Latino Politicians Have It Harder

Los Angeles is pissed off at their mayor Antonio Villaraigosa–with good reason–but does his ethnicity give them the right to be extra pissed?

Last week while we were all jizzing over Los Angeles mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s new girlfriend, he was having the Worst. Week. Ever. The same day that news broke of his affair with newscaster Lu Parker–a former beauty queen turned televison journalist who’s covered him on her beat–his face also graced the cover of Los Angeles magazine with the simple headline “Failure.” The featured story, “Dear Mr. Mayor: So Much Promise, So Much Dissapointment. An Open Letter To Antonio Villaraigosa,” written by Los Angeles Writer at Large Ed Leibowitz, is a three page account of every promise Villaraigosa has broken since the day he took office–from failing to plant enough trees to failing to rid LA of its gang problem. (And, of course, the awkward matter of his wife and kids disappearing from his official mayoral biography half-way through his first term.) But it’s these opening remarks by Leibowitz that most reveal the source his ire:

Why, you may ask, are we so bitter? It’s a fair question. We weren’t as harsh when your predecessor, James Hahn, ran our city like a midlevel bureaucrat. [...] We are bitter because [...] You were not only our first Latino mayor in 137 years but arguably the most charismatic leader in memory to step onto L.A.’s bland political stage. You had charm, poise, and vigor, and you spoke in cadences that reconciled reason and compassion.

Boy, this sounds a lot like another politician of color. Watch out, Mr. President.

As a boy, you endured Eastside poverty and a drunken, violent father who abandoned the family. Dropping out of high school, you sank into hurt and hostility. A tattoo on your arm warned that you were “born to raise hell.” In your rise from those beginnings to the mayor’s office, you bulldozed long-held prejudices about what any of us could or deserved to achieve. You spanned the city’s divides of race, class, and geography.

Therefore, you aren’t allowed to be a typical politician. It’s true. Because even though Leibowitz’s letter is full of admissions like, “Yes, crime has dipped under your stewardship, and it looks as if we will be getting those thousand cops,” or, “you introduced a gang reduction and youth development plan articulating a vision both focused and audacious,” the fact that Villaraigosa is a politician operating in a political world and, lo and behold, shit really hasn’t changed much, just isn’t acceptable to Leibowitz. Not from the little brown man he trusted with his vote.

And it’s not just white people who feel this way. On the contrary, Latinos are far more scarred when one of their own commits a public transgression. If we had a nickel for every time our publisher said about Villaraigosa’s affairs, “It’s just such a Latino man cliché,” well, we’d have at least five bucks.

We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again. The whole thing reminds us a lot of another Latino mayor whose name, to this day, inspires sighs of regret from his former constituency. We’re speaking, of course, of former San Antonio Mayor and later U.S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Henry Cisneros. Talk about pressure, Cisneros was the very first Latino to be elected mayor of a major American city when he took office in 1981. And, yes, he was charming and charismatic. ALL of San Antonio’s MAP population had their hopes pinned firmly on him as the first Latino President of the United States. Until…wait for it, wait for it…he got caught having an affair. (And P.S. as Secretary under Bill Clinton, he loosened housing mortgage restrictions to create the financial crisis we find ourselves in today.) But, what is baffling to us, is the pain San Antonians still feel at his fall from grace.

When Barack Obama took the White House last fall, this comment was left by one reader beneath a celebratory post at former San Antonian Jim Mendiola’s site Ken Burns Hates Mexicans:

Henry C, [...] I hope that you realized [sic] that it could have been you.

A shame. I hope that blonde poontang was worth it. I’m guessing it wasn’t.

Wow. Let it go, man. Let it go. But Mendiola explains:

Unless you were there, in San Antonio, during the dorky, skinny-tie years of what VH1 calls the Big 80s, it’s hard to imagine the positive self-actualizing impact Henry Cisneros had on the Chicano community, not just in San Antonio, but all across Aztlan

Way back in the day — like 1988 — Henry Cisneros was the most famous Mexican American in the United States. The guy spoke at Democratic National conventions. He shared a presidential commission with Henry Kissenger. In barrio grade schools nationwide his distinct, and to Latinos, recognizably indigenous face, smiled down from thousands of Hispanic-pride-type posters alongside fellow Brown heroes like Cesar Chavez, and… and… well, you get the picture. He was pretty much all we had.

And 21 years later, not much has changed. A miniscule group of high-profile politicians who call their heritage Latino (Hispanic, et, al) are, to their own people, “all we have,” so, they better not fuck it up. And to the group in power, they are still damn lucky to be here. So they better not let them down, either. Catching a break in this climate is a tall order. And it doesn’t help when those high-profile Latino politicians who commit actual treason, like Alberto Gonzales, (yeah, we said it), go so far as to invoke their ethnic background as an excuse for their bad behavior. Then we all get lumped in with their shady behavior.

And what about the Latinas who aren’t even technically politicians, but who have dared to speak out in their own defense and in the defense of their minority group? Who dared call themselves “wiser” than some white man in the context of a society that has assumed the exact opposite since the beginning of time? What kind of break will they get? Hopefully some. Hopefully part of assimilating in the United States means not only being seen as capable of achieving the heights of professional achievement, but also being able to achieve forgiveness when we stumble. As it looks now, Latinos in public service don’t just have to do the job. They have to do it to perfection.

Dear Mr. Mayor [LA Mag]