Knock LA

On the September afternoon that I meet up with Raul Ureña, it is 105 degrees in her hometown of Calexico, California – the city that sits on the south easternmost border of California and Mexico. I am already drenched in sweat. She chuckles at my aversion to the extreme heat and makes an offhanded comment about how today is the coolest day in the forecast for the week. Then she tells me that she’s already been out campaigning (lit dropping and door knocking) since 6:00 AM. 

The hard work of running for local office is nothing new to Ureña. At the ripe age of 26, she already touts the title of being the youngest and first openly transgender elected official in Calexico. This November will be her fourth election in Imperial County – the rural county, 200 miles Southeast of Los Angeles, known for its farming economy and its proximity to Mexico. 

When I ask Ureña if she’s nervous for the upcoming election, she shrugs and laughs again. “I think we’ll be just fine,” she says. Her playful response gives off the confidence of someone much older and wiser than 26. 

But even at her young age, Ureña has been through quite the political journey. In 2020, at the height of the pandemic, when she was forced to come home from college at UC Santa Cruz, she decided to run for office. She describes her decision as an almost Weberian ‘calling’ to politics. “I saw what was happening here in Calexico with my own eyes,” she tells me. “I knew the faces of the farm workers who were dying here during the pandemic and I just knew I had to do something about it.”

And so, she did. 

In late 2020, Ureña won a seat on the Calexico City Council in a landslide. In November 2022, she won her first full four year term. But then, in 2023, just four months into her full term, Ureña was presented with a recall notice from her opponents, who criticized her for prioritizing the wrong issues, contributing to rising homelessness, and neglecting small businesses downtown. Ureña says that her platform prioritizes government accountability (in a city plagued with public corruption), affordable housing, and better distribution of economic and academic opportunity. Ureña also came out publicly as gender fluid in 2022 and she says that she believes that her gender identity played a large role in the recall effort. She fought to keep her seat on the council, but ultimately lost in the special election this past April. 

While the recall and its aftermath have been difficult for Ureña, she says that the whole thing brought to light the heart of the political battle in Calexico and Imperial County as a whole. It’s an age-old battle of old versus new. “There are the ‘establishment’ Democrats who will do anything to maintain the status quo, and then there are the newcomers, who are fighting for real change,” Ureña says.

Most of these newcomers fighting for change across the Valley are young, fresh faces who are part of a generation that is cynical about the status quo and prioritizes social justice. There is Bryan Vega, a thirty something, self-described “Swiftie” who is passionate about clean energy and is running for a council seat in Holtville. There is Diana Osuna, the first Latina to run for a council seat in Brawley. There’s Ureña’s main ally in Calexico, Gilberto Manzanarez, a 31 year old who has been working tirelessly on affordable housing, among other young changemakers.

But the political lines in Imperial County aren’t always drawn in the way one might expect. It is not always literally the old vs. the new. Ureña tells me that some of her staunchest supporters in this election have been the older Catholic women in the community. Imperial County is California’s most heavily Latino county, and many community members are Catholic, which one might think would lead to politically conservative values, but not necessarily. 

“[These women] are the generation of Cesar Chavez,” Ureña says. “That generation still feels connected to their Mexican identity. They still remember what it was like to fight for their rights, they look past the dress. They are some of our most fervent supporters, regardless of religious background.” 

After the spring recall, with the support of older Catholic women and younger progressives in the community, Ureña was finally able to register a Political Action Committee devoted to pushing progressive change in the Valley by endorsing and helping to finance the campaigns of progressive candidates. The PAC is called Imperial Valley United for Progress (IVUP).

 “This is not just a battle over my seat anymore,” Ureña says. “This is about something bigger. Where is Imperial County headed as a whole?” 

One of the reasons that the stakes of this election feel much higher to Ureña than previous elections have is lithium. In 2022, energy companies began lithium mining at a geothermal plant in Calipatria, a town just north of Calexico in the Imperial Valley, which could lead to many new economic opportunities in the Valley. Environmental justice groups in the Valley, like Comite Civico Del Valle (CCV) are fighting to make sure that energy companies are taking into account air pollution and possible degradation of the Salton Sea. But overall, Ureña and her allies support the mining efforts, seeing the benefits, like a massive influx of local jobs and money to fix broken infrastructure and curb some of the highest unemployment rates in the state, as a big plus.

“If there’s anything that we should be investing in from a statewide lithium extraction tax, it’s education and transportation,” Ureña says. Imperial County has one of the lowest percentage of residents with a four year degree in the entire state. Ureña says that this is due to lack of access to higher education. The closest four year university is over two and a half hours away, in San Diego. Ureña says that, if elected, she will make it a priority to partner with more universities and get satellite campuses in the Imperial Valley. She also will prioritize investing in free, high speed public transportation to San Diego, Los Angeles, and Las Vegas. 

This dynamic, where California residents have the power to decide the future of the Imperial Valley, speaks to a larger frustration of residents feeling overlooked. “Water from the Valley goes to San Diego and Los Angeles. We feed everyone, we provide solar energy to these big cities, but they don’t invest in us,” Ureña says.

One thing that Ureña is specifically frustrated about right now is the lack of support from state Democrats in the Imperial Valley. She says that state Republicans invest in local politicians in the Imperial Valley, but Democrats don’t because the county is already blue. 

“It’s frustrating,” she says, more to herself than to me, as we get ready to go back out into the heat to do more lit dropping and door knocking. When I ask her to expand, she says, “I have faith in my own ability to change my party and to define what it means to be a Democrat in the Imperial Valley, but it is frustrating,” she sighs. “The Democrats don’t take risks on people like myself when we are the future. We are the very base of the Democratic Party.” 

Correction: A previous version of this story referred inaccurately to a potential threat to the lithium tax from the proposed California Taxpayer Protection Act appearing on the ballot. However, the California Taxpayer Protection Act has been ruled unconstitutional and struck from the ballot by the California Supreme Court, so this reference has been removed.”