WashPost Hints at Marching Orders for Villaraigosa
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Can one politician heal L.A.'s racial and cultural divisions?
Can he stop the black-vs-Latino brawls at Jefferson High, end the freeway shootings, roll back Gov. Schwarzenegger's antipathy toward the drivers- licenses- for- immigrants measure being tossed around in Sacramento and mend the damage the LAPD has done with the <a href=article521.html">beating of Stanely Miller and the killing of Devin Brown?
Less than a week after Mayor-elect Antonio Villaraigosa got the star treatment in profiles by the Los Angeles and New York Timeses, the Washington Post weighs in with what amounts to a hopeful maybe on all counts ...
The piece by non-staffer Marcela Sanchez seems based on a single phone interview with the mayor-to-be and an exploration of the movie Crash's view of the city's interracial static:
He faces enormous challenges. The demands for jobs, affordable housing and a sense of security will require serious juggling. His predecessor failed to deliver and lost. But Villaraigosa is what no other mayor was before him, said the Rev. Clyde W. Oden, Jr., senior pastor of Bryant Temple AME Church in Los Angeles. "He is multilingual.'' Villaraigosa can talk "to the brothers on the streets,'' said Oden, just as he is able to connect with upper-middle-class residents, with labor leaders, and with newly arrived immigrant ...
Americans around the country are angry and blaming the seemingly uncontrollable flood of immigrants -- particularly from Latin America -- for taking U.S. jobs, transforming U.S. communities and making them very unsettled.
All of this happens just as most leaders in Washington seem oblivious, unwilling to show the leadership necessary to face the issue head on. They leave a void that Villaraigosa, at least, is trying to fill by appealing to Angelenos' better nature.
It's a tall order.
Villaraigosa and the administration he builds could - we hope - do a better job than absentee mayor Jim Hahn ever did of setting up proactive pan-cultural organizations that work on root causes of racial strife by improving the availability of good jobs, cheap housing, better educational opportunities, and after-school programs and vocational mentoring that could bridge the gulf between bad parents and worse gang-parenting.
But can he put a dent in the absolutist good-bad paradigm that Angelenos try to lay over the complexities of illegal immigration?
Can he work with LAPD Chief William Bratton to curb the department's unfortunate tendency toward moving-too-fast street justice that balloons into national scandals and attracts charges of racism?
Can he work closely with the city council to effect neighborhood-level changes in the shortage of opportunity that so many people take as an excuse to flex their bigotry?
We'll start to find out when Mayor Villaraigosa takes office July 1.
Posted by: Mack_Reed on Friday, June 03, 2005 - 10:26 AM
