The New Mayor

Gilroy made history last month when voters elected the city’s first Mexican-American mayor, Roland Velasco.
Sworn in this week, Velasco becomes the 34th person to hold the office since the city incorporated in 1870, and the first whose family hails from south of the Rio Grande.
That 60 percent of Gilroy, and more than 80 percent of its school students, are Latino suggests his win might have brought out mariachi bands and an outpouring of festive celebration.
Instead, the ascension of a Mexican-American to the town’s highest political office seems to have gone largely unnoticed.
“That is interesting,” a nonplused Velasco says when asked about his unique place in city history.
“If it’s true, I am proud of that,” he says, “but the reality is that Gilroy has challenges and voters elected a person, regardless of race, to make the best decisions they can.”
Voting returns show the one-time cold-war army intelligence analyst didn’t win just among Latinos in a city where non-Hispanic Caucasians make up about 30 percent of residents.
“I won every precinct except of Eagle Ridge (where) I came to within 9 or 10 votes,” says Velasco, referring to opponent Perry Woodward’s neighborhood.
Woodward, an attorney and former councilman, was appointed in 2015 to complete the term of Mayor Don Gage, who resigned abruptly after decades in city and county office.
As for ethnicity being a factor in the election, it wasn’t, say long-time observers.
“We never talked about that, didn’t even think about it,” says Eleanor Villarreal, a leader in Democratic circles whose blessings have for years been sought by office seekers.
So, why no mariachis or tri-color Mexican flags or big shows of ethnic pride?
It might be because race relations in Gilroy—where Cesar Chavez once overnighted in a ‘safe house’ and high school kids were either ‘cowboys’ or ‘Mexicans’—have improved since the United Farm Workers picketed the Gilroy Garlic Festival and the good-old-boys network was so embedded that a community college official could get away with ordering a state employee to use a school camera to film demonstrators.
Today’s voters are focused not on what candidates look like but on quality of life issues such as sidewalks, traffic jams and growth.
Or maybe it’s just good-old-boy politics as usual, albeit in a coat of more colors.
That is to say, Velasco, politically, isn’t your typical Mexican-American. In an ethnic community that historically has sworn allegiance to the Democrats, Velasco is an enthusiastic, unapologetic Republican. He won’t say for whom he cast his vote in November’s presidential election. “I did not vote for Clinton, and I did not vote for Trump,” he says, and leaves it at that.
From an English-speaking family that’s been in California two or three generations, Velasco says he speaks Spanish “not very well.” On immigration, Velasco believes,”We need to know who’s here. We need to protect the sovereignty of our nation. There needs to be a legal process for people to come into the country and work.”
He learned the ropes from his early mentor, Gage, perhaps the city’s most savvy politician in recent memory, after Sig Sanchez, now in his 90s and a first generation American whose parents emigrated from Spain—and the only other Hispanic surname on the roster of mayors over the last 146 years.
Both were city councilmen and mayors before being elected to multiple terms as county supervisors and water district directors.
At the age of 50, Velasco has now made it to rung two of that climb.
And while city elections are non-partisan, a council veteran says Republicans have forever had a solid grip on the mayor’s seat, and she wondered aloud how many Democrats have held the position?
“I think it’s zero,” says Lupe Arellano, who served on the council with Velasco in the late 1990s and lost a mayoral bid after declining to change her Democrat party affiliation.
While she hadn’t thought about Velasco being the first Mexican-American mayor, she called it “another breakthrough (for Latinos), and that is always wonderful.
“I want to say it’s about time,” she adds, “especially since the majority of residents is Latino, but I think our community has gotten to the point where, and I say this with pride, we are looking at issues and what is best for the community and it won’t make a difference what color or race or religion (a person is), it’s how are you going to benefit the whole community?”
She and others seemed to suggest that Velasco’s victory might have deeper significance among Hispanics if he was perceived more as a traditional Latino activist and the Democrat party mold instead of being seen by many as part of a Republican political machine.
For Arellano, the more important milestones were those made by Latinos elected to the council a decade or two ago, herself, her brother, Dr. Pete Arellano, Pete Valdez and Charlie Morales, among others.
Today, more than half the seven-member council, including the mayor, is Hispanic or part Hispanic.
“It has been a long time coming,” says Velasco’s great-aunt, Irma Batrez, who came from Texas at age two with eight siblings in 1948 so the family could be close to its men stationed at Fort Ord.
“Everything is so ironic,” says Batrez, a highly respected member of the community who has volunteered years of service on nonprofit boards.
She recalled how when she was a young girl her older brother would be stopped in town by authorities “rounding up young Mexican men to deport.”
He’d explain he was American and just finished serving his country and ask, ‘What do I have to do, carry my discharge papers with me?’ and they would let him go, she says.
“That was one of the things people had to put up with. When I went to school at St. Mary’s, I was the only Hispanic in my class; I stood out like a sore thumb with all the Irish and Italian kids.”
But her family ran two successful businesses, a popular grocery store on Sixth Street, across from what’s now the Dispatch building, and Garcia’s Restaurant on Monterey—the latter for nearly a half-century—and one of the men in the family was encouraged by Sanchez to serve on a city commission and did.
The family got along with everyone and was politically astute she says, qualities she sees in her nephew.
She credits him with doing a good job “planning what he wanted to do and where he wanted to be and knowing what he had to do to get there.”
She sees his election as part of a “transition,” from the days when Latinos were a tiny part of the population, to when most were migrant farmworkers to now, when they are the majority and are in positions of influence.
It’s as an inspiration to others that Velasco’s election might be most significant, Arellano suggested.
“Having a Latino as mayor, we can aspire to achieve anything, and of course we know that,” she says.
She noted, too, the overwhelming passage of the growth controlling Measure H on Nov. 8 as an indicator of voter mood.
While neither mayoral candidate endorsed H, observers say Velasco was much less identified than Woodward with the kind of rapid residential growth that prompted Arellano, former councilwoman Connie Rogers and others to launch the ballot measure.
In fact, the 66.55 percent of voters that elected Velasco almost mirrors the number that voted for H, 66.31 percent.
Rogers attributed Velasco’s victory to several things. “His roots go back at least 70 years,” and his heritage “probably” was a factor but not the most significant one, she says.
“I think name recognition and his platform of ‘listening’ were probably more important,” she says, adding a that Mexican-American majority “Makes a difference,” too.
“I admire Roland for taking the stands he has taken and towing the line silently because I think he is a man of integrity and I respect him for that,” says Arellano.
Velasco, who serves as an aide to Santa Clara County District 1 Supervisor Mike Wasserman, seems to want to serve his hometown as much as he wanted to serve his nation when he enlisted in the army after high school.
“I am honored to have been elected to be the political figurehead for the city, and I am proud that I have a lot of support on both sides of the community,” he says.
As for being the city’s first Mexican-American mayor, he tried to explain it with a little help from Bob Dylan and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., while seeming to acknowledge all that people have been through on the way to the historic election outcome.
“The times they are a changing,” Velasco says. “People are seeing past skin color and are looking at the content of a person’s character.”