Although Latinos represent the emergent brown majority of Los Angeles, they have been written out of the script of its latest racial drama. Yet bit by bit they are redefining the city's racial and ethnic dynamics from the ground up. PNS associate editor Gregory Rodriguez is a fellow of the Alta California Research Center and is co-authoring a book with David Hayes-Bautista on post-minority culture.

LOS ANGELES -- It's a black-white thing we just don't understand.

That's how many Latinos here view the O.J. Simpson murder trial. Like Rosa Lopez, the hapless Salvadoran immigrant witness who wasn't quite sure what she saw the night of the killings, we see ourselves as unwitting witnesses to a grudge match between blacks and whites so mesmerized by each other they don't even know we're here.

From the start, many Latinos questioned why nine of the 12 jurors who deliberated O.J.'s fate were black, given that fewer than one out of ten Los Angeles County residents are black. By contrast, only one juror was Latino in a county where Latinos now constitute the largest ethnic group and an emergent brown majority.

The assumption many of us make is that the D.A.'s office -- ironically headed by a Latino with an Italian surname -- figured only by stacking the jury with blacks would the verdict be credible. Everyone remembers what happened the last time a racially unbalanced Southern Californian jury came to an unpopular decision in a racially charged case.

Black and white Angelenos could follow the intricate racial symbolism of the trial because they've been reared on the age-old Cain and Able script. To Latinos -- particularly foreign-born people who now make up the majority of the city's Latino population -- the script was indecipherable. Absent the racial implications we saw the stakes of the trial as cut and dry: was O.J. guilty or innocent?

What our collective sentiment was on the issue of guilt or innocence is, of course, impossible to know. No one really asked. One English language Los Angeles television station did an informal survey and found most Latino viewers believed O.J. was guilty, though not in as high proportions as whites. But most polls reported in the news media uniformly defined racial viewpoints in black and white terms. Given the tendency to lump all non-whites into the "minority" category, a lot of whites probably just assumed we Latinos fell on the black side of the racial divide.

In fact, a lot of Latinos considered ourselves the most objective observers around. "Blacks and whites had too much invested in this case to be objective about it," one friend remarked the night before the jury handed down its decision. "They should have let us Latinos decide it. We're an impartial party."

The dj who announced the verdict on L.A.'s most popular Spanish language music station sounded dazed and incredulous after the announcement. But even Latino callers who expressed moral outrage over the acquittal conveyed little of the racial indignation expressed by whites.

One could deduce from all this that we Latinos are destined to be nothing more than passive bystanders of the racial drama that now defines America's view of L.A. The reality is just the opposite. Bit by bit we are subsuming the black-white antagonism in new fledgling relationships with the other racial and ethnic groups that now make up L.A. Throughout the city, the rate of Latino-Asian marriages are on the rise. Blacks in South Central L.A. and Russian Armenians in North Hollywood are taking Spanish classes in order to communicate with their neighbors and compete better in the job market. Anglo-Americans who have married into Latino families are the ones who are drawing up Latino family trees.

Rather than siding with black or white in America's stalemated racial divide Latinos through sheer force of our numbers may ultimately distract both groups away from their obsession with each other. One thing is for sure: while we barely got a word in edgewise on L.A.'s O.J. drama, we're redefining the city's racial and ethnic dynamics from the ground up.