-

PHOENIX (By Gregory Rodriguez, Newsweek) May 24, 2005 - Antonio Villaraigosa may not realize it, but his election as mayor of America's second largest city borrows a page from Al Smith. Like a lot of Irish-American politicians of his day, Smith knew how to play the ethnic card to great effect. After all, "shamrock politics" had helped the Irish establish a firm grasp on power throughout the Northeast in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. But as Smith rose through the ranks in New York politics, from speaker of the Assembly to the statehouse in the 1910s, both he and Irish-controlled Tammany Hall, the powerful Manhattan Democratic Party organization, agreed that he needed to build out his base. While never forgetting his ethnic roots, Smith broadened his outlook and became more politically independent, seeking allies in all corners of the state. Smith's political success helped normalize the image of the Irish as mainstream Americans throughout the Northeast.

As with the Irish, so too with Mexican-Americans, as Villaraigosa's comfortable margin of victory in the Los Angeles mayor's race attests. Villaraigosa, a onetime militant campus activist, fashioned his first race for the mayoralty in 2001 around a labor-left-Latino alliance. He lost. Four years later he broadened his message, built a more ideologically moderate multiethnic coalition and won by nearly 20 percentage points.

Villaraigosa's political ascent is a metaphor for the maturation of Mexican-American politics—a process that is more evolutionary than revolutionary, and, at bottom, a classic American story of ethnic integration into the mainstream.

Throughout American history, countless other ethnic groups have been stripped of their foreignness and have achieved mainstream acceptance. Political and cultural icons are often the vehicles for this cultural shift. In 1939, Life magazine complimented Italian-American ballplayer Joe DiMaggio for not reeking of garlic or using grease in his hair. By his retirement in 1951, however, it called him an all-American hero.

Of course, while European immigrant experiences generally had a beginning and an end, Mexican immigration has been virtually continuous for the past century. This has made the process of Mexican integration a perpetual one. But this dynamic hasn't so much retarded assimilation as it has sown confusion in the formulation of political and cultural identities. Though the self-definition of European-American groups gradually evolved from an immigrant to an ethnic American identity as time passed, Mexican-Americans have always had to contend with the presence of unassimilated newcomers as well as cyclical waves of anti-Mexican sentiment. Consequently, Mexican-Americans have had to battle against the presumption of foreignness longer than other ethnic groups.

What's happening with Mexican-Americans is happening to some extent among other Latino groups as well. In New York City, Puerto Rican mayoral hopeful Fernando Ferrer's only hope of catching the wealthy Republican incumbent Mayor Michael Bloomberg is to build bridges to blacks and other ethnic-minority groups in the metropolitan mosaic, while denting Bloomberg's base among middle- and upper-class whites. A growing number of immigrants from Latin America are flooding into south Florida, teaming with non-Latinos to chip away at the Cuban hold on political power there. Those groups pale in comparison to the political clout of Mexican-Americans, though. While Latinos now live in all parts of the country, two thirds of the nation's Hispanics are of Mexican origin—and their heavy concentration in Texas and California, the country's two most populous states, gives Mexican-Americans extraordinary clout.

Villaraigosa's overwhelming victory is a reminder that despite the uniqueness of Mexican immigration, the process of—and desire for—achieving "Americanness" is as strong as it ever was. Over the next generation, Mexican-Americans will only produce more of their own modern Smiths and DiMaggios. In so doing, they will be exchanging the now outdated language of multi-culturalism for an updated version of the melting pot.

Rodriguez is an Irvine Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation and a contributing editor of the Los Angeles Times.