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.
BOYLE HEIGHTS, LOS ANGELES - As a lawmaker, Los Angeles City Councilman Kevin De León has kept an eye on the bold and the specific ways his work can impact the most vulnerable. He is someone who sees the impact of a good headline but someone who also dares to take on the wonky policy proposals that hardly make the news. Born in downtown to a Guatemalan mother and Guatemalan-Chinese father, assembled in San Diego and across the state–Kevin De León has set a legacy of significant impact and hopes to continue doing so if elected as the next Mayor of the city of Los Angeles. The primary election for this race is in June. The goal? To make the top two candidates for the election in November and win.
At the start of the Trump administration, De León, then-President Pro-Tem of the California State Senate, pushed hard for California to be the first sanctuary state in U.S. history and won. In 2018, he ran against Senator Dianne Feinstein. Like many high-profile democrats across the state, running for this seat has become a rite of passage. If you win, you scale up in national presence the way now Vice President Kamala Harris did, or if you lose, you may disappear the way Congresswoman Loretta Sanchez has. But there is something about De León, who, despite losing the race in 2018, just two years late,r is now representing the city of Los Angeles’s most acclaimed and rapidly gentrifying district. Last fall, we sat down at Yeya’s Restaurant in Boyle Heights to talk about the development of his progressive politics, how his family shapes his policy priorities and this pivotal race in his career over some enchiladas and coffee.