Somalia continues to face al-Shabab rebellion and political friction, leading officials to urge international support.
Somalia’s State Minister for Foreign Affairs Ali Mohamed Omar says Somalia has come a long way since its government collapsed 30 years ago, plunging the country into civil war.
Omar notes that Somalia would not have recovered without the international community’s help.
The United Nations established a political office to help rebuild institutions and resolve political disputes. And more than three decades after its creation, the mission ended in October at the request of the government, which says it wants to be responsible for its own affairs.
But the government will face challenges. African Union peacekeepers are still on the ground supporting Mogadishu in its fight against al-Shabaab, an armed group linked to al-Qaeda that controls large parts of central and southern Somalia. Cuts to United States funding threaten the African Union’s mission.
Meanwhile, Somalia’s opposition says its president is not legitimate, as the government says the new constitution allows him to stay in office until next year.
Omar says that despite these issues, Somalia is more stable than it was a few years ago. And he hopes the international community will continue supporting it financially as it seeks to become a stronger state.
In Kangan, in central Kashmir, 53-year-old singer Yousuf Naseem has spent three decades preserving Shina through music.
Sitting on his veranda, he plays a six-stringed rabab. His songs carry memories of migration, loss and the home he left behind.
Born in Dangithal, near the Line of Control in Gurez Valley, Naseem remembers long winters, family storytelling and songs passed along by older relatives.
“The elders in our house were our library,” he says. “Whatever they hummed, we sang.”
During the 1999 Kargil conflict, his family was among those forced to leave Gurez. They resettled in Kangan.
“We lost everything,” he says. “But the songs travelled with us.”
Naseem began taking Shina music to new listeners in Srinagar. In Bohri Kadal, a historic market in the old city where many Dard families work as wazas, or chefs, he gave a shopkeeper a copy of his first cassette, Dardistan, and asked him to play it every morning.
His voice began travelling through the market.
“People would ask what language it was,” Naseem says. “It was Shina. For many, it was the first time they had heard it.”
While Naseem carried Shina music beyond Gurez, Fareed Ahmed Kaloo worked to preserve it within the valley.
At the Shina Cultural Centre near Dawar, young musicians gather as Kaloo, 67, adjusts his harmonium and begins to sing. He wears a traditional shoka and white pakol cap.
Yousuf Naseem, 53, a Shina singer and rabab player, plays on the veranda of his home in Kangan, Indian-administered Kashmir [Ishtayaq Rasool/Al Jazeera]
“Gilgit, Kargil, Gurez, Drass – our pride, our own, This is our Golden Garden: Dardistan, our home.”
Kaloo leads the Habba Khatoon Dramatic Club, a cultural group founded in 1976 to preserve Shina folklore in Gurez.
“After Partition, our culture faded,” he says. “Kashmiri music dominated, and our Dardic roots went silent.”
For years, he travelled between villages on foot, carrying a harmonium and a tumbak naari, a clay percussion instrument. He performed at weddings, fairs and local gatherings, accepting food, a place to sleep or a small honorarium as payment.
“We didn’t do it for money,” he says. “We did it because someone had to, and no one else would.”
Some of the club’s earliest members have died. Others left amid cross-border shelling and never returned. Kaloo stayed, teaching folk songs to younger generations.
He now listens to new tracks on his phone and admires how musicians in Gilgit have developed their sound while retaining elements of traditional Shina music.
“They’ve gone far ahead of us,” he says with a smile. “As they should. Our songs must evolve, but never lose their roots.”
Even before Los Angeles City Councilmember Nithya Raman won her campaign for mayor, residents in her Hollywood Hills district had begun talking about who might run to replace her after she’s sworn in to her new job next month.
But now, with the dust settled on Raman’s mayoral victory, community leaders have begun prepping for a different type of political fight: making sure the City Council moves forward with a special election for Raman’s seat.
Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson said this week that the council won’t make a decision on the vacancy until next year. Raman, for her part, has not said whether she would want a special election for her 4th District seat, which stretches from Silver Lake to the west San Fernando Valley.
Anastasia Mann, president of the Hollywood Hills West Neighborhood Council, said she has received numerous calls from people across Raman’s district worried the council will skip a special election and instead select someone to fill the seat until the end of 2028.
The council made a similar move several years ago, appointing legislative aide Heather Hutt to serve as a voting member after the indictment of then-Councilmember Mark Ridley-Thomas on corruption charges.
“We just want to have a voice. That’s the way the system is supposed to work,” Mann said. “It’s not like we have six months left in her term. We have half of the term left.”
On Wednesday, the Encino Property Owners Assn. voted unanimously to ask Raman, Harris-Dawson and the rest of the council to hold a special election so that voters can choose their next representative.
“Any other way is essentially backroom anointment,” said Rob Glushon, the group’s president. “We won’t accept an anointment.”
A coalition of neighborhood and business leaders from across the district is scheduled to meet on the issue this week.
The council has the power to call a special election for a vacant seat, installing a nonvoting caretaker in the interim, said Josué Marcus, a spokesperson for the city clerk’s office. The council also could appoint an interim replacement, one with voting power, to fill a seat until a special election is held and those results are finalized, he said.
The council also could appoint a voting member to fill the seat until the end of Raman’s term, which concludes in December 2028.
Harris-Dawson declined to say whether he has a preference for any of those options.
“We haven’t ruled anything out,” he said in an interview.
Raman takes office as mayor Dec. 14. The council is scheduled to go on winter recess the following day. Harris-Dawson said Tuesday that he does not plan on having the council decide how to fill Raman’s vacant seat until after the council returns from the holiday break.
Stella Stahl, a Raman spokesperson, said her office has already received a policy briefing on “potential pathways forward.” Raman, she said, believes that district residents deserve effective representation and “continuity of services.”
“She looks forward to a thoughtful process that puts their interests first,” Stahl said in an email.
In 2022, the council selected Hutt, a former state legislative staffer, to temporarily replace Ridley-Thomas as a voting council member as he fought federal corruption charges. The following year, after Ridley-Thomas had been convicted and forced from office, the council reappointed Hutt to serve out the remainder of his term.
Hutt won her own election to represent the South L.A. district in 2024.
After the abrupt resignation of Council President Nury Martinez in 2022, then-Council President Mitch O’Farrell designated the office of the chief legislative analyst, which advises the council on policy matters, to serve as the nonvoting caretaker of her vacant seat until a special election could be held. Her replacement, Imelda Padilla, was elected the following year.
Councilmember Traci Park , who represents part of the Westside, said the council shouldn’t make any decision without first hearing from Raman’s constituents.
“I strongly urge the Council President to engage directly with CD4 leaders and residents to discuss their needs and vision for the next two years,” she said in a statement. “Whether it’s an appointment, election or both, residents deserve a say in their future.”
Leo Daube, a spokesperson for Councilmember Katy Yaroslavsky, said his boss believes that district voters “should have the opportunity to decide who they want to represent them on the city council, and that there should be a special election as soon as possible.”
“She does not believe a candidate for that seat should be appointed by the City Council before a special election is held,” Daube said in a statement.
On the eastern end of Raman’s district, Debra Matlock, president of the Los Feliz Improvement Assn., said she too believes that a special election should be held. She recommended that the council appoint one of Raman’s staffers to serve as the district’s caretaker in the intervening six to nine months.
Meanwhile, at least two people are looking to run for Raman’s seat.
Jimmy Biblarz, who served as a senior advisor and campaign counsel to Raman’s mayoral campaign, said he is prepared to launch a campaign if a special election is called. A resident of Hollywood, he said he is focused for now on putting together next month’s mayoral inauguration ceremony.
Deputy City Atty. Ethan Weaver, who lost to Raman in 2024, said he too would run for the seat if a special election were held.
This summer, I cheered — and at times, secretly sneered — in crowds of Angelenos cheering for the Mexican national team during the World Cup.
Friends, colleagues, strangers who had grown up in Southern California arrived at watch parties prepared with the players’ names, stats and even deep lore on what the World Cup meant to each country. Such was the beauty of shared diaspora with other countries in my city of Los Angeles.
Then, it occurred to me: As a Mexican-born immigrant, I should know the players’ names too, right? Should I know the national anthem and maybe even shed a tear as it plays? Maybe I’ve grown cold, maybe bitter, annoyed even, at the fervor, I thought.
But it wasn’t until Mexico was eliminated in its match against England (curse you, Jude Bellingham) that I, on the drive home, sobbed into the steering wheel.
I realized many questions then, which led me to investigate this piece: Why did I finally feel what everyone had been feeling? Why did the World Cup piss me off? Was it only the corruption? Or was there something stranger inside me? There’s no simple answer, but I will start with one word: nationalism.
Suited up in the cardigan of excess privilege, which is my UCLA education, I can easily be trapped in my own musings to identify, assess and even profess what I think should be the truth about what “country” is to me. My “undocumented-ness,” too, however, is not a golden ticket to absolute genius in my country, nationalism, or cross-border identities. For the Chicano Studies-initiated, there are libraries full of books to help answer this question; but here, I posit a few things to chew on.
Mexican teammates toss goalkeeper Guillermo Ochoa into the air after their 3-0 victory over Czechia in Group A.
(Molly Darlington / Getty Images)
After the deluge of 2026 World Cup tequila brand activations, and the more recent midterm elections in the U.S. — which, with the help of Latino voters, resulted in a “blue tsunami” of Democratic wins — we’re reaching the end of two very rousing years for Latinas/os. As the summer of 2025 was hallmarked by Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids that have continued to wreak havoc, especially in California, this time has called for a reckoning with our own conservatism, as well as the need for stronger leadership.
When I look back on the times I felt angry in gatherings to celebrate Latinidad — or even my own Mexican identity — I realize that I just want more from us and for us.
The answer to my questions, then, must not come from just ruminating; I must talk to people who know more than I do.
Over the years, I’ve known Rudy Mondragón as a key expert in the intersection of boxing, race and culture, particularly in the ways fighters use the ring to perform identity, belonging and resistance. As an assistant professor at Loyola Marymount University, he asks us to take seriously the few minutes before the bell goes off in the boxing ring: Notice what flags are draped over the athletes’ shoulders, what kind of music booms through the arenas, the colors stitched into their trunks. These were all the things I had been trying to understand as merely symbolic.
Mexico national soccer team fan Hector Chavez, also known as Caramelo, poses with a replica of the World Cup trophy in Iztapalapa, a Mexico City neighborhood, in 2022.
(Kevin C. Cox / Getty Images)
For many Mexicans, both here and in our home country, boxing is one of the main sports we grow up watching — whether we wanted to or not. When I arrived here, I became a huge fan of the L.A. Lakers and Dodgers, but the only times my family would gather around a TV or have carne asadas would be for the big boxing matches. As I grew older, I began to cheer for key fighters, many of whom are working class; and I can profoundly appreciate the greater legacy that the sport carries in our communities.
One of the key things I wanted to deeply understand, however, was why this impact was so huge for our community. Cynically, I’ve asked: Why do so many fighters say “Viva Mexico,” but don’t give back to Mexico? What do they stand for?
“You’re not saying that you support the federal government, the nation-state,” explains Mondragón over a Zoom call, with a framed Muhammad Ali photograph behind him. “It’s their way of expressing their version, their definition, which is infinite in terms of how we can express and socially construct being Latino, being Mexican.”
When Canelo wins and says “Viva Mexico,” it becomes our victory. Many of his high-profile fights have been with non-Mexicans too, thus creating a sense of cultural representation among other Latinos who may be forced to see his fights, but can appreciate the intense passion and joy when he wins.
But the same people who create that sense of belonging can also police its boundaries. Mondragón points to Canelo distinguishing Ryan Garcia as Mexican American, rather than Mexican. That matters, because someone with Canelo’s cultural power can help define who the public understands as authentically Mexican.
Mondragón warns, however, against expecting athletes to communicate politics in exactly the vocabulary that activists or academics might prefer. Public gestures can carry political meaning, even when they don’t resemble conventional activism. Their contributions are still impactful and meaningful, but we don’t need to look far to also see how others are expanding what belonging can be.
A portrait of professional fighter and actor Kali Reis.
(Justin J Wee / For The Times)
Kali Reis, a former world champion boxer and actor who identifies with the Seaconke Wampanoag Tribe, offers a different kind of entrance.
Mondragón told me that when Reis fights, she reaches out to Native communities whose lands she is fighting on and invites them to help create her walk to the ring. Rather than simply arriving with her own symbols and asking an audience to recognize them, she has invited members of those communities to walk alongside her — even allowing them to choose music culturally specific to their nation.
In Reis’ telling, Mondragón says, the entrance borrows from the opening of a powwow: The people walking with her are not for decoration; they are helping bless the space before she enters it.
I keep coming back to that distinction: Reis is still performing belonging. She is still using music, clothing and ceremony to tell thousands of people who she is. But she is not necessarily drawing a circle around herself and declaring who belongs inside it — she is asking the people whose land she enters to help draw the circle with her.
In a sport so often expensively sold through flags, borders, and at times racist and xenophobic rivalries, her entrance offers another possibility: What if pride did not require making the borders of belonging smaller but invited more people into its making? What if nationalism alone isn’t what creates community?
Bad Bunny at the Super Bowl LX halftime show in February. His powerful performance illustrated the complexity of the Latino community.
(Eric Thayer / Los Angeles Times)
Vanessa J. Díaz, who recently appeared on the De Los podcast, pushes the argument further: Art, music, dance and cultural expression are not necessarily separate from material resistance, but they help us imagine what community can truly look like for Latinos.
Also a professor at LMU, Díaz has become the leading chronicler of Bad Bunny’s relationship to Puerto Rican identity and resistance. She is the co-author, with Petra Rivera-Rideau, of “P FKN R: How Bad Bunny Became the Global Voice of Puerto Rican Resistance,” a book that places his music and political expression within a much longer history of Puerto Rican cultural resistance.
“If we are talking about resistance in comprehensive terms, then we make room for lots of different kinds of resistance,” Díaz tells me in a series of phone calls.
For her, the symbolism is the material; it is the powerful arm to meet the ends of empowerment and healing for our community. Beyond all the anthems Bad Bunny played during his halftime show — songs that carried me from my 20s into my 30s — it was him literally painting a picture of how complex our Latino community is at the Super Bowl, which in my opinion, remains the most powerful Latino cultural moment in recent times. (And, yes, this means I count Gaga as an honorary Latina now. Deal with it.)
Bad Bunny, to some, has campaigned for candidates, funded political billboards and unequivocally impacted his Puerto Rico — extending the idea of what nationalism is. He also shows how expanding it can be a more impactful form of pride, rather than just touting your country’s name.
“[But] can one person do everything?” asks Díaz. “Is one person responsible for all of the different components of a movement? I don’t think so.”
However, she adds: “Every movement has [to have] a soundtrack.”
In Puerto Rico, she argues, music has never simply accompanied resistance; it has been one of the ways people practice it. From bomba carrying messages of revolt and abolition to reggaetón emerging from poor Afro-Puerto Rican communities and narrating experiences of racism, poverty, and policing, culture has long been one of the places Puerto Ricans make politics.
And perhaps that is what I had been missing when I first started asking what comes after “¡Viva México!” — the song, the dance, the flag, the entrance, even the cry itself do not have to be the thing that comes before political action. Sometimes they, the universal one, are already doing something: preserving memory, teaching history, finding one another, or simply giving people enough joy to imagine themselves as a people worth fighting for.
Puerto Rico, to some, is a modern colony, a settler colonial state to the U.S. But though its political context is different from that of Mexico, it can offer a deeper imagination of what is possible. Benito did not need to include Chicanos, or any other Latin American flag at the Super Bowl — but choosing to display those visuals alone are what truly got our community together in ways a simple gesture just can’t.
The anger I felt during the World Cup, I know now, was just a yearning for more. In an ideal timeline, Mexico would have made it to the finals and won. Los Angeles would have erupted into a parade — and I would have marched across the border to reunite with my family. In this world, there are no ICE agents; there is only music; there are only long hugs.
Maybe that is why I still feel angry, but that is also why I will keep returning to music and gatherings — because what I long for is not the validation of the nation-state. What I really long for is community.
Randall Winston has declared victory in his campaign for Seat 6 on the Los Angeles Community College District Board of Trustees, in what was the closest of three races in last week’s election for the seven-member board.
Second-place finisher Gabriel Buelna has conceded.
According to the count released Monday, Winston had 38.7% of the vote and Buelna had 31.7%, followed by community college professor Roberto David LaCarra in third place and realtor Tonia Arey in fourth.
To win a seat on the seven-member board, candidates need only a plurality of votes, not a majority.
Winston declared victory in an email to supporters over the weekend.
“You voted and told your friends and family why this race mattered,” Winston told supporters on Saturday. “Because of you, the Los Angeles Community College District will have a trustee who believes our colleges are where this city builds opportunity.”
In a brief interview Monday, Buelna said he called Winston to concede and wished him the best in his new role.
Seat 6 turned out to be the most contentious of the races for the Board of Trustees, which oversees the largest community college district in the country with some 200,000 students, most of whom are low-income.
During the campaign, Buelna and Arey accused Winston of misleading the public by describing himself as an architect and an educator, when his full-time job is deputy mayor of infrastructure and climate resilience under Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass.
Winston responded by saying his first professional degree is in architecture, he is licensed in the field and he will be teaching a leadership class at West L.A. College this fall.
Helping boost him to victory was a key endorsement from the community college district’s faculty union, which put significant financial resources behind his candidacy.
Between Sept. 20 and Oct. 17, the union contributed $800,000 to a committee supporting Winston and the two other winning candidates, helping produce slate mailers that hit the doors of voters, according to campaign filings.
James McKeever, president of the faculty union, AFT Local 1521, declined to discuss many details of the union’s decision, but told The Times that the executive board wanted to go “in a different direction” and saw Winston as the best candidate.
In the race for Seat 2, incumbent Steve Veres held a 40.91% to 33.48% lead over educator Adriana Cabrera, who was in second.
Cabrera did not return emails seeking comment, and Veres said she had not called to concede. As of Monday afternoon, Veres had nearly 97,000 more votes than Cabrera with an estimated 44,000 more ballots to be counted county-wide, according to the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk.
In Seat 4, Darryn Harris, a government and community affairs officer for St. John’s Community Health, has the biggest lead of all.
According to the latest numbers, Harris had 57.3% of the vote in a seven-person race. Healthcare workforce specialist Elaine Alaniz was in second place with 14.4%.
Press Forward, the nonprofit launched in 2023 to strengthen local news as outlets struggle with economic and technological changes, announced Tuesday that it has completed investing nearly $600 million in journalism organizations, about two years ahead of schedule.
However, Press Forward Executive Director Dale Anglin said the organization’s work is far from complete. Not only will the group continue raising and investing money, it will also expand its range of initiatives to support journalism.
“The industry is going through an incredible transformation,” Anglin told the Associated Press in an interview. “It took 20 years to get to this point — if not longer. It’s going to take us a while to get out of it.”
According to “ The State of Local News 2026 ” from Northwestern University, the number of news deserts – counties that have no locally based professional sources of news – grew by 12% this year to 238, as advertising and audiences continued to decline. Though there were dozens of newsrooms started this year, more than two newspapers closed for each outlet launched.
Anglin said she has had success convincing more funders to support Press Forward, which launched in 2023 through donations from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Democracy Fund and 19 other funders. The nonprofit now has 144 funders and has explained how longer-term support for journalism is necessary, similar to arts or education funding in a community.
Press Forward has established a $21-million impact investing fund to support outlets with small loans they would likely not get elsewhere. It already has 50 local Press Forward chapters that have invested $87 million to strengthen journalism in their communities, including $53 million in the past year.
“The challenges in local news were really kind of universal,” Anglin said. “But it turns out, as we have learned over the last three years, that a lot of the solutions are local.”
Press Forward Chicago sees promise in pooled funds
Tracy Baim, executive director of Press Forward Chicago, said her chapter believes it has developed part of the solution to journalism’s funding problems.
In addition to accepting traditional donations, Press Forward Chicago has established a pooled fund, which uses donations from multiple organizations to support specific initiatives.
“It is a way to tiptoe into journalism funding,” said Baim, adding that many foundations, especially smaller ones, saw supporting individual news outlets as too intimidating. She said the potential pitfalls of being associated with a controversial project or being accused of influencing coverage because of their donations kept some foundations from getting involved.
“A pooled fund mitigates those risks,” Baim said. Chicago’s fund further minimizes risk for donors by distributing the donations to multiple outlets.
Its first pooled fund was used last year to fund increased immigration reporting. Nearly $1 million was collected from 12 donors and distributed to 12 organizations, ranging from national outlets like ProPublica and major local outlets like Chicago Public Media and Block Club Chicago to smaller outlets serving Latino and Chinese communities. The donations allowed the outlets to add reporting, editing and presentation capacity right before the Department of Homeland Security launched the immigration operation “Midway Blitz” in Chicago.
A second pooled fund focused on education and allowed outlets to increase coverage of the Chicago Board of Education elections.
“We are making these outlets stronger,” Baim said. “We’re not just giving an organization a grant to cover stuff. We are amplifying their work so that they can get new subscribers and that’s a pipeline of potential donors.”
Knight Foundation looks to local funding
Supporting that sort of sustainable growth is the next phase of Press Forward’s work. And Knight Foundation President and Chief ExecutiveMaribel Perez Wadsworth said that is more significant than co-founding the organization.
“Announcing half a billion dollars in national funding toward journalism was important in terms of demonstrating the urgency and the importance of supporting local journalism,” Wadsworth said. “But the more important thing, ultimately, is to really catalyze and create deeper awareness at the local level about the essential nature of access to reliable news and information as a public good.”
There are signs that donors, both big and small, are making journalism a priority because it provides an information base that supports other initiatives. Last month, the Ford Foundation, one of the world’s largest grantmakers, said that supporting journalism would become one of its priorities as it overhauls its giving to focus on the building blocks of democracy. The much smaller nonprofit Public Media Co. has made providing trustworthy local information a cornerstone of its work to keep public radio stations operating following ongoing federal funding cuts.
Perez Wadsworth said that having local and regional funders work together to keep local news outlets open in their communities is a more sustainable solution to many journalism outlets’ budgetary problems.
“Philanthropy writ large is not a business model,” she said. “And it’s not sustainable to believe that philanthropy is just going to always support whatever the thing is, no matter how important.”
‘No silver bullet’ for economic woes
Press Forward’s Anglin said there is “no silver bullet” to solve journalism’s economic problems. But philanthropy can help strengthen news outlets until they figure out a new business model that will make them sustainable.
Press Forward plans to promote solutions through public policy changes, encouraging cooperation and resource-sharing between outlets and supplying infrastructure and capacity-building grants. Its chapters, which operate independently, have met a wide spectrum of needs — from helping defray some Minnesota outlets’ cost of covering the surge of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in Minneapolis earlier this year to training local residents in Kentucky to become reporters.
“You can’t nonprofit your way out of this problem,” Anglin said. “We understand that some things will still close. But we are building for the long term.”
Last week’s midterm elections made history across the country, and Los Angeles was no exception: Asian Americans will now hold all three citywide elective offices — mayor, city attorney and controller — for the first time.
Mayor-elect Nithya Raman came to the U.S. from India as a child. City Atty.-elect Marissa Roy’s mother also emigrated from India. And City Controller Kenneth Mejia, who is Filipino, won reelection to a second four-year term in June.
“This is a historic moment for the nation and certainly for our city and state, and for [Asian American and Pacific Islander] communities,” said Manjusha P. Kulkarni, executive director of the AAPI Equity Alliance, which advocates for resources and funding for the coalition of community organizations it represents. “We feel that the work that we’ve done across many decades has come to fruition in seeing progressive Asian American representation in our city.”
Kulkarni noted that Asian American voters have trended more progressive over the decades, after years of being pigeonholed as largely conservative. Raman and Roy were both endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America, and Mejia was recommended by the leftist group.
Across the country, voters made history at the ballot box: California voted in its first Latino governor, Texas elected its first Latina governor and Georgia will have its first Black female governor. Michigan elected Abdul El-Sayed, who will become the first Muslim in the U.S. Senate.
The two largest U.S. cities will now be headed by South Asian Americans: New York City’s Zohran Mamdani, born to Indian parents, and Raman, who arrived from India to the U.S. at the age of 6. Raman became the first Asian American woman and the first South Asian elected to the City Council when she won her seat in 2020.
In her first address as mayor-elect last week, Raman acknowledged the significance of voters putting their faith in her at a time when the Trump administration has terrified immigrant communities with mass deportations.
“This city has opened its arms to people to come and build their dreams here, and the idea that Angelenos voted for an immigrant to be their next mayor at this moment in American history is so deeply moving to me,” she said.
Roy frequently invoked her mother’s immigrant story and her Indian heritage on the campaign trail. As a founding board member of the Asian Democrats of Los Angeles County, she had key Asian American backers, including California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta and San Francisco City Atty. David Chiu.
Roy, whose campaign was infused with Bollywood needle drops on Instagram, is also the co-creator of a “Raman Rager” Bollywood dance mix for a South Asian-themed fundraiser that has since taken on a life of its own.
Roy said in an interview that her win in last week’s election represents a moment for the city’s broader immigrant community. When she won, she received Whatsapp messages from family members in India who were watching closely and was featured in an India Weekly article.
“I think this is really a significant moment, not just for the Asian American community, but for the immigrant community to have an immigrant mayor, to have a city attorney who is the daughter of an immigrant,” Roy said. “This is Los Angeles sending a message about who it is.”
Asians are the fastest growing population in the U.S., outpacing Black, Latino and white populations, according to the Pew Research Center. Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders represent about 12% of the city’s population, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
And they constitute more than 1 million eligible voters in L.A. County, according to an analysis of census data by Asian Americans Advancing Justice Southern California.
“Our communities have helped build Los Angeles, and it’s time our political leadership reflects the enormous role we play in shaping its future,” Dahni Tsuboi, chief executive of the organization, said in a statement.
On election night last week, Zahra Hajee, president of Asian Democrats of L.A. County, hopped from Roy’s election night party — which featured a henna station and a victorious Roy who flashed glittering bangles — to Raman’s, where Mejia gave an impassioned speech as a Raman win looked likely. After Raman took the lead by early Wednesday morning, Hajee, who is Pakistani American and Muslim, became emotional.
“To be able to see two South Asian women leaders — I didn’t think I’d see this in my lifetime,” Hajee said. “Being able to have those shared experiences with our next city attorney and next mayor is just such a surreal feeling and a connection I thought I’d never have.”
The group, which has about a thousand members, was among the first to endorse Roy’s campaign and supported Raman early on. The organization also has a working relationship with Mejia, who is a member of the Green Party. It also helped introduce Raman to key constituencies; she set up an event with small business owners in L.A.’s Little Bangladesh neighborhood near Koreatown, for example.
Nina Long, policy manager for AAPI Force, a progressive statewide coalition, said the candidates’ outreach reflected the nuances of the community, reaching groups including Chinese, Korean and Filipino voters.
“They did not treat AAPIs as a voter bloc to be taken for granted,” she said. “Each of the candidates was really savvy about the diversity of AAPI communities in Los Angeles.”
The dominance of Asian Americans in this election is also a display of the growing political influence of Asian American and Pacific Islander voters.
“For a very long time, the AAPI community was considered a quote unquote margin of victory in Democratic politics,” Hajee said. “We have shown our community is not just a margin of victory but a true base of voters.”
Mejia acknowledged the moment as a “huge feat” for progressive values being championed by Asian Americans.
“Representation is great, but it’s also showing that we have people running on great values centered on people, not special interests,” he said in an interview. “The fact that we are all AAPI is amazing, but the credit is what we stand for and what we believe in.”
He said his views were shaped by having parents who worked hard but were exposed to more conservative values and were expected to keep their heads down and not ask questions. But as life has become harder, more Asian Americans, especially young people, want better, he said.
“I believe what you’re seeing right now, this movement in politics, is that so many people are paying attention, especially those from immigrant communities,” he said.
There are currently three Asian Americans on the L.A. City Council, including Raman, who represents District 4. The other two are Ysabel Jurado of District 14 and John Lee of District 12.
Jurado became the first Filipina elected to the City Council when she won in 2024. In a statement, she said, seeing three Asian American leaders elected to citywide office felt deeply personal.
“It reflects generations of organizing by communities who fought to be heard and opened doors for those who would follow,” she said, adding that she looked forward to pushing for policies that would make living in L.A. more affordable. “We have an opportunity to show what greater representation can mean in people’s everyday lives.”
Times staff writers Noah Haggerty and Sonja Sharp contributed to this report.
Jane Kim, a progressive former San Francisco supervisor with no insurance experience, appears to have won the race to be California’s industry commissioner, topping veteran legislator Ben Allen, who represents the Pacific Palisades community devastated by the January 2025 wildfires.
Kim, 49, declared victory Friday in the contest to replace outgoing Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara, ahead of a final vote count. However, a narrow gap between the two Democratic candidates has widened since election day. She also topped June’s primary field.
“We pay into the system so that when the worst happens, we’re protected. Californians have kept our end of that bargain, but insurance companies have broken their side of the promise by denying, delaying and underpaying valid claims and dropping coverage. Voters made clear in this election that they want — and deserve — that promise restored,” she said in a statement that called the vote a “rejection of the status quo.”
Allen, 48, issued a statement noting that he had congratulated Kim earlier in the day and wished her well.
“Jane ran a strong race, and it appears that she has won,” he said. “Assuming that is the case, I desperately want her to succeed, because if she succeeds, the state succeeds, especially the families in need that we’ve been fighting for across the state.”
“I ran for this office because of what I saw after fires devastated my community and region. Families in the Palisades and Altadena who had paid their premiums for decades and did everything right and who are now struggling to get the help they need,” Allen added.
Election officials continue to tally the votes in the race, and no winner had been declared by the Associated Press as of Friday afternoon.
The downballot contest didn’t draw attention like the race for governor or Los Angeles mayor, even as Kim will take office amid a state home insurance crisis in which private carriers have raised rates and dropped hundreds of thousands of residential policyholders amid rising wildfire risks.
The January 2025 wildfires that devastated Altadena, Pacific Palisades and nearby communities exacerbated the problems, with widespread complaints that some insurers were illegally delaying, underpaying or denying claims — including from smoke-damaged homes . The situation prompted investigations by the department and Los Angeles County.
The commissioner oversees an office with 1,400 employees that regulates more than 1,700 home, auto, workers’ compensation and other insurers, as well as more than 510,000 agents, brokers, adjusters, bail agents and other business entities.
Kim, the daughter of Korean immigrants who attended Stanford and has a UC Berkeley law degree, entered the race with little statewide recognition but serious progressive bona fides.
During her time on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors from 2011 to 2019, she led campaigns to sharply raise the minimum wage and make the local community college tuition free. She also served as California political director for the 2020 presidential run of Bernie Sanders, the progressive independent senator from Vermont who stumped for her commissioner’s bid.
Kim built her campaign around a novel proposal to establish a state-run insurance pool largely funded by homeowners that would cover wildfire claims and invest in programs to reduce fire risks for homeowners and communities. Insurers would continue to cover other claims.
The plan responds to the growing number of homeowners who can’t find insurance and are forced into the California FAIR Plan, the state’s privately operated insurer of last resort, which typically offers more expensive and less broad coverage than the open market. Though the plan’s growth has slowed, as of Sept. 30 it insured 677,000 residential policyholders, up from 271,000 four years earlier.
Kim was criticized during the campaign by Allen and others for failing to provide details on how her so-called “single payer” system would work. In late October, she released a policy brief with more details, including how coverage would be capped at a replacement cost to fully rebuild the typical California home, with more expensive homes needing additional private wildfire insurance.
The novel plan would require buy-in from Gov.-elect Xavier Becerra, the Legislature and the industry.
Allen, who called the plan unworkable and too expensive, campaigned on a platform that called attention to his three Senate terms in the Legislature, where he authored bills that cracked down on insurers and offered consumers more protection. They included higher up-front payouts in fire losses without requiring itemization by policyholders during states of emergency, and requiring insurers to fix any deficiencies uncovered by department examinations.
Kim was outspent by Allen, who raised $3.7 million compared to Kim’s $1.5 million. He also was the recipient of $2.3 million of spending by independent political action committees on his behalf.
Although Allen said he would not take insurance industry money for the race, Kim sought to tie him to the industry through past donations to his prior campaigns for office.
In her victory speech, she said insurers “lined up” behind Allen, a characterization he rejected.
The attempt to tie Allen to the industry followed controversies surrounding Lara, who The Times reported last year took at least 32 international trips but consistently failed to disclose who paid for luxury hotels, airfare and fine dining, while soliciting charity donations from those with business before the agency.
Lara has denied any wrongdoing and has pointed to his Sustainable Insurance Strategy as the reason for the slowing of the FAIR Plan’s growth. The strategy provided insurers with concessions such as the right to charge policyholders for the reinsurance carriers must buy to protect themselves from catastrophes, such as the January 2025 wildfires.
Kim’s victory brought congratulations across the business and political spectrum.
Denni Ritter, vice president of state government relations for the American Property Casualty Insurance Assn., a leading trade association for home, auto and business insurers, said the group was “looking forward” to working with Kim, Becerra and lawmakers to resolve the state’s insurance issues.
“While recent reforms are beginning to stabilize the market, the insurance crisis is far from over, and a full recovery will take time. Protecting this progress is critical. Costly new mandates or regulatory actions that drive up costs or limit coverage options risk reversing this progress and worsening the crisis,” Ritter said in a statement.
The California Working Families Party, a grassroots progressive political organization that Kim served as founding director, said the “cozy relationship between the California Insurance Commissioner and the insurance industry is over. Jane’s bold proposals and plans for real accountability for insurers overcame a tsunami of special interest spending against her.”
When I recall the great restaurants, culture and art found in Los Angeles’ Little Tokyo, one story that comes to mind is the tranquility and resilience of Higashi Honganji Buddhist Temple.
The roughly 1½-acre parcel at the corner of 3rd Street and Central Avenue offers peace amid the noise and bustle of downtown. It’s an oasis I first learned about five years ago when an unknown vandal broke into the sanctuary and stole some lanterns while burning others and vandalizing the facility.
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Hallock jumps into the history of one of L.A.’s most vibrant neighborhoods and picks a few of the many places and experiences that make Little Tokyo unique. Let’s jump into a few of them.
(Laurie Ochoa / Los Angeles Times)
Japanese breakfast at Azay
Azay, a restaurant founded by the late chef Akira Hirose and run by his son Philip and wife, JoAnn, is one of the few places in Los Angeles serving traditional Japanese breakfast, and this one is stellar.
Composed of several small dishes, it feels like a celebration and draws a weekend crowd (reservations recommended). A wooden tray arrives at the table laden with jewel-like dishes such as grilled black cod and rolled omelet. Or order the daily bento or à la carte items, including custardy, savory chawanmushi or curry potato croquettes with shiso aioli.
Visit the family’s legacy shop next door, Anzen Hardware, for Japanese kitchen goods, knives and housewares. Philip Hirose also regularly programs community workshops and pop-ups.
Pro tip: Park all day in the Aiso Parking Garage across the street at 101 N. Judge John Aiso St., named after the first Japanese American to hold a judicial position in the continental U.S.
(Gary Coronado/For The Times)
Mexican American muralist Robert Vargas, who was born near Little Tokyo in Boyle Heights, painted a 150-foot image of baseball superstar Shohei Ohtani on the side of the 11-story Miyako Hotel, unveiled in the spring of 2024.
The painting, titled “L.A. Rising,” is meant to promote a cultural bridge between communities celebrating Dodgers pride. Vargas painted two versions of Ohtani, the best two-way player in Major League Baseball history (he’s the first to hit at least 50 home runs and steal at least 50 bases in a single season).
The mural shows Ohtani both pitching and hitting, and you can see him come to life by using an augmented reality feature. Scan a QR code located beneath the mural and point your phone camera at the image to see Ohtani swing the bat and pitch.
(Jeni Afuso/For The Times)
Shop for souvenirs at Bunkado, where Little Tokyo began
Gift shop Bunkado stands at the location of Little Tokyo’s beginning, where Hamanosuke Sugita opened a restaurant called Kame (which means “turtle,” a symbol of longevity) in 1884, the first Japanese-owned business in Los Angeles.
In 2022, the L.A. City Council commemorated the site and “the birth of Little Tokyo” with a plaque and street sign. Bunkado was founded in the same location in the mid-1940s by renowned Japanese American oil painter Tokio Ueyama and his wife, Suye, after they returned from incarceration in the World World II internment camps.
The name means “house of culture,” and the Ueyamas built an artists’ hub and eventually became important sellers and importers of recorded Japanese music. The store is now owned by their niece, Irene Tsukada Simonian, and sells Japanese ceramics, art tools, incense, toys, T-shirts and postcards.
(Illustrations by Lindsey Made This; photograph by Monica Schipper / Getty Images for The Recording Academy)
Today’s recipe
(Katrina Frederick / For The Times)
Los Angeles food writer Carolynn Carreño believes the shift in the season marks an opportunity to embrace pumpkins this fall. Carreño’s twist, however, is telling her readers, who love fresh and organic ingredients, that it’s OK to use canned pumpkins. In fact, the canned product beats fresh when baking loaves, cookies and pancakes. She included several recipes here. Take a deep breath and try it out.
Photo of the day
Construction platforms are visible beneath and on the sides of the Vincent Thomas Bridge as vehicles travel across the span above the Port of Los Angeles in San Pedro. Caltrans is preparing for a 16-month closure of the bridge.
Have a great day, from the Essential California team
Jack Dolan, investigative reporter Hugo Martín, assistant editor, Fast Break desk Kevinisha Walker, multiplatform editor Andrew J. Campa, weekend writer Karim Doumar, head of Newsletters
The new head of English rugby league has backed a call for Prime Minister Andy Burnham to approve a £30m five-year community funding plan for the sport.
Former England international Jon Wilkin has appealed directly to Burnham and Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy, both rugby league fans, to pledge government money to a rugby league-based social impact project.
Ian Nolan, the new chief executive of the Rugby Football League, has supported Wilkin’s plea, issued on BBC Radio 5 Live’s Rugby League show on Monday.
That initiative is designed to help create sporting, educational and employment opportunities in Papua New Guinea, Tonga, Samoa and Fiji, and is being led by the Australian Rugby League Commission – the country’s rugby league governing body.
Wilkin has argued that a similar plan for the north of England would benefit deprived communities.
He said: “Australia has recognised rugby league’s potential as a vehicle for social change, committing hundreds of millions to developing communities, especially across the Pacific. Why shouldn’t Britain show the same ambition for the north?
“The infrastructure already exists, the clubs, the foundations, the school and community relationships are already well established. What’s missing is a coordinated strategy and meaningful government investment.
“The ask would be simple: For the government to establish a £30m five-year Northern Rugby League social impact partnership, bringing together the RFL, professional clubs, community foundations, local authorities and government departments.
“The programme would target disadvantaged northern communities.”
Nolan, a former Manchester United executive who took up his role with the RFL on 1 October, suggested the social benefits of such an initiative would be felt more quickly because rugby league clubs are already established in their communities.
“When the government normally invest in community hubs and new things to generate something, they tend to be brand new,” he said. “And it’s really difficult then to attract people to go there because it’s a new habit, it’s a new place.
“But rugby clubs are already established in the most deprived towns in the UK. And that’s the difference. People already go there. Families already rely on them for even just moving around.”
BBC Sport has contacted the Department for Culture, Media and Sport for comment.
The Los Angeles Community College District is the largest community college district in the nation, serving 200,000 students with a budget of $10 million.
Voters will elect three members to the board.
Seat 2
Steven F. Veres
Veres is a member of the Los Angeles Community College District Board of Trustees and works as a state political adviser. He says he has worked to strengthen job training programs and improve graduation rates and wants to make college as affordable as possible.
Robert Payne
Payne taught at L.A. Mission College, worked on movie crews and ran an import business. He would focus on low enrollment growth. He also wants to make community colleges “cheaper, faster, better” in part by offering students more training for specific jobs and less expensive online textbooks.
Kristina Irwin
Irwin serves on the general advisory board at Santa Monica College. She previously served on the board of trustees at Palisades Charter High School. She wants to offer students more tools to succeed in college and to establish “preentry” programs in every local high school to better prepare students for community college.
Adriana Cabrera
Cabrera served as president of the Central Alameda Neighborhood Council and co-founded Empowering Youth in South Central. She wants to make student services easier to navigate and to strengthen financial aid and other support, including for food, housing, child care and mental health.
Roy Payan
Payan has suspended his campaign.
Seat 4
Nancy Pearlman
Pearlman is an environmentalist who served on the LACC Board of Trustees from 2001 to 2017 and taught part time at all nine colleges. She would focus on improving low enrollment while ensuring students are given the necessary support and resources to succeed. She also cites the need to make sure faculty receive equal pay.
Darryn Harris
Harris is a government and community affairs officer for St. John’s Community Health and teaches at Santa Monica College. Harris wants to tackle the affordability crisis blocking student achievement by building more low-cost housing on district land and making it “easier for students to get help with food, transportation, child care, and other basic needs.”
Adam Bruno
Bruno has worked as a therapist helping children and been a community college student. His main goals are to increase enrollment and make it easier for students to afford college. He’d explore student stipends as a way to make community college more affordable.
Elaine Alaniz
Alaniz serves as a public affairs specialist with the U.S. Small Business Administration’s Office of Disaster Recovery and Resilience. She wants to better prepare students for a changing workforce and ensure classroom instruction “keeps pace with a rapidly changing workforce” in the age of artificial intelligence and other technologies.
Isidro J. Armenta
Armenta did not reply to The Times’ survey.
Priscilla Umana
Umana works as an American Sign Language interpreter. She says the district’s biggest challenge “is the high percentage of students experiencing housing insecurity, homelessness, and food insecurity.” She would work with the district to expand affordable housing, work-study opportunities and food aid.
Jason R. Aula
Aula has worked as a political campaign consultant and in the world of mobile apps. He considers fraud a major issue including people posing as community college students to steal financial aid. He proposed a moratorium on noncitizens attending district schools and a focus on pandemic learning loss.
Seat 6
Gabriel Buelna
Buelna serves on the board of trustees. He also is an attorney and teaches history and political science at Cal State Northridge. He said a key issue is making college more affordable to students and ensuring that they graduate. He also said the board must conduct strong fiscal oversight of the billions in voter-approved bond funds.
Tonia Arey
Arey has worked in real estate, public advocacy and community engagement. Arey would work to implement campus safety plans, support additional academic advising and career education and more closely “examine spending, contracts, program outcomes and administrative costs to ensure resources reach classrooms and directly support students.”
Randall Winston
Winston works as a licensed architect and attorney and serves as Los Angeles’ deputy mayor of infrastructure and climate resilience under Mayor Karen Bass. Winston’s priorities for the district include ensuring colleges are a pathway to opportunity and good jobs, that students can afford basic needs and people historically shut out of higher education are let in.
San Francisco artist Barry McGee, 60, walked through Jeffrey Deitch’s Santa Monica Boulevard gallery on a recent Wednesday, while a small army of friends went about their business — some moving objects, others equipped with power tools. A few stood near a closet-size replica of a 99 Cents Only store, an homage to the weeklong art takeover McGee staged at the shuttered Wilshire Boulevard retailer in February.
Gallery visitors were careful not to step on the sprawling assemblage of photographs, drawings and artifacts scattered across the floor. Many were destined for the large installation McGee’s friends helped to assemble for “Another Round,” his recently opened exhibition, which runs through Jan. 30.
Like “99 CENT,” McGee’s aim is for the Deitch show to serve as a gathering place. A makeshift storefront houses an “anarchist bookstore” with activities organized by Matthew James-Wilson, who operates the Heavy Manners lending library and gallery in Echo Park. Events planned during the show’s three-month run include French beading and papier-mâché workshops, clothed figure drawing, and “music shows.”
Adjacent to the bookstore, the untitled work bends and bulges on a plywood structure. It serves as a portal into McGee’s artistic life: Framed messages, photographs of friends, colorful, textile-inspired imagery and his father’s sketches of cars on napkins are grouped together in a bold display.
An untitled installation piece by Barry McGee at Jeffrey Deitch gallery. McGee is showing at the gallery for the first time in 20 years.
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
A related installation is in the collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and has also been shown at the Oakland Museum of California. “It feels like something entirely new this time and definitely unplanned,” McGee said of the work taking shape at the Deitch show.
The exhibition is billed as McGee’s first gallery exhibit with Deitch in more than 20 years, although the artist and dealer have collaborated on projects since the 1990s. McGee came up in San Francisco’s graffiti scene in the 1980s, developing a visual language under the moniker Twist that included faces, liquor bottles and stylized screws. Deitch traces McGee’s primary influences to the city’s punk, skate, surf and graffiti cultures, as well as its hand-painted signs. McGee has exhibited at the Hammer Museum, Fondazione Prada and the 2001 Venice Biennale.
When asked whether he was bringing street art inside for the Deitch show, McGee pushed back. “That’s not my goal at all,” he said.
McGee long ago achieved cult status and comes from a tradition of graffiti that he sees as separate from work made for a gallery. When he began tagging in the 1980s, he said, it wasn’t to create something for the market: “There’s no product at the end.” McGee’s connections across the graffiti scene and the gallery world attract artists and audiences alike for exuberant gatherings, sometimes with complications, as when he transformed the vacant 99 Cents Only Store into a pop-up resembling an indoor flea market during L.A.’s Art Week.
The tagger-turned-blue-chip artist Barry McGee reopened a former 99 Cents Only on Wilshire Boulevard for a one-week art fair event.
(Mariella Rudi)
McGee and Bay Area artist Tom Franco worked with Deitch and the Hole, a gallery that has since closed its Los Angeles location, to stage the exhibition. McGee’s devoted following came out in force: Deitch estimated that about 25,000 people visited. “L.A. really showed up for that,” McGee said.
The event also drew complaints. Several neighboring businesses and apartment buildings were tagged, though McGee said the graffiti was cleaned up. In July, L.A. Taco found that several participating artists had not been paid for work sold during the exhibition. Kathy Grayson, who runs the Hole in New York, wrote in an email that all artists and vendors have since been paid. “It was a gigantic undertaking,” she wrote of staging the exhibit, adding that she had stepped in to help McGee realize his “dream-come-true project.”
Barry McGee is a celebrated street artist who is equally comfortable in a blue-chip world. He brings both sensibilities to bear in his new show, “Another Round,” at Jeffrey Deitch.
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
While McGee has no plans to revive the concept, he has created a miniature replica of the 99 Cents Only Store at the gallery, complete with the store’s iconic blue-and-white floor. “The element of surprise is always the best thing,” he said.
Throughout the gallery, McGee’s paintings, drawings and found objects are displayed alongside work by what he estimates will be “around 200” like-minded artists, including C.R. Stecyk III, Chito K.K. and Chris Lux, who mounted two stained-glass works beneath the gallery’s skylights.
“When we do a show with Barry, we get the whole community,” Deitch said. “That’s one of the great things about it.”
Although the exhibition bears his name, McGee is wary of being the center of attention. “In this day and age, a solo anything seems ridiculous,” he said. “The ego of the artist is a tricky thing.” He prefers to bring together different generations and sensibilities: “Some young people, some older people, things that you wouldn’t imagine being next to each other.”
A surfboard installation by Barry McGee is part of his show, “Another Round,” at Jeffrey Deitch gallery on Santa Monica Blvd.
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
McGee’s own work is also in dialogue with itself: Geometric patterns, inspired in part by Islamic tile designs, share the canvas with his trademark male faces with drooping, melancholic eyes.
Deitch describes McGee as possessing “a unique kind of charisma.” Though shy, “he’s very accessible and reaches people.”
Franco agrees. He had wanted to meet McGee long before they encountered each other in a San Francisco thrift store last year, and he admires his support for less established artists.
“He nurtures young people,” Franco said. “It’s amazing to see. Somebody at his level, you can easily forget how famous he is, or how accomplished he is, because he’ll hug every single person who comes through the door.”
McGee sees the relationship as reciprocal. “They’re mentoring me also. It’s really mutual,” he said. “Their visual language is so rich.”
Working into the evenings after mornings spent surfing with his crew, McGee is allowing the exhibition to take shape as it goes. His connection to surfing is visible in the gallery, where surfboards are stacked like a wooden fan.
He contrasts his freedom to improvise at Deitch with museums’ lengthy planning schedules: “Their shows are seven years out, sometimes. So there’s no room for spontaneity.”
A week before the Deitch show opened, he was still anticipating what it might become. “I still don’t know what’s going to happen,” he said.
The 16 candidates vying for three seats on the board that overseas the Los Angeles Community College District have diverse backgrounds and varying ideas — and near unanimous agreement that district leaders need to do more to meet the basic needs of students struggling to pursue their higher education goals.
The candidates include those with experience both within and outside the district, with many citing the need to better connect students in the largest community college district in the nation with good paying jobs after they graduate. The seven-member Board of Trustees are managing a 2022 voter-approved $5.3 billion bond-funded construction boom to revitalize aging campuses and build student housing and at the same time are grasping to find ways to meet the basic needs of students, the majority of whom are low-income, juggling school with jobs.
Members of the board are elected to at-large seats and do not represent a specific area. The 900-square-mile district includes the city of Los Angeles and nearby cities, including Culver City, Montebello and Burbank.
Seat 2
In Seat 2, incumbent Steve Veres is being challenged by three candidates: writer Robert Payne, business owner Kristina Irwin and educator Adriana Cabrera. Roy Payan is also on the ballot for Seat 2, but told The Times he has suspended his campaign.
Veres has served on the Board of Trustees for multiple terms and also works as a staff director and policy advisor for state Sen. Maria Elena Durazo, who previously ran the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor and will soon take a seat on the powerful Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors.
In responses to a Times questionnaire, Veres said during his 13 years on the LACCD Board he’s been able to strengthen job training programs, improve graduation rates and helped push to give students access to free and discounted food and emergency housing shelter.
Veres has the endorsement of the Los Angeles Democratic establishment, including Durazo, Mayor Karen Bass and the county Democratic party. Four members of the board of trustees support him, as does the district’s faculty and staff unions.
Between Sept. 20 and Oct. 17, a campaign committee sponsored by the faculty union has paid for nearly $150,000 worth of slate mailers in support of Veres, according to campaign finance records.
An online database of campaign finance records show the other candidates, Payne, Irwin and Cabrera, have not received campaign contributions. Those candidates did not respond to a request for comment about their fundraising.
Seat 4
Seat 4 is an open race, with seven candidates running. Incumbent Sara Hernandez is stepping down and running for state senate.
The most well-funded Seat 4 candidate is Darryn Harris, a government and community affairs officer for St. John’s Community Health, who recently started teaching a class on student skills at Santa Monica College, which is not an LACCD campus.
Harris has the support of a wide swath of Democratic politicians and organizations, as well as labor unions and six of seven current LACCD trustees.
Others running for Seat 4 include environmentalist and former board member Nancy Pearlman; therapist Adam Bruno; healthcare workforce specialist Elaine Alaniz; sign language educational interpreter Priscilla Umana; fire department employee Isidro Armenta; and business owner Jason Aula, who in response to the Times questionnaire, as well as in a recent press release, included comments about the Chinese Communist party and cannibalism.
Seat 6
Perhaps the most contested race is Seat 6, where incumbent Gabriel Buelna is facing off against Randall Winston, who serves as deputy mayor of infrastructure and climate resilience under Bass.
Buelna failed to gain a key endorsement of the district’s faculty guild, whose executive board endorsed Winston.
James McKeever, president of the faculty union, AFT Local 1521, declined to discuss many details of the union’s decision to endorse Winston, but said the executive board wanted to go “in a different direction” and saw Winston as the best candidate.
AFT 1521A, the guild representing district clerical and technical staff, issued a dual endorsement of both Winston and Buelna and has given money to both campaigns.
“I absolutely really love both,” said Andrea Edwards, president of the staff guild. “I could not choose.”
Others running for Seat 6 are community college professor Roberto David LaCarra and realtor Tonia Arey.
Buelna and Arey have accused Winston of misleading the public by listing architect as his occupation on the ballot, as well as describing himself as an educator and a teacher at West L.A. college during the campaign.
“The public doesn’t understand who he really is,” Buelna said.
Arey, who was endorsed by the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Assn., has vowed to ensure there’s more transparency and accountability surrounding the district’s nearly $10-billion annual budget.
Asked in an interview why he didn’t list deputy mayor of infrastructure as his occupation when it’s his day-to-day job, Winston said “architect seemed to resonate the most and architect is my first professional degree and fundamentally part of still how I think and act.” Winston said he is currently licensed to practice architecture but doesn’t practice day to day.
Winston said he will also start teaching a leadership class at West L.A. College later this fall and is currently helping to teach a workshop at the college on climate solutions. He also said he has mentored UCLA students.
“I believe I have met the qualifications of an educator,” he said.
The Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk‘s Office disagreed and declined to allow Winston to list educator as his occupation on the ballot, according to an Aug. 27 email from the registrar’s office to Winston.
Winston said that at the time “West LA College was still completing the administrative processing for my adjunct instructor appointment.”
Before becoming deputy mayor, Winston also ran the California Strategic Growth Council, which helps fund sustainable development.
McKeever of the faculty union said he saw Winston’s long experience in development as an architect, deputy mayor and head of the growth council as an asset to the district as trustees deal with the bond-funded building program.
“This will help maintain the integrity of the bond process as the district moves forward with new construction projects,” McKeever said.
Despite not receiving the endorsement of the faculty guild, Buelna retains the support of a number of faculty members, including the president of the academic senate, Angela Echeverri.
Echeverri said Buelna “really cares about students and education” and helped successfully push for state legislation to make it easier for students to take courses in languages other than English.
The law “really opened up community colleges to people who previously couldn’t access education,” she said.
As the nation hurtles toward a pivotal and divisive midterm election, it’s fair to wonder if people on opposite sides of the political spectrum will ever be able to again live peacefully as neighbors, to talk, and especially listen, to each other.
It’s a question co-directors Robert May and Barry Levinson and producer Jason Sosnoff set out to answer in the aftermath of the insurrection at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. It led to their five-part docuseries, “Bucks County, USA,” now on streaming on PBS.org and the PBS app, that unfolds across four years in a suburban Pennsylvania county being ripped apart by vicious school board battles poisoned by partisan personal conflicts. (The finale streams Sunday, and the full docuseries will air Oct. 29 on SoCal PBS.)
“We don’t pay enough attention to one another,” Levinson says. “We just say, ‘I’ve formed my position and I’m locked into it’ and we don’t share enough interaction where we can discuss things. Democracy requires interactions, and if we cannot find a way to find common ground, that’s my big worry.”
The series shows how Paul Martino spent a fortune supporting Republican candidates who supported reopening schools quickly after the height of the pandemic but then, more contentiously, turned their attention to the culture wars. They focused on what was being taught in the classrooms and stocked on the shelves in the school libraries, leaving teachers feeling attacked and Black families and LGBTQ+ students alienated and ostracized.
“It’s unexpected how something like that can accelerate into such a contentious situation,” Levinson says, “where well-educated people in a wonderful community can’t figure things out.”
May says national polarization is poisoning the atmosphere locally. “It became a life-or-death battle in the name of their kids, but they both felt their children would be mercilessly mistreated if they didn’t do something to save them from the other side.”
An aerial view of Bucks County, Pa., the community at the center of Robert May and Barry Levinson’s docuseries.
(SenArt Films & Baltimore Pictures)
The filmmakers followed the heated battles as people in the divided community resorted to screaming and name-calling. It frequently plays like a fun house nightmare version of “Our Town.” That’s true even of their version of the play’s Stage Manager. Two teenagers, Evi Casey and Vanessa Martino, Paul’s daughter, guide us through each episode. While the girls are best friends, Evi’s liberal mother and Vanessa’s conservative father view each other as hostile opposition.
“I think the series does a good job of showing the political division and how it affects the kids,” says Casey.
The series opens with a school choir singing “What a Wonderful World” underneath a collection of residents telling us how they’ve been berated: “I’ve been called a pedophile.” “I’ve been called a Nazi.” “I’ve been called anti-American.” “I’ve been called a dyke and a groomer.”
But the series then gets to know people in depth, allowing for far more nuance than the contentious school board meetings.
“My hope was that people can take the time to at least have a deeper conversation with somebody who they think is doing harm to their community and try and understand it better, “ Sosnoff adds. “It starts with microchanges where somebody reconsiders the way they might harm somebody else.”
Katherine “Kitty” Good Semisch, a retired Bucks County teacher and a key figure in the documentary, says the series is perfectly timed for the midterms because of its efforts to humanize everyone. “Dehumanization and demonization lead to the worst outcomes, and this kicks out from under anybody the lazy position that the people on the other side aren’t human,” she says. “Everyone is just trying to find something that works for their community.”
Sosnoff originally approached Levinson with the idea of a project that would humanize both sides, but his original idea was to bring people together at a summer camp with a facilitator so they could get to know each other better. “Barry wisely said, ‘That’s more of a sociological experiment where you’re playing God,’” Sosnoff recalls. “He said, ‘Let’s focus on a seemingly idyllic small town, like in “Our Town,” and examine what happened and why.’”
They chose Bucks County, a purple county in a purple state. “It’s not a place of extremists but people were really inflamed,” Sosnoff says, noting that some people were reluctant to speak on camera. “The climate of fear was very much alive. It was a community in trauma.”
There are brawls over policy that lead to lawsuits, but the main drama is the 2023 school board election, where the Democrats hoped to reverse the Republicans’ 6-3 majority.
While May says he is offended by “people that don’t care about other people or their right to exist,” especially when it comes to LGBTQ+ rights, he emphasized that he resisted taking sides in the documentary. “When we don’t see people as human, that’s when you lose a society.”
Indeed, Sosnoff says that while it’s bad when people are marginalized and victimized by discrimination from those in power, they’d still edit episodes to keep everything balanced, occasionally saying, “We need to give conservative characters more screen time and understand their positions.” (He also says they grew to like everyone involved.)
At the center of the drama depicted in “Bucks County, USA” is a school board election and a community grappling with political division.
(SenArt Films & Baltimore Pictures)
May says he knows some viewers will be furious with this approach, but he hopes that if they watch all five episodes, they’ll get a full picture. “You can’t just see parts of it. You need to see in order,” May says. “People reveal who they are over the five episodes. There’s an extraordinary amount of nuance, but if somebody’s saying something stupid, we have that too.”
(And don’t mistake May’s efforts at evenhandedness for a lack of passion — the day after a 30-minute joint interview with Levinson, he called me back and talked, largely uninterrupted, mostly about bias and perceptions.)
Amazingly, most people interviewed from both sides in the community support the final version.
At the center of the action are Vanessa’s mother, Aarati Martino, who ran for school board as a Republican, and Paul, who poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into school board elections.
“Overall, I am pleased,” Paul Martino says now. “There’s some things I think don’t portray the facts exactly quite right, but they recorded 500 hours and you’re not going to love everything that’s on the screen. Everybody is represented in this film.”
Martino, who never really owns the impact of him using his fortune to try to elect cultural conservatives, says he’s been “unfairly attacked” and has become “a convenient boogeyman in some of the scenes. But I’m actually not even upset about that piece of the puzzle.” (What he feels is lacking is that in 2021 he says 30% of the 300 candidates he funded around the state were Democrats.)
And Donte King, whose family endures racism both subtle and blatant, praises the filmmakers’ attempts to humanize people with contrasting viewpoints, saying he was pleased with getting to tell his story. “It allows people to connect with you,” he says. “We might have different ideologies, but we’re more alike than we are unalike, so maybe somebody who votes blue will identify with someone who votes red and vice versa.”
The closest thing to a hero in the series may be Semisch, a liberal, who shows civic courage in her efforts to build bridges, meeting one-on-one with Vonna DeArmond, a conservative elementary school teacher, and organizing events like an ice cream social and a candle-making evening. (Martino also posted an online peace offering, saying he’d buy anyone from the other side drinks; Semisch was the only one to take him up on it, but several people interviewed, including May, say Martino’s unbending personality may explain the lack of response.)
Semisch wishes that May had fact-checked some of the misleading claims by the right, but she praises the series’ subtlety. “I understand people’s frustration, but they’re leaving it to the audience to sort out who’s making sense,” she says. “My side was advocating for more books in the library and for better training for teachers to navigate difficult topics. As you watch, it seems to me that the people on the other side aren’t making as much sense.”
Near the end of the series, there’s one sweet moment of coming together between Evi’s and Vanessa’s mothers and another moment of seemingly genuine outreach by one of the town’s conservatives to King. But there’s also plenty of acrimony and recrimination in the aftermath of the school board election and one final confrontation between King and Paul Martino at a roundtable that leaves little doubt that tensions are still simmering.
Still, May says, “I remain hopeful and optimistic because I’ve seen the humanity in all of them. I think things are better there now than when we started.”
Semisch, with DeArmond, will lead discussions about the series in Bucks County and May hopes others will follow suit around the country. He and Levinson hope that by strengthening local communities, it can eventually lead to stronger national bonds. “Maybe people can learn from them. Maybe this series is literally the beginning of a change.”
Sosnoff is a bit more measured in his final assessment, quoting a participant as saying, “We haven’t buried the hatchet yet, but it’s been put away in the closet,” he says. “I’ll take that as progress.”
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