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Jose Huizar: The American Dream Reborn
 | | Jose Huizar with Rep. Xavier Becerra. |
By TONY CASTRO and MARY FRANCES GURTON, Staff Writers 22.JUN.05
School board president is proof that the U.S. remains a country of promise and immigrant hopes
When
he was recently named to the prestigious board of Princeton University,
Los Angeles School Board President Jose Huizar spoke humbly of how far
he had come in his American immigrant dream story — from his roots in
Zacatecas, Mexico, to policy-making at one of the country’s leading Ivy
League schools.
But Huizar, 36, could soon wind up making an
even bigger claim — the first immigrant to win election to the Los
Angeles City Council, where he is running to fill Mayor-elect Antonio
Villaraigosa’s soon-to-be open seat from the city’s Northeast and
Eastside 14th District.
In the context of Los Angeles’ Third
World cultural diversity, such an accomplish would rival that of the
election of the first African American and first Latino almost half a
century ago to the City Council.
“The distinction is significant
and it shows that the immigrant is integrating into the political
system even quicker than anyone expected,” says Harry Pachon, president
of the Tomás Rivera Policy Institute at the University of Southern
California.
The significance is also readily apparent in the
city’s public school system, on which Huizar has been a board member
since 2001 — a district in which, according to Huizar, nearly 42
percent of its 740,000 students are not completely fluent in English,
and more than 90 percent of them speak Spanish.
“Next to
national security,” says Huizar, “this country faces no single issue of
greater importance than the education of our children.”
If this
is the future of Los Angeles, then Huizar — as not only a
Spanish-speaking Latino but an immigrant to boot — feels well
positioned to make the leap from school to city policy-making.
Immigrants,
their children and grandchildren “are going to be the backbone of our
economy in the future," Huizar told reporters last week when a new USC
study of immigrants’ impact on the workforce was released.
“If
the Los Angeles Unified School District isn’t up to the challenge, it
will set up immigrants for a cycle of failure. What we don’t want to do
is create a permanent underclass of immigrants. We want to ensure that
people have social mobility.” The alternative, he said, is “to create
permanent poverty.”
More importantly, with Villaraigosa seeking
city government influence over the Los Angeles Unified School District,
Huizar believes himself to be the new mayor’s point-person with the
schools.
“There is so much room for the city and the school district to work together,” he says.
For
Huizar, however, the road to City Hall means having to go through
former City Councilman Nick Pacheco, whose backing in the past has
included the support of Rep. Xavier Becerra — but whose opposition in
the special election includes Villaraigosa, the man who ousted him from
the Council two years ago while planning his second run for mayor.
While
Villaraigosa has not officially endorsed Huizar, insiders close to the
mayor-elect say he will do so in the future and campaign on his behalf,
to elect an ally to the council and keep a political enemy — especially
from his home district in the Latino Eastside — out of power and out of
City Hall.
“Whoever Antonio anoints,” says longtime Eastside political observer Louis F. Moret, “is going to win.”
But
City Hall political observers say that Huizar on his own has raised
eyebrows and caught the attention of movers and shakers, among them
City Council President Alex Padilla who has been working with Huizar on
a report on government and managing the city’s public schools,
including the possible breakup, according to County Supervisor Gloria
Molina.
“I don’t know if Antonio is going to be able to deliver
on all his promises,” Molina said in an interview after Villaraigosa’s
election, “but there are probably hundreds of us who are willing to
roll up our sleeves to make the schools work for our children.”
For
Huizar, the fourth of five children of Simon and Isidra, who brought
him to Los Angeles from Zacatecas when he was five, education is a
subject that is personally moving — especially now as he sees 3
1/2-year-old Emilia, the older of his two daughters, about to enter the
process.
During a recent interview, he was visibly moved when he
spoke about how just days earlier his wife Richelle had taken Emilia to
the PUENTE Learning Center in Boyle Heights for its pre-school
enrollment.
“That was a very exciting phone call to receive from
my wife,” Huizar said. “That was an important moment in my daughter’s
life.”
For Huizar himself, schooling began at the Euclid Avenue
Elementary School in Boyle Heights and included being elected class
president in sixth grade. But in junior high school, Huizar came to a
crossroads in his life after being expelled for fighting.
It
was just a low point in his young life that Huizar recalls that at one
point, “I remember trying to figure out or decide how I was going to
act when I went to jail.”
But Huizar continued to show promise.
At another middle school he scored high on a placement exam and
remembers a counselor taking notice and telling him, “If you keep this
up you may go to college.”
But it was not until Huizar reached
Salesian High School where on a school retreat he met the Rev. Jim
Nieblas, a teacher at another local Catholic school, Bosco Tech, who
took an interest in him and became his tutor — later even paying for
him to visit college campuses where he was thinking of going to school.
“Neither
of my parents made it past third grade,” says Huizar, “So they weren’t
going to be able to offer much of this type of guidance.”
Nieblas remembers young Huizar as having “leadership, intelligence and charisma.
“He had a job in a video store after school,” he recalls. “He was someone who really wanted to succeed.
“[Later]
I took him to [UC] Berkeley with his mother and made sure he was set up
there. I showed him there was a world beyond the area that he was
familiar with.”
The role of a high school counselor changing
his life is stunningly similar to what Villaraigosa went through at
Roosevelt High School, where even on election night last month the
mayor-elect continued heaping praise and thanks at the help he received
from his counselor.
Huizar eventually was accepted by UC
Berkeley where he earned his bachelor of arts degree. He received a law
degree from UCLA and a master’s degree in public affairs and urban and
regional planning from Princeton.
After working several years as
an associate in the environmental divisions of several Los Angeles law
firms, Huizar in 2001 became a deputy City Attorney in the Los Angeles
City Attorney’ Office, advising city departments and the City Council
on real property matters.
Since 2003 he has practiced land use
and real estate law part-time with Escobar, Avila, Christopher and
Ruiz, LLP, a Pasadena-based law firm.
It is a long way from his
roots, as Huizar often notes with amazement. His late father Simon was
a migrant worker who later worked as a machinist. His mother is retired
from a meat packing plant. The video store where Huizar worked as a
teenager was not a job where he earned money for weekends — it helped
pay his private Catholic school tuition.
Throughout the family’s
struggle in acculturating into the American Dream, of all his siblings,
he was the first to go to college — and the only one with a college
degree.
At the same time, while their son was at college
majoring in Sociology and Chicano Studies, Huizar’s parents became
naturalized citizens.
Today, Huizar’s assimilation into the
mainstream is such that he does not often bring up his own immigrant
experience in education while talking about the challenges facing young
children of immigrants learning English.
But he makes no secret that he feels himself to be a champion of the underdog.
“I have an unquenchable thirst,” he says, “to make the world a better place.” - Staff Photo by Gary McCarthy
 
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