Antonio Villaraigosa, 52, a left-wing Democrat and the eldest of four children brought up by a single mother in the poor Eastside area of the city, beat James Hahn, who became the first incumbent Los Angeles Mayor to lose a second term since the Great Depression.

Mr Hahn, 54, the son of a prominent local politician, was crippled by investigations into City Hall corruption. Two of his supporters were charged with laundering money to get around limits on political campaign donations.

The election landslide comes amid growing racial tension between whites and Latinos, who now represent more than a third of the electorate in California. Many Latinos work for less than the minimum wage, avoid taxes and send most of their earnings back to Mexico.

Concern over illegal immigration has reached such a level that an armed private militia, known as the Minutemen, patrols a stretch of the border between Arizona and Mexico. Arnold Schwarzenegger, California’s Austrian-born Governor, praised the Minutemen as doing a “terrific job”.

In a conciliatory victory speech, Mr Villaraigosa said: “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. Our purpose is to bring this great city together. Our purpose is to draw fully and equally on the rich diversity of all our communities and neighbourhoods.”

Mr Villaraigosa was a high- school dropout — his violent father abandoned his family — who turned around his life to become speaker of the California Assembly and then a member of Los Angeles City Council. He won 59 per cent of the vote yesterday, after losing the 2001 election to Mr Hahn.

He campaigned as a “unity candidate”, bringing together a collection of sprawling “boomburbs” where whites are now a minority with only 31 per cent of the population, compared with 48 per cent for Hispanics, 11 per cent for Asians and 10 per cent for blacks.

His celebrity endorsements included John Kerry, the former presidential candidate, and Magic Johnson, the basketball player.

Unrest between whites and Latinos is not limited to the southwestern states that America won from Mexico in the Mexican War of 1846-48. In New York, Michael Bloomberg, the Mayor, began his re-election campaign yesterday with a television advert in Spanish.

Tension has been aggravated further by comments that President Fox of Mexico made to a business audience last week.

“There is no doubt that Mexican men and women, full of dignity, drive and a capacity for work, are doing the jobs that not even blacks want to do there, in the United States,” he said.

The remark was denounced as racist by US civil rights leaders including the Rev Jesse Jackson and the Rev Al Sharpton. Even the Bush Administration, through the State Department, said that the comment was insensitive to African-Americans.

The last Latino mayor of Los Angeles was Cristobal Aguilar, who left office in 1872. He probably saved the city from extinction by refusing to sell its water rights.

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