María Elena Durazo

(born 1953)

“You look around at who has the most difficult jobs, at who is doing the work we rely on every day, and it is immigrants.”

Years in political office: 2017–present

Position: member of the California State Senate, 2018–present; vice chair of the Democratic National Committee, 2017–present

Party affiliation: Democrat

Hometown: Madera, California

Top causes: immigrant rights, creating new jobs in environmentally sustainable industries, and public education

Life Story

María Elena Durazo was born in California’s San Joaquin Valley to parents who had come to the US from Mexico as migrant agricultural workers. The family traveled up and down the West Coast looking for jobs. According to Durazo’s sisters, sometimes they lived out of their truck, bathed in rivers, and slept underneath the stars. Durazo was one of eleven siblings, and everyone helped out in the fields, picking grapes, melons, nectarines, peaches, plums, tomatoes, and string beans. Contractors often underpaid them, and the family faced deplorable working conditions. The experience taught Durazo about exploitation, fair payment issues, and workplace safety. “No toilets, no drinking water, no shade,” Durazo remembers of those years.

She was the first of her family to graduate from high school and to get a university degree. By then a single mom, Durazo began to work as a labor union organizer. In her early thirties, she led a sea change at the local chapter of a hotel workers’ union in which members voted out longtime leadership who were reluctant to give translated versions of important information to its growing number of Spanish-speaking members. Once Durazo became the union’s president, the organization went fully bilingual. She was determined that everyone should understand the union’s strategies and contribute to the fight for their rights.

After the unexpected shakeup of leadership, the national office of the hotel workers’ union sent in an organizer to help guide—and possibly control—Durazo’s leadership team. That representative happened to be Miguel Contreras, another child of migrant laborers who had worked with iconic labor leader César Chávez on the United Farmworkers campaign. “You ain’t gonna just walk right into this and be the boss here,” Durazo remembers thinking at their initial meetings. “What ended up happening was he came in with the same ideas I had, and then I fell in love.” The two were married, and with their shared passion for the labor movement, became one of California’s most influential political power couples.

The ’90s were a rough time for Californian Latinxs. In 1994 voters passed Proposition 187, a ballot referendum that banned undocumented immigrants from using key social services such as public schools and nonemergency health care. Those who knew how many undocumented immigrants are part of the Latinx community, not to mention the extent that those individuals’ lives depend on those services, were enraged. Two years later, Contreras was elected secretary-treasurer of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor and underlined the common political issues faced by Latinxs and other members of the working class. Contreras put a big emphasis on voter registration, and even Latinx community members whose immigration status prevented them from voting were enlisted to do outreach.

Contreras held his position for eleven years before dying of a heart attack at fifty-two years old. In 2006 Durazo succeeded him, becoming a leader of 350 unions and six hundred thousand members. She was set on continuing the fight for the principles she’d shared with her husband, and became a powerful force in Los Angeles. Her coalition was able to pass living wage increases, ensuring new jobs and other benefits for workers—victories that critics said often emptied the city’s pockets. Durazo’s movement was so powerful that by 2013, two-thirds of the city council was comprised of candidates she and her allies had helped put in office.

In 2008 she left the labor federation to become the hotel workers union’s general vice president for immigration, civil rights, and diversity. In 2017 she was named vice chair of the Democratic National Committee and in 2018 was elected a California state senator. She has two children, Mario and Michael Contreras.

What’s on Her Agenda

It’s hard to overestimate the importance of Durazo’s power as an organizer. In the United States, union membership has been declining since 1954, leaving workers without an organized voice in the fight for health insurance and fair working conditions. By 2013 unions represented only 11.3 percent of US workers. Durazo said that part of the reason for the labor movement’s decay was that it wasn’t focusing on the rights of all workers. While union membership was still concentrated in well-paying (but disappearing and moving overseas) manufacturing jobs, union organizing campaigns rarely focused on many of the country’s most vulnerable individuals in low-wage positions. Durazo’s labor federation focused on working with health care and service industry workers, often Latinxs and recent immigrants. She built the Los Angeles labor movement into one of the strongest in the country. As a result, rates of union membership in California rose while, in much of the rest of the US, they stagnated.

Durazo was not shy about the fact that Trump’s election drove her to electoral politics. “We’re at another very critical time in this state,” she said. “I know what it’s like to press elected officials.” Her first government election was a big one; Durazo ran for the seat of California state senator Kevin de León, who was leaving the most powerful position in the state senate as president pro tempore. She easily trounced her opponent, winning 66 to his 33 percent of the votes.

As a state senator, Durazo represents over 931,000 constituents—more than most members of the US Congress represent! Her considerable name recognition and understanding of the issues of various marginalized communities have served her well in politics. She has presented bills that would provide better aid to the victims of violent crimes, as well as legislation to limit the number of charter schools, which she sees as key to continued support for public education. She has also supported bills to help California’s growing number of homeless residents and protect individuals from losing money to predatory lenders.

Awesome Achievements

Quotables

“We cannot fix the prosperity of the rest of the country without improving the prosperity of immigrants.”

“Here in Los Angeles, and in a number of cities, officials are standing up and saying we’re not going to allow our local police to cooperate with ICE [US Immigration and Customs Enforcement]. Our schools are saying we’re not going to allow ICE to come in.”

“I am not asking you [my constituents] to send me to Sacramento. I am asking you to come with me to the State Capitol.”