Priority Two
Fight bigotry aimed at our neighbors
I was the first American of Filipino or Japanese descent to sit on this Council. I grew up on the West End among Filipino, Guamanian, Samoan, Cape Verdean, Afghani, Black, Chinese, Latino, White and Jewish neighbors. That is why I will keep fighting bigotry in every form. As Mayor, I will stand with our LGBTQ+ neighbors, our immigrant families, and every faith community in Alameda.
1996
First Filipino- or Japanese-American on this Council
25.5%
Alamedans born outside the U.S.
28.6%
Asian American share of the city
Defending Our Diversity Is A City Hall Matter
As Mayor, I will lead the fight against bigotry aimed at Alamedans caught in the crossfire of the ongoing national culture wars: I will keep City Hall, and Alameda, a welcoming place for all — especially for our LGBTQ and transgender communities, as well as for the faith communities in Alameda that are under the gun.
- Our full equality commitment
- City Council endorses new LGBTQ action plan (Alameda Post)
- Alameda's interfaith response, covered by J.
“I helped push my city into becoming a progressive place that welcomes all.”
The record, and what comes next
Won marriage equality in the tax code, in 2003
I pushed Alameda to extend the real property transfer tax exemption to domestic partners — the same break married couples already got. The Alameda Journal covered it at the time. It is a small line in a tax code and it was worth the fight, because equality is mostly made out of small lines in tax codes. This was twelve years before Obergefell.
Put Filipino labor history on Alameda's street signs
During my 2012–2016 term Alameda named streets at Alameda Landing for Larry Itliong and Philip Vera Cruz — the Filipino labor leaders who started the Delano grape strike — alongside Bohol Lane and Bohol Circle. It was a first in the Bay Area. Six thousand Filipino Alamedans live here, and their children read those names on the way to school.
Said it out loud when Roe fell
When the Supreme Court ended the federal constitutional right to abortion, I issued a public statement as a pro-choice Democrat: Alameda would continue to be a place where women can exercise that right, with the help of their doctors.
Keep Alameda police out of federal immigration enforcement
A quarter of this city was born somewhere else. Federal civil immigration enforcement is not our police department's job, and lending our officers to it destroys exactly the trust that makes real policing possible. I will not do it.
Treat language access as a design requirement, not a program
City notices, ballot material and emergency communications that only work in English do not work in a city where one in four residents was born abroad. That is a service-delivery failure before it is anything else, and I will fund it inside the departments that generate the notices.
What this costs
Most of it costs nothing at all. Naming a street, issuing a statement, extending an exemption, and refusing to lend the city's police to someone else's agenda are acts of will. They are not line items.
Language access is a real cost, though a modest one. It belongs inside the departments that generate the notices, not in a standalone program that gets cut the first hard budget year — which is how these things usually die.
Why it matters
My mother was five years old in Nagasaki on August 9, 1945. My father came from Ormoc, in Leyte. My grandfather settled our family in Oakland's Fruitvale before we came across the estuary.
I am the product of the two countries the United States fought a war against and beside. And I got to grow up as an American on the West End of Alameda.
A city that forgets what that was worth is a city that will eventually take it away from somebody else's family. My job is to see that it does not.