Arellano: The future of Latino politics just played out in Whittier
The Whittier City Council chambers were too small to hold the hundreds who wanted to witness history. So they gathered outside on Tuesday, under a bright blue sky and a warm afternoon sun.
A few weeks earlier, voters had elected a Latino-majority council for the first time in Whittier's 128-year history — the culmination, it seemed, of a generation of activism to make the government reflect a city that was once a bastion of suburban white residents and is now 67% Latino.
But what drove the voters I talked to wasn't a chance to right demographic wrongs.
Paul Villa and his wife, Kristen, were concerned about too many massage parlors popping up in the city of about 87,000, nestled against the hills between the 605 Freeway and the Orange County border.
Polly Vigil was furious that the City Council didn't speak out against the immigration raids that hit local car washes with such force last summer that U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor decried them.
“The angst in the community was like Whack-a-Mole,” said Helen Rahder, who served on the City Council in the 1990s and is now executive director of the Whittier Conservancy, which is suing the city over plans to chop down dozens of ficus trees in the Uptown district . "It bubbled up into one big cauldron of discontent.”
Read more: Column: Of course Latinos can assimilate into American society. Just look at Whittier
Angie Medina heads the Whittier Latino Coalition, which since 2000 has pushed for more Latinos on the council. Her group joined others with their own causes — LGBTQ+ rights, better roads, moving municipal elections from April to November — to form an alliance so they could win together instead of lose apart.
"Once we talked, we realized we actually all had common goals and objectives," said Medina, who lives in an unincorporated part of Los Angeles County near Whittier.
For the three winning Latino candidates, their ethnicity was an afterthought.
James Becerra, a retired Cal Poly Pomona environmental design professor and someone I count as a friend, walloped Mayor Joe Vinatieri, who had served on the council since 2006, with 67% of the vote. Vicky Santana and Aida Macedo, daughters of Mexican immigrants, easily beat incumbents Fernando Dutra and Octavio Martinez.
Residents were so motivated to vote for the Democratic challengers and boot out the Republican incumbents that turnout doubled from the previous election. The newcomers join Mary Ann Pacheco to form a council where four of the five members are Latino, up from two.
People munched on cheese cubes and cheesecake bites or fanned themselves in the shade, watching on big-screen televisions as the old guard said their goodbyes inside the council chambers. Behind them, the undeveloped Puente Hills Preserve loomed on the horizon.
Jim Sass and his wife, Carina, arrived early. The 65-year-old retired educational researcher was once a Vinatieri voter.
“Joe’s a nice guy, but in recent years he became tone-deaf” to residents and "just wanted to stay in power to stay in power," Sass said.
Kim Gomez was there with her 9-year-old son, Fabian, who showed me a drawing of Becerra that he hoped to give to the new mayor along with a letter stating that he wants to one day run for the seat.
"I taught Fabian how important it was that people voted because they weren't happy with how things were," said Gomez, 47, who homeschools her son. "That's democracy.”
The upset victories thrilled Southern California’s Latino political class, who long saw Whittier as a Republican-run lost cause. The city, which once was so conservative that it claimed Richard Nixon as a native son even though he was born in Orange County, began to change in the 1990s with an influx of middle-class Latinos from the Eastside who found an attainable Mayberry in the city's well-kept homes and tree-lined streets.
Whittier was majority Latino by the 2000 census. Yet Latino council candidates kept losing, leading to a 2013 lawsuit demanding that the city switch to district rather than citywide elections. That change, which happened in 2016 , resulted in only a trickle of Latinos on the council, most of the MAGA variety .
The new Latino-majority council might be seen as a harbinger of how Latinos — who helped Donald Trump retake the White House in 2024 — can boost the Democratic Party's efforts to claw back control of the U.S. House and Senate in this year’s midterms.
But anyone who thinks of what happened as a flex of ethnic power isn't paying attention.
Melissa Hidalgo, who teaches women’s, gender and ethnic studies at Cal State Long Beach, grew up in and around Whittier and described the City Council of that time as “a tag team of white people.” The 52-year-old was so resigned to that reality that when Becerra knocked on her door asking for her vote, she and her partner thought he was an evangelizing Christian.
“Thank God we listened to his pitch!” she cracked.
Hidalgo thinks Whittier should serve as a guiding light for Latino politics in Southern California.
“Identity politics are now just secondary, because we’re all Latino,” she said. “We should now be organizing under other issues that matter to all.”
Read more: Upscale Latinos at home in Whittier
The sun was long gone and a cold breeze blew when Becerra, Santana and Macedo finally emerged from City Hall. The shivering crowd rose to give the new council members a standing ovation.
L.A. County Supervisor Janice Hahn began the ceremony with congratulatory remarks, stating, “The voters of Whittier spoke.”
“Yes, we did!” shouted Martha Escutia, the former California legislator who was passed over in 2012 when she applied to fill a vacancy on the Whittier City Council.
The first person sworn in was Santana. In 2004, as a student at Harvard Kennedy School, she wrote a paper about the lack of Latino voices in Whittier politics.
“We needed to see elected officials who were representative of our community,” Santana told me over the phone earlier this week. “For a long time, we just wanted one.”
She laughed. “And now we have four!”
Santana was sworn in by Alex Moisa , whose unsuccessful City Council runs in the mid-2000s inspired her Harvard paper. Macedo followed with thoughtful remarks while apologizing because her giggling son kept climbing into her arms.
"Whittier was put on the national radar due to our community and our hard work," she said, noting that former Vice President Kamala Harris had called with congratulations. "We gave hope to the country."
Then it was my friend's turn.
When Becerra told me he was thinking about running for mayor, I wished him good luck, because he would need it. Whittier’s too conservative, I argued. You’re a first-time candidate taking on an entrenched political establishment.
Boy, did he prove me wrong!
We talked a week before the swearing-in, over drinks at Bizarra Capital in Whittier. The 70-year-old was raised on the Westside and has lived in Whittier for over 30 years. He previously voted for Vinatieri and even contributed money to him because “he was a very competent manager."
But the Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids and the council's indifference to residents angered Becerra, who looks every bit the profe with a perfectly shaved head and tortoiseshell glasses. He decided to run because "it was put up or shut up."
I asked about the significance of a Latino-majority council.
“I didn't campaign on that,” he responded. “My slogan was ‘A mayor for all.’”
Becerra continued that post-Latino mindset during his swearing-in. He took his oath with his hand on a book of poems by the city’s namesake, Quaker poet John Greenleaf Whittier , that belonged to the council’s sole remaining white person, Republican Cathy Warner.
He promised the crowd to serve “with humility in having your trust and with the strongest resolve to do my best for our city.”
There were no stirring words in Spanish, no " Sí se puede " chanted, as might have happened in the past. Instead, Mayor Becerra invited the crowd to join him and the council inside City Hall. There was work to do.
This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times .
