California’s Latino Voting Power Grows, But Many Aren’t Reaching Elected Office

This story was reported for K Onda KQED, a monthly newsletter focused on the Bay Area’s Latinx community. Click here to subscribe.

From 2012 to 2022, 2.1 million Latinos in California became eligible to vote, according to the National Association of Latino Elected Officials, an advocacy and research organization.

The group estimates that 4.8 million Latines will vote in the state in November, a whopping 200% jump from the 1.6 million who voted in 2000. The Latinx electorate is growing in California, but what about our political influence and representation in elected offices?

Statewide, the NALEO counted 1,786 Latinos serving in local elected offices in 2021 — more than double the 734 it counted in 2001.

The Bay Area has roughly 62% people of color. Yet people of color hold just 37% of top local elected offices, according to the Bay Area Equity Atlas, a data resource produced by the San Francisco Foundation, PolicyLink and the USC Equity Research Institute.

Asian Americans and Latinos continue to be underrepresented among local electeds. Researchers found that while Latinos and Asian Americans make up half of the region’s population, they are just 25% of top local elected officials.

In 2023, Latinos accounted for 13.6% of elected officials in the Bay Area.

I wanted to learn more about the experience of Bay Area Latines serving in elected office, so I sat down with Berkeley Mayor Jesse Arreguín. I also spoke with Rosemary Kamei and Ellen Kamei, a mother and daughter who are city council representatives in San José and Mountain View, respectively.

For the Kameis, serving their neighbors while representing the Asian and Latino communities has been important.

Rosemary Kamei grew up in the Bronx, New York, in a working-class family with a Chinese father and a Puerto Rican mother. She is the only Latina and woman of Asian descent on the San José City Council. Previously, she was on the Santa Clara Valley County Water Board, among other positions.

She told me she hadn’t planned to run for city council but believed she could elevate cultural and linguistic understanding in the Bay Area’s largest city. San José is about 38% Asian and 30% Latino, according to U.S. Census data.

“It is an important perspective and lens to have when you’re making decisions,” Kamei, 65, said.

When she began her term in 2023, she noticed the city didn’t provide translations for meetings, so she worked to change that. She’s gained a reputation for focusing on housing and public safety.

Ellen Kamei, elected to the Mountain View City Council in 2018, didn’t have to look far for a role model. She spent hours of her youth accompanying her mother to public meetings and events.

“I thought that women in leadership and women of color in leadership was really natural,” said Ellen Kamei, who recalled accompanying her mother to public meetings and events growing up. “I always thought I would run for office, but I would run for office later when I was older and maybe when my kids were grown.”

Instead, she joined the city’s planning commission in 2012. She unsuccessfully ran for a council seat in 2014 before winning four years later.

The impetus for running for office came from her desire to address housing affordability and the rising cost of living for low-income residents. The city’s population of about 86,000 people is roughly 17% Hispanic and 35% Asian, according to census data. The median household income in Mountain View is $182,000 — twice the state median.

“I realized early on in my career that people usually interface with the government in a negative way,” Ellen Kamei, 40, said. “Those who have the resources can usually manage and find the answers, but there’s a large swath of the population who can’t do that.

“For me, representation is about who are those people who don’t have the luxury of sitting there and emailing or calling me or coming to a council meeting that’s at night?”

Her accomplishments include helping secure rental and financial assistance programs for residents and business owners who struggled during the pandemic. She established a maternity leave policy for the city council because she was the first council member to give birth while in office. She now has a 2-year-old and a 6-month-old.

She’s connected with the Latinx community through her regular “cafecito” meetups with residents.

Because of her Japanese surname, Ellen Kamei said some people often dismiss her Latina identity — or expect her to pick one part of her heritage over another.

“If you don’t own your own story, somebody else will try to tell it for you,” she said. “My father is Japanese American, born at Heart Mountain incarceration camp. My mother is Chinese and Puerto Rican from New York City. And that’s how I lead my story. It avoids the ‘Where are you really from?’ question.”

Ellen Kamei’s second and final term expires in January 2026. She told me she’s not sure if she will pursue another office. She has been working on reviving the Bay Area Association of Latino Elected Officials, a local version of the NALEO, in hopes of building a support system for those already in office as well as a robust pipeline of future candidates.

“In the Latino community, you’re so busy doing the work that it’s hard to create the infrastructure,” she said. “What are we doing to support those Latino electeds now, but also identify elected officials for the future? Where’s that Latinx person who’s just looking to be asked to run for office?”

One thing Arreguín has learned about running for public office is that “you’re never ready,” he said. In 2008, he was 23 when he was elected as the youngest person and first Latino to the Berkeley City Council. He served two terms before running for mayor, a post he’s held for the last eight years.

Now, 39, he has his sights set on District 7’s state Senate seat, representing a large portion of the East Bay. If elected next month, he would be the only Latino in the chamber from Northern California.

Arreguín made his heritage and youth a cornerstone for his first campaign, which he said worked because his story resonated with non-Latinos seeking a change in Berkeley, where Latinos are 14% of the population.

“Berkeley is a largely affluent, white city, and there is not a large Latino and organized Latino political constituency,” he said. “But I felt it was important to step forward. And we really leaned into my Latino heritage. Our campaign signs said, ‘Viva Jesse.’ It really was people embracing change and embracing new leadership and wanting diverse representation in office.”

Latinos have made significant progress in pursuing public office and tackling issues the Latinx community cares about, like increasing housing, tenants’ rights and immigrant rights. But for Latines to be less of an afterthought in California politics, “We have a lot of work to do,” Arreguín said.

“Not enough of Latinos are in positions of leadership and we have to change that,” he said. “There is real power in organizing. We’ve seen that a lot of critical victories in California around raising wages and labor rights have happened because of organizing. And it’s extremely important that people get involved.

“There’s a saying that if you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu.”