Educator and Formerly Undocumented Immigrant, Dulce Vasquez, Runs for LA City Council
We spoke with Dulce Vasquez, candidate for Los Angeles City Council District 9, which includes part of South Los Angeles and the western edition of Downtown Los Angeles. Dulce is a formerly undocumented immigrant and educator, who is running for city council on a platform highlighting issues including housing, transportation, and reimagining policing. Here, Vasquez talks about her road to running for office, the need for new leadership in a district with low voter engagement, and the need for progressive approaches towards public transit and education.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
RIFT Magazine: Tell me about yourself, and what prompted you to run for City Council.
Dulce Vasquez: Sure. I’m Dulce. I was born in Mexico. When I was three, my mom left to go to el otro lado, which is the other side, and when I was seven I joined her. When they brought me over to the states I was such an excited kid. I was so excited about McDonalds. What I did not know was that I was undocumented. I spent the next seven years undocumented, not really knowing what was gonna happen to me once I reached adulthood. Thankfully, the stars aligned and I got papers, which allowed me to really pursue what I wanted. I went to college and studied political science and philosophy. That experience of being an undocumented immigrant really laid the foundation for so much of what I’ve done throughout my life. From the moment I got papers and I became an American citizen, like the first thing I did was exercise the right to be a citizen, exercise the right to vote.
So the first thing I did at 14 was volunteer for a campaign. And I remember getting involved with the Howard Dean campaign, which feels like so long ago. That’s something I’ve always valued, to have a participatory democracy and actually participate in it. So I studied political science, I studied the formations of states. Here in Los Angeles I ran a nonprofit for about 9 years called Zocalo. Through it we did public programs, and had a digital magazine. A lot of our conversations were around issues that mattered; housing, homelessness, the mayor trying to take over the school system, and it was at the start of street vending permits, and the issue of getting vendors licensed. So we wanted to educate people on those issues, but to me, at some point, it wasn’t enough to just inform people, because our discourse nationally was really deteriorating.
So I went back to my passion, which is education. I didn’t quite realize how exceptional my story was — of going from undocumented immigrant to graduating — until I started meeting other young women who were having a hard time going to college, or were being steered towards systems that were not in their best interest, or were being dissuaded by the high cost of education. So I started working for a university, trying to fix some of those gaps, trying to make sure that particularly our Latino population has access to four-year universities. Through it I started getting more politically engaged, particularly after the 2018 election, where you just saw this amazing group of women shatter every notion of what an elected official looks like, talks like, how they build their campaigns, what kind of background you’re supposed to have.
So I was like, “Okay, this is my moment to get involved”. Just to show up. Because this is a sign we need to change the narrative nationally. 2018 was a very tumultuous time in our nation post-midterm elections, and through a 45 presidency. My neighbor invited me to run in her slate to be a delegate to the California Democratic Party. We ran, and I won a seat to be a delegate, and through that it just opened many doors into how some of these systems work. I didn’t think about myself as being a candidate at this level, but understanding how some of those systems work, and then with the pandemic starting, and as an educator, how for many students and how many students of color, education gaps were being widened, through lack of infrastructure, lack of public broadband, lack of resources. Oftentimes for Latino families who are low income — and I grew up with this because I was a latchkey kid, you come home and you don’t have any support and you don’t have any support to finish homework, or ask questions, or get help on an essay, whatever it is. So I saw that and I was just getting exceedingly frustrated, while our elected officials were lauding themselves for the great work they were doing.
So the pandemic, the effect on Latino families, particularly in my neighborhood, seeing the damage that was being done, because so many in my district are the people who have to go to work. They don’t have jobs that can be done from home. I was getting very angry, and then of course the protests started. And seeing how the police were being used against our citizens who were fighting for racial and economic equity, and literally fighting for the police to stop shooting, and being responded to with more violence…I was so shaken, at my core, about what was happening. I couldn’t understand, and I still don’t understand, because this keeps happening — literally weekly. There were protests this weekend that were met with ‘non-lethal’ weapons that we know are very damaging to the body, particularly shot at point-blank. I just couldn’t understand how our elected officials have no power to stop it. For all intents and purposes, our council members and our mayor employ the police chief. So to this day, I don’t quite understand why we can’t get them to put their guns down.
So all of that. I started literally asking myself these questions, like, “Well, who is my council member? Why aren’t they speaking up about this? Why aren’t they doing something about this?” So, I looked into my council member, and I was like, “You know what? There are so many more people that could do a better job than what you’re doing.” And oftentimes, people take it for granted, and I felt like he was taking it for granted. So I decided to run against him.
RIFT: How has that been going so far? How has the campaign been going as of late?
DV: You know every day is different, and there’s always something difficult and something that is really amazing. I think in general our campaign has been very well received. There’s so much excitement. We are at about 1,000 individual contributions to the campaign. This is a completely grassroots operation.
I see that desire for different leadership. We have been putting up with so many transactional politicians over time. You know; “You do something for me, I’ll do something for you”. We need to pull ourselves out of that mentality, and our city’s not gonna prosper unless we have transformational politicians, who say, “You know what? I’m just going to do the right thing. I’m going to make the right decisions. I’m going to prioritize the people”. And I think that message is really resonating with a lot of people.
RIFT: A thing that I’m hearing a lot is that there are constituencies that are being underrepresented there, and there is a necessity for better representation. Yourself, with an immigrant background, knowing what it is like to be undocumented, how do you perceive that kind of need in your district? Do you see it there? Are there people that are just being left out of the local political process in your district?
DV: I think that there are a lot of good people being left out of the political process. You can just see that by voter registration numbers. Every district is similarly sized in population, but take for instance CD-4, which just had an election last November. Council District 4 is a much wealthier, much whiter district. It has 180,000 registered voters. Compared to Council District 9, there’s a discrepancy of about 80,000 voters. That is a large, large, large, large population that is not being incentivized to get involved in the political process that we’re leaving behind. We’re not figuring out how to reach them, how to make them interested in this process.
You can also see that in voter turnout. Back in the 2017 municipal race we had a 10% voter turnout. 10,000 people voted in that election, and the councilmember who won his reelection in 2017 won with 6600 votes out of a district with a population of 280,000. Like that is abhorrent. It’s almost to the point that we limit how many people participate in our democracy. We don’t want people paying attention to what’s happening. I want to change that. I want this campaign to be about how many people can we include? We’re going to be doing voter registration drives because we need more young people involved too. Half of this district is under the age of 35. Bernie Sanders won this district, all but two precincts. So we’re talking about a district that’s younger, it’s way more progressive, it’s 80% Latino. So we talk about representation, and those are numbers that are very obvious to point to.
RIFT: And I want to ask you about policy as well. On your website you have a section on transportation policy. I’m from Northern California, and when I talk to people in local government in Northern California, transportation is a really big issue up here. Although, when I talk to people in Southern California I don’t hear about it nearly as much. So can you kind of outline what your transportation policy would be?
DV: That’s a total shame that you don’t hear enough candidates talk about it. I’ve made it one of my three priorities for my campaign; transportation, small business assistance, and housing. Those are my top 3 priorities. And transportation really just integrates into all of the other policies. It’s literally our connector.
Los Angeles is famous for its freeways and car culture, but that is not the way that our city is going to continue to grow. We don’t have room for more freeways. We cannot think about any more freeway expansion. But at the same time, we have to prepare for growing our population. You know, this has been the first year ever that California has lost a congressional seat due to population size.
We need to make sure we are connected and we can move. We need to update our fleet. We need to make sure that buses are running on time, that there are more of them, that people know how to navigate our transit system, that we have dedicated bus lanes that incentivize people to take the bus because it’s gonna get them there faster than being in a car. I think it’s negligent how few bus lanes we have, we need more of them. I see some of our arterial roads clogged with parking spaces, like major, major thoroughfares in our city. And those could be dedicated bus lanes, but also protected bike and scooter lanes. We need to think about different modes of transportation, and I think it’s really, really important.
RIFT: On your platform you also talk about access to education, and making things better in general for students, even though you make the distinction that the city itself does not have the jurisdiction over the public school system. So can you talk about the kind of interaction you would be having with that system, trying to improve things for students?
DV: Absolutely. For me, my entire career has been about partnerships. How do we work together to accomplish something? And when I look at the school district and the city, not just the K-12 school system but also our community college system, I think that the city could be proactive. On parks and rec, for example. South LA is a park-poor part of the city, and particularly through COVID, all of our green spaces are in schools, and all of our schools are closed. We’re encouraging people to go outside and get some fresh air because we’ve been told to stay inside this whole time, but there’s nowhere for people to go. And I think the schools would have been a great resource for people for recreation.
So being able to partner on something like that. The other thing is our graduation rate; our graduation rate is dismal. So thinking about how the city can better help, whether that’s through after-school programs, tutoring, mentoring programs, et cetera. And then the next part of that, like once they actually graduate, how do we make sure that they stay in a 2 or 4 year track, should they want to, whether that’s vocational, whatever it is. We want our students to succeed, so how does the city help the district, help the community college district, and the CSUs and the UCs? I think that’s through prioritizing education.
RIFT: Finally, another part of your platform has to do with reimagining public safety, reimagining law enforcement. You referenced earlier that video that was circulating online of the protester in Wilshire being shot at point-blank range with one of the less-than-lethal rounds by the LAPD. That, to my understanding, happens all too often. So what would you be doing in your position on city council to try and improve the situation in the city as it relates to public safety, but also reigning in law enforcement to try and prevent that kind of thing.
DV: I think we need to really sit down and rethink what the police are for. I think that as a default they have become an all-encompassing agency. That shouldn’t be so. I think that we should be questioning every single thing that we’ve asked the police to do, from traffic enforcement to noise complaints, et cetera. To be met with someone who’s armed for so many of these different things…For me as an immigrant, I have a visceral reaction to police, and to guns. And I imagine that so many people do too.
When you get pulled over for a traffic violation, or a perceived traffic violation, I think about efficiencies and inefficiencies. The average police officer makes $130,000 a year. You usually have two of them per vehicle. Now you’ve got $260,000 a year, whatever that turns out to be per hour, pulling someone over for 15-20 minutes, giving them a $150 citation that they could pay, but we’ve probably actually already paid more than $150 for that interaction to begin with. So, judges, stenographers, people checking them in, the usage of the building, et cetera. As a city, we’re at a net negative on just that interaction already. And it just baffles me why we would do this. I think in general we need to rethink why we’re doing some of these things.
When it comes to our unhoused population, too — bringing them more violence, I don’t think is very helpful. So how do we change this? I think there’s just a lot of work that can be done there.
