The mayor’s marching orders

CONSIDER THE PLIGHT OF Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. Worse yet, consider the plight of his scheduler. Monday’s immigration protests played havoc with the mayor’s travel plans, which already included an appearance at the weekend’s Fiesta Broadway downtown, then flights to Philadelphia for a Senate

Democrats’ conference and Washington for the White House correspondents’ dinner, then a jaunt to Dallas, where National Football League officials were discussing whether Los Angeles or some other city should get a new team. No time for a new round of immigration marches. Not originally, anyway.

As recently as last week, the mayor made it clear that he was planning to be out of town May 1. Staying away was a statement, whether he admitted it or not. Kids, stay in school. Bureaucrats, stay at work. Protesters, sing the national anthem in English. But as the day grew close and, perhaps, the mayor’s exquisitely tuned political antennae began picking up the vibrations of another history-making day at home, he changed his mind.

With so many people marching in town, the mayor explained, he simply had to be here to keep an eye on things in the event of trouble, monitoring events from City Hall. See? He was working, not boycotting. Then, perhaps, he would get into a helicopter with the police chief (news cameras welcome) to survey the situation. Then, time permitting, he would squeeze in a prime-time speech to the crowd at Wilshire and La Brea. How many people? 400,000? Maybe there was a later flight to Dallas.

So, is the mayor simply a political opportunist? No, that’s not quite it. The immigration protests bring together several conflicting strains of Villaraigosa’s public life, ones that before now never really had to be reconciled. The quandary in which he finds himself is in many ways familiar to many Mexican immigrants and, to some extent, to all of Los Angeles.

One Antonio Villaraigosa is a Latino outsider, railing against the power structure, walking out of school, marching for justice. This is the Villaraigosa who uses the word “we” when he talks about immigrants, legal and otherwise. The other is a pillar of the political establishment, concerned with law and order, whose parents are first-generation American on one side and second-generation on the other.

If the mayor is confused about how to portray himself, he needn’t worry; that confusion is as American as Madonna or Alexander Hamilton. And he can console himself with the knowledge that these marches would have happened, in Los Angeles and elsewhere, even without him. He is not leading them, and in many ways, he must be more of a bystander to this episode of history than a participant. This movement is bigger than any one person, and there is no shame in merely saluting those who march.