Los Angeles Councilmember Kevin de León and then-Council President Nury Martinez confer at a City Council meeting on Oct. 4, 2022. It’s been nearly two years since a secretly recorded conversation featuring Los Angeles political heavyweights rocked City Hall — and really, what has changed? But Gil Cedillo — who claimed on the recording that the three City Council districts …
Santa Ana Mayor Pro Tem Jessie Lopez poses for a portrait at Santa Ana City Hall. That’s why election night at Chato’s was as joyous as any gathering I’ve seen in covering Santa Ana politics for nearly as long as many of Lopez’s young volunteers have lived. In Santa Ana, activists tilted at political windmills as moderate council members — …
On a Tuesday morning in the fall of 1998, I waited in line at a polling precinct at Manzanita Park in Anaheim. “If we focus on that, we’ll just continue to circle the wagons and not advance anywhere.” Fernando Guerra, director for the Center for the Study of Los Angeles at Loyola Marymount University, has tracked the rise of Latino …
