By Rachel Nguyen, 2025 CLA Intern
Before our Mock Campaign team began strategizing, we set four goals (in order of priority):
1. Uplift the voices of the San Gabriel Valley and amplify the concerns of Esther’s neighbors, friends, and the very special community that she comes from;
2. Urge elected officials and changemakers at CAUSE’s Summer Soirée to bring AD-49 residents’ stories back to their respective City Council, Board of Supervisors, State Assembly/Senate, or Congress;
3. Achieve a 100% voter turnout at CAUSE’s Summer Soirée; and
4. Win on Election Night.
After years of disillusionment and neglect, we asked ourselves: How do we meaningfully engage with our communities and change what political engagement in AD-49 looks like?
We went to the Alhambra Farmers Market and the El Monte City Hall meeting—community events in two cities that voted conservatively on propositions to increase criminal penalties, reject a minimum wage increase, and maintain the high voter approval requirement for affordable housing funds. There, we intended to listen rather than lecture, as we believe that political turnout is activated when people know what to vote for, rather than against.
At the Alhambra Farmers Market, we met with local farmers, city officials, and Alhambra residents looking for their next bonsai tree. They expressed needs across the political spectrum, ranging from microloans for small and mid-sized farmers to increased police presence in the neighborhood. A conversation with a stone fruit farmer revealed that he was hesitant to support an increase in the minimum wage due to the rising costs of opening, owning, and operating a small business, allegedly with little to no support or guidance from the government. One theme emerged: frustration with political partisanship.
At El Monte’s City Hall Meeting, I counted 52 attendees in the audience, excluding my team, all waiting for their turn to speak during public comment. Residents lined up at the microphone to express both strong support and vehement opposition to the proposed extension of a contract with a waste management company. In the middle of it all, one resident delivered a line that cut through the noise: “We did not elect you to fight with each other. We elected you to fight for us.”
Without context, our communities are easy to write off as being unworthy of investment in outreach because they are either “unsalvagable voters” or “politically apathetic.” Apathy is rarely the root. It is the fruit—the symptom—of years of neglect. Therefore, we must begin by sowing seeds where trust has withered if we are serious about building power in AD-49. Our campaign mobilizes people long before Election Night, and it starts by rewriting the story of who counts as a “political” person in the San Gabriel Valley.