Meet the Non-binary Socialist Who Just Won a City Council Seat in California
Interview by Joaquin Romero
We spoke with Lissette Espinoza-Garnica, city councilmember for District 3 of Redwood City, California. For a number of reasons Lissette’s ascension to the council is a first for Redwood City, a small-ish community of just over 85,000 on the eastern edge of the San Francisco peninsula. Lissette is 24, the youngest person to hold the seat. They are also the first openly nonbinary individual to join the council. Just as significant, Espinoza-Garnica is a socialist, and a member of Silicon Valley’s DSA chapter. Their win is further evidence of a modest, but not-to-be-discounted wave of Democratic Socialists taking power in the local politics of the Bay Area.
Here, Espinoza-Garnica tracks the roundabout way by which they entered politics, and outlines how popular policies like Defund the Police and Housing for All can be initiated on the local level.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity
RIFT Magazine: Tell me about yourself and what brought you into politics. Oftentimes when somebody runs for office it’s because they see a need in their community that they don’t see being addressed by the present leadership. Was that the case for you?
Lissette Espinoza-Garnica: It’s pretty obvious that folks like myself, who are intersections of multiple identities like many people…all those things are very much misrepresented or co-opted, so it’s very hard to feel like there’s adequate representation, especially when it comes to the predominant neoliberal narratives about diversity and equity. It’s pretty much still a surface level discussion, I think.
Folks like Bernie Sanders, and people that are not white, many people have said this before...where it’s beyond just meeting the categories of having marginalized identities, beyond just being categorically a woman, being categorically trans, it’s really about the systems of our oppression.
I knew at a young age I was queer, I knew that I always was brown, and I felt really comfortable in my predominantly brown schools. In high school I didn’t want to go to my high school where everyone from my district goes to, because it was predominantly white. So I had a consciousness from a young age. I knew that I was different, and I already had friends that experienced life among white people, and also affluent people, so I’ve always had a perception of that and where I stood. [And a perception] of mental health as well, because queer people of color struggle with many things, like substance abuse, mental illness, being threatened at home, or not feeling safe at home for their identity or the way they live or the way they appear.
Because of the pressure of the capitalist state on working class families, that causes major pain and strain on a family. These things add up to our physical and emotional turmoil. And so I think I was very much aware through my own experience of all that stuff, navigating all that stuff in my community, and in my friends and the people I truly identified with. I didn’t really grow up in a family that was so open…[about] trans identity or queer liberation or anything like that, you know. I’m first generation. My folks are from Mexico, and they're working class people.
I’ve just lived this experience of being a queer, nonbinary person of color. I was brought up in Redwood City, my mom had me in the Kaiser hospital in Redwood City. So my life has been here. I actually have family that live around Menlo Park, like in East Menlo Park and stuff like that. I have enough family to see their own experience, and how our struggles intersect and stuff like that.
After I graduated [from college] I started working at a Pre-K…and I worked there for a whole year and I was laid off due to the COVID pandemic. So at the time, I had been working there and also part-time taking care of my grandmother as a caregiver through the county IHSS program. Now I’m [a] city councilmember, I still work caregiving for my grandmother and I have another client that I take care of in San Mateo.
I got agitated during the summer because we had, like everywhere else in the country, protests. I know it’s had so much impact on us, on the community, on everyone everywhere. I had no part in organizing it, but there were at least 3,000 people attending the first rally for black lives in Redwood City. After that, I started trying to get more involved. I called into city council meetings. I started organizing with my local Silicon Valley DSA chapter. They had been organizing a while longer…in Redwood City. They already had some folks organizing for some time now in Mountainview and other cities around there, but Redwood City quickly grew in support, and we organized a lot of stuff with other community organizations.
So we tried things like abolition rallies in Redwood City, which we did have in partnership with…Real Community Coalition and...the San Mateo Coalition for Immigrant Rights. I also was a co-facilitator in virtual teach-ins on abolition for Redwood City, so we had researched specific things about Redwood City and ways to defund the Redwood City police. And we didn’t really get any reception from the city council that looked like they were taking our ideas seriously about abolition or defunding. The incumbent from my district was talking about how she understood the sentiment of defunding, but doesn’t support it. She’d say things like “maybe we’ll add money, maybe we’ll defund, we’ll have to see”.
From all that agitation and buildup, I decided to run after we were discussing which among us would be interested in the open vacancy coming up.
RIFT: Let me ask you about something that you mentioned just a minute ago, about defunding the police. It’s a thing that you ran on, and since it became part of our common parlance over the past year or so, we’ve come to understand that policy as taking money that would normally be given to police departments or to other law enforcement departments, and using that money instead on things like mental healthcare or social services that would do the jobs that are allocated to the police normally, but do them better. So I’m wondering in your community, in Redwood City, what does that policy look like? How do you implement that in your community?
LEG: So, in Redwood City DSA, they developed a caucus among themselves, the Redwood City caucus of Silicon Valley [DSA], and they also created a petition after working on this with other community voices for a while now. It also took in some of the language that was reported in city commissioned research of the [Redwood City] police by Stanford. And in that report, they even clearly state that we must decrease the footprint of policing. So they must be descoped and in what capacities they serve they have to be reeled back in.
So it’s creating these jobs…figures like doctors and nurses and therapists who study this and specialize in this kind of care, and understand the community resources and concerns that arise through the whole process. But also folks that are not threats of incarceration, a direct threat to be incarcerated. Because if you have someone who’s an officer there, there's a direct threat of being arrested.
And so rather than investing in having police show up to these types of cases we need public employees who specialize in this stuff, in professional care, in counseling, in social work, in housing resources. We need social workers out there, honestly. And we need to build adequate shelters and housing for [unhoused] folks, in order to meet their needs. Because a cop can offer a referral, but not many because there aren’t that many sites available to house someone, and only very temporarily at this time.
The Silicon Valley DSA caucus had a great petition that outlined some of these ideas that incorporate different facets of it, from descoping, to reinvesting funds into expanded public safety and community service, and to also accountability for the [police] presence in our community.
[W]e’d be able to fund community services, community resources that would directly impact our residents, especially those in need. So, funding housing for a general fund, also having permanent housing, such as public housing, be incorporated as well, providing support services like through navigation centers as well.
So that’s the whole model for community care, trying to incorporate styles that are not punitive or leading into the carceral system.
RIFT: You mention housing, and how housing intersects with the necessity of defunding police. So I wanted to ask you about housing policy in general, and what you’re planning on advocating for in office in your first term on city council. I’m sure in Redwood City, and in California statewide, there is a housing crisis; too few units, certainly too few units that are affordable for people, things like homelessness like you were mentioning, and gentrification that makes it more difficult for people to live there. What do you think can be done in your community specifically to combat this housing crisis.
LEG: [We need] as much affordable and public housing as possible, because for a long while we’ve been just focusing on affordable housing, which is adjusted to the median income of the city, which half of people cannot afford. With that we have to think about long term solutions. I’m all about decommodifying…housing and land…so further taxation that is trying to end speculation, that would be something like vacancy taxes.
There has to be a homes guarantee, and Housing For All is the initiative to make housing a priority or essential rather than a commodity, or capital, or something you can profit off of. That should be brought to an end. So things like flipping taxes can be discussed.
That’s why I’m a big advocate of public housing, because it’ll serve us longer, and house more people. And [we need to] have community input on development, trying to further the amount of input neighborhoods have with the developers themselves, more directly, so they service more of our needs, [like for those with] instability with housing, low income people, queer and trans people, disabled people, elderly people, people of color. Like those folks ought to be given more priority with housing due to the disproportionate harm. We need to address housing from the harm that’s been perpetuated systematically for so long. So we need to prioritize them for those exact reasons, because everything that’s happening with the pandemic affects working class people, but it disproportionately impacts people of color and the like.
Also, to create more housing and resources in general, I hope to create more business taxes. Because we still have businesses like EA, we have businesses like Equinix, and others that are still in Redwood City. And a lot of developers are coming in here, trying to create more office space. So there’s a lot of interest in developing here in Redwood City still. And folks that don’t want to push on that…I think in general we have to adjust priorities to see that the budget is about making sure that our residents benefit from the development the most, directly.
RIFT: Kind of to round out our conversation here, I, a couple of weeks ago had the opportunity to interview James Coleman up in South San Francisco…
LEG: Yeah! The Homie!
RIFT: And I asked him this question and I wanted to get your take on it — what does it mean to be a democratic socialist or socialist member of city government? Because oftentimes, people will associate it with national figures like Bernie Sanders or AOC if they’re not just…afraid of it. So as somebody who is a socialist who is now entering city government, how do you govern with that in mind?
LEG: So, as a member of DSA I feel that I employ these principles of being a Democratic Socialist in trying to put people before profit. In trying to ensure that every process is Democratic, and not something that’s done based on personality or private interest. It ensures that there is adequate participation in all members participating in whatever that will directly impact them. So trying to improve the access between regular people to understand how much government should serve them.
