I am honored to be appointed by Governor Newsom to serve as California’s next United States Senator.
I’m the proud son of immigrants. My parents met as immigrants from Mexico — they fell in love, got married, and applied for green cards, ready to embrace a country that valued hard work and opportunity.
That’s something they instilled in me, from my father working his way up from a dishwasher to head cook at a local diner with only an elementary school education (he liked to boast that his kitchen “never failed an inspection”), to my mother working tirelessly as a housekeeper for affluent families.
We grew up in a tough neighborhood — sirens and gunfire were a constant, but we were grateful for what we had, including a backyard. But it was just those conditions that got me active in political activism: As a teenager, I helped organize neighbors to take back the streets from crime and joined protests with my mother against environmental racism. And in 1994, after California voters passed a sweeping anti-immigration ballot initiative, I put aside a job in engineering to dedicate my life to public service.
I took my opportunity and I turned it into the backbone of my fight every single day for California families.
It led to my election as the youngest Los Angeles Council President in LA history. It’s what stoked the fire to bring after-school programs and libraries to communities that had none. It’s why I passed more than 70 bills as a California state senator to fight climate change, expand educational opportunities, protect health care, and demand gun safety. That opportunity is what I remembered when I fought back against Donald Trump’s attacks on immigrants and voting rights as California Secretary of State — all while registering a record-breaking 22 million voters.
Now, I’m excited to do the same as California’s next senator — to keep on fighting, to keep on building on that opportunity. I still live less than five miles from the home I grew up in, and I’m still fighting for the same progress I was as an upstart teenager in Pacoima.
There’s so much to do, there’s so much to achieve — but I know we can do it together, with our families and our communities by our side. That’s how I’ve made progress since I was a kid, and I know that’s how we’ll make progress as a state and as a nation.
Onward.
Thanks,
Alex Padilla
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