It Helps If Voters Can Pronounce Your Name

You’ve seen it in print and heard it on TV and radio about a million times, but you still can’t pronounce the name to save your life.

Vill-ar-go-sa.

Nope.

Vil-ga-ro-sa.

Nice try.

Some people know they’re botching it. They hesitate, try again. Do the double Ls sound like L? Or Y? Do you roll the R?

Many fall back on the relative safety of “Antonio.” Others forge ahead, ill-advisedly, certain they’ve got it right.

Vill-a-ga-rosa.

Close, but no enchilada.

My question is this:

Are the good citizens of Los Angeles ready to elect a Latino mayor whose name many of them can’t pronounce?

I always bet on the candidate people call by first name, especially when the other guy’s last name rhymes with “yawn.” But on election night, I bumped into Councilman Tony Cardenas at Pete’s Cafe, and he bet me a steak dinner that Mayor Jim Hahn will beat ANTONIO

V-I-L-L-A-R-A-I-G-O-S-A in a rematch of the showdown four years ago.

Los Angeles isn’t ready to embrace a Latino for citywide office, said Cardenas (KAR-day-noss), who also happens to think Hahn is better on policy details than Villaraigosa. Cardenas was sitting with Councilman Alex Padilla (pa-DEE-yah), who predicts a narrow win for Villaraigosa, but agreed that a Latino candidate had to jump hurdles like an Olympic champ.

What about City Atty. Rocky Delgadillo? I asked.

The name Delgadillo doesn’t sound as Latino as Villaraigosa, Cardenas said. It sounds almost Italian.

And then you’ve got Rocky.

As in Stallone.

But it’s not as if there were a big Italian swing vote in Los Angeles, I said.

No, but there’s still an anti-Latino vote, said Cardenas. He doesn’t see Villaraigosa picking up enough black votes in South L.A., or white votes in the San Fernando Valley, to do any better than he did in the runoff four years ago.

“It’s painful for me to say that as a Latino,” Cardenas said, “because I wish it were different. I really do.”

It’s a function of human nature and social conditioning to identify more with someone who looks like you. But in Tuesday’s election, to be fair, white and black voters scattered their votes across racial boundaries more abundantly than did Latinos, 73% of whom voted for Villaraigosa or state Sen. Richard Alarcon.

Among whites, 59% voted for a white candidate, and among black voters, 54% voted for Councilman Bernard C. Parks.

The numbers tell the story of a diverse, open-minded electorate, assuming that the roughly 75% of registered voters who stayed home to clip their toenails aren’t bigots.

In a perfect world, ideas and leadership would determine the outcome in the May 17 runoff. But ethnicity was in play last time, when -- as I wrote recently -- the Hahn campaign did its honest best to make voters fear that Villaraigosa would run a Mexican drug cartel out of City Hall. And ethnicity is sure to be in play this time too.

“There’s still a large racial component in the politics of any large city, and Los Angeles is no different,” said Jaime Regalado of Cal State L.A. “It’s still harder for minorities to win.”

Harder but not unheard of. Fernando Guerra of Loyola Marymount University pointed to former mayors Tom Bradley in Los Angeles, David Dinkins in New York and Henry Cisneros in San Antonio.

“Antonio has the same issue all of them faced,” Guerra said. “How do you simultaneously energize co-ethnics and not create a backlash” from non-Latinos?

Having a pronounceable name might help, and Villaraigosa used to have one.

He was born Antonio Villar. But when he and Corina Raigosa tied the knot in 1987, they also married their names.

“I remember saying to him, ‘You just violated one of the major tenets of politics,’ ” Guerra says.

He took a perfectly good name, slapped on three syllables and made it impossible to remember, let alone pronounce. You can barely get it on a political button.

“Villar was not only simple, but while it sounds Latino, it could also be Italian,” Guerra says. “Is it Latino? It might be, but maybe not. Then you go to Villaraigosa, which is clearly Latino.”

Guerra now claims the name has actually become a political asset, but that might be wishful thinking. He voted for Villaraigosa on Tuesday.

“It’s so unpronounceable, so clumsy, that it becomes memorable,” Guerra said. “Everybody knows it now. They can’t spell it, can’t pronounce it, but they remember it.”

Nathan James, a Villaraigosa flack, said some people will get as far as Villa, and then throw in the towel. Villaraigosa sometimes gives lessons when he’s on the stump.

“He’ll break it into three parts for them,” James said.

I can do that too.

It’s Villa, as in tortilla.

It’s Rai, as in rye bread.

And Gosa, as in Sammy Sosa.

That’s a lot to remember, but it could have been worse.

Corina’s last name could have been Huitzilopochtli.