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This paper is a reflection on several years' struggle to establish a federation of housing cooperatives in a low-income, multi-ethnic, bilingual community in Los Angeles. The history of this organization has significant implications for the study of multicultural organization in general, and for the modeling of multicultural, as opposed to assimilative or pluralistic, society. The concept of multiculturalism has grown in importance as the melting pot myths of the past and shortcomings of pluralism are fully exposed.

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Based on the authors' synthesis of the multicultural literature, this article proposes that for organizing to succeed in bilingual, multicultural environments, three roles - organizer, interpreter, and multicultural mediator - must be filled. Moreover, the authors consider it difficult and unwise to have the functions of all three roles filled by the same person, as this can lead to conflicts of interest and a concentration of power in one person that can threaten democratic processes and lead to gatekeeping. The case of the organization of a federation of five housing cooperatives in a multi-ethnic district of Los Angeles is presented to examine how residents and the cooperatives' leadership grappled with the organization problems and learned to solve them through recognizing the importance of the organizers, interpreters, and multicultural mediators and the need for keeping these roles separate. (Reprinted by permission of the publisher)

The article examines the community and class struggles in Los Angeles, California against corporate development forces. The political isolation of Los Angeles communities also occurs within the setting of a city tremendously segregated by race and class, intentionally designed is such by private developers in the early 1900s. Pico Union, Skid Row, and Route 2 are only three of the communities in Los Angeles that have organized to gain political autonomy. The lack of political accountability to working-class communities in Los Angeles had bred the need for creating mass based solidarity within communities.

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