I was born and raised in Oakland, the daughter of immigrants from Mexico and El Salvador. My mother raised me on her own, relying on food stamps and low-income housing to keep us afloat — public systems that helped us survive but weren’t built for us to lead. Though Oakland has a powerful history of organizing, my family wasn’t connected to those movements. It wasn’t until years later, in East San José, that I began to understand how community power is built.
For the past decade, I’ve worked in Mayfair, a neighborhood shaped by the same structural forces I knew growing up: redlining, disinvest- ment, and exclusion. But it was here, while working at SOMOS Mayfair, that I saw what local organizing could look like at its best. SOMOS didn’t just provide services through family resource centers, it created space for residents to define their own needs and lead solutions. It offered something rare: guidance without gate- keeping and tools that turned care into action.
These experiences — from being shaped by public systems to now helping shape them — have fundamentally informed how I understand governance. It’s not about symbolic representation. It’s about power: who holds it, who sets the agenda, and whether systems are built with communities or imposed on them. In East San José, we’re choosing the former and building what we’ve long been denied.
When Power Moves Without Us
In the 1950s and ’60s, San José’s urban renewal policies tore through communities of color, displacing families and fragmenting neighborhoods. Freeway construction cut through long-established areas, splitting neighborhoods apart and isolating residents from opportunity. Investment flowed toward the city’s core while East San José was left with crumbling infrastructure and shrinking access to basic services.
Nowhere was this pattern more visible than in Mayfair — once known as Sal Si Puedes, or “get out if you can.” For residents, the name reflected the neighborhood’s poor drainage and lack of infrastructure, which caused frequent flooding and underscored the city’s neglect.
For outsiders, it became shorthand for danger, reinforcing racialized stereotypes and justifying further disinvestment. The phrase carried a double meaning, both grounded in truth and steeped in stigma.
These weren’t isolated incidents. City and regional leaders made disinvestment knowingly and repeatedly — and communities like East San José paid the price. The damage wasn’t just physical. It fractured public trust and severed generations from the systems that were supposed to serve them.
Good governance isn’t theoretical. It shows up in who gets to decide, whose values are honored, and whether the systems we build actually deliver on the promises they make. If the Bay
Area is serious about equity, belonging, and regional resilience, it must invest in communities like East San José — not as exceptions, but as examples.
Investing in What’s Always Been Here
And yet, even in the face of exclusion, East San José has always carved its own path forward.
One defining moment came in 1999 with the creation of the Mexican Heritage Plaza (La Plaza). This wasn’t the result of bureaucratic goodwill — it was made possible by the tireless advocacy of Blanca Alvarado, the first Latina elected to the San José City Council and one of the region’s most visionary leaders. At a time when the city was pouring resources into downtown, Blanca fought to bring public investment to East San José. She championed a cultural facility that reflected the identity and aspirations of our community — and won.
La Plaza was built at the site of César Chávez’s first grocery store boycott, a place rooted in civil rights history and working- class solidarity. But it has never been just a building. Over the last 26 years, La Plaza has become a symbol of resistance and possibility. During the pandemic, it became a lifeline for Mayfair and East San José families, serving as a hub for food distribution, COVID testing, and vaccination.
Today, La Plaza stands as the cornerstone of what will become San José’s first cultural district: La Avenida. This district is more than a designation — it’s a declaration. A commitment to cultural preservation, economic mobility, and neighborhood resilience driven by the people who have long sustained this place. When public investment reflects the values of the community it serves, it becomes more than infrastructure — it becomes power. That’s what La Plaza represents, and that’s the future La Avenida is poised to build.
Governance That Starts With Us
But infrastructure alone doesn’t build trust or equity. That requires governance rooted in community leadership, not bureaucracy.
Through the Sí Se Puede Collective — a coalition of five grassroots nonprofits rooted in East San José — we’re not just delivering services. We’re building the civic infrastructure our community needs to lead. That includes arts and culture, mental health support, food access, housing advocacy and, critically, coordinated advocacy that drives systems change.
This work is powered not only by our organizations but by local residents who are organizing, leading, and holding systems accountable. Together, we’ve advanced tenant preference policies at the city and state levels; fought for affordable, high-quality childcare; and begun driving the creation of San José’s first cultural district and future affordable housing at the Mexican Heritage Plaza, leveraging tools like Assembly Bill 812.
We’re not just responding to broken systems — we’re collectively redesigning them. And nowhere is that work more visible than in how we’re governing the La Avenida Cultural District. The district is guided by a formal governance board made up of artists, residents, small business owners, a neighborhood association, the City of San José, the Sí Se Puede Collective, and the School of Arts and Culture at Mexican Heritage Plaza. This isn’t an advisory body — it holds real authority. It determines which priorities move forward and how the district evolves. Priorities include protecting affordability, elevating community voice and agency, preserving cultural assets, and shaping the built environment to reflect and serve the people who live here.
This model redefines how hyper-local governance can work. It moves from symbolic engagement to power-sharing. It centers lived experience and shifts decision-making to those closest to the challenges — and the solutions.
We’re not asking to be included in someone else’s vision. We’re building our own and inviting others to meet us there.
What the Bay Area Can Learn
East San José has long been left out of the conversations shaping the region’s future. But today, we offer a model not just of community resilience but of civic engagement.
The systems that helped my family in East Oakland were never designed to center us. In East San José, we’re building systems that do. Systems that allow families not only to survive, but to shape the policies, spaces, and futures that define their lives.
Good governance isn’t theoretical. It shows up in who gets to decide, whose values are honored, and whether the systems we build actually deliver on the promises they make.
If the Bay Area is serious about equity, belonging, and regional resilience, it must invest in communities like East San José — not as exceptions, but as examples.