Candidate for
Supervisor; County of San Mateo; District 4

A Passion to Serve: My life and political principles are formed by a constant reminder of the importance and centrality of equity. My father, from the humblest of beginnings in rural Mexico yearned to be a builder of roads and bridges. The opportunities were few in a revolution-torn countryside in the throes of a worldwide depression. Fortunately the Country's progressive president was intent on creating a new class of professionals ready to take on the challenges of a socially and economically stratified Mexico. With this mission, he established rural technical vocational boarding schools providing my father with a solid education that eventually lead him to the University of Michigan where he pursued graduate studies in structural engineering. From subsistence peasantry to a professional within one generation, I am a beneficiary of the foresight and the quest for social justice of that depression era Mexican president.

With his young wife in tow to a bitter cold, but welcoming Ann Arbor, Michigan, my father studied engineering. It was there in the Midwest that I was born in 1958. My father's graduate studies completed, I journeyed back to Mexico City as an English-speaking toddler, only to learn Spanish at pre-school. As I learned my father's native tongue, he contributed to the industrial growth of Mexico, working on hydroelectric rural electrification projects. He had come full circle. The president's investment in educational opportunity and an equitable distribution of it had paid off.

In time, my father was drawn back to the US with a wife, two sons and a daughter, to join a consulting engineering firm working on post tensioned bridge design. We settled in San Jose's pleasant Willow Glen neighborhood and soon a fourth child would be born to complete our family. My siblings and I quickly learned English, substituted football for futbol and in time I chose competitive swimming as my sport.

It was in San Jose where my father's charitable community work with less fortunate Mexican families exposed me to issues of social and economic justice. In the tumultuous late sixties and early seventies, we found ourselves part of a nation changing and calling for equity on all fronts. We marched with farm workers in the newly founded UFW and went to hear speeches by Robert Kennedy and George McGovern. Our parents would take us on outings to pick strawberries or apricots for a morning to understand the true toil of farmworkers. Even at the age of 10, the disparities in lifestyles were shocking. My concerns for fairness and equality had now been cemented. The torch had been passed.

My father wanted us to be raised fully bilingual and bicultural and he also desired to return and work for the country that had given him an opportunity to break out of the hard rural past of his parents. As my grandparents aged and grew frail, he wished to be closer to them. Consequently I spent my teenage years in Guadalajara in a large six-bedroom home with siblings and my widowed grandmother.

We all did well in school in Guadalajara, attending a private high school but not sheltered from the surrounding poverty. Having been to California public schools, the change was glaring and the socio economic differences even more so. As a family, we were now staunchly part of an upper-class world, belonging to a private country club where we swam and played water polo. In high school I competed in both sports and even made it to nationals. However, by my high school junior year I had decided to apply to colleges in the US.

I was fortunate enough to be admitted to Stanford. The West Coast was familiar and Stanford's reputation for attracting a racially diverse student body appealed to me. Within my first month, however, my charmed life of a college student met the stark reality of East Palo Alto, less than three miles away. While studying international relations and economics, I tutored and mentored EPA youth for four years, directing the Stanford's Barrio Assistance program in my Junior year. I hosted a bilingual Latin jazz radio program on KZSU that quickly morphed into a weekly local and international news show with an emphasis on social justice issues.

My undergraduate experience studying development economics, finance, and international politics gave significance to my work in EPA. I moved to EPA in 1982, my final year at Stanford. I joined a small group of dedicated residents struggling to incorporate East Palo Alto. I volunteered on voter registration drives, wrote articles and leaflets, and walked and talked, knocking on doors through the entire city dozens of times over. I supported myself working half time at a small computer start up in Palo Alto. One of my proud contributions to the effort was to write computer code for parsing the EBCDIC encoded county computer voter registration tapes.

It was through the city incorporation process that I grew to know and understand the workings of the Board of Supervisors. Anna Eshoo and Jackie Speier were serving on the Board and their support and belief in our quest for self-sufficiency was critical. We struggled mightily and organized ferociously. Despite two close contested referenda, the community was triumphant and East Palo Alto was born on July 5, 1983.

I was appointed for a four-year seat on the new city's voter approved rent stabilization board and served as its chair the final two years. As a commissioner I realized that developing affordable housing would be essential if we desired to improve housing options in our community. By 1988 I help found EPA CAN DO, a community development corporation, to develop affordable housing production options in EPA. With my studies in economics and a contractor's license, I went to work in the field of affordable housing and community development. Concurrently, I worked with the East Palo Alto Community Law Project where on the Board, I served as Chair working on issues of tenant displacement brought on by the newly formed redevelopment agency. The loss of East Palo Alto's downtown, which became the Four Seasons Hotel-anchored University Circle Development, created a new identity for EPA but one that displaced and erased the much of the city's history and diversity.

Theses experiences launched my 24-year career in community economic development taking me to work throughout California, Arizona and Hawaii in a wide array of projects totaling over $120,000,000. This breadth of experience has taught me much about local and regional government and the challenges of complex public financing.

With my skills as a developer, housing finance specialist, and organizer, I was hired as the Executive Director of Mission Housing Development Corporation, a non-profit in SF's Mission District. My experience helped MHDC grow to a quarter billion dollar, 160-person organization developing housing, providing needed social services in the neighborhood, and engaging in comprehensive land use planning efforts throughout San Francisco. Along the way, I was selected as a Fannie Mae fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government where I studied housing policy. I subsequently was awarded a Loeb Fellowship in 2005 at the Harvard School of Design doing graduate studies in urban planning and finance, national housing policy and transportation studies.

Returning home to East Palo Alto, I resumed my work as Planning Commissioner, was appointed to the nine county Metropolitan Transportation Commission's advisory bodies, and started my economic development consulting practice. After 12 years of working professionally outside of EPA, my academic training, professional experience, and community organizing skills began to coalesce around environmental justice, sustainable and equitable economic development, and planning issues in my city and the region. Now, I too, had come full circle as had my father some 40 years earlier. My passion for pursuing issues of equity had brought me home.

Hand in hand with residents and local community groups I co-founded a land use planning and environmental advocacy group. This led to my running for and my election to the East Palo Alto City Council in 2008 and Mayor in 2011. Acting on my experience that local issues could not be separated from our regional concerns I joined countywide and regional bodies including the City and County Association of Governments, the Dumbarton Rail Policy Advisory Board and Silicon Valley Leadership Group. I am now vice-chair of the latter two organizations. We can only continue to prosper as a county if the nine county Bay Area is also healthy. I am convinced this is only achievable through broad dialogue and collaboration.

East Palo Alto will always be my home as will San Mateo County. Blessed with good health, I use a bicycle for much of my transportation needs and I rely on public transit at every opportunity. San Mateo County is a wonderful place to work and live that makes possible an environmentally friendly lifestyle. This is where I thrive and have dedicated my life to making our county a place where we all can prosper. I hope to serve the residents of San Mateo County as I have endeavored to serve East Palo Alto--with honesty, intelligence, respect and courage.