Election 2024: First Afro-Latina running for L.A. City Council

Aura Vasquez is the first Afro-Latina running for Los Angeles City Council in District 10. She is a community organizer, an environmental activist and she also worked as a commissioner for the Department of Water and Power. 

“I want people to see themselves in this campaign,” said Vasquez in a conversation with CALÓ News. “This system is not set up for women, this system is not set up for people of color, the system is not set up for immigrants, [it] is not set up for women with an accent.”

Vasquez was born in Colombia and moved to New York City when she was 18. She was undocumented at first while she was a college student at Lehman College. She recalled living the “majority of my college years, we lived in the shadows," but became a citizen in the early 2000s. “I remember because the first person that I was able to vote for was Obama.”

After college she became an advocate for United Way and she worked for a member of the U.S. Congress in New York but she discovered community organizing which led her to Los Angeles. She has been an environmental justice advocate with the Sierra Club. 

She believes the most pressing issues facing District 10, which encompasses Koreatown and parts of South and Central L.A., are the housing and homelessness crises. “I want to build more affordable housing that is also sustainable.” Vasquez said. Some of the environmental changes that could also help make housing affordable include solar panels which could make energy bills more affordable and “that our new buildings have a way to retain the rain water so that they can reuse it to irrigate, or to filter and utilize it with other things.” 

Other infrastructure proposals that she has for the district include changing the lighting to solar panels to save the city more costs but also install more lighting poles that can help provide free Wi-Fi to the city. “In a lot of our communities there’s a big need to have Wi-Fi that is reliable.”

To fix streets, she proposed the use of permeable asphalt, which allows “rain water to penetrate the earth, because it will allow water to get through and it will allow [replenishment] of the aquifer.” This could also help reduce the amount of “heat island” effect. “Where there’s a lot of asphalt, in the majority of places that sadly are low-income people of color neighborhoods, they don’t have a lot of trees and a lot of shade. It gets really hot in the summer. That’s called a heat island effect.” 

According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) "In addition to reducing the runoff from the rain that falls on them, permeable pavements can help filter out pollutants that contribute to water pollution."

“When we have heat,” Vasquez said, “we have to pay more for [energy] bills, we have to bump the A/C because it’s so hot…There’s a lot of intersectionality between fixing our infrastructure and having a better quality of life.” 

Vasquez said what distinguishes her from the other candidates running for District 10 is that she has experience working with the city and has been “effective with working with community members, and making sure that those bureaucracies are changed and adjusted so that they work for us.”

March 5 will be California’s primary election, and Vasquez will be on the ballot for District 10, along with Eddie Anderson, incumbent Heather Hutt, Reggie Jones-Sawyer and Grace Yoo. Hutt was appointed after Mark Ridley-Thomas, who represented the district, was indicted on bribery charges.

When asked what she would say to people in the Latino community that say they don’t care about voting, she acknowledged that “It’s hard to blame them because people are going through so much.” 

Then she added, “When we don’t vote and we don’t take action, we allow others to take action for us… our vote is our superpower and it’s how we can really change things. Collectively we can do so much together.”

When she encounters people with voter apathy she says to them “If you’re tired of seeing things the way they are, the more you need to vote. The more upset you are, the more you need to vote.”

You can check your voter registration status in L.A. County at plan.lavote.gov.