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The Remaking of Los Angeles - Part II
 | | Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and wife Corina celebrated at The Grove Christmas tree-lighting show Sunday. Chuck Green Photo |
TONY CASTRO, Columnist 22.NOV.05
The Kingdom and The Power: How an untimely death led to a dramatic power shift in city politics.
The
Emergency Room at Daniel Freeman Hospital in Inglewood may not seem
like the typical place where political power and influence are wielded
and transferred.
Indeed, it is an ER where, like other ERs, the
only real power is over life and death, and even then from the grace of
the almighty, giving and taking. That night in May, none of the friends
of Los Angeles labor leader Miguel Contreras who had rushed to the
hospital and now spilled out of the waiting room and into the cool
evening outside could fathom the mystery of why he had been taken at
what seemed like the prime of life.
“We're all here because of
Miguel,” said a saddened Fabian Nuñez, who had once worked for
Contreras as the political director of his union, the largest county
labor federation in the country and was now Speaker of the California
State Assembly. “He brought us to the dance. A lot of us owe a lot of
our political success to him.”
It was a dance of political power
and leadership — a tango, as it were, in which Contreras had
choreographed much of what had transpired in political life in Southern
California over the past decade, as elected offices had dramatically
changed hands in ways reflecting the demographic transformation of the
landscape.
Perhaps no elected office reflected the influence
Contreras had come to wield more than the one which two of the men who
had rushed to the hospital earlier that night each coveted desperately,
even as they stood feet apart, both teary-eyed and clearly shaken by
the news of their friend’s untimely death: James K. Hahn, the present
mayor of Los Angeles, who had come to count Contreras as a personal
friend in the past four years of his administration; and Antonio
Villaraigosa, the City Councilman seeking to defeat Hahn in their
second campaign for mayor and someone whose friendship and kinship with
Contreras at times approached that of brothers.
In 2001,
Contreras had come anguishingly close to realizing Villaraigosa’s
election as mayor. He and his union had worked feverishly in his
campaign, trying to make a decade’s worth of organizing and fundraising
pay off for Villaraigosa. On election night, Contreras had cried along
with Villaraigosa over the disappointment.
But four years
later, Hahn having mended fences with the union leader and the County
Federation of Labor, Contreras and Villaraigosa found themselves in
opposing camps. Contreras and the leadership of the federation had
endorsed Hahn for re-election, though Villaraigosa — himself a former
union organizer — continued wooing the rank-and-file membership, which
still sympathized with him.
The test for Contreras of whether he
could deliver the union vote for Hahn and deny power to Villaraigosa
lay only 11 days away on election day. In the weeks since the labor
federation’s endorsement of Hahn, Contreras had come under intense
criticism and pressure from the rank-and-file, from labor activists,
and from Villaraigosa supporters.
“The irony is that while the
Fed backed Hahn in the current race, it was the Fed’s work of the past
nine years — all the voter registration and labor mobilization, the
showcasing of issues like the living wage, and the extraordinary
campaign labor waged for Villaraigosa four years ago — that helped the
create the city that stands ready today to make Villaraigosa mayor,”
Los Angeles Weekly writer and Contreras confidant Harold Meyerson,
wrote at the height of the campaign.
It all weighed heavily on
Contreras, and he as much as anyone else knew what was at stake: If,
despite the corruption scandal swirling around his administration, Hahn
were to beat Villaraigosa, particularly in a close election, Contreras
would possibly forever bear the cross of having been the hurdle that
defeated the standard-bearer for labor, for Latino political
aspirations, and for the progressive agenda many believed was necessary
for the future of a diverse Los Angeles whose very diversity was
driving the fractionalization and polarization within the city — from
classrooms to neighborhoods, from sweatshops to board rooms, across
races and religions.
The direction Los Angeles would take in the
coming years — the way it defined its leadership in this campaign —
would ultimately go a long way in defining how others would see it: as
the city of undying hope and optimism, the city of dreams lived out in
real life, and a microcosm of a country still keeping faith with the
promise held out by its founding principles, or as a city of cynicism
and corruption, a city of lofty claims but empty rhetoric, a city where
politics and leadership still appealed to the baser instincts of
mankind and not to what Villaraigosa had once called “the better angels
within us.”
“It was a hard decision for Miguel,” Nuñez, the
Assembly Speaker, recalled with reporters later. “He was torn between
what his heart was saying and what his unions wanted. He came to the
conclusion that he had to defend the institutional interest of the
labor movement and put his personal preferences aside.”
Making
Contreras feel worse over the weeks since the federation’s endorsement
of Hahn had been Villaraigosa’s own magnanimity, both public and
private, as he assured Contreras that there were no hard feelings and
that their friendship remained as solid as ever. Villaraigosa was aware
that Contreras had tried unsuccessfully to broker a dual endorsement
from the labor organization for both Hahn and him, but that even
Contreras’ influence had limits — and that Hahn in his four years in
office had delivered too much to some unions and that those individual
union leaders felt obligated to the mayor.
“In my heart of hearts, I know you are there with me,” Villaraigosa told his friend, trying to assuage any guilt.
At
another time, Villaraigosa said the two of them were “cut from the same
cloth.” They were, after all, virtually the same age — both men were
52, though Contreras just a few months older. Both men also owed their
respective political power to organized labor, although each had come
to the union movement in ways that symbolized the differences in the
way they had grown up.
The son of immigrant farm workers,
Contreras grew up in the ranching town of Dinuba where the defining
moment in his life came one pre-dawn morning in 1973 when the entire
Contreras family was dragged outside their modest home and all of them
fired by the ranch boss in front of the crew chiefs and his father
Jesus blacklisted — for following Cesar Chavez and his United Farm
Workers organization.
“For those who don't know me,” Contreras
liked to say after retelling the story, “I've been a union man since
that day in 1973 at 4:30 a.m.”
By that time Villaraigosa had
been a volunteer with Chavez’s union for five years. Although their
paths crossed during UFW rallies and activities, Villaraigosa and
Contreras connected in the 1980s when Contreras was an organizer for
the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International Union, with
much of his trouble-shooting in Los Angeles. By then Villaraigosa was a
field representative and organizer with the United Teachers Los Angeles
and also involved in the American Federation of Government Employees.
Around
the same time that Villaraigosa won his first elective office — a
bitter 1994 campaign for the State Assembly, with the backing of
Supervisor Gloria Molina against the candidate of a longtime political
rival — Contreras had gone to work for the County Federation of Labor
where he became the political director. In a future ironic twist of
fate, he became head of the federation in 1996 when its executive
secretary, Jim Wood, died tragically young of cancer.
Villaraigosa
recalled all that and more as his relationship with Contreras spilled
out along with his emotions at the Daniel Freeman ER. A part of him had
been hurt by the County Fed’s refusal to endorse him, but the feeling
had been brief and without rancor or bitterness. It was one of the
great lessons he had learned in the State Assembly where loyalties
sometime lasted no longer than a handshake, and where he often found
himself in alliance with someone he had opposed just weeks earlier.
Villaraigosa
also knew what Contreras had known — and feared — since the
announcement of the federation’s endorsement of Hahn: That in the labor
movement, Villaraigosa had a devoted following, irrespective of
endorsement, and that his ability to tap that well in the mayoral
election could ultimately prove embarrassing for labor’s leadership, as
well as for Contreras.
If death could ever be considered an
omen, and often in Greek tragedy it was, Villaraigosa, the consummate
political animal, recognized his friend death for what it was: a
personal loss for him, Contreras’ loved ones, and the labor movement —
but an absolute, perhaps fatal blow, to Hahn.
“[Hahn] expected,
over the last seven to nine days before the election, that Miguel would
be out and rallying the troops,” Jaime Regalado, the executive director
of the Edmund G. “Pat” Brown Institute of Public Affairs at Cal State
Los Angeles, told an interviewer in the wake of Contreras’ death.
“Nobody has the even symbolic or the real power to speak with one voice
that Miguel did.”
Tony Castro can be reached at tcastro@laindependent.com.
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