Ethnicity Issue Mixed Blessing for Villaraigosa

Antonio Villaraigosa and his political handlers don’t want to talk about it, but if elected mayor of Los Angeles, he will inevitably be catapulted into a national, albeit non-official, position: the country’s highest-profile Latino elected official.

It is a prospective role fraught with both promise and peril.

“If he wins, he will automatically become the Latino leader in the country,” predicted ex-Energy Secretary Bill Richardson, former chairman of the congressional Hispanic Caucus. “And immediately a major player in Democratic and presidential politics. There’s enormous buzz about Villaraigosa.”

But the national excitement among many Latinos over the prospect of a Villaraigosa victory is deliberately being downplayed by the candidate himself and his closest advisors. Worried about the possibility of backlash in their close campaign against City Atty. James K. Hahn, they have crafted a strategy that emphasizes Villaraigosa’s record and ideas while barely mentioning that he stands at the brink of becoming the first Latino to be elected mayor of Los Angeles in more than 130 years.

“He’s not running to be a national leader of anything; he’s running to be mayor of Los Angeles,” said Parke Skelton, Villaraigosa’s political consultant.

“We’ve had calls from Swedish TV, Japanese TV,” Skelton continued. “I don’t think it’s because Antonio is Swedish. It’s just because it’s the second-largest city in the country and it’s an important race.”

Is it not noteworthy that a Mexican American may soon become the first Latino mayor since Los Angeles became a modern city? That he would govern at the center of the nation’s biggest Latino community at a time when Latinos are poised to become the nation’s largest minority group?

“There’s a lot of Latinos in elected office all over the country now,” Skelton said. “It’s not that big a deal.”

That is far from the sentiment expressed across the nation, as Latino business leaders, political figures and others enthusiastically warm to Villaraigosa--for reasons that have more to do with national symbolism than with the day-to-day job of running Los Angeles.

Indeed, the buzz has transcended political and geographic lines, as was evident during a recent whirlwind series of fund-raisers in New York, Washington and Miami--events that yielded some $250,000 for the Villaraigosa campaign.

“This was off the charts,” said Mickey Ibarra, a former Clinton administration official who co-chaired the Washington luncheon along with Rudy Beserra, a Republican who is Coca-Cola’s vice president for Hispanic affairs.

Even in Miami, where a conservative political hierarchy seems an unlikely soul mate for the former labor leader and civil liberties activist, the Villaraigosa drive is generating a pan-Latino, bipartisan thrill.

“You wouldn’t expect the Miami Hispanic community, which is mostly Cuban American in terms of its establishment, to be strongly supportive of a candidate who is a liberal Democrat,” noted Sergio Bendixen, a Miami-based pollster. “They hardly know Villaraigosa, but there’s tremendous interest and enthusiasm.”

Across the country, the dramatic arc of Villaraigosa’s life--from his humble Eastside upbringing to a career of activism and politics--has begun to captivate Latino audiences.

“With his story and the success he has been able to achieve at such a young age, it’s going to be something that kids are going to be talking about in their civics classes,” said Beserra.

Added Angelo Figueroa, managing editor of New York-based People en Espanol, a spinoff of People magazine: “Overnight, he [Villaraigosa] would become the Latino politician with the greatest stage, and the spotlight would certainly be on him.” But don’t expect Villaraigosa to talk about it.

Like Tom Bradley before him, the former Assembly speaker clearly believes he can succeed in multihued Los Angeles only as a builder of bridges between the city’s often-conflicting communities and interests. In fact, analysts agree that Villaraigosa’s embrace of coalition politics and shunning of ethnic nationalism and left-wing rhetoric have been key propellants of his political rise, just as his alliance with business interests has advanced his mayoral run.

Among independent observers, there is widespread agreement that Villaraigosa is strategically wise to distance the campaign from talk of national Latino leadership.

“People are open in this community to voting for a candidate who happens to be Latino,” noted Arnold Steinberg, a veteran Los Angeles political consultant. “They are less open to voting for a Latino candidate.”

Villaraigosa’s public de-emphasis of his own ethnicity in the campaign is a familiar manifestation of urban realpolitik. Candidates with strong ethnic constituencies that remain minorities in the broader electorate must reach to other groups. So it has been historically with Catholic ethnics, Jews, blacks and, increasingly, Latinos.

Henry Cisneros became mayor of San Antonio after a largely non-racial contest in which the young Mexican American brought together a broad coalition of Texans. Tom Bradley was elected mayor of Los Angeles following a more racial campaign, but one in which he consciously avoided the ethnic implications of his victory. Los Angeles’ first African American mayor, a former police officer and City Council member, excelled at reassuring white voters.

“When Tom Bradley was elected, a lot of people said he suddenly became the leader of the black community,” said Raphael Sonenshein, political scientist at Cal State Fullerton. “Tom Bradley never went near that.”

The principle still applies today in Villaraigosa’s case, despite talk of Latino political advancement--and the drumbeat of new census findings documenting ever-greater Latino population gains. Even in Los Angeles, where Latinos make up about half the population, they still only accounted for about one in five voters in last month’s elections. Latinos nationwide remain disproportionately young, poor, non-citizens and non-voters.

Villaraigosa’s political career has occurred during a period of growing Latino influence but also amid occasional eruptions of anti-immigrant sentiment (Villaraigosa was born and raised in Los Angeles and is of Mexican ancestry).

He was elected to the California Assembly in 1994. At the time, the recession-battered state was convulsed in nasty “wedge politics.” He won office the same year as the landslide victory for Proposition 187, a statewide initiative that targeted illegal immigrants but was seen by many Latinos as an assault on their entire community. The backlash spread nationwide and sent record numbers of Latinos to get citizenship papers and vote.

Today, many see the prospect of the former Assembly speaker’s election as mayor as perhaps the most dramatic evidence to date of how the group’s political fortunes have been transformed since the mid-1990s.

“The election of a Latino mayor in Los Angeles would be a milestone that would cap an incredible and brief era in Latino political development,” said Arturo Vargas, executive director of the National Assn. of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials.

Ironically, the most contested voters in Los Angeles probably include many who cast ballots favoring Proposition 187. It is conventional political wisdom that Villaraigosa and Hahn are vying for middle-of-the-road to conservative voters, particularly the non-Latino whites who still dominate the electorate.

Those are the voters Villaraigosa risks offending should he build his message around the prospect of a Latino breakthrough, political analysts say.

“If he [Villaraigosa] runs too much of an ethnic campaign, that could frighten too many voters away,” said Allan Hoffenblum, author of a Republican voter’s guide endorsing Hahn.

The need to reach out beyond his Latino base is one reason why Villaraigosa worked so hard to win the endorsement of Mayor Richard Riordan, a Republican multimillionaire. Some winced, however, when the mayor broke out his pidgin Spanish to introduce Villaraigosa during the endorsement ceremony.

Advisors to Hahn recognize Villaraigosa’s balancing act. And while refraining from criticizing his opponent, a Hahn campaign spokesman, Kam Kuwata, did hint at a certain disingenuousness--especially since national Latino support has boosted finances in a race in which Villaraigosa, with union and Democratic Party help, is already outspending his opponent.

“I understand that on some levels it is wonderful to talk about this, and to their advantage,” Kuwata said, “and at other times they think it’s not to their advantage [and] they don’t talk about it.”

Villaraigosa’s standing as an emerging Latino leader with a national audience was on full display during the East Coast fund-raising swing, which featured Latino politicians such as Miami-Dade Mayor Alex Penelas and Bronx Borough President Fernando Ferrer, who is competing to become New York’s first Latino mayor. Even analysts leery of the national-leader label say that raising money is one arena in which the possibility of a historic breakthrough can be a plus.

“If somebody’s going to be a trend setter, it may be enormously helpful in fund-raising during a campaign, but it is not necessarily helpful in reaching a broader constituency,” said Steinberg, the political consultant.

Nor do candidates with overarching national agendas necessarily win the hearts of voters in local elections. “The people of this city want a working mayor,” noted Steinberg.

If elected, though, Villaraigosa will inexorably face mounting pressure to fill what many see as a void in the national Latino leadership ranks since legal and personal problems set back the career of Cisneros, who was Secretary of Housing and Urban Development in the Clinton administration. Villaraigosa would be forced to walk a political tightrope, balancing his municipal responsibilities and his evolving national stature--at a time when both parties are vying for the Latino electorate.

On the plus side, observers say the distinction of a Villaraigosa administration could be marshaled to the city’s benefit. The sudden prominence could attract national attention, and investment, to Los Angeles. The Latino Democrat could also push for special consideration from a Republican president eager to court a growing voting bloc.

If elected mayor, however, Villaraigosa would inherit a city government burdened with scores of obligations at a time when the economy may be slumping. Fellow politicians say he would hardly need the added burden of serving as unelected leader of a heterogeneous Latino populace that embraces many political agendas.

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