When Antonio Villaraigosa was sworn in as Los Angeles's 41st mayor, on July 1, 2005, he became the first Latino to hold the office since 1872, a milestone for a city that is now almost 50 percent Latino. "I don't want to be known as the Latino mayor," Villaraigosa, a Democrat, told Farai Chideya for the National Public Radio show News & Notes with Ed Gordon (May 19, 2005, on-line). "I want to be known as the mayor who happens to be Latino who made a difference. I ran to make a difference." After six years in the California State Assembly (including two years as speaker), one unsuccessful mayoral run, and two years on the Los Angeles City Council, Villaraigosa took on the highest post in the city in which he has spent his entire life. During his childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood--which, until a laser procedure a few years ago, was represented by tattoos reading "Born to Raise Hell" and "Tony [heart] Arlene"--he endured the presence of an abusive father, his father's abandonment of the family, surgery to remove a tumor on his spine, a hiatus from high school, excessive consumption of alcohol, the births of two children out of wedlock, and other experiences that might seem to preclude a political career. Villaraigosa has made his youthful mistakes an important aspect of his electoral campaigns, because they have made him someone with whom many others can easily relate, while at the same time providing evidence of his firsthand understanding of many of the problems plaguing the city and of his unique position in attempting to tackle them. "Antonio has a real human story, and this makes him someone we can truly touch, feel, and connect with," Martin Ludlow, a former top aide to Villaraigosa, told an interviewer for U.S. News & World Report (October 31, 2005), which named the mayor one of the nation's best leaders. Villaraigosa sees his success as emblematic of the American dream, proof that hard work and perseverance will be rewarded. "I'm a guy who has fallen down my whole life," he told the U.S. News reporter, "but I've gotten up and wiped the blood off my knees every time." "Do you know what it is to grow up under the circumstances I did and to have a job like this?" he asked Rick Orlov rhetorically for the Daily News of Los Angeles (July 2, 2006). "I wake up every morning grateful and blessed to have this job." Villaraigosa--whom Jennifer Warren described for the Los Angeles Times Magazine (August 2, 1998) as "impetuous, charming, and unusually frank"--told Chideya, "I say to people that Los Angeles is a city of America's hope and its promise. It's a city where we come from every corner of the earth here to make the American dream happen. It's a place where we come from every part of the United States to remake ourselves and to, you know, find our destiny, if you will. And I'm excited about Los Angeles because I believe in her. I believe in her destiny."

    The oldest of three children, Villaraigosa was born Antonio Ramon Villar Jr. in East Los Angeles on January 23, 1953. He has two sisters, Deborah and Mary Lou. His father, Antonio Ramon Villar Sr., was a Mexican immigrant whose jobs included butcher and cab driver. Villaraigosa has often described his father as an abusive alcoholic, allegations that Villar Sr. has denied. When Villaraigosa was five years old, his father left the family. Villaraigosa's mother, Natalia, who worked for the California Department of Transportation, later remarried and gave birth to another son, Robert Delgado. In their two-bedroom house in the City Terrace neighborhood of East Los Angeles, the family maintained a modest standard of living. To help make ends meet, Villaraigosa shined shoes and sold newspapers beginning at the age of seven. He attended the private, Catholic, all-boys Cathedral High School. During his sophomore year Villaraigosa was suddenly struck with partial paralysis, caused by a benign tumor in his spinal column; after surgery, part of the tumor remained embedded in his spine. Following three weeks in the hospital, he returned to school, where, although he could walk again, he was no longer able to play football or run track. He quickly became frustrated and lost interest in his studies; his grade-point average dropped to 1.4 out of a possible four. The next year, in 1969, he got into a fight while watching a student football game; that incident, compounded by his failing grades, led Cathedral to expel him. Villaraigosa's expulsion was a blow to his mother, whom he has consistently named as his major inspiration. Still, she continued to encourage her son, and in a letter to him she wrote, "I just want you to know I haven't given up on you," as quoted by Warren. He enrolled at the public Roosevelt High School and was placed in remedial classes, where he grew "alienated, mad at the world," as he put it to Warren, and then dropped out of school altogether. During the next several months, he got tattooed and spent his time wandering around his neighborhood, getting into fights. At the urging of his mother, he returned to Roosevelt, taking night classes and graduating the year in which he would have completed his education had he remained at Cathedral.

    Villaraigosa then enrolled at East Los Angeles College, a two-year facility, and later transferred to the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), where he earned a B.A. degree in history in 1977. Earlier, at 21, he had fathered a child with a woman he had known for a matter of weeks. On his 24th birthday he was arrested for fighting in a Los Angeles restaurant; at his trial he insisted that he had been defending his mother and a sister following inappropriate comments, and the jury voted for acquittal. At 25 Villaraigosa fathered his second child with a different woman. In 1985 he graduated from the unaccredited People's College of Law in Los Angeles; he failed the California bar exam four times, however, meaning that technically he cannot practice law. Also in 1985, at a conference on immigrant rights, he met Corina Raigosa, a public-school teacher. When they married, in 1987, they combined their surnames into one--Villaraigosa. Villaraigosa has said that he suggested the merger, believing it to be an important, progressive step in marriage. Meanwhile, he had begun working as an investigator for the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, where his co-workers elected him union steward. He next got a job as a field representative and organizer for United Teachers Los Angeles and played an important role in that union's 1989 strike. In 1991 the Los Angeles County supervisor, Gloria Molina, appointed Villaraigosa to a seat on the city's Metropolitan Transportation Authority, where he acted as an advocate for bus riders, opposing fare increases, fighting for better security, and trying to eliminate graffiti.

    In 1994 Villaraigosa ran for a vacated seat in the California State Assembly. Although his opponent made public the details of his arrest of 17 years earlier, Villaraigosa won the election to represent California's 45th District, a diverse area encompassing the communities of Mount Washington, Boyle Heights, Silver Lake, and Hollywood. One day after the election, his wife filed for divorce, on the grounds that he had been engaging in an extramarital affair. The scandal caused Villaraigosa to lose some of his political allies, including Molina. (The couple reconciled two years later.) During his first few years as an assemblyman, Villaraigosa sponsored almost three dozen bills, but with only moderate success. Many of his higher-profile proposals--among them those that would have allowed terminally ill convicts to be released into their families' care, required trigger locks on firearms, reintroduced food stamps for legal immigrants (under federal welfare reform, they had been eliminated)--failed to garner support. One of his best-known bills, which made it legal for women to breast-feed in public, passed after a second attempt. In 1996 Cruz Bustamante, California's first Latino speaker of the Assembly, appointed Villaraigosa majority leader. The following year Villaraigosa sponsored a bill creating the Healthy Families Program, to provide health insurance to 250,000 children from families categorized as "working poor." The bill passed and was signed into law by Governor Pete Wilson, thus ushering in the largest new medical program in the state of California since Congress launched Medicaid (called Medi-Cal in California), in 1965. That achievement was clouded by accusations from Assemblywoman Martha Escutia that Villaraigosa's bill was more or less a copy of a health-care bill that she had introduced earlier. Villaraigosa denied Escutia's claim and noted that he had unsuccessfully sponsored a bill in 1996 that sought universal health care for all children under the age of 18.

    In 1998, after four years in politics, Villaraigosa became the speaker of the 80-member Assembly. California's strict term limits prevented his predecessor, Bustamante, from running again, but rumors circulated that Villaraigosa had forced Bustamante out months before Bustamante wanted to leave. Villaraigosa assumed the position in January 1998, at the beginning of his final term as an assemblyman. "Am I prepared?" he said to Warren. "Absolutely not. But we live in the era of term limits, where all of us are amateurs. The fact is, I got the job. And in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king." Villaraigosa suffered an embarrassing defeat later in 1998, when a bill he sponsored that would have outlawed discrimination against gay high-school students failed to pass because moderates within his own party refused to support it. That same year he enjoyed one of his biggest successes: the signing into law of the Leroy F. Greene School Facilities Act--a $9.2 billion school bond bill that had failed twice before Villaraigosa brokered a compromise with key Republicans in the Assembly. During his years in the Assembly, and especially his years as speaker, Villaraigosa became known for both his willingness and his ability to cooperate with Republicans. "I'm very much somebody who understands that at the end of the day, you've got to move the ball a little bit forward," he told Ray Suarez for National Public Radio's Talk of the Nation (March 11, 1998). "It's not enough to grandstand and protect, you know, your ideological, philosophical spheres of influence and the like, you have to move that ball, and you have to fix problems." To "move the ball," Villaraigosa explained to Suarez, he does his best to see all sides of an issue: "You know, I'm a grandpa and have four kids and I can tell you the older you get, the grayer you see the world. There is always room for honest differences of opinion."

    In 1999 Villaraigosa was instrumental in winning the passage of a law banning the manufacture, import, and sale of assault weapons; his critics were quick to point out that while Villaraigosa handled the bill on the Assembly floor, state senator Don Perata had done much of the work behind the scenes. That year Villaraigosa joined Assemblyman Fred Keeley to sponsor a $2 billion bond issue for state parks, a greater sum for bonds than ever before for any purpose in California. Keeley had been responsible for much of the legwork for the bill, while Villaraigosa had introduced a new emphasis on urban beautification, including at least $90 million for land along the Los Angeles River. Looking back on Villaraigosa's record as speaker, the veteran journalist Rone Tempest, who was based for decades in Sacramento, the California state capital, wrote for the Los Angeles Times (May 24, 2001), "A lackluster detail man by his own admission, he was forced by his weaknesses in the mechanics of policy to lean heavily on a strong staff as well as on intellectually gifted colleagues who didn't always agree with him."

    As was expected, after Villaraigosa's last term in the Assembly ended, he entered the race for mayor of Los Angeles. In that city's nonpartisan mayoral race, the candidates run in a general election; the top two vote-getters in that contest, regardless of party affiliation, then compete in a run-off. Villaraigosa won the general election in April with 30 percent of the vote; his closest competitor, James K. Hahn, got 25 percent. In the following months Villaraigosa and Hahn campaigned intensely, often attacking each other. Especially damaging to Villaraigosa was the revelation that while he was an assemblyman, he had written a letter to President Bill Clinton on behalf of Carlos Vignali, who had then served less than half of a 15-year prison sentence after being convicted on federal charges of drug trafficking. At the request of Vignali's father, a friend of his, Villaraigosa, reportedly without seeking more information about Vignali's sentence, had protested it as an unjustifiably harsh punishment. Just before Clinton left office, he commuted Vignali's sentence. In the June run-off, Hahn captured 56 percent of the vote to win the mayorship. Supporters of Villaraigosa noted that, despite his defeat, the race had helped him to gain national exposure. "People all over the country now know the name Antonio Villaraigosa," Tony McAuliffe, then the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, told Michelle DeArmond for the Associated Press (June 9, 2001). An exhausted Villaraigosa announced that he would be taking some time off from politics. "I put everything I had into this race," he told DeArmond. "I don't have anything left, frankly, at least on the short term." Immediately after Election Day, Villaraigosa underwent two operations: one on his vocal cords and the other on his spine, where his tumor had started to enlarge. Within a few months he was appointed a distinguished fellow at UCLA and at the University of Southern California, where he co-authored the policy blueprint "After Sprawl," which addressed the myriad problems facing urban centers.

    In the 2003 election for members of the Los Angeles City Council, Villaraigosa defeated the incumbent, Nick Pacheco, for the seat representing the 14th District. While in that post Villaraigosa did not push through any major laws, serving instead mainly as a negotiator. He helped secure $800 million in federal funding for the extension of the Los Angeles County rail system into East Los Angeles, and he played a key role in settling the city's 2003 transit strike. He also focused on the larger political arena. In 2003-04 he was the national co-chairman of the Democratic U.S. senator John Kerry's presidential bid. The following year Villaraigosa announced that he would again run for mayor of Los Angeles. While many residents welcomed him as a candidate, in the belief that he would bring much-needed energy to the mayoralty, others complained that he was breaking his promise to remain on the City Council for his full four-year term. Some among the latter group attempted without success to mount a recall election, to oust him from his council seat.

    The rematch between Villaraigosa and Hahn (who emerged in first and second place, respectively, in the March 8, 2005 general election) brought some of Villaraigosa's faults to the fore. "His volcanic reactions to Hahn's attacks are beginning to reveal what political insiders have known for years: The former Assembly speaker can be thin-skinned, easily angered and even vindictive," Gregory Rodriguez wrote in his May 2, 2005 Los Angeles Times column. "Although great politicians learn to distinguish between what is political and what is personal, Villaraigosa has not. He can try to hide this side of his personality, as he has erased his tattoo, but, so far, he can't make it go away." Despite such criticism and Hahn's solid achievements, in the run-off election, held on May 17, 2005, Villaraigosa got 58.7 percent of the vote to Hahn's 41.3 percent. "In large measure, Mr. Villaraigosa's electoral success . . . is the product of his ability to talk," John M. Broder wrote for the New York Times (May 30, 2005). "His landslide victory in the May 17 election transcended the lines of race, class, ethnicity and geography that make Los Angeles less a city than a collection of enclaves. It was Mr. Villaraigosa's ability to keep talking across all of Los Angeles's divisions that enabled him to put together a coalition that defeated Mayor James K. Hahn by a stunning 17-point margin. . . . His evident earnestness, contrasted with Mr. Hahn's detachment and seeming lack of passion, apparently was just what residents of this city were eager to hear. His election coincided with the release of the film Crash, which depicts Los Angeles as a seething hell of racial fear, and his message of hope seemed a welcome tonic." After he won the election, Villaraigosa said, as quoted by Michael Finnegan and Mark Barabak in the Los Angeles Times (May 18, 2005), "It doesn't matter whether you grew up on the Eastside or the Westside, whether you're from South Los Angeles or Sylmar. It doesn't matter whether you go to work in a fancy car or on a bus, or whether you worship in a cathedral or a synagogue or a mosque. We are all Angelenos, and we all have a difference to make." As Los Angeles' first Latino mayor since 1872, Villaraigosa also emphasized that while his heritage was important to him, he did not want it to be the defining characteristic of his mayorship. "I'm an American of Mexican descent, and I'm proud of that," he said, as quoted by John M. Broder in the New York Times (May 19, 2005). "But I intend to be the mayor of all of Los Angeles. As the mayor of the most diverse city in the world, that's the only way it can work."

    In one of his first moves after being sworn into office as mayor, on July 1, 2005, Villaraigosa banned construction during rush hours on major streets. He has since embarked on several ambitious projects, most notably an overhaul of the city's school system. During his first year in office, he tried to shift control of the schools from the Los Angeles United School District (LAUSD) to the mayor's office; in the end, he settled for a compromise that allows him to hire the superintendent and also oversee the three lowest-performing high schools and their feeder campuses. The new arrangement, which went into effect in September 2006, has been a source of much contention, with the LAUSD school board claiming in a lawsuit that it violates the state constitution. Villaraigosa also made crime prevention a priority, pledging to add 1,000 police officers to the Los Angeles Police Department by 2010, which would bring the total number of police officers to more than 10,000 for the first time. (Citywide violent crime went down by 14 percent in 2005 and by another 11 percent in the first six months of 2006.) In addition, Villaraigosa spearheaded several environmental initiatives, among them a new bus route and a project to plant one million trees. He has also said that he wants to increase the city's renewable energy to 20 percent of its total energy consumption by 2010.

    During the summer of 2007, after Villaraigosa urged Los Angeles residents to decrease their use of water because of the severe drought that affected large parts of the American West, Duke Helfand reported in the Los Angeles Times (August 10, 2007) that the mayor and his family had used close to twice as much water in their home as had the average family. The mayor later attributed the excessive use to gophers that had been chewing holes through rubber pipes in his estate's lawn-sprinkler system. On another front, in efforts to make Los Angeles more of a national and global presence, Villaraigosa has been trying to bring the National Football League (NFL) back to the city and is promoting a bid for the 2016 Olympics.

    Villaraigosa has often been described as seeking attention and celebrity to an extent perhaps unbecoming for the average politician but acceptable in the mayor of a city as star-driven as Los Angeles. "If Villaraigosa does nothing else in his first term, he will have at least given L.A. a mayor as colorful, as flashy and as able to play in the national big leagues as the City of Angels itself aspires to be. And that's something," Mariel Garza wrote for the Daily News of Los Angeles (June 25, 2006). In his Los Angeles Times (October 15, 2006) column, Gregory Rodriguez pointed out the ambiguities of Villaraigosa's personality: "It's impossible not to admire the mayor's extraordinary energy," he wrote, adding, "But his attendant braggadocio is both endearing and disturbing." Rodriguez continued, "Of course, a big ego isn't necessarily a bad thing in a politician. . . . But with Villaraigosa, as with every great politician, there's a fine line between the drive for personal glory and the desire to make the world a better place."

    Given that term limits on statewide office in California require that the current governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, step down in 2010, many suspect that Villaraigosa is primed to move on to bigger things. "He's earned our patience--up to a point--by working frantically and making us feel good. It's hard not to wonder, however, whether his ardor for this relationship ultimately will wane," Kevin Roderick wrote for the Los Angeles Times Magazine (December 1, 2006). "Although he calls being mayor of Los Angeles the best political job in the country, most who know Villaraigosa believe that a piece of his heart always belongs to the next office." Currently, Villaraigosa serves as one of four national co-chairmen of Hillary Rodham Clinton's presidential campaign.

    On June 12, 2007 Villaraigosa and his wife filed for divorce, citing "irreconcilable differences." On July 3, 2007 Villaraigosa announced that he was romantically involved with the Spanish-language television reporter Mirthala Salinas. With his former wife, he has a son, Antonio Jr., and a daughter, Natalia Fe. His two older children are his daughters Marisela and Prisila. In May 2006 the mayor was named one of People en Espanol's 50 Most Beautiful People.

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