Dear residents of Los Angeles Council District 14,

Like you, I love our city, and most importantly, I love our community. That is why I'm running for Los Angeles City Council to represent Council District 14.

This community raised me, it's where I grew up and where my family and I call home.

This community offered my mother and I refuge when we fled the civil war in El Salvador in the early 1980's. This is the community that offered my father, who left his home in Zacatecas, Mexico following the dreams of his father, a Bracero worker, the opportunity to start a new life in Boyle Heights, to dream, raise a family and create a better future for my four younger sisters and I. This is a community whose arms have always welcomed, supported and encouraged working class families like mine, and like many of yours.

I am proud to be a homegrown candidate running to represent you and your families. As a child, I learned to play the violin at Sheridan Elementary School in Boyle Heights, joined the Mariachi and Orchestra at El Sereno Middle School, and joined the generations of Rough Riders who graduated from Roosevelt High School. My hardworking parents went to work each day to provide for our family. My father is a sanitation worker in Chinatown and my mother is a former kindergarten assistant and member of SEIU Local 99 and most recently, a homecare worker with SEIU 2015. To honor their struggle and with their support, I became a first generation college student, finding my way through East LA College, Cal State Los Angeles and USC.

The City of Los Angeles is a beautiful place because of the people that call it home, but now, more than ever before, our district needs new leadership - a homegrown fighter and coalition builder who can bring people together in solidarity to persevere through our challenges.

The people of Council District 14 are tenacious and resilient. Whether it be our fight for more funding for public schools, for equity and representation, or against the massive gentrification and displacement of families due to the growing costs of housing. I know the issues families in our communities face because I have lived them. However, not only have I lived these challenges, over my five years in the California State Assembly I have worked to deliver results.

Together, we can work towards finding more solutions to the biggest issues facing our city and our community. Council District 14 is home to Skid Row, ground zero of our homelessness crisis. Across our city, more than 40,000 people sleep on the streets on any given night, many of them mothers and children. This is a humanitarian crisis that needs to be addressed with urgency, thoughtfulness and through a lens of compassion and with direct resources. Together, we can address the growing costs of housing, the need for good jobs, we can fast track the development of public infrastructure that meets our statewide climate goals, we can improve policies on public health and public safety, and we can work on policies that get people out of poverty and correct a race to the bottom.

Since 2017, I have had the immense privilege of representing a large majority of Council District 14 in my overlapping Assembly district and I’m ready to get to work alongside all of you in Northeast LA, El Sereno, Lincoln Heights, Downtown Los Angeles and Boyle Heights.

It is time we move forward, we heal, we organize and we build. Our community needs a champion, send me to City Hall. No one will fight harder than me for you and for those you love.

In service,