The Border’s in His Blood

Sometimes you cross over the border, and sometimes it crosses over you.

Probably you’ve never thought of Los Angeles as a border town, what with Mexico a three-hour drive from City Hall. But shifting borders -- both political and cultural -- are what have defined L.A. history.

That was certainly the case for Cristobal Aguilar, the last Spanish-surnamed person elected mayor here. He grew up in Los Angeles when it was a frontier outpost of the Republic of Mexico. By the time he was elected mayor in 1866, California had been claimed for the United States by an army of conquest that marched across the Sonora Desert, and Spanish speakers were becoming a minority.

And it’s the case, too, for Antonio Villaraigosa. Behind the public story of his victory in Tuesday’s historic election is a modern border-crossing story, the kind shared by thousands of Angelenos.

Villaraigosa was born in Los Angeles in 1952. L.A. was the capital city of American reinvention then, a place where freeways and subdivisions were replacing the orange groves planted by the westward-bound American migrants. Half a century later, Villaraigosa has been elected mayor of a city where (according to the last census) Spanish-speaking households are roughly equal in number to those where only English is spoken.

Villaraigosa is a native English speaker. On the campaign trail, he tried to make the occasional speech in halting Spanish, the native language of a small but growing chunk of the electorate. His victory comes in a time of cultural unease triggered by thousands of immigrants trekking across the desert from Mexico in an attempt to reach Los Angeles and other American cities.

Los Angeles is now, as it was in its early history, a place caught in the vortex between the United States and Mexico. The border crossers of the late 20th century brought the demographic transformations that reinvented Los Angeles as a multinational city and made Villaraigosa’s election inevitable. The stories of the border crossers are the great soap opera of Los Angeles in the Villaraigosa era. They are tales of dreamers, ambition, betrayal, love, poverty and violence.

Nearly every Latino family in California has a border crosser in its near or distant past. Some families tell their crossing stories proudly. Others try to keep them hidden. Maybe it’s a grandparent who left Mexico to escape the gunplay of the Mexican Revolution (my wife’s abuelo). Or a father and mother who left Central America to escape the consequences of an out-of-wedlock pregnancy (my own parents’ reason for leaving Guatemala in the 1960s).

Villaraigosa has at least two border crossings in his family history. One he knows well: His maternal grandfather, a Mexican immigrant, settled on the Eastside in 1903. The other was largely hidden from him: the story of his estranged father, the man who has the same name on his birth certificate as the newly elected mayor does on his: Antonio Villar. (Villaraigosa changed his name as an adult.)

Villaraigosa is the son of an immigrant. His father abandoned the future mayor’s mother many, many years ago, leaving her to raise her Los Angeles children alone. Villaraigosa and his father have spoken only rarely in the last five decades. He didn’t grow up, as so many Angelenos do these days (and as I did), listening to his father tell him about the dramatic circumstances of his arrival in California.

Villar does not grant interviews. I learned his story four years ago from a collection of court documents left over from an old and unfortunate run-in with the law. Villar’s childhood has some parallels to that of his son. Villar’s mother died of cancer when he was 5, and he was raised by a single parent. (Villaraigosa’s father abandoned him when he was in kindergarten and he too was raised by a single parent.) Villar said his younger siblings were physically abused by his stepmother after his father remarried. (Villaraigosa has recounted witnessing his father beat his mother.)

Villar had only a fourth-grade education, worked various odd jobs in his native Mexico City and then at age 24 headed northward to remake himself. He left Mexico in 1950. His solitary journey would change the course of California history.

The son Villar abandoned grew up Mexican American in a city where that meant, more often than not, that you lived in a barrio, one of the segregated places that were a legacy of the 19th century shift of the border.

Now, Villaraigosa will be the mayor of a city with a Latino plurality. The barrio is everywhere.

These days, Los Angeles is a city populated by hundreds of thousands of people with stories like the family saga of Antonio Villaraigosa: an epic of reinvention and betrayal, of failure and redemption. A story with a border in the middle.