Only 8 percentage points separated the winner from the loser in a race that Villaraigosa–until the last few weeks–seemed poised to win. But for all his efforts to present himself as the face of the future, he fell victim to campaign tactics rooted in the past. His opponent, James Hahn, effectively portrayed him as untrustworthy and soft on crime–a task made easier by Villaraigosa’s 1996 letter requesting presidential clemency for a convicted drug dealer. With an ad featuring the letter, a crack-cocaine pipe and a dark portrait of Villaraigosa, Hahn made his rival appear sinister. The image was so murky that (to Villaraigosa’s team, at least) it seemed an intentional effort to make the Mexican-American swarthier, to evoke (as they saw it) nebulous yet potent fears of dusky drug-addled immigrants menacing civilized society.
Even without such vicious attack ads, the campaign was fated to accentuate issues of ethnicity–since little in the way of substance separated the two liberal Democrats. Spurred by Villaraigosa’s candidacy, Latinos (82 percent of whom voted for him) set a record for turnout. The roughly 130,000 Latinos who voted constituted nearly 24 percent of all votes cast, up from 15 percent in 1997, according to an analysis by the William C. Velasquez Institute, a nonpartisan research and Latino-advocacy group. Villaraigosa also won a majority of Jewish votes, but he lost the white vote overall. And blacks rejected him in droves. Blacks (17 percent of all voters) overwhelmingly (80 percent) went for Hahn.
Strong black support for Villaraigosa never seemed likely since, in a sense, he was running against history. The late Kenneth Hahn, the mayor-elect’s father, was a county supervisor and revered figure in L.A.’s black community. When Martin Luther King Jr. arrived in the city during the 1960s, Kenneth Hahn was the lone white leader who welcomed him at the airport. The elder Hahn was “the first legislator to bring resources to a very beleaguered and powerless African-American community in the ’40s and ’50s,” says Connie Rice, a Los Angeles civil-rights attorney who supported Villaraigosa. When Maxine Waters, now a congresswoman, ran for the state Assembly in 1976, James Hahn’s father “helped me out,” she recalls. She, in turn, helped run the son’s campaign for city attorney 16 years ago. “There are relationships that you don’t throw out the window simply for ethnic politics,” said Waters.
Villaraigosa also confronted, in Rice’s words, a certain “bristling in the black community at all the emphasis on the new Latino numbers.” Or as Harry Pachon, president of the Tomas Rivera Policy Institute, put it, there are serious issues of “interethnic competition… that have to be worked out for the future.” Such issues notwithstanding, blacks’ rejection of Villaraigosa is something of a special case. For even as they turned away from Villaraigosa, black Angelenos strongly backed Rocky Delgadillo, allowing him to become L.A.’s first Latino city attorney in modern times. And in Jersey City, N.J., last Tuesday, a black former U.S. marshal, Glenn Cunningham, became mayor by forging a multiracial coalition that included Latinos and whites.
Yet, as politicians elsewhere have discovered, little can be taken for granted in the arena of racial politics. New York mayoral candidate Fernando Ferrer believed he had sewn up Al Sharpton’s endorsement until the unpredictable minister imposed new (and potentially polarizing) conditions. That episode has reminded some of the fiasco of 1985. That year African-American politicians’ promised support for New York mayoral candidate Herman Badillo vanished after black Assemblyman Herman D. Farrell Jr. decided he wanted to run. Black and Latino politicians were left exchanging angry recriminations.
The future of such coalitions is far from clear. What is clear is that the Latino population will continue to boom. In California, close to half a million Latinos became citizens during the last decade alone. Most, at this point, are not voters. But as permanent residents increasingly become citizens, as youths increasingly become adults and as adult citizens increasingly become voters, Latinos will increasingly demand political recognition. Whether those demands spawn a new racial-political spoils system is tied to much larger questions of American identity, questions that ask, at root: Will tomorrow’s America be a place where race becomes largely irrelevant? Or will we see old, racialized preoccupations simply re-created in new, multicolored hues? The answers ultimately lie in our will and in our ability to be better than our past.
