His ‘Second Chance’ Shaped Villaraigosa

As he campaigns to be mayor of Los Angeles, Antonio Villaraigosa often reaches back to his tumultuous days growing up in a poor Eastside neighborhood. The onetime high school dropout refers frequently to his “second chance” and the impact it had on his adult life and worldview.

“What this candidacy is about is opening up this city to parts . . . that have been left behind,” Villaraigosa told several hundred people at a church service Sunday. “And who better to do that than a young man who got a second chance, a young man who someone pulled over the threshold of opportunity?”

A closer look at those years shows that Villaraigosa was an often reckless, angry young man who got into fights, tattooed his arms and frequented “ditch parties” instead of going to school. He once was arrested in connection with a brawl at a restaurant.

But Villaraigosa was far from being a disaffected street kid, as he’s often described. He was never in a gang--rather, he belonged to a car club that cruised Whittier Boulevard and cut up the floor at the local dance halls, that got into fights but that bore little resemblance to the violent street gangs that existed then and in today’s Los Angeles.

At the same time, Villaraigosa was a smart and bookish teenager, who hung out at the library and was caught up in the fervor of the civil rights movement. According to Villaraigosa, that interest, along with his strong-willed mother and a dedicated teacher, helped give him the second chance he now trumpets as a candidate.

“I think he’s learned a lot from the problems he had growing up,” said Herman Katz, a counselor at Roosevelt High School who encouraged him to go to college. “It’s made him so much more conscious of the needs of so many people who don’t have a voice.”

Tony Villar, as he was known then, was 5 when his father and mother divorced. (Villaraigosa and his wife combined their last names when they were married.) Before his father moved out of their City Terrace house, he left his young son with vivid memories of alcohol-fueled physical abuse.

After the divorce, his father often would come by the house drunk and threaten his mother, Villaraigosa recalls. By age 13, Villaraigosa began standing up to him, challenging him to a fight when he went after his mother. Eventually, his father stopped coming by.

“Looking back, part of my anger [as a teenager] was feeling frustrated that I didn’t defend my mother more, feeling like that was my responsibility,” Villaraigosa said recently.

At Cathedral High School, a private Catholic school just east of downtown, Villaraigosa worked as a janitor and in the rectory kitchen to earn his tuition. He was popular and talkative. He was on the honor roll, and he flourished at sports and led student walkouts demanding changes in curriculum.

“Antonio has always had the same exuberance you see in him now, the same ear-to-ear smile,” said Jim Aguirre, who has known Villaraigosa since the fifth grade and who is one of many City Terrace friends still close to the former assemblyman.

But in his sophomore year, Villaraigosa was diagnosed with a congenital tumor on his spine that paralyzed his legs. He had a complicated surgery and could no longer play football or run track.

“I got wild, angry and wild,” he said. “I felt sorry for myself.”

His grades plummeted. He got two tattoos: “Born to Raise Hell” and “Tony (Heart) Arlene.” (He later had them removed when his young son expressed interest in them.)

During a football game against St. Francis High School, students from the opposing team started baiting the Cathedral students with racial slurs. A fight broke out. Later, Villaraigosa refused to tell administrators who was involved. They expelled him.

During his first day at Roosevelt High, a large public school in Boyle Heights, Villaraigosa got into a fight because of his neat, Ivy League clothes. The school put him into remedial reading and upholstery classes--although he was doing college prep work at Cathedral.

Villaraigosa began spending more time with his car club, “The Clique,” lovingly waxing his brown Chevy Malibu, which he bought with money he made at odd jobs starting at age 7, selling newspapers and shining shoes.

The teenagers competed to see which club had more cars on Whittier Boulevard, and faced off in football games. As Villaraigosa and friends from those days describe it, the various clubs would sometimes fight, but they spent most of their time at car shows and dancing at local halls to Animal and the Headhunters and other Eastside rock ‘n’ roll groups.

“I never was a cholo,” he said. “My mother would have killed me! We were basically good kids who had cars.”

But Villaraigosa was bored. He started cutting school, going to “ditch parties.” By the middle of his junior year, he was no longer attending class at all.

“Going to college was the furthest thing from my mind,” he recalled. “That was the period when I didn’t really see beyond the present.”

Instead, he earned money working at Safeway as a bag boy and loading trucks. And he spent hours in the library--where he read about the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement.

“There’s a lot of coverage about his rough-around-the-edges youth, but I also remember him being slightly nerdy,” said longtime friend Jesus Quinones, now a labor attorney.

Defending Underdogs

He also spent his time frequenting parties, a pastime that sometimes got him into fights. Villaraigosa insists he never started the scuffles, but gained a reputation for defending underdogs.

“Antonio was often the peacemaker, often stood up for other people who were bullied around,” Quinones said. “He was never afraid to do that. As a result, he did get into a few scrapes.”

Villaraigosa would come home at 2 or 3 in the morning, scratched and bruised from his latest fight, and his mother would be waiting for him, crying. She told him she was disappointed. She told him she believed in him, even if he didn’t believe in himself.

It was this force--his mother’s encouragement and pleas--that began to move him, he said.

“I wasn’t satisfied with myself,” he said. “And I felt like my anger was eating me, and I felt like I was doing destructive things to myself.”

And as much as his mother influenced him, he said, the image of his absent father also drove him.

“Part of me, my whole life, has wanted to say, ‘I told you so,’ ” Villaraigosa said.

So in the fall of 1970, he decided to go back to school. It was a dramatic decision. The dropout rate at Roosevelt then was more than 50%, and once students left, they rarely returned.

“I think he was on the verge of going the wrong way,” said Antonio Rodriguez, who ran an Eastside social services center and met Villaraigosa when he was 17. “He was straddling the fence at one point, and he made a choice.”

Villaraigosa re-enrolled at Roosevelt for his senior year and took night classes four days a week to graduate on time.

At school, he was put in a remedial reading class taught by Katz, who immediately saw that he didn’t belong there. Katz bumped him up to an advanced class. And he pressed Villaraigosa to go to college, even paying for him to take the SAT.

“It was a time when he just needed someone to reach out, tell him he’s capable,” Katz said.

Villaraigosa took classes at East Los Angeles Community College, then was accepted to UCLA. But he didn’t immediately abandon all of his rough-and-tumble ways.

A few days before his 24th birthday, Villaraigosa was celebrating at a mid-Wilshire restaurant with his mother and sister when a drunk couple at a nearby table started yelling profanities at the mariachi musicians. A brawl broke out, and his mother was struck, according to a police report of the 1977 incident. Villaraigosa came to her defense.

During the fight, which spilled onto the dance floor, a man’s arm was cut, and a box-carton opener was found nearby. Villaraigosa was arrested on suspicion of assault with a deadly weapon but was charged in court with misdemeanor assault. The trial ended in a hung jury--according to his lawyer, the panel was split 11 to 1 to acquit. Prosecutors declined to retry the case.

Villaraigosa eventually channeled his anger into activism, becoming a student leader at UCLA and getting involved with MEChA, a Chicano rights organization.

“He was one of the guys that would go out there and start the slogans because he was the loudest one,” said Arturo Chavez, a fellow activist in college. “He was one of the people who would make sure people were riled up.”

Empathy for Teenagers

His younger years have left Villaraigosa with an empathy for teenagers who have gone off course. Villaraigosa argues for prevention and intervention programs to accompany tough sentencing.

During an address to a USC journalism class in April, he talked about visiting a probation camp soon after being elected Assembly speaker. After hearing several young men in the camp talk about growing up in abusive and alcoholic households, Villaraigosa said, he broke down in tears.

“When it was over, I couldn’t stop crying,” he told the students. “Because there but for the grace of God go I.”

He paused.

“I think we see those kids sometimes, you know the ones with the bald heads and the tattoos around the neck, and you kind of see them as ‘the other,’ ” he said. “You forget that, in fact, they’re real-life human beings, that if we invested in them, maybe we could turn them around.”

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Times staff writer Hector Tobar contributed to this story.