Well-known union leader María Elena Durazo, currently State Senator for District 26, is running for the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, District 1.
This county district is the demographic core of its Latino community, making up 68% of its population and a majority of its voting-age citizens.
The primary elections will take place on June 2. If no candidate obtains a majority, the first two will compete on November 3.
Other candidates for the position are Elaine Alaniz, Noel Almario, David E. Argudo, and Annabella Figueroa Mazariegos.
The position is vacant due to the expiration of the term limits of incumbent Hilda Solís, who for her part is running for Congress after 12 years as Supervisor.
The five members of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors share immense power. They legislate and at the same time are the Executive, administering the areas under their charge as if they were mayors. They manage, assign and prioritize an annual budget of about Forty eight.8 billion dollars.
A population of almost 10 million people depends on them.
A position of such magnitude must be filled by someone with deep knowledge of the nature of the county and its communities, the issues that concern the population, the prevailing political climate, relationships with the cities, the Legislature, the Governor’s office, the congressmen who represent the area and more. Must have a long-standing record of community involvement and recognized and appreciated service to the people.
La Opinion considers that María Elena Durazo is the best candidate to occupy the position. Los Angeles County will benefit significantly from your presence.
Born in Madera, California, in 1953, the seventh of 11 children of her Mexican parents, María Elena Durazo was a farm laborer in California’s Central Valley and Oregon.
In a column in La Opinión in 2019, her sisters believed that “the difficulties of agricultural workers are memories that… motivated her to seek social justice.”
In 1975 he graduated from Saint Mary’s College, and in 1985 from the Americans’ College of Rules. It was there that she began a lifetime of social, union and political activism, as an activist in the historic seamstresses union (ILGWU), one of the predecessors of UNITE-HERE. This followed a long and fruitful work in union leadership positions, as executive secretary-treasurer of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor between 2006 and 2014, the first woman to lead the second largest union in the country, which had 825,000 members from 300 local unions when she took office. She was also executive vice president of the UNITE-HERE Global union, which represents 300,000 hospitality and support industry workers in the United States and Canada. Between 2010 and 2014 she was vice president of the National Executive Council of the American labor confederation AFL-CIO.
In addition to her union leadership, María Elena Durazo’s image and prestige emanates from her legislative work during her time in the California Senate since 2018. She achieved important victories for workers, protections for immigrants and housing solutions. Thanks to the contribution of your laws SB 29 in 2020 and SB59 in 20121, by 2024 California HE became the first state to provide full Medi-Cal health coverage to low-income undocumented immigrants, regardless of their age.
His SB 731 bill in 2022 expanded automatic expungement for arrests without convictions and for those who served their full sentence and did not violate the law for four years. In 2023, his law SB 252 increased the minimum wage for health care workers to $23 an hour.
If elected, Durazo says she will continue fighting for better wages as a solution to the affordability problem in the County. It recognizes “our massive collective failure” on the homeless problem, that joint actions by the city and county have not produced results, and that Angelenos must be mobilized to solve it. In response to the immigration raids he says only this: “Disobey Trump.”
María Elena Durazo has demonstrated for decades her commitment to immigrants and the Latino community in Los Angeles and California, which began when many unions were still opposed to immigrant worker participation efforts.
This tireless worker for the rights of workers, immigrants, the poor, the elderly, has come from below to lead and improve the lives of Californians. Now, Los Angeles County has the opportunity to count her among its supervisors.
La Opinion considers that María Elena Durazo is the most qualified candidate for the position of Supervisor for District 1 in Los Angeles County and encourages its readers to vote for her.
