A tale of two Oxnards

Politicians are not supposed to sweat — outside of press conferences and grand jury hearings, anyway. But Oxnard City Council candidate Francisco Romero is doing just that as he descends the staircase of yet another apartment complex in a small neighborhood on the south side of town. It is a bright, warm Saturday morning, 10 days from the election, and Romero, wearing beige slacks and a dark-blue shirt with a nametag pinned to its right breast, is doing something else few elected officials do: walking the precincts. Or, more precisely, re-walking them. He and what could loosely be referred to as his “staff” — his friends, his family and supporters of All Power to the People, the grassroots electoral campaign he launched in tandem with his longtime compañero, elementary school board candidate Jose Moreno — first went door to door in this and other communities largely neglected by the other candidates about two months ago. With little more than a week left before November 7, Romero, armed with a clipboard containing a list of all registered non-Republicans in the area, is hitting these homes again, slipping yellow informational cards in screen doors and, as often as possible, conversing with residents. Even on the second round, there is still a collective shock among the people he meets, a disbelief that somebody running for public office is actually bothering to ask for their vote.

“A lot of people have said, ‘Hey, man, nobody’s ever come over here,’ ” says Romero, 31. “Residents have been living in their homes for 20 years, and nobody comes and knocks on their door to campaign. They get fliers and all that, but nobody physically has come. They’re like, ‘Wow, man, you’re the first person in 20 years to knock on my door.’ ”

For that reason alone, Romero, who teaches reading and math at Haydock Intermediate School, does not fit the label of “politician,” at least not as defined by history. There are other reasons, too: With his tinted glasses, goatee and long ponytail sectioned off by a series of hair bands and extending to the middle of his back, he doesn’t look much like one. He doesn’t talk like one, either, punctuating sentences with words like “brother,” “man” and “dude” and slipping Spanish phrases into English conversations. And, most of all, he doesn’t think like one. Raised in a culture of activism, Romero, as well as Moreno, 29, are concerned with the needs of Oxnard’s working class — or, more accurately, working poor — a voting bloc historically ignored and alienated by “traditional” politicians.

Of course, that doesn’t stop some people from regarding him as one.

You can’t blame them. Traveling from block to block, it is hard to imagine that anyone either already in local government or hoping to become part of it truly gives a damn about what’s going on out here in south Oxnard. While the current council deliberates on how to bring more big-box retailers, high-rise condominiums and upscale housing developments to the comparatively affluent northern and western parts of the city, here trash is piling up in the gutters. Sidewalks are cracked, paint is peeling and ends are not meeting. There is a vibrancy to this community that transcends the average income level: rancheras blare out of bedroom windows; pet roosters scamper around front yards; ice cream trucks luring kids outside with the theme song to a popular Spanish sitcom. But beyond the romanticism of this kind of scene, the stark truth is that these families are struggling, and that struggle is breeding apathy, cynicism and, ultimately, hopelessness.

That is why Romero is sweating today. It is not enough just to send out mailers and make phone calls. To accomplish the goals he and Moreno have set, to galvanize these forgotten communities into believing that they do matter, they have to put feet to pavement and hands to flesh and tell them, directly to their faces, that by simply going to the polls, they can prove that they are a group that deserves recognition and, in doing so, change completely the city’s political landscape.

It’s a tall order, especially with a practically nonexistent budget. Although they are vying for essentially nonpartisan positions, pushing a progressive agenda in a place where roughly 10 percent of the population votes is almost like contending as a third party. (For the record, Romero is a registered Green.) But, coming from poor backgrounds themselves, Romero and Moreno are accustomed to starting miles behind everybody else. The thrill of fighting their way to the front is partially what got them into this, and what continues to drive them now.

“The odds are never in your favor,” Moreno says, “but you try to beat them.”

Francisco Romero has had several political awakenings in his life, none of which has ever taken place in a boardroom, an office or any of the other venues where aspirations for power and influence are typically born. All his epiphanies happened in the street. Not the metaphorical street — the actual concrete and asphalt he played pickup baseball on as a kid, marched for immigrant rights on as a college student and where, on the night of his graduation from Cal State Northridge, he had his first encounter with authority run amok.

“On May 25, 2000, we were having a big family party with friends. We had a rock band in my backyard and everything,” Romero recalls, sitting in a Hamburger Habit in Ventura before attending a conference on global warming downtown. “It was about 8 p.m., and my sister said, ‘Hey the cops are here.’ I’m like, ‘What? It’s 8 p.m., they’re here already?’ We had timed it because right at 10:01, they’re usually at the door. So we’re like, ‘Hey, they’re early.’ ” But when he went outside to greet them, Romero found a caravan of cop cars but no officers. He checked around the corner, and that’s where he allegedly saw two policemen slam one of his neighbors to the ground. “My immediate reaction was to go out there and take photographs,” he says, and, as party host, he just happened to have a camera in his pocket right at that moment. He positioned himself in the street, close enough to capture what was going on but far enough away not to get involved, and started snapping.

Seconds later, Romero was grabbed from behind by two men trying to wrestle the camera out of his hand. He resisted for three minutes, fracturing his finger in the process. Then their badges came out. “Once I knew they were officers, I let go,” he says. “I put my hands down and I went to the ground.” After things settled down, Romero, who had just initiated a campaign to inform residents of their rights when confronted by law enforcement, stood up and calmly asked to speak to the officers’ supervisor. “They started getting in my face: ‘What are you gonna do?’ I was like, ‘I can’t speak to you, officer, I need to speak to the officer above you.’ ” By then, a mob scene had developed, with K-9 units and bike cops and Romero’s relatives looking on. When the officers’ superior arrived, Romero logged a verbal complaint against them and announced his intent to file a written report, as soon as he got his finger checked out. The police dispersed, he went to the hospital, and the party continued without him. The next day, he went down to the station and made good on his promise.

Several months later, Romero was charged with resisting arrest. “They never arrested me,” claims Romero. “They never said they were going to arrest me, I walked away and everything was fine. But they tried to charge me with that.” Eventually, the case was settled out of court, but not before giving Romero hands-on experience with the slow, often stubborn machinery of justice. “It informed us about what works and what doesn’t work, and how to defend your rights using the mechanisms of city and state laws. But it also highlighted how difficult the process is. There are serious inequities in the process of how marginalized, poor communities can defend their rights and uphold their dignity.

“Those lessons have led us to this point where we’re at,” he continues. “As policymakers, as representatives of the city, we believe we can bring true, concrete changes that will make those same systems more equitable, despite the fact that people are poor and don’t have access to certain things or aren’t informed about how to access certain things.”

Equity is a theme Romero returns to constantly when discussing his bid for city council. It is the crux of his campaign, and something he feels is desperately lacking in the public discourse about the problems, policies and future of Oxnard. On the day I meet with Romero, a Ventura County Superior Court judge has made permanent a second gang injunction, this one against the Southside Chiques. It covers more than four square miles, from the corner of Wooley and Ventura roads east to Rose Avenue and running southward through Port Hueneme, adding to the six-mile Colonia Chiques injunction put in place a year ago. At our table, Romero lays out a map outlining the neighborhoods now within the twin “safety zones,” where identified gang members are prohibited from congregating publicly, from wearing certain clothes and from even being outside after 10 p.m. For him, the dotted line framing the affected areas is not an indicator of the city’s most troubled communities; it is a visual representation of the class division that has long cut the population in half — a literal, visible border separating the haves from the have-nots. Or, as Romero sees it, the vocal from the voiceless.

“The reality is that there are at least two Oxnards,” he says. “An Oxnard where people are living day-to-day, check-by-check, barely making it, and an Oxnard where people don’t need any resources, they’re fine. What we want to do is bring equity and equality. Equity doesn’t just mean that you and I look at each other, because of the color of our skin, as equals. That’s one point. Equity means that the systems in place provide for everybody.”

The Oxnard Romero grew up in fell on the “have not” side of the border. Born to recently arrived Mexican immigrants in 1975, Romero and his siblings spent their childhood barely above the poverty line. His mother worked at the Saticoy Lemon factory, near their home in La Colonia, his father at the Nabisco plant, where he operated a forklift for 20 years. They had little, but his parents found ways to compensate. “They always made it a point to make life fun, whatever it took,” Romero says. “Like, ‘Hey, let’s hop in the car and drive all the way to [Tijuana], then come back the same day.’ Crazy things like that.” Their birthday parties were legendary, and even after moving to central Oxnard, their house was known as the hangout spot, the door always open to practically every kid in the neighborhood. “I remember my dad finally was able to get enough money to buy the Atari system. We were like the community arcade.”

Like many first-generation Mexican-Americans, Romero’s life became more complicated as he entered adolescence. In junior high, he went through what he terms “an identity crisis.” “Right about sixth grade, going into seventh grade, there was a distinct division between our own friends. We all started dividing amongst each other, to say, ‘This is the cool crowd, this is not the cool crowd,’ ” the demarcation being the degree of assimilation, he says. Along those lines, Romero was somewhere in the middle, but he tried hard to fit in with the former. “It got to the point in the seventh grade, I remember clearly, that my best friend — or who I thought was my best friend — would always talk about our friends from the year before, like, ‘Look at all those wetbacks right there!’ or ‘Look at them fools, they can’t even play basketball!’ And that hurt me, because here I am, thinking these guys are cool, but they’re not, because they’re creating these divisions amongst people.

“So what I did, I went, ‘See you guys later.’ I stopped hanging around with that crowd. I left the table where the cool people hung out and I went to play with my friends that they said didn’t know how to play basketball. We did know how to play basketball. It’s just that we didn’t have Nikes — we had Payless Shoes on.”

It was then that Romero began to define himself as a Chicano. But his politicization was still a long way off. Unmotivated by what he learned in class, in high school Romero’s concerns were of the social variety: partying, drinking, getting in trouble. In 1994, a year after graduation, a friend convinced him to enroll at Ventura College. It was a potent time: the furor over Proposition 187 (the ballot measure seeking to deny undocumented immigrants access to social services, health care and education) sparked mass protests throughout California. For Romero, who had just been introduced to Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan, or MEChA, the national Mexican rights student organization, it was a perfect storm of inspiration. “Seeing all the people walking out, coming out with placards saying, ‘We want our rights! We want justice!’ coming from where I was coming from, it was like, yeah, it’s OK to be proud of your history and your heritage and your roots.” Once he participated in some school walkouts himself, his path was set. “I said, ‘This is it. I’m going to organize to do this for the rest of my life.’”

That same year, at a march outside the Ventura County Government Center, Romero met Jose Moreno, then 17 and working as a reporter for the campus newspaper at Hueneme High School. Although younger than Romero, Moreno was farther along in his politicization process. His older brother, a member of Oxnard College MEChA, had given him a copy of Rodolfo Acuña’s Occupied America: A History of Chicanos, a couple of months before. “I read the book, and it opened my eyes up, that we have a history and a culture,” Moreno says. His upbringing, however, was much the same as Romero’s, brought up in a low-income household in La Colonia by parents who encouraged him to transcend his economic status. “You can be poor,” they taught him, “but it doesn’t mean you have to get caught in the conditions of your environment.” He interviewed Romero — who now admits to parroting back stuff he was just beginning to learn about — and passed along a flier for a meeting regarding the National Chicano Moratorium Committee, the short-lived Mexican-American antiwar coalition formed during the Vietnam era. Over the next few months, Romero and Moreno helped put together a bus ride from Oxnard to Los Angeles for a huge march celebrating the 25th anniversary of the organization’s founding.

“And it just snowballed from there,” Romero says.

In July 1995, recognizing the lack of an epicenter for activism in their own community, Romero, Moreno and his brother Luis, inspired by the Chicano rights movement of the 1960s, created the Committee on Raza Rights, a “broad-based, broad-issue group that would attempt to focus on civil rights and human rights work dealing with Mexicans and Latinos in the United States and also Latinos abroad.” Over the proceeding decade, the CRR established itself as a prominent organizational force in Oxnard, holding events and mobilizing around issues, with Romero and Moreno — who in that time both earned teaching credentials — becoming staples at city council meetings as well as on street corners, passing out pamphlets, fliers and cards.

But while the idea of entering into electoral politics had been entertained from the beginning, the conditions for making such a leap did not present themselves until recently.

“What changed everything was May Day,” Moreno says. Witnessing the massive turnout in Plaza Park on May 1 against HR 4437 — the latest attempt to strip undocumented aliens of their rights, this time on a federal scale — convinced Romero and Moreno that Oxnard was finally prepared to embrace, or at least consider, a newer, younger, more inclusive perspective in government. “We feel that the community is ready for this change,” Romero says. “And they want an array of selections other than the same old folks who keep running — unchallenged, to a certain degree — and who are progressive, able to raise issues and not necessarily appeal only to upper middle-class, elite needs.” Moreno’s decision to run for school board was more personal: In elementary school, he was deemed “hyperactive” and placed in special education classes. “I was very smart for my age, but I couldn’t stay focused in the classroom,” says Moreno, who has a bachelor’s degree in Chicano studies, a doctorate in history and is a professor at Moorpark and Oxnard colleges. “I experienced a lot of racism within the school district. For instance, when I was going to school, teachers told me I would never go to college. They never encouraged me to go to college. They never told me that the thing to do was to go to college. It was my family that basically told me what to do. So I saw injustices. I saw how kids don’t have the mentorship of teachers.”

Together, they adopted the slogan “All Power to the People,” as a reference to the ’60s radicalism that informed the CRR and also as a direct statement of mission: This campaign is not about them as individuals, but about the city, as a whole, moving forward in a unified direction. “The All Power to the People Campaign is an overarching vision of bringing more people into the decision-making process and exercising their rights without fear of being repressed,” Romero says.

In short, it’s about equity. And that, Romero insists, is a tangible concept. “It’s not theoretical, philosophical. People believe that because we come from organizing and things like that, that’s all we’re about. We have a vision.”

And contrary to what some might think, it is not a particularly radical vision. It simply has to do with addressing problems at their root rather than waiting for them to grow into epidemics. For instance, instead of dealing with crime through near-totalitarian measures such as gang injunctions, Romero suggests reprioritizing the city budget to funnel more money into programs that create job opportunities and career training for young people. While outlets like the Boys & Girls Club are already in place to shelter kids from the gang lifestyle, “that’s more like prevention,” he says. “And then there’s a whole other aspect, which is the enforcement component. But in the middle, there’s this huge gaping hole, of a need to bridge those two areas, prevention and enforcement. And the bridge in between that’s missing or half-built is intervention, which is specifically looking at those individuals that have already had gang labels attached to them, that already have records. You outreach and you recruit those individuals to become the participants and the leaders in calling for an end to the violence in the community and for more access to opportunities.”

Romero also advocates passing a living wage ordinance, establishing a community police review board (because, as he knows from experience, “more police officers doesn’t necessarily mean more effective or efficient policing”), promoting sustainable development and, most pressingly, looking deeper into what can be done to provide more affordable, “dignified” housing, current access to which he finds “deplorable.” “We’ve walked into some homes where the entire complex is literally deteriorating,” Romero says. “There’s rat holes like this big” — he connects both hands to indicate a hole the size of a baseball — “cockroaches, nails coming out of the carpet, the ceiling’s falling in, housing conditions that are unsafe. You walk in, and there’s a sign that says a lot of the chemicals or materials used in that complex are cancerous and, basically, ‘Live here at your own risk.’” Romero is already working to develop a tenant’s rights organization, to monitor landlords and ensure they are providing healthy, safe living environments for residents.

Moreno’s plans are less concrete, not because he doesn’t have any, but because, as he explains, “it’s not about what I want — it’s about what these people want. They’re the focus. That’s who I represent and that who I’ll be working for. I work for the students, I work for the staff, I work for the community. That’s why I’m an elected official. So I have ideas, but I want to consult with them first.” He does believe in restructuring the district’s budget to provide more funding for infrastructure and after-school and teacher training programs. And he supports bilingual education, although he says the method in which it is applied needs to be reevaluated, to include a more multicultural curriculum. “People can relate to their personal images, images of their culture,” he says. “They can relate to it and learn English faster. Studies out there have proven it.”

Both admit that, even if they win their respective seats, the kind of sweeping, systemic change they are ultimately striving for will take a long time to implement. But no matter what the final results of the election are, by forcing the more traditional politicians in the race to address topics they would rather ignore, they feel like the process of change has already begun.

“The purpose of this campaign,” Moreno says, “is to raise consciousness out there and to promote issues the other candidates are not [promoting] and make candidates bring those issues up. And they’re starting to bring those issues up.”

“For most of the candidates, it has become a situation where the focus is on the upper middle-class voting bloc, providing the needs for that constituency. That cuts off the working poor voting bloc as secondary,” Romero says. “Our focus is switched, because we believe that if we focus on the working poor communities and organize and deal with the issues that are directly affecting and impacting those communities, that you do bring the sense of balance and equity that everybody wants, including the upper middle-class. So it’s not about us against them. It’s about finding the balance between the haves and the have-nots.”

It’s early afternoon now, and Romero is at the end of his list. He approaches the final house, a nice-looking one with a freshly mowed lawn, tomato plants in the yard, Halloween decorations in front and a large, tattered Mexican flag jutting out of the roof. “Buenos dias,” he shouts into the open door. A gray-haired woman in her 50s answers. Romero introduces himself and hands her a yellow card. She leans against the threshold. “All right, let me hear your speech,” she says, and you can almost hear her eyes rolling. She knows the usual spiel, about how he is going to fight for the people, make a change, etc., and she is not about to buy into it now just because he is standing on her doorstep. And the fact that Romero is Latino gives her little comfort: She has been let down too many times in the past, by candidates with Hispanic names who talk big, get elected and become, in her words, “whitewashed.”

Romero does not get defensive when she tells him this. He explains to her that he has lived here all his life, has been organizing within the community for 12 years and this is his first shot at public office. It is not a stump speech or a desperate plea filled with clichés and empty sloganeering. It sounds, simply, like a conversation between two strangers — not politician to constituent, but neighbor to neighbor.

She studies his card more closely, then looks up. “Well, Francisco,” she says, “you’ve got my vote.”

One more down. A few thousand more to go.