It’s not unusual to see the word “disgraced” prefacing the former City Councilman José Huízar’s name in news headlines, blog posts, or op-eds.
After a lengthy FBI investigation, arrest, and an eventual 2023 guilty plea, Huízar, 55, will face a judge and a long prison sentence on Friday in regards to his historic city corruption trial that involved bribes from Chinese developers, tax evasion, extortion, and conspiracy.
Angelenos protested outside of his Boyle Heights home when he was arrested in 2020, calling him an enemy of the people, a sellout. But, things weren’t always this way.
Before the bribes, back-room deals, affairs, sexual harassment lawsuits, and before the FBI raid of his Eastside home and district office, his constituents considered the Mexican-born immigrant to embody the true values of the community.
Humble beginnings
Born in 1968 in a rural town in Zacatecas, a mountainous state in central Mexico, José Huízar was the son of working-class parents. His mother, Isidra, worked at a meat packing plant, and his father, Simón, was a bracero, a farmworker who would work temporarily in the United States from Mexico.
Huízar’s paternal grandfather even had ties to Los Angeles; he, and many other temporary laborers from Mexico, were brought into the United States to help build the foundation of City Hall in the 1920s.
Huízar’s family brought him to the Eastside as a toddler to achieve their vision of the American dream, he said during a graduation speech at Princeton, his alma mater.
His coming of age in Boyle Heights wasn’t an uncommon one. He played baseball, got into fights in middle school, was a newspaper…
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