Racism a challenge for new Los Angeles mayor

Michael R. Blood:

As a candidate for mayor, Antonio Villaraigosa packaged his ethnicity as carefully as he knotted one of his designer ties. Looking to appeal across the racial rainbow, he became the candidate who happened to be Hispanic, not the Hispanic candidate. But only days after his watershed election as the first Hispanic mayor of modern Los Angeles, fighting between black and Latino high school students forced him to speak to the racial lines that crisscross - and sometimes divide - one of the nation's most diverse cities.

On issues ranging from jobs to housing to education, the city's complex and shifting racial milieu will test his promise to be a mayor "for all Los Angeles."

Among blacks and Latinos, "at the street level, the tensions are there, at schools, over employment," said Harry Pachon, director of the Tomas Rivera Policy Institute at the University of Southern California.

School-yard fights are commonplace, but the racial rivalries that played a part in recent brawls at Jefferson High School gave the mayor-elect an early opportunity to take up the role of civic and cultural bridge-builder he talked about during his campaign.

A May 26 fight involving several dozen black and Hispanic teens at the school was so serious that school police used batons and pepper spray to break it up. It was the third racially motivated brawl in six weeks at the overwhelmingly Hispanic school.

Villaraigosa was at the school the next day, meeting with teachers and students. He is reviewing the organization of the mayor's office to determine if a special office for race and safety issues is needed to work with the Los Angeles Unified School District, which runs the 800-campus system.

"One of the most important responsibilities for the next mayor is to help bring this city together," said Villaraigosa, 52, the son of a Mexican immigrant. "We cannot allow - in a city as diverse as this one - racial violence in our schools. We've got to have a zero tolerance for it."

Villaraigosa's election as the city's first Latino mayor since 1872 was the latest sign of expanding Latino political clout in California and across the nation. He knit together Hispanics, blacks and left-leaning whites - a coalition that some analysts called a new paradigm in urban politics.

Or a new paradigm in urban disaster.