Cristina Garcia

She is a Democrat who represented the 58th Assembly District, which encompassed parts of southeastern Los Angeles County, including her home city of Bell Gardens.

Cristina Garcia (born August 22, 1977) is an American educator and politician who served in the California State Assembly.

Although Prop 187 passed in November 1994, it was later found unconstitutional and never implemented.

Growing up, Garcia was a self-described math nerd.

She went to Pomona College, where she studied both math and politics.

She spent her junior year studying in Prague as the Czech Republic, after years of Soviet rule, took its first steps toward democracy in the wake of the Velvet Revolution.

Later, she earned a teaching credential and a master's degree from Claremont Graduate School, and is a doctoral candidate in public administration at USC.

After graduation, Cristina taught math and statistics for 12 years, first in a Los Angeles public high school, then at L.A. City College, and at USC where she taught statistics.

In the late 2000s, tired of what seemed to her to be inaction by the Bell Gardens city council, she began attending its meetings and questioning its members.

A bid to get elected to council herself failed, but a friend who lived in neighboring Bell asked her if she could attend that city's council meetings and help her figure out why its property taxes were so high.

The investigations they did led to a municipal corruption scandal in which several city officials were found to have enriched themselves at public expense, and were imprisoned.

After her mother suffered a heart attack in 2009, the thirty year-old Garcia moved back to Bell Gardens to help care for her parents (her stepfather was already struggling with diabetes).

She has admitted to being frustrated with the move because, like many ambitious young people from the area, she had felt success meant "leaving and never coming back."

She complained regularly about the city's lack of services and economic development, until she took her sister's advice to stop griping and do something about it.

She became a regular at City Council meetings, turning into an agitator and a gadfly.

She studied budgets, learned how to make Public Records Act requests, tracked the compensation city officials received, and demanded fiscal responsibility.

In 2009, Garcia ran for Bell Gardens city council, but fell 114 votes short of getting one of the three open seats.

At about the same time, activists in the neighboring city of Bell, California were growing concerned about rising local property taxes, and what their money was going toward.

One of them asked Garcia for help, and she started digging into Bell's finances.

Los Angeles Times reporter Jeff Gottlieb said Garcia was one of the first people he interviewed about corruption in Bell— "Talking to Cristina and others, you got a feeling that there was something wrong in Bell".

On Thursday, July 15, 2010, the Los Angeles Times broke its first story on the corruption in Bell.

Headlined "Is A City Manager Worth $800,000?"

it detailed the exorbitant salaries Robert Rizzo and other Bell city officials were paid.

After the mayor and targeted council members refused to step down, BASTA organized a recall effort in August 2010 and started collecting signatures to put the measure before the voters.

(For their coverage of the corruption in Bell, Times reporters Jeff Gottlieb and Ruben Vives were awarded the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service.)

That night, Garcia and local businessman Ali Saleh—with Dale Walker and Denise Rodarte joining the next day— founded a group that would come to be called BASTA—an acronym for the Bell Association to Stop the Abuse, and in Spanish, ENOUGH!

Garcia became the chief spokesperson for the grassroots movement that, according to BASTA political consultant Leo Briones, did 60 press releases in a year.

In a city where the electorate was known for Apathy, the group drew hundreds of residents to town hall meetings, covered the city with overnight flyer blitzes, staged rallies and flooded council meetings with thousands of angry residents.

In March 2011, the effort succeeded in ousting Mayor Oscar Hernandez and council members Teresa Jacobo, George Mirabal, as well as Luis Artiga, who had resigned but remained on the ballot.

She had served in the Assembly since 2012.

While Garcia had been involved in politics in high school, where she organized opposition to Proposition 187, after college she became a teacher.

In 2012, Garcia defeated Tom Calderon, a former assemblyman, in the primary and went on to defeat her Republican opponent in the general election for the 58th District seat.

She was re-elected in 2014, 2016, 2018 and 2020.

In December 2021, Garcia announced she was running in the primary for the newly created 42nd Congressional District that will stretch from Long Beach to Downtown Los Angeles, she lost the June 7 primary finishing in third place.

Garcia was raised in Bell Gardens, California, one of a number of largely Latino working-class suburbs in Southeast Los Angeles County.

Her parents, who were from Mexico, divorced when Garcia's mother was pregnant with her.

Her mother worked making clothes in a sweatshop, raising her four children in a one bedroom apartment.

Later, Garcia's mother started her own clothing manufacturing business and remarried.

Investments in other businesses and properties followed, and though they were upwardly mobile, the family stayed in Bell Gardens.

While still in high school, Garcia and a friend organized opposition to Proposition 187, a statewide ballot measure championed by then-governor Pete Wilson that sought to establish a state-run citizenship screening system and prohibit undocumented residents from receiving non-emergency health care, public education and other services in California.