Los Angeles

While the campaign and its concurrent political realignments have stirred black-Latino tensions, such tensions are nuanced--nowhere near the sparking levels found in, say, Miami. For twenty years, once solidly black South Central has been turning brown; nowadays it's a lot easier to find a taqueria on Central Avenue than a soul-food eatery. But that is not to say tensions don't exist. Los Angeles Latinos are a population rising both in numbers and in economic and political aspirations, while African-Americans are shrinking in numbers and as a presence in local government. "Many blacks view it as a zero-sum calculation," recently wrote Madison Shockley, a board member of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. African-American voters, he said, "must begin to see Villaraigosa as an individual, not as a symbol of their deep fears and prejudices, like the ones we heard during the debate over Proposition 187." (Nearly 50 percent of black voters supported that measure.) Villaraigosa organizer Thigpen acknowledges that "no doubt there is a racial element in play here. But in South LA, blacks and Latinos have lived easily side by side for the past ten years. It all works at the neighborhood level, and now the challenge is to make it come together at the higher level."

Villaraigosa's rise to political prominence is a direct product of burgeoning Latino political power, but he has gotten there without making appeals to race or positioning himself as a race-based leader. And in some key tense moments in recent city politicking when powerful Latino politicians pandered to race, Villaraigosa openly dissented. Certainly there is a pragmatic and strategic calculation here: If Villaraigosa were to proclaim himself as the Latino candidate, he could unleash a lethal white (and black) backlash. But beyond that electoral expediency, a review of Villaraigosa's record reveals a deep-seated commitment to transcend racial politics. For this reason, political analyst Gregory Rodriguez recently observed that Villaraigosa should be seen not so much as LA's "first Latino mayor" in more than a hundred years--as the national press has unfailingly put it--but rather as potentially the city's first "postethnic" mayor.

The crosstown, left-of-center coalition put together by Villaraigosa is of more than symbolic importance. It will help determine on whose terms this decade's political discourse will be framed. During the past eight years of the Riordan administration, that discourse has been dominated by white, corporate and developer interests. But Villaraigosa's emergence means that even if Hahn is elected, there are new and more populist political forces that any city administration will have to accommodate to be successful.

If Villaraigosa wins, the challenge will be to translate the electoral victory into palpable progressive policy. The powerful fifteen-member Los Angeles City Council will also have an important say in LA's future. The Council's political composition would render it more friendly to Villaraigosa than it has been to Riordan, with whom it has regularly battled. (And the probable election of former State Senator Tom Hayden to a Council seat in the June 5 runoff would push it even further in Villaraigosa's direction.) Most crucial is just how rooted the new progressive coalition will be in real-life, ground-level politics. "What we call coalitions are sometimes really just voting blocs that come together to support a candidate and are not sustainable in the long term," says Bill Zimmerman, a Santa Monica-based political consultant who helped elect Harold Washington as mayor of Chicago in 1983. That's arguably what happened to the Tom Bradley coalition that governed Los Angeles for two decades (and of which both Villaraigosa and Hahn claim to be progeny).

Bradley's election in 1973 with the backing of a black-Jewish alliance broke open a political system previously monopolized by the white establishment. And while blacks quickly gained a toe-hold in political office, Bradley eventually focused his efforts on downtown business development. For all the schmaltzy lip service currently being paid to the Bradley coalition by both mayoral campaigns, conveniently overlooked is the fact that Bradley's tenure overlapped with the deindustrialization of the city and the rise of the Daryl Gates-dominated LAPD, and that the culminating event in that administration was the fiery riots of 1992.

All of which raises the question of just how Villaraigosa, if elected, would relate to big business, and vice versa. That a Villaraigosa administration and corporate Los Angeles would find a mutual accommodation is a given. The question is, on what terms? Villaraigosa's answer: on very new ones. "Dick Riordan has done a great job as a cheerleader, selling the idea that LA is a great place to do business," he says. "But if LA's going to be a truly great city, then you have to raise more people up, you have to raise them up from the bottom. You have to support investment, but you have to support unionization. You have to make sure business has what it needs to prosper, but you also need a living wage."

Says Thigpen, "We should have no illusions about the last thirty years, about what happened under Bradley and even what would happen under Villaraigosa. Corporate power is disproportionately strong in city life. Electing Antonio will give us access; it will open up the system. And that can all lead to better public policy. But either way, we will still have to wage the battle. This will be a beginning--not an end."

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