With working families struggling and our communities becoming too expensive to live, we can’t just wait around for change. It’s time for us to act.
The California Dream. My family has pursued it across generations.
My great-grandfather came to Los Angeles from Guanajuato, Mexico in the 1920s with nothing but hopes and dreams. His labor helped lay the very sidewalks we walk on today. My grandparents as children were migrant farmworkers in the 1930s, picking fruit across California and dreaming of a better life. My grandfather later worked in a cement factory and was active in his local union—he taught his children that education was the pathway out of poverty and in the 1950s, when they became the first Mexican family to move into a white neighborhood, he showed them that the dream for equality was always worth fighting for. As the daughter of two civil rights attorneys who fought for better working conditions for migrant farmworkers in the '60s and '70s, I was raised to believe that leadership is not measured by the words you say—but by the lives you change, the dreams you ignite, and the future you help shape.
California and the 26th Senate District is rooted in that legacy—built by the hopes, hard work, and resilience of those who came before us.
But today, that dream is slipping away. I’m part of the first generation expected to do worse than our parents. Too many people feel that the promise of California is no longer for them. They’ve lost faith in the government's ability to deliver—to create a society where working people can build a good life and pass it on to their kids. The cost of housing and childcare is crushing, good jobs with benefits are harder to find. Just living your life in LA feels so unaffordable especially when saddled with a lifetime of student debt and the public institutions we once trusted to help us climb the ladder- schools, governments, public services feel further and further out of reach.
I’m running because we are at an inflection point. We can let the dream fade—or we can fight to renew it. This means real action: building more housing, expanding world-class public transit, providing debt-free higher education and good-paying jobs, creating safe and walkable neighborhoods, investing in green space and universal childcare, keeping our iconic industries like film and TV rooted in L.A., and protecting our immigrant communities.
I don’t just understand these issues, I’ve lived them in the classroom as a teacher, in the courtroom as a lawyer, in the boardroom as a non-profit founder and executive director, in the halls of power as a trustee for the LA Community College District and in our community as a 20 year resident and mom. Good policy only happens when our leaders know how it actually plays out on the ground.
Most importantly though, these separate struggles are really one: a quest for a better life, a chance to raise your children to live a life better than your own. A chance to grow old in the community that you love. This campaign is for everyone who still believes in the promise of the California dream—and wants to make sure it’s within reach for the next generation.