Latinas Eye L.A. City Council Seats

By Tony Castro, Voxxi

Los Angeles hasn’t had a Latina City Councilwoman in a generation, but that may change this coming year.

Three Latina politicians are running for two open Los Angeles City Council seats hoping to become the first Hispanic woman to sit on the law-making body since Gloria Molina was elected 25 years ago.

Molina, who went on to be become a member of the county’s Board of Supervisors, first won election when Los Angeles Latino politics was exclusively the province of Hispanic men—a ceiling she is credited for bringing down.

“The reality is that men will select men (to succeed them),” says Molina who became a national feminist figure after her election. “That’s just the way it works. Women have to put themselves in that role.”

Two Latinas are running for the City Council seat

Two Latinas, school board member Nury Martinez and former State Assemblywoman Cindy Montanez, have announced that they will be running for the City Council seat from the San Fernando Valley area that is being vacated by Congressman-elect Tony Cardenas.

Meanwhile, Ana Cubas, who was formerly chief of staff for Councilman Jose Huizar, will be seeking an open council seat in the downtown area.

Latinas have regularly been elected to Congress, the legislature and the city’s school board, and hold other important appointed positions in local governments. However their failure to be represented on the city council has been glaring since Molina left in 1991.

“You see Latinas doing well, except at the City Council level,” Fernando Guerra, director of the Center for the Study of Los Angeles at Loyola Marymount University, told the Los Angeles Daily News.

“It’s tough for us to argue that we are an inclusive and transparent system if we exclude a population of the city,” Guerra said. “If we don’t have 25 percent of the population, it doesn’t speak well for how Democracy works.”

In the next legislative session, five Latinas will in the California Assembly while nine Hispanic women will be in the 113th Congress. Between 1996 and 2010, the country’s elected Latinas increased 105 percent—or three times more than the number of elected Hispanic men, according to the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials.

In the upcoming March city election, much attention will be to the district Cubas is attempting to win—a district extending from part of downtown into South Los Angeles.

Although traditionally a district represented by African American politicians, the area has undergone a radical demographic transformation.

Ana Cubas favorite to succeed Jan Perry

Cubas, a refugee as a child from civil war-torn El Salvador, is regarded by many as the frontrunner to succeed black councilwoman Jan Perry.

Becoming a councilwoman, she said, would fulfill her American Dream.

“Mija, what do you want for your 18th birthday?” she recalls her mother asking her. “I didn’t say I wanted a car or fancy clothes. I said, ‘Mom, I want to become a U.S. citizen so that I can vote.’”

This article was first published in Voxxi.

Los Angeles based writer Tony Castro is the author of the critically-acclaimed “Chicano Power: The Emergence of Mexican America” and the best-selling “Mickey Mantle: America’s Prodigal Son.”