The Whittier City Council chambers were too small to hold the hundreds of people who wanted to witness history. So they gathered outside on Tuesday under a bright blue sky and warm afternoon sunshine.
A few weeks ago, voters elected a Latino-majority council for the first time in Whittier’s 128-year history — the culmination, it seems, of a generation of activism to get government to reflect a city that was once a bastion of suburban white residents and is now 67% Latino.
But the voters I spoke to didn’t give him a chance to correct demographic mistakes.
Paul Villa and his wife, Kristen, were concerned about too many massage parlors opening in the town of about 87,000, nestled among the hills between the 605 Freeway and the Orange County border.
Polly Vigil was angry that the City Council did nothing against the immigration raids that hit local car washers last summer with such force that U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor condemned them.
“The anger in the community was like whack-a-mole,” said Helen Rahder, who served on the City Council in the 1990s and is now executive director of the Whittier Conservancy, which is suing the city over plans to cut down dozens of ficus trees in the Uptown district. “It turned into a big cauldron of discontent.”
Angie Medina heads the Whittier Latino Coalition, which has pushed to include more Latinos on the council since 2000. His group joined others with their own issues — LGBTQ+ rights, better roads, moving municipal elections from April to November — to form a coalition so they could win together rather than lose separately.
“Once we talked, we realized we really all had the same goals and objectives,” said Medina, who lives in an unincorporated part of Los Angeles County near Whittier.
For the three victorious Latino candidates, their ethnicity was an afterthought.
James Becerra, a retired Cal Poly Pomona environmental design professor and whom I consider a friend, defeated Mayor Joe Vinatieri, who had served on the council since 2006, with 67% of the vote. Vicky Santana and Aida Macedo, daughters of Mexican immigrants, easily defeated incumbents Fernando Dutra and Octavio Martínez.
Residents were so motivated to vote for Democratic challengers and oust Republican incumbents that turnout doubled compared to the previous election. The newcomers join Mary Ann Pacheco to form a council where four out of five members are Latino, up from two.
People were eating cheesesteaks and cheesecakes or fanning themselves in the shade and watching on big-screen televisions as the old guard bid farewell inside the council chambers. Behind them, the undeveloped Puente Hills Preserve loomed on the horizon.
Jim Sass and his wife Carina arrived early. The 65-year-old retired educational researcher was once a Vinatieri voter.
Sasse said, “Joe is a nice guy, but in recent years he has become indifferent to residents” and “just wanted to stay in power for the sake of staying in power.”
Kim Gomez was there with her 9-year-old son Fabian, who showed me a portrait of Becerra that he was hoping to give to the new mayor as well as a letter saying he wanted to run for the seat one day.
“I taught Fabian how important it was that people vote because they were not happy with how things were,” said Gomez, 47, who homeschools her son. “This is what democracy looks like.”
Councilwoman Aida Macedo speaks after being sworn in outside Whittier City Hall on Tuesday. She is part of a newly elected city council that is majority Latino – a first in the city’s 128-year history.
(Kayla Bartkowski/Los Angeles Times)
The upset victory thrilled Southern California’s Latino political class, which had long viewed Whittier as a lost cause run by Republicans. The city, which was once so conservative that it claimed Richard Nixon was its native son even though he was born in Orange County, began to change in the 1990s with an influx of middle-class Latinos from the Eastside, who found an attainable Mayberry in the city’s well-kept homes and tree-lined streets.
Whittier was majority Latino as of the 2000 census. Yet Latino council candidates continued to lose, leading to a lawsuit filed in 2013 demanding that the city be redistricted into district instead of citywide elections. That change, which occurred in 2016, resulted in only a small number of Latinos joining the council, most of whom were of the MAGA variety.
The new Latino-majority council could be seen as a harbinger of how Latinos — who helped Donald Trump recapture the White House in 2024 — could boost the Democratic Party’s efforts to regain control of the U.S. House and Senate in this year’s midterms.
But anyone who thinks that what happened is the result of caste power is not paying attention.
Melissa Hidalgo, who teaches women’s, gender and ethnic studies at Cal State Long Beach, grew up in and around Whittier and described the City Council at that time as “a tag team of white people.” The 52-year-old woman was so convinced of that reality that when Becerra knocked on her door asking for her vote, she and her companion thought he was an evangelist.
“Thank God we heard his voice!” She broke down.
Hidalgo believes that Whittier should serve as a guide for Latino politics in Southern California.
“Identity politics are secondary now, because we’re all Latino,” he said. “We must now organize around other issues that matter to everyone.”
When Becerra, Santana and Macedo finally emerged from City Hall the sun was long gone and a cold wind blew. The trembling crowd rose to give the new council members a standing ovation.
LA County Supervisor Janice Hahn opened the ceremony with congratulatory remarks, saying, “Whittier’s voters have spoken.”
“Yes we did!” shouted Martha Escutia, a former California legislator who died in 2012 when she applied to fill a vacancy on the Whittier City Council.
The first person to take the oath was Santana. In 2004, while a student at the Harvard Kennedy School, she wrote a paper about the lack of Latino voices in Whittier politics.
“We needed to meet with elected officials who were representative of our community,” Santana told me over the phone earlier this week. “For a long time, we just wanted one.”
She laughed. “And now we have four!”
Santana was sworn in by Alex Moisa, whose unsuccessful City Council run in the mid-2000s inspired his Harvard paper. Macedo commented thoughtfully apologetically as his laughing son climbed into his arms again and again.
“Whittier was put on the national radar because of our community and our hard work,” he said, noting that former Vice President Kamala Harris had called with congratulations. “We gave hope to the country.”
Then it was my friend’s turn.
When Becerra told me he was thinking about running for mayor, I wished him good luck, because he’s going to need it. I argued that Whittier is too conservative. You are a candidate taking on a strong political establishment for the first time.
Boy, did he prove me wrong!
Whittier Mayor James Becerra speaks in front of City Hall on Tuesday.
(Kayla Bartkowski/Los Angeles Times)
The week before the inauguration we talked over drinks at Bizarre Capital in Whittier. The 70-year-old man was raised on the Westside and has lived in Whittier for more than 30 years. He had previously voted for Vinatieri and even given him money because “he was a very capable manager.”
But Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids and the council’s indifference toward residents angered Becerra, who looks every way Pro With a completely shaved head and tortoiseshell glasses. He decided to flee because “it was either closed down or silenced.”
I asked about the importance of the Latino-majority council.
“I didn’t campaign on that,” he responded. “My slogan was ‘A mayor for all.’
Becerra continued his post-Latino mentality during his swearing-in. He took the oath by placing his hand on a book of poems by the city’s renowned Quaker poet John Greenleaf Whittier that belonged to the council’s only remaining white person, Republican Kathy Warner.
He promised the crowd that he would serve “with humility in your trust and with a determination to do our best for our city.”
There were no provocative words in Spanish, no”Si Se Puede” were chanted, as would have happened in the past. Instead, Mayor Becerra invited the crowd to join him and the Council inside City Hall. There was work to be done.
