Heavily immigrant corner of L.A. County sees a new wave of young leaders
*I’ve been seeing many more stories like these since this month’s elections. In Washington state, in Massachusetts, and now this one from L.A. County. Young Latinos are claiming and in some cases reclaiming their cities through technology and political action. It’s great to read stories like these in the midst of so much divisive rhetoric. VL
By Ruben Vives, The Los Angeles Times
After the dust settled and the FBI had scoured through town on the hunt for crooked politicians, the voters of the city of Cudahy cleaned house.
But they didn’t just elect new politicians. They elected younger ones, with college degrees — millennials with the know-how to use Twitter, Facebook and other social media to deliver their messages to residents.
[pullquote]The heavily immigrant, working-class towns along the 710 Freeway have long struggled with municipal corruption, in part because there was little public scrutiny of City Hall. A new generation of younger leaders now believes technology can lead to more transparency, and participation.[/pullquote]Gone were skeletal city websites that almost seemed designed to share no meaningful information, replaced with more in-depth sites.
Just below the framed photos of the five Cudahy council members at City Hall is a sign with a bar code that people can use to download the agenda on their smartphones. Most of the residents on a recent night walked past the sign and went straight to physical copies sitting on a glass counter. But the bar code underscored the direction Cudahy officials want to go in a predominantly Latino city of 24,000 where the average person is only 22 years old.
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[Photo by Luis Sinco, courtesy of The Los Angeles Times]
