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New
Mayor Faces the Two Cities of L.A.
By
Ruben Martinez, Pacific News Service, June 7, 2001
The real division that Los Angeles mayoralty candidate Antonio
Villaraigosa could no cross was on not of ethnicity or race
but of class. L.A. increasingly is a city of the server and
the served. PNS Associate Editor Ruben Martinez is a Loeb Fellow
at Harvard University and author of the forthcoming "Crossing
Over: A Mexican Family on the Migrant Trail" (Metropolitan/Holt
Books, September 2001).
The morning after L.A.'s most hotly-contested mayoral election
in more than three decades, my e-mail and voice-mail are full
of messages from friends and colleagues and virtual people.
They share one sentiment -- "we" were robbed. We Latinos, that
is.
I can't say I was happy about the results, but neither can I
say I agree with these voices. One said the whites weren't ready
to "trust a Mexican" in the mayor's office. Another said the
black political leadership sold out Latinos and sided with whites
(implying that blacks, too, do not "trust a Mexican"). Yet another
prophesied racial division.
Official election results and exit polls show the election divided
Los Angeles along ethnic and racial lines. African Americans
voted overwhelmingly for mayor-elect Jim Hahn, as did moderate
and conservative whites, especially in the San Fernando Valley.
Latinos and progressives, we are told, voted for Antonio Villaraigosa
who, as the media reminded us for more than a year, would have
been become the city's first Latino mayor since 1872.
But for me the race wasn't about race. It was about a candidate
from a working-class background, with a long history of labor
activism, attempting to forge a new multi-ethnic coalition the
likes of which hadn't been seen since the days of former mayor
Tom Bradley, the city's first African-American mayor.
Bradley was elected with backing from then mostly-black South
Los Angeles and the largely liberal Jewish enclave of the West
Side. That coalition went up in flames during the riots of 1992,
paving the way for the election of Republican mayor Richard
Riordan -- a fuzzy, warm kind of conservative who nonetheless
called for a vastly increased police force.
Villaraigosa's coalition was a newer and more progressive version
of Bradley's. A native son of East L.A., he banked on support
from Latinos, of course, but he never played the race card.
A labor activist never places race over class inequity -- that
would set too many demons loose.
In labor struggles, the issues are wages and working conditions.
The labor force may be all brown and the bosses all white or
Asian, but that isn't the point for labor -- you never know
when you'll need the support of like-minded people from other
racial or ethnic groups. It's about class, not race.
It is hard to remember that in L.A. these days. The language
of race and ethnicity permeates discourse. In large part this
reflects the 2000 Census, which shows Latinos nearing an absolute
majority, whites dipping below 30, black population about the
same and a surging Asian population. But by and large, L.A.'s
new neighborhoods are mixed. What divides us most is not language,
or skin color. It is class.
L.A. has become a city of staggering wealth -- and staggering
poverty. The United Way documented this not long ago in a report
titled "A Tale of Two Cities." Only a handful of sectors in
the local economy have grown over the last decade. Most jobs
have not been in the film and music industries or in high-tech,
but in the "service sector" -- jobs which involve literally
"serving" someone. Hotels and restaurants, landscaping and nannying
-- in these jobs, union representation is scarce, not to mention
health benefits or even a "living wage." To a great degree,
L.A.'s up-and-coming majority, Latinos, fill these jobs. But
there are many whites, blacks and Asians "serving" as well,
and this is the L.A. Villaraigosa sought to represent.
In the final weeks of the campaign, Villaraigosa's opponent
Jim Hahn played the race card, using advertising imagery and
rhetoric not much different from the infamous "Willy Horton"
ads used by George Bush Sr. against Mike Dukakis.
The problem for Villaraigosa and for the city is not so much
the ethnic demons that were set loose. It is the fact that those
demons mask, as they always have, the true issue. We may live
in a city of many colors and languages, foods and musics. But
most of us live in one city or another: in the L.A. of the served
or the L.A. of the server.
Those are the cities that Jim Hahn will face as the new mayor
of Los Angeles. |
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