As Election Day 2020 approaches, them. is interviewing LGBTQ+ politicians who are making America’s political landscape more queer, more progressive, and more inclusive. Check out more from our series, Inside the Rainbow Wave, here.
The effects of injustice can be seen in the air itself in San Diego. As with other cities around the world, climate change and pollution have hit historically marginalized communities hard. People of color and lower-income residents are more likely to live in areas zoned for industrial use. Diesel trucks rumble down the streets and factories blot the landscape, leaving community members at greater risk of developing health problems. One of the areas with the most permitted waste sites and generators in the city is Barrio Logan, in south central San Diego.
Barrio Logan is where Georgette Gómez grew up. Gómez, who once described the air in the neighborhood as having a “slight metallic flavor,” says she spent two decades as a community organizer, pushing policies aimed at keeping toxins out of neighborhoods. In 2016, she transitioned into politics, becoming the first queer Latina member of the San Diego City Council; she was unanimously appointed City Council president two years later. Now Gómez is running for California’s 53rd Congressional District. If elected, she will be the first queer Latina in U.S. Congress — an opportunity she says she never saw coming.
Gómez is running to replace Democratic Rep. Susan Davis, who announced her retirement from office last year. Because of California’s top-two primary system, both candidates in the general election are Democrats: This November Gómez faces Sara Jacobs, a former Hillary Clinton adviser who serves on the board of Equality California and is the founder and chair of an organization addressing child poverty in San Diego. Both candidates support Medicare for All and a Green New Deal, popular issues among voters.
As fire turned the sky orange and rained ash over much of the West Coast — lending a renewed urgency to discussions about the environment and climate — Gómez, who lives in San Diego with her fiancé and two dogs, Canela and Totoro, spoke to them. about the issues key to her candidacy and her hopes for the upcoming election.
What inspired your move to politics after years of community organizing?
I’m a first-generation Mexican-American. I grew up in the barrio here in San Diego. My parents immigrated, came here undocumented, and they worked many jobs to be able to provide the necessities that we needed as children growing up. We, at one time in my life, had to live with another family to be able to have shelter. My home was the living room for a family of five.
At times we didn’t have health care. I saw my mom making hard decisions. When I was sick, she would consider, “Do I take her to the emergency room or not? I still need to pay that bill.” When you’re growing up poor, you need to think about all this stuff.
As someone who grew up in the barrio, I never thought that I would ever say, “Mom, I’m gonna run for Congress.” I never saw that in my wildest dreams. I always thought [of myself] as someone who was an organizer, a public policy advocate, pushing decision makers to do the right thing, to create a government that is more inclusive and more reflective of who we are. I have dedicated my life to fight hard to ensure that we’re creating a government that is more responsive and more inclusive of the community members that have been left behind. We are a wealthy city, a wealthy state, a wealthy nation. We can do things better if we had the right people elected to push on these issues.
How would you bring your experience at a municipal level to a position in federal government?
All my work has been guided by community members on the front-lines of all these different social injustices, from the climate crisis, to housing insecurity, to income inequalities, to not being able to afford a home because of the cost of living in California. I learned very quickly as a community organizer that to truly change the discourse that elected officials had been having, the people that are living with the impacts of these social injustices need to be at the core and need to be at the center of the conversations.
