The savage beating of undocumented immigrants by sheriff's deputies in Southern California has triggered protests by Latino and civil rights activists across California. But defensive mode politics belongs to an old era when Latinos were a beleaguered minority. As the burgeoning majority in Los Angeles, for example, Latinos need to focus less on how others treat them and more on how they treat each other. PNS associate editor Gregory Rodriguez is a fellow of the Alto California Research Center and the Pepperdine Institute for Public Policy.

LOS ANGELES -- A week of protests over the savage beating of undocumented immigrants by two Riverside County sheriff's deputies leaves me wondering: Why does our Latino pride swell only when we collectively feel wronged by someone else?

When an 11-year-old Latina was shot in the back of the head late last year with an automatic weapon as she lounged with her father on their front porch, Latino activists, civil rights lawyers and politicians sponsored no protests or press conferences. Erica Izquierdo, like hundreds of other children murdered each year by street gangs, was buried last November with barely a murmur from the most vocal segments of Los Angeles' Latino residents.

Yet last Monday, as deputies' batons reigned down on unresisting Mexicans beneath the camera's unblinking lens, Latino activism was reborn. Either the indignities and struggles many Latinos face every day are not as disturbing as police brutality or the scope of Latino activism has become dangerously narrow.

As necessary a role as these activists play in attempting to keep police and other government agencies accountable to Latino communities, it's long since time that our activist ethos go beyond the defensive posture of old and become a more self-directed, and therefore more self-empowering, campaign to improve the lives and living conditions of Latinos who are marginalized politically, socially or economically. We shouldn't have to wait for abuses from the "outside" to formulate our goals.

Part of the problem is that too many activists are more concerned with how we are treated than with how we treat each other. We fixate on the challenges Latino communities face rather than preparing ourselves to surmount the challenges. The defensive activist mode was born of a different era -- when we were a beleaguered and often besieged minority. Today's burgeoning majority -- over four million Latinos in Los Angeles county -- needs a more proactive agenda. We need to divert more of our attention away from the establishment and confront our problems, develop our strengths, and prepare ourselves not just to challenge the system but mold it, to become the system.

Activists too often allow tragic events like last week's beating to define our priorities at the expense of everyday community struggles. We also appear to need these tragedies to keep our activism alive. Unfortunately, such moments rarely last long. By week's end, the videotape of the beatings was being replayed regularly only on Spanish-language TV. Worse, they end up creating polarized shouting matches by those who wish to exploit the issue at hand to promote their own goals.

Two days after the beatings, in front of the Roybal Federal Building in downtown Los Angeles, pro- and anti-immigrant activists hurled insults at each other and turned the singular issue of police brutality into an argument over which group -- Anglos or Latinos -- had a right to be in the United States.

The media, of course, has always loved to see the natives restless. The most newsworthy Latinos have always been the most angry, preferably violent ones. To be fair, this time they found a cast of crackpot Anglo anti-immigrant activists to make for a good cat fight. What in the world could Ron Prince, who spearheaded the Save Our State campaign, or any other anti-immigrant activist have to say that would illuminate the inexcusable beating of two undocumented immigrants?

There's so much to be done to improve the lot of Latino communities across the country. As long as activists only come out in cases of official abuse, we wind up playing into the polarized media circus and drawing little attention to the less charged but equally important issues we face. Just as we rightfully demand to know what the police are doing when the cameras are not present, we should do no less than ask the same of ourselves.