may lie in the fact that the motives some immigrants have for coming to the United States, as well as their home-country experiences, actually work against getting involved politically.

“A lot of immigrants, and all refugees, are escaping something, something horrible, probably caused by politics . . . like the killing fields in Cambodia,” said Don T. Nakanishi, director of Asian-American studies at UCLA. The notion of a political party to many Asian immigrants, he said, has a connotation of extreme loyalty demanded under threat of dire consequences--even death.

Nakanishi blames the system that teaches aspiring citizens for failing to explain what American political parties are really about. Immigrants who pass through citizenship classes are bombarded with facts and figures on American government and exposed to a body of information that many native-born Americans don’t see after elementary school.

Yet, argues Nakanishi, the rote learning of statistics does little to really teach immigrants how the political system works and what it means to participate.

Zita Bernabe Reyes believes that by acquiring citizenship and voting, she can do something for her children.

Reyes was born in the Philippines nearly 40 years ago and in 1976 moved to Kalamazoo, Mich., to work as a nurse. She eventually met the man she would marry, a fellow Filipino from Manila, and moved to Southern California in 1979.

Reyes and her husband, Florante, have twins, a girl and a boy, barely 2 years old.

Becoming a citizen after 16 years in the United States “is like a natural thing,” Reyes said.

“I just thought I would become American,” she said. “I wanted to be in the mainstream. . . . (As a citizen) I would have the right to vote and have more representation about things that would affect me and my children in the future. . . .

“It gives me a voice for my kids.”

Reyes works as an emergency room nurse in an Inland Empire hospital. Although she is employed on a per-diem basis, her hours can be long and arduous. It is not uncommon that she works 12-hour days, right through the weekend.

On the morning she was sworn in as an American citizen, Reyes registered as a Democrat--”They told me I could change my mind later”--largely because she admired Jimmy Carter as a champion of the poor. Her husband, a real estate broker, is a Republican.

Asians--including Filipinos, Chinese, Koreans and Vietnamese--and Latinos--from Mexico and Central America--make up the two largest ethnic groups in California. Activists in both communities say lack of citizenship among legal immigrants has greatly weakened the two groups’ potential political power.

The reasons for not swearing the citizenship oath are many, from fear of taking the examination, to lack of English skills, to the discomfort of giving up one’s birthright.

Veronica Tello’s reluctance to become a citizen is typical of many older immigrants, activists and immigration experts say. The sentimental notion of going home “one day” lingers for many foreign-born residents, sometimes for decades after moving to the United States.

Tello, 53, came to Los Angeles in 1964, a young newlywed from the Mexican state of Jalisco. Her four children--the youngest is a senior in high school--were born here, and she readily agrees that “my home is here” with her husband, Vicente, a welder.

Yet it took the persistent urging of her children, especially an older son who is a mechanic in the Air Force, to finally persuade Tello to become a U.S. citizen.

“He kept telling me, ‘Mama, you’ll never return to Mexico.’ I kept saying I didn’t want to do it, I didn’t speak English very well, that I had too many things to do. . . .

“Finally, he said, ‘Mama, you’re making excuses.’ ” She had to agree.

Once she took the plunge, Tello was eager to give her new government a piece of her mind. She hopes she can have more influence on how the schools in her home of Pacoima are run, on ways to clear the streets of gangs and on how her elected officials spend money.

“They spend all that money supporting guerrillas in Nicaragua and things like that,” said Tello, a gray-haired and compact woman. “They could do so much more here.”

Tello voted once before, when she was 21 years old. She cast her ballot for a losing candidate in the Mexican presidential election that year.

“I did not much care for it (the political system) in Mexico,” she said. “Sometimes they steal votes . . . or you know who is going to win three months before the election is held.”

Hector Sandoval, the Salvadoran native, had always intended to become an American, ever since he left the village of Armenia as a 14-year-old. It took him seven furtive dashes across the U.S. border before he made it, eventually reaching Santa Ana to join an aunt.

Civil war had not yet gripped El Salvador, but poverty abounded and opportunity did not. Once in Southern California, Sandoval set about perfecting his skills in repairing sewing machines. The firm he worked for valued his talents and helped him obtain a green card by 1983.

In the meantime, he attended night classes at Santa Ana High School to learn English and began raising a family.

Today, the 37-year-old new citizen owns an industrial sewing machine shop with his brother, Jorge, near downtown Santa Ana. He lives a few blocks away with his Mexican-born wife and their three children in one of two houses he owns.

“Since I first came to this country, I said I am going to make money and stay in this country,” Sandoval said, seated at a large desk in the office behind his shop. “I always said I would.”

On the day he became a citizen, Sandoval joined the Democratic Party because, like millions of native-born Americans, he is feeling the pinch of hard economic times and blames President Bush. His business, he figures, is down 25%, and school budget crises have forced sharp cutbacks in special-education classes for his 10-year-old son.

“In a personal way, we have been very affected by the recession,” he said. “We feel the recession.”

He wonders, though, what impact he can possibly have on the political process. In fact, Sandoval is one tiny piece in what Latino activists see as a much larger picture.

In California alone, the size of the Latino electorate has the potential of nearly tripling if all eligible Latin American immigrants were to become citizens and register to vote, according to the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project.

The organization estimates that 1.3 million adult Latinos have not registered to vote, slightly more than half the number of adult Latino citizens residing in California. About 2 million additional Latino adult immigrants in California are eligible to become citizens but have not chosen to do so.

In addition, another 1 million Latin American immigrants--of all ages--will be eligible for citizenship next year as they complete the landmark amnesty program started in 1987.

This potential gives Sandoval pause. With more Latino voters, there could be more Latino elected officials. And then, he concludes, governments might pay more attention to problems in the barrios.

“The voice of one or two might not make a difference,” Sandoval said. “But we need a change.”