This isn’t a job that Mateo Camarillo really wanted.
If he’d had his way, in fact, he wouldn’t even be a resident of the newest San Diego City Council district.
As the Redistricting Commission redrew the city’s political lines last year, Camarillo led the push to create a second Latino-majority district. His proposed map for District 9 looked relatively similar to what eventually got created.
But it didn’t have some of the whiter neighborhoods that ended up there like College Area, Talmadge and Kensington, the very place Camarillo’s called home for the last two decades.
He’s running for City Council now, frustrated that no other Latinos jumped at the chance to empower the district he worked to create.
For Camarillo, the move is the latest in a career that’s married classic social activism with one of the bedrocks of American capitalism. He has a master’s degree in social work and takes credit for bringing food stamps to San Diego County and diversity training to City Hall.
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