I was doing environmental justice work before I knew what it was, just by nature of where I grew up in Kern County and what we were going through. My family was having to deal with my asthma and everything that comes with living around oil fields. I remember sitting in a presentation at UC Davis about “environmental justice.” The example she gave was kids who grew up in the Valley who had asthma. That was the first time I’d ever heard the phrase.

Much of what’s going on is embedded in the way we built our communities physically to separate people of color from white people. The people of color ended up in neighborhoods that lacked investment in trees, parks, and all the important infrastructure we need, and also usually live close to power plants, oil fields, freeways, and distribution centers — all the things that the wealthy neighborhoods didn’t want near them.

It comes back to this really ugly history of segregation and racialized land use policy. I’m focused on confronting that history of racism by building power among members of communities who can fix the problems they face on their own terms.

I grew up in Kern County. My parents were already Democrats in one of the most conservative counties in the state of California. I used to call it “Tea Party Central.” I knew that people who were impacted deserved a voice, and that the system of inequality and wealth capture was inherently messed up.

Later, Bernie Sanders emerged. I think a lot of us came into the movement through Bernie, because he started talking about the problems we face, and I’m like, “Yes!” Then, “And socialism?” They didn’t really talk about socialism in my schools growing up. Then learning about his platform and building his campaign into the movement, and again, I was like, “Yes!” It’s like the environmental justice example: this is the word for the thing that I’ve been seeing and feeling.

I ran for city council in 2018. We were feeling the impact of more and more unhoused folks coming onto the streets. They’re suffering. When you live and work downtown, they’re there all the time, and it’s getting worse and worse.

Running as a democratic socialist definitely raised a few eyebrows. I give a lot of credit to Bernie Sanders. I didn’t really appreciate it until I ran — he made it easy for us to say, “Yes, this is what I believe: capitalism isn’t helping us. We need to start figuring out how to move away from this system that’s inherently harmful and exploitative.” And it was nice to realize just how many people gravitate toward that. I didn’t want to win because I tricked somebody. So I said, “This is what I believe in.” And people responded to that authenticity.

The authenticity is huge. Something that I was so glad someone told me early was that I needed a solid answer for why I was running: “It needs to be something that lights your fire, that when your tank is empty can fill it back up again. What’s that thing?”

You have to have that strong reason why, otherwise it’s so easy to lose sight of what you’re doing in the middle of all the hoopla.

I met someone from Sacramento named Kathy, who’s living with her husband who has dementia and is going to die soon. She is not going to be able to afford that apartment when he goes. She’s thinking about getting a better car, so she at least has a place to sleep if she loses her apartment. To imagine what that’s like, to be taking care of an ill partner and to know that they are dying, and to also know that you may end up on the street as a result of that. We have to change that.

She actually signed my nomination papers — I went back to her apartment, so she could be one of my signatures, that felt really good.

We came together around a pledge to refuse campaign contributions from law enforcement. It was just a simple idea, to respect this political moment and the legacy of racist violence perpetrated by police and prisons against black people in our country.

We thought it’d be cool. We all made our posts, we’re texting each other. We’re all excited: “Oh, it’s going to be so great.” And within like fifteen to twenty minutes, we were getting these texts from some of our supporters: “It’s political suicide.” “You shouldn’t have done this.” People were even attacking us because they said it was anti-union to say that you wouldn’t take a police union’s money. But we decided early on that we weren’t going to back down — this was something important to take a stand against police violence.

It brought us together. We were already friends, but responding to this made us all so supportive of each other.

There are more progressive politicians in this region than we might think. I was on the phone with a bunch of female electeds from all around the Sacramento region, and shared with them the primary results. I was showing them the map that DSA had created showing that Bernie had taken almost every precinct in Sacramento County. I said to them, “your community is more progressive than you think it is!” And I had two or three women reached out to me since then to be like, “can you send me that map again?”

The squad has been very supportive of the Sacramento People’s Budget. It goes beyond our pledge to refuse campaign funds from law enforcement and starts to talk about moving money from the police budget toward other city services. It was an idea I had, watching what was happening in Minneapolis, where after a month of organizing and hard conversations, they came together to say they were abolishing their police department in order to rebuild it to serve their community.

Local Progress, a network of progressive elected officials I’m a part of, did a call with those council members the day that they went out to announce they were going to do this, and it was just incredible, inspiring. I was watching People’s Budget LA and what Black Lives Matter LA did in that project and how they built that, and it was clearly an important moment.

I called Black Justice Sacramento, right before Juneteenth. Just talking about police accountability and hiring and firing, it didn’t feel like enough. So I called one of the organizers for that and I said, “you know, we should talk about bringing People’s Budget to Sacramento.” We realized this is the thing we’ve been waiting for. We’d been talking about moving the money, but not on this scale.

This has become a broad effort. Something like thirty different organizations are on these calls every week — they worked together to create this survey, and this website of resources, and these tools so that we could try to influence the county and city budget.

It’s also become a broader organizing platform. It’s got this life of its own. It’s beautiful, and I think it really shows Sacramento has leveled up. The organizing has just reached this point where it’s like we’re doing stuff that I’ve only seen other cities do.

An effective response would have been one that prioritized people and workers. I am glad the city finally created some rent assistance — $5 million, from the $89 million we were given from the CARES Act. But it took them five months to do so, after initially using CARES money to roll out three rounds of business funding. People can’t pay rent! People are in line at food banks! Can we please take care of them first?

We’ve watched bigger cities, cities with different demographics, do this months ago. And we’re just waiting. Finally, renters got $5 million in assistance. How much unemployment do we have? Over 13 percent in Sacramento alone right now!

It illustrates for me just how disconnected our current decision-makers are from average people. They’re talking about it like, “Oh, we can’t do that.” And I’m thinking, “What? Are you looking at other cities? Are you talking to folks in the community right now? Because this is absolutely what we need to be doing.” It’s been incredibly frustrating to see the level of suffering, and to know that we had the money, that we were just sitting on it, that could have helped them. And we didn’t for five months.

It’s been interesting to see how the center has shifted, having someone who’s more progressive is suddenly moving everything. I come out and say, “I want to talk about the police budget. I want to talk about the use of force.” Suddenly, everybody wants to figure it out. I am deeply connected to the communities here; they’re recognizing that if I say something, and I say that I’ve talked to folks, maybe it’s real.

Absolutely. What gives me faith is that they’re still playing the game the old way. It perplexed me at first, but now I’m amused by it. They still think that they can throw a lot of money at a campaign and that’s all they need to win. Even after watching the former city council member for my district, Steve Hansen, go down. They’re still not recognizing what’s happening. It’s not a fluke — it’s the result of many years of coalition building and canvassing and campaigns.

We’ve built more power. Your grip is loosening, neoliberals!

The mayor is the key figure on both of those measures. He was the primary author against rent control on the ballot, and he’s also the primary proponent of the Strong Mayor. This battle is so much more than the federal election, or even state-level stuff. This is a battle for Sacramento, and how we’re going to be governed moving forward.

It’s such a critical test for us that it makes me anxious. But it makes me excited at the same time, because I want to see how far we can push it.

Someone asked me the other day, “How are you so optimistic?” Well, it’s either that or I’m just gonna go eat chocolate and lay in my bed all day.

I hope every time the people who are working against us see me out laughing, doing something with the community, that it just chips away at their soul a little bit. We’re going to do this. I don’t care if it takes my whole lifetime. We’re going to do this in Sacramento.

I actually joined a socialist book club. My friend organized it after the quarantine started. I really miss socializing and meeting new people.

We read Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine. It’s funny because you mentioned Strong Mayor. I got to the chapter about South Africa, where Klein is talking about post-apartheid, the transition of power, and how when [Nelson] Mandela’s party came in, they weren’t able to do any of the land distribution or anything they wanted, because of the pressure from international financial institutions. Mandela and the African National Congress couldn’t do anything.

I remember getting to that chapter and being like, “Holy shit! This is why they’re doing this right now!” They see us coming, and they’re giving away the farm.

Also, I have been making tortillas. It’s something from my childhood that my grandmother used to always do.