Seeking one more act, Villaraigosa faces stacked odds
SALINAS, Calif. _ A few dozen migrants from Mexico looked up from the Salinas Valley field where they were picking strawberries and watched Antonio Villaraigosa's convoy rumble toward them in a cloud of dust.
Moments later, the former Los Angeles mayor, wearing shiny black dress shoes, stepped out of a sedan.
"Hola, senora _ Antonio Villaraigosa," he told Estela Almanza, a fruit sorter.
He inspected a handful of ripe berries for news cameras and greeted Almanza's co-workers, most of them covered in hats, scarves and hoodies. "Buenas tardes. Hola."
The harvest was the highlight of a Monterey Bay campaign swing for Villaraigosa, a Democrat running for governor. It came almost 50 years after he broke into politics as an East L.A. teenager, urging Safeway shoppers to join a grape boycott for farmworker rights. He went on to serve as state Assembly speaker and win two terms as mayor.
But now, four years after his mayoralty came to an end, Villaraigosa, 64, is no longer the scrappy upstart whose rise to power symbolized Latinos' growing clout in California.
Instead, he stands out as the
