\u201cThe angst in the community was like Whack-a-Mole,\u201d said Helen Rahder, who served on the City Council in the 1990s and is now executive director of the Whittier Conservancy, which is suing the city over plans to chop down dozens of ficus trees in the Uptown district<\/a>. \u201cIt bubbled up into one big cauldron of discontent.\u201d<\/p>\n Angie Medina heads the Whittier Latino Coalition, which since 2000 has pushed for more Latinos on the council. Her group joined others with their own causes \u2014 LGBTQ+ rights, better roads, moving municipal elections from April to November \u2014 to form an alliance so they could win together instead of lose apart.<\/p>\n \u201cOnce we talked, we realized we actually all had common goals and objectives,\u201d said Medina, who lives in an unincorporated part of Los Angeles County near Whittier. <\/p>\n For the three winning Latino candidates, their ethnicity was an afterthought.<\/p>\n James Becerra, a retired Cal Poly Pomona environmental design professor and someone I count as a friend, walloped Mayor Joe Vinatieri, who had served on the council since 2006, with 67% of the vote. Vicky Santana and Aida Macedo, daughters of Mexican immigrants, easily beat incumbents Fernando Dutra and Octavio Martinez. <\/p>\n Residents were so motivated to vote for the Democratic challengers and boot out the Republican incumbents that turnout doubled from the previous election. The newcomers join Mary Ann Pacheco to form a council where four of the five members are Latino, up from two.<\/p>\n People munched on cheese cubes and cheesecake bites or fanned themselves in the shade, watching on big-screen televisions as the old guard said their goodbyes inside the council chambers. Behind them, the undeveloped Puente Hills Preserve loomed on the horizon.<\/p>\n Jim Sass and his wife, Carina, arrived early. The 65-year-old retired educational researcher was once a Vinatieri voter. <\/p>\n \u201cJoe\u2019s a nice guy, but in recent years he became tone-deaf\u201d to residents and \u201cjust wanted to stay in power to stay in power,\u201d Sass said.<\/p>\n Kim Gomez was there with her 9-year-old son, Fabian, who showed me a drawing of Becerra that he hoped to give to the new mayor along with a letter stating that he wants to one day run for the seat. <\/p>\n \u201cI taught Fabian how important it was that people voted because they weren\u2019t happy with how things were,\u201d said Gomez, 47, who homeschools her son. \u201cThat\u2019s democracy.\u201d<\/p>\n Councilmember Aida Macedo speaks after being sworn in outside Whittier City Hall on Tuesday. She\u2019s part of a newly elected City Council that\u2019s majority Latino \u2014 the first in the city\u2019s 128-year history.<\/p>\n (Kayla Bartkowski \/ Los Angeles Times)<\/p>\n The upset victories thrilled Southern California\u2019s Latino political class, who long saw Whittier as a Republican-run lost cause. The city, which once was so conservative that it claimed Richard Nixon as a native son even though he was born in Orange County, began to change in the 1990s with an influx of middle-class Latinos from the Eastside<\/a> who found an attainable Mayberry in the city\u2019s well-kept homes and tree-lined streets.<\/p>\n Whittier was majority Latino by the 2000 census. Yet Latino council candidates kept losing, leading to a 2013 lawsuit demanding that the city switch to district<\/a> rather than citywide elections. That change, which happened in 2016<\/a>, resulted in only a trickle of Latinos on the council, most of the MAGA variety<\/a>.<\/p>\n The new Latino-majority council might be seen as a harbinger of how Latinos \u2014 who helped Donald Trump retake the White House in 2024 \u2014 can boost the Democratic Party\u2019s efforts to claw back control of the U.S. House and Senate in this year\u2019s midterms.<\/p>\n But anyone who thinks of what happened as a flex of ethnic power isn\u2019t paying attention.<\/p>\n Melissa Hidalgo, who teaches women\u2019s, gender and ethnic studies at Cal State Long Beach, grew up in and around Whittier and described the City Council of that time as \u201ca tag team of white people.\u201d The 52-year-old was so resigned to that reality that when Becerra knocked on her door asking for her vote, she and her partner thought he was an evangelizing Christian. <\/p>\n \u201cThank God we listened to his pitch!\u201d she cracked.<\/p>\n Hidalgo thinks Whittier should serve as a guiding light for Latino politics in Southern California.<\/p>\n \u201cIdentity politics are now just secondary, because we\u2019re all Latino,\u201d she said. \u201cWe should now be organizing under other issues that matter to all.\u201d<\/p>\n The sun was long gone and a cold breeze blew when Becerra, Santana and Macedo finally emerged from City Hall. The shivering crowd rose to give the new council members a standing ovation.<\/p>\n L.A. County Supervisor Janice Hahn began the ceremony with congratulatory remarks, stating, \u201cThe voters of Whittier spoke.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cYes, we did!\u201d shouted Martha Escutia, the former California legislator<\/a> who was passed over in 2012 when she applied to fill a vacancy on the Whittier City Council.<\/p>\n The first person sworn in was Santana. In 2004, as a student at Harvard Kennedy School, she wrote a paper about the lack of Latino voices in Whittier politics. <\/p>\n \u201cWe needed to see elected officials who were representative of our community,\u201d Santana told me over the phone earlier this week. \u201cFor a long time, we just wanted one.\u201d<\/p>\n She laughed. \u201cAnd now we have four!\u201d<\/p>\n![\"New](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/1777810291_578_.jpeg\")
<\/p>\n
![\"New](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/1777810291_370_.jpeg\")
<\/p>\n