Welcome to the mayoral candidate edition of L.A. TACO Votes! As L.A.’s primary election comes up in June, we will bring you street-level interviews and features with L.A.’s frontrunner mayoral candidates.
SOUTH CENTRAL, LOS ANGELES - As a Congresswoman, Karen Bass needs to live between Los Angeles and Washington D.C. She also, however, continuously lives between the past and the future. After telling L.A. TACO that solving homelessness was her priority in her mayoral race, she alludes to the Project Room key effort to house unhoused people saying that together with other organizers and community leaders: “[they] tried to take the hotels back in the 90s, in the 90s!” While Estelle Lawton became the acting Mayor in 1915 and the “first woman to be Mayor in Los Angeles,” if elected, Karen Bass could not only become the first woman elected to one of the most influential and most prominent cities in the world but also the first Black woman to do so. The primary election for this race is in June.
The congresswoman says she has known this possibility of serving her city for decades or, arguably, her whole life. In the offices of the Community Coalition, the organization she co-founded and left to develop long-term leadership, L.A. TACO talked last fall about the 90s, her roots and legacy in South Central, her international world views, and how all of this is the reason she wants to lead Los Angeles to fix its generational curses in the upcoming election to replace LA Mayor Eric Garcetti.