LA set to vote in Latino mayor

Antonio Villaraigosa has had to forge alliances across several ethnic groups. Picture / Reuters

LOS ANGELES - In what could be a landmark election in one of America's most ethnically diverse cities, Antonio Villaraigosa is favoured today to become the first Latino Mayor of Los Angeles since the 19th century.

Villaraigosa, a charismatic Mexican immigrant's son, faces incumbent mayor and political veteran James Hahn in a race that has been characterised as style over substance - and by some as the future versus the past in the country's second most populous city.

Both Villaraigosa, 52, and Hahn, 54, are Democrats and have few policy differences. Both men ran for mayor in 2001, when Hahn emerged a narrow winner after a divisive campaign.

Both also have history on their minds. Hahn risks becoming the first incumbent LA mayor to be voted out of office since 1973.

According to recent surveys, Villaraigosa is running about 11 percentage points ahead of Hahn in his bid to become the first Latino Mayor of Los Angeles since Cristobal Aguilar in 1872.

"I think [the election] is being watched very carefully. It's got a lot of symbolic value," said Fernando Guerra, director of the Centre for the Study of Los Angeles at Loyola Marymount University.

"Latinos have captured all kinds of elective office in Los Angeles and California but there is nothing more symbolic than Mayor of LA or Governor of California," he said.

Villaraigosa, a former speaker of the California State Assembly, draws his strength from the vibrant Hispanic community that forms about 46 per cent of Los Angeles' 3.7 million population. But Hispanics whose age and US citizenship qualify them to vote form only about 23 per cent of the electorate.

Even so, ethnic issues have been notable by their absence from the campaign.

Villaraigosa's own story as a high school dropout who clawed his way up from the grim city streets makes him a poster child for the American dream. But he has also had to forge alliances with blacks, liberal whites and the city's Jewish community.

"I'm asking you to believe in the idea that somebody in this city can come from another neighbourhood but share the same circumstances," he told a meeting at a predominantly black church over the weekend.

Ironically, it was Hahn who once counted on the support of the city's black community, which makes up 11 per cent of the population. Hahn, who is white, grew up in south Los Angeles where his father, Kenneth Hahn, became a legend as a county supervisor in the 1960s.

But Hahn's ousting in 2002 of then Police Chief Bernard Parks, an African-American, estranged some black voters.

The mayor has also been hurt by a City Hall corruption investigation, although he has never been charged.

- REUTERS