LAST L.A. LATINO MAYOR EVOKED.

Byline: Rick Coca Special to the Daily News

With his inauguration Friday, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa stepped in to lead a city strained by changing demographics, fearful of gang violence and gridlocked as public transit makes slow progress.

Historians recalling the city's last Latino mayor - 133 years ago - say the new mayor can learn much from Jose Cristobal Aguilar, who served two mayoral terms beginning in 1868.

``It would be very interesting to conjure up the ghost of Cristobal Aguilar and get some advice,'' said William Deverell, director of the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West. ``I'm sure he'd recognize the complexity of today's situation.''

As mayor, Aguilar vetoed a City Council ordinance to sign away Los Angeles water rights, oversaw a 22-mile railroad line from San Pedro to downtown and witnessed vicious racial violence when in 1871 a mob lynched 19 Chinese men following the death of an Englishman.

Aguilar lost his re-election bid in 1872 after his opponent, James R. Toberman, made an issue of Aguilar's poor English skills.

But historians say a closer look at Aguilar's reign also might shed light on why it took 133 years for a Latino to once again hold the city's highest political office.

Born in Los Angeles in 1815, Aguilar was among upper-class Latinos commonly known at the time as Californios.

Beginning in 1850 for a span of 22 years, Aguilar's political career included serving on the City Council and board of directors. But it was his two terms as mayor - 1866-68 and 1871-72 - that distinguishes him.

``Cristobal is sitting on a powder keg of democracy, and change is all around him,'' Deverell said. ``He's presiding over a moment that we can look back on as momentous. Southern California is transformed, creating racial difficulty between whites and nonwhites.''

In 1850, with a population of about 1,600, the city was roughly 80 percent Latino and 20 percent white, historians said. In 1870, with a population of about 6,000 people, those percentages had reversed, with whites now an 80 percent majority.

``On the heels of the Mexican-American War, things get a little more brutal,'' Deverell said. ``There's a belief at the time that Mexicans can't compete.''

Deverell, the author of ``Whitewashed Adobe: The Rise of Los Angeles and the Remaking of its Mexican Past,'' said many Anglos also believed that Latinos, like American Indians, would disappear from Southern California and ``fade away from history.''

Part of the reason Latinos didn't disappear still holds true today - they represented a readily available labor force.

Paul Spitzzeri, curator for the Homestead Museum in the City of Industry, said there was a major gap between the working-class people who made up the majority of the Latino population and the wealthy Californio elites.

As the Californios lost their fortunes and land, the class distinctions among Latinos faded. Experts said there seems to be a re-emergence of those distinctions today.

``Los Angeles in 1872 was very diverse,'' Spitzzeri said. ``Whether you're Aguilar or Villaraigosa, you have to deal with these segments of your community.''

As Latinos faded from power, Spitzzeri said, city leaders co-opted the Spanish culture in their boosterism of the city as a European-inspired Mediterranean paradise, while attempting to manage the ``Mexican problem'' as a powerless labor force.

David Diaz, Chicana/o Studies professor at California State University, Northridge, said the recent Latino political power surge is decades late.

Rather than support the candidacies of potential Latino politicians in the 1980s and 1990s, ``Democratic leaders circled the wagons for incumbents,'' Diaz said.

Term limits were the catalyst for the increasing numbers of Latinos elected, Diaz said, but he added there still is little Latino representation in higher offices.

``I don't think the glass is half-full yet,'' Diaz said.

Diaz said that in the scope of the increasing political power of Latinos, Villaraigosa is ``in the midstream of that trajectory.''

Some would say that trajectory began with early Latino leaders like Aguilar.

Rick Coca, [phone]

rick.coca(at)dailynews.com

CAPTION(S):

photo

Photo:

Antonio Villaraigosa gives his first speech as mayor of Los Angeles on Friday, following his inauguration. The new mayor asked fellow Angelenos to ``dream with me'' of a better city.

David Sprague/Staff Photographer