The Brief

In four years as a peer educator for the group Sexperts at UCLA, Sriha Srinivasan talked to a lot of student groups about sex education.

Some were more difficult than others. Fraternities and sororities were the toughest.

Because of the Greek system’s reputation for ignoring consent in sexual relations, “they expected us to come in and basically scrutinize them or scold them,” said Srinivasan, who is now an abortion doula with the Los Angeles Abortion Support Collective and enrolled in medical school.

She remembers the work it took to loosen students up and help them let their guards down.

“I would start off and say, ‘Hi, my name is Sriha and I'm a part of Greek life too, I'm in ADPi,’ you would see [them react], ‘OK, she's part of this, she's not going to judge us for being a part of this and she understands where we're coming from.’”

That, in a nutshell, is peer health education: training students as ambassadors to convey sometimes controversial health topics. They create spaces where students feel open to listening, dialogue, and discussion.

A state law that took effect in 2023 also offers a new opportunity to universities’ student health ambassadors: informing their peers across public university campuses that students are now entitled to medication abortion services.

Who knows what about medication abortion?

An LAist investigation published in January found that in the year since the abortion pill requirement went into effect, a patchwork approach of outreach and promotion has developed among UC and CSU campuses. Some campuses put a lot of information online about medication abortion while other campuses put out none. Some students — it’s unclear how many — don’t know their campuses now provide abortion pills.

In the absence of consistent messaging over the past year, students have said they feel a need to step in to inform other students about their rights.

Staff on some of these campuses see an opportunity to create awareness campaigns for abortion pills, using the peer education model.

“Students have had to sort of go out of their way to access an abortion that they could have access to right here on campus,” said Shira Brown, director of Cal State Northridge’s Women’s Research and Resource Center. “For me that feels like a major gap in knowledge-sharing.”

After reading the LAist report, Brown said she did her own research, which confirmed a knowledge-sharing gap on her campus. She also talked to leaders of the university student health center. All that led her to decide to organize an awareness campaign this year focused on medication abortion.

Here’s what she plans to do:

• Publish information about medication abortion in the center’s twice a month newsletter. (Done!)
• Have students create a social media campaign on the center’s Instagram page.
• Organize an event around medication abortion information.
• Submit an article to the student newspaper, or pitch a reporter to write one.

The awareness campaign for medication abortion needs to stand on its own, she said, because couching it with other reproductive health topics and context may dilute the message, which she hopes to keep simple.

“This is a service that’s available and it’s legal and you should know about it,” she said.

Sriha Srinivasan poses for a portrait on campus at UCLA.

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Brian Feinzimer

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LAist

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Eight students, most of them unpaid, help run CSUN’s Women’s Research and Resource Center. Three of them will work on this campaign, she said, because as peers they know best all that students are juggling these days while earning a degree.

Altogether, 33 public university campuses in California are affected by the medication abortion requirement, and each campus is left to its own devices about how to implement it.

However, some system leaders think there’s room for more involvement.

“We are looking at template language for campuses to include on [individual school websites],” said Ray Murillo, the Cal State University system’s assistant vice chancellor of student affairs.

In-person outreach efforts will likely still be developed by the individual campuses.

Will students react to peer education model?

Cal Poly Pomona’s student health center organized for the first time this month a female reproductive health topic workshop called “Taboo Topics: Womxn’s Health Workshop.”

“It was awesome,” said Kenya Luse, senior coordinator for health promotion and wellness services at the student health center at Cal Poly Pomona. The workshop took place in a conference room in the university student center. About a dozen people attended.

“Students were able to share their feelings around menstruation, their feelings around birth control, how culturally those things have been for them,” Luse said.

Kenya Luse, senior coordinator of health promotion & wellness services at Cal Poly Pomona, in her office on Tuesday, Feb. 20, 2024.

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Julie Leopo

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LAist

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The success, she said, was due in part to the work of a handful of peer health educators during the workshop, students trained by the center who communicated the topics and facilitated discussion using their own student experiences to do that.

“As a student and also a student worker, I’m like a middle channel to bridge the gap between the student and the professional,” said Minh Tam Vo, a Cal Poly Pomona senior majoring in chemical engineering who was one of the student educators in the workshop.

“They feel more comfortable talking to me and asking me questions,” Vo said.

Did the peer educators make a difference?

“I felt more connected,” said Celina Robles as she walked out of the workshop. She’s a Cal Poly Pomona urban planning and design major. She knows one of the peer educators and came to support her. She also learned a few things about the menstruation cycle. It was a safe space for learning, she said.

Ala Elkambaei, social justice leader, at the Womxn's Resource Center at Cal Poly Pomona.

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Julie Leopo

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LAist

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“When you see people similar [to your] age and other women as well, it just feels like a more tight-knit community,” she said.

It’s not a secret to campus administrators that peer health educators are a powerful tool.

“They can reach their peers so much better than I ever could,” said Susan Flaming Yeats, director of the student health center at CSU Dominguez Hills. "They are the best people to speak to their friends and their classmates about these sensitive topics, better than anybody on staff and faculty ever could.”

Campus administrators say it’s urgent to include information about medication abortion as one more resource to help students graduate.

“It's about reproductive justice and reproductive rights,” CSU Northridge’s Shira Brown said, “but it's also just about making sure our students graduate, which is ultimately what every single center, organization, department on this campus, what our end goal is, right?”

Dan Shimell, an attorney and a new face in local politics, is Santa Ana’s next mayor after a shocking win against incumbent Valerie Amezcua. His win has become one of the most surprising upsets in Orange County’s general election and marks a shift for a city that previously elected its first Latina mayor.

Amezcua congratulated Shimell on social media late Monday night after the last round of election results nearly doubled Shimell’s lead. As of Tuesday night, Shimell held a 5-point lead over Amezcua. Amezcua did not respond to LAist’s requests for comment.

“It has been the honor of my life to serve the people of Santa Ana,” Amezcua said in a post. “Together, we have accomplished great things. We invested in our neighborhoods, expanded opportunity for families, and strengthened the services that make Santa Ana home. Our work was never about one person. It was about all of us moving this community forward.”

Aside from Shimell, progressives Sandra de Anda and Isuri S. Ramos are also projected to win City Council seats, deepening the Santa Ana City Council’s progressive bench.

A flashpoint in Amezcua’s re-election campaign was during the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids that rattled much of Southern California, including Santa Ana, Orange County’s only sanctuary city. The raids sparked protests that drew a heavy law enforcement response from Santa Ana police, including rubber bullets and tear gas.

In Amezcua’s first public response, she accused protesters of inciting chaos and violence. She later walked back her comments in a city statement, saying most protesters were demonstrating peacefully and that she did not support the raids.

Shimell told LAist he thinks Santa Ana voters, especially young and first-time voters, went to the polls to vote for those who can't.

“Those who have been or might in the future be impacted by immigration policy and enforcement,” Shimell added. “Taking a bold stance on immigration and police accountability seemed to resonate with voters I spoke with, and stood in stark contrast to the [police]-backed candidates who remained largely silent on those issues.”

What does this say about Santa Ana politics? 

Orange County Supervisor Vicente Sarmiento served as mayor of the city from 2020 to 2022, and his current district includes Santa Ana. Sarmiento told LAist that the results were surprising but reflected the change voters want to see in their elected officials.

“I think the underlying message is that money and establishment conventional politics no longer is the formula to success in a campaign in the city,” Sarmiento said. “It's really the influence of people and voters over money. That's really the theme here.”

Santa Ana City Councilmember Thai Viet Phan told LAist that the race results were somewhat surprising — but spoke to a larger trend.

“[In] the election results throughout the country … you saw a very leftward shift, with not just candidates but also just how voters voted,” Phan said. “I think that was reflected here in Santa Ana on the council.”

Amezcua outspent Shimell — by a lot

Shimell raised about $28,500 in his campaign for mayor. Amezcua raised more than $75,000 and received more than $200,000 in outside support — more than half of that came from the Santa Ana Police Officers Association.

Mike Moodian, a public policy professor at Chapman University, told LAist that in many ways, the races capture the zeitgeist of Santa Ana.

“Here we saw that there was a police union-backed group, and there was a resistance to that,” Moodian said. “People might have seen the incumbent mayor as part of a police union-backed establishment."

He explained that voters may have looked at Shimell as a fresh face who can represent more people and that the city is experiencing a deeper progressive shift.

“I find the residents of Santa Ana tend to be much more involved and engaged in local politics than most other cities in Orange County. So you also have a well-informed, engaged citizenry that showed up, and the voices were heard in Santa Ana,” Moodian said.

Moodian said Amezcua may have lost support from some voters because they were unsatisfied with her response to immigration enforcement.

What’s next?

Ballots are still being counted. The OC Registrar of Voters posts updates every day, except Sundays, at 5 p.m. Election results will be certified by Dec. 3. You can find updates on key measures and other races here.

For seven years, Nazmul Chaudhry has been trying to get the city of Los Angeles to fix a broken sidewalk in front of his store.

Chaudhry owns Deshi Food, a restaurant and grocery store in Little Bangladesh. Before I could even begin our interview, he led me to the front of his store to show me the sidewalk that pedestrians sidestep and electric scooter riders slow down around.

He said he’s tried to get the attention of city officials, but nothing has been done.

The broken sidewalk in front of Nazmul Chaudhry's shop in Little Bangladesh.

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Yusra Farzan

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LAist

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He’s hoping that will soon change. He said then-candidate Nithya Raman spent time in the historic enclave just north of Koreatown this fall, talking with community members about their problems. For the first time since he moved to the United States in 1989, Chaudhry is excited about a mayoral election.

“Everybody's happy because we've never seen anyone [come] like that directly to us,” Chaudhry said.

Mayor-elect Raman is of Indian descent and an immigrant. When she takes office, she will be the first South Asian mayor of Los Angeles. Chaudhry is proud of that distinction. But what means more to him is that Raman spent time walking the streets of Little Bangladesh, visiting businesses and speaking to community members about their concerns. Chaudhry said that, because of that, he asked all his customers and family members to vote for Raman. At dinner parties, Chaudhry said, Bengalis would share how they were excited to vote for Raman in this election.

Nazmul Chaudhry and one of his customers, Mohamed Hassen. They both voted for Nithya Raman for mayor.

In the Little Bangladesh area, vote returns to date show Raman with a 2-to-1 margin over Mayor Karen Bass.

 "Hopefully she's gonna take care of the city," Chaudhry said.

His business has been hit hard after federal immigration raids ramped up in Southern California. People are afraid to leave their homes for fear of being taken by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. And for those who do come to his store, he said, they are met with increased prices because of tariffs imposed by President Donald Trump's administration on imported goods.

Nazmul Chaudry offers a lunch buffet at his restaurant but he has seen a drop in foot traffic after ICE raids ramped up.

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Yusra Farzan

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LAist

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"Everybody's suffering actually these days," Chaudhry said. “If you see, Nov. 3 is a huge change because people [are] fed up."

Chaudhry also said city services don’t do a good job keeping the streets clean. So he takes it upon himself to pick up trash in front of his shop.

A few weeks before Election Day, Raman posted a social media video from Little Bangladesh addressing the trash along the street.

His relatives in New York told Chaudhry that New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, also of Indian descent, has “changed the whole city.” He’s hoping for some of that change in Los Angeles when Raman takes office in December.

Shift away from identity politics

While Raman’s Indian background was a feature of her campaign, it was “not the central thesis,” said Sara Sadhwani,  an associate professor of politics at Pomona College and a senior researcher with AAPI Data.

In 2020, when Kamala Harris, also of Indian descent, was running for vice president, Sadhwani said, she conducted research on Indian Americans who wanted to see more representation in politics. In 2024, some of them turned away from Harris.

“When the economy is bad, identity slips away as the top issue on someone's mind,” she said.

Identity politics, Sadhwani said, was important in 2008 when the nation elected the first Black president, Barack Obama.

Los Angeles mayor-elect Nithya Raman poses for a photograph with family members after casting her vote on Election Day during the midterm elections at the Silverlake Community Church.

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Frederic J. Brown

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“ We're ushering in a new political generation of millennials and Gen Z; diversity is just expected at this point amongst a vast majority of Americans,” she said, highlighting how at the last census more people identified as multiracial.

Nationally too, Sadhwani said, thec ountry is seeing a shift. South Asians have gone from “model minority” to “governing minority.”

”The old script was that for Indian Americans, for South Asians, that being that quiet professional is what success meant,” she said. “When we look at Raman and also Mamdani, they're fighting for executive power in very visible, very messy city politics, and they won not by following the rules, but they won by challenging the status quo.”

South Asians as a political force

That idea resonates with Faizah Malik, managing attorney for housing justice at Public Counsel and a former L.A. City Council candidate.

“When we were growing up, our parents said, ‘Just keep your head down, go to school, get educated, make a nice life for your family, and that's it,’” she said. “Politics was not really part of the conversation, but I think what we're seeing is that we can run for office, we can win by being our full selves.”

This is an exciting time, she said, for “South Asian political empowerment,” with Raman set to join Mamdani in leading the country’s two largest cities.

Malik said that, as a housing advocate, she cares about Raman’s fight “to build more housing around the city that people can afford, her fight to keep renters in their homes, to prevent homelessness, her fight to try and really solve our homelessness crisis but also be efficient with our public dollars.”

Nikita Chaudhry, an actor and political organizer, wants to see Raman revitalize L.A.’s film industry, “to call the city the home of Hollywood again.”

“Having that kind of representation and knowing that it exists is really exciting because I think and hope it will activate South Asian Americans of all ages to get more involved in their communities,” Chaudhry said.

Raman's and Mamdani’s victories were years in the making, Chaudhry said: from organizing in their communities to holding other elected positions to engaging voters who are otherwise ignored by elected officials. And she hopes that it will inspire other South Asians to become more involved in their communities.

“If you're feeling activated, if you're feeling excited, that's great," she said. "Take that energy and the time and the skills and the specificity of what fires you up towards your local organization, towards your neighborhood, towards your community.”

As the race to represent L.A.’s Council District 9 remains too close to call, candidate Estuardo Mazariegos’ campaign has accused the campaign of Jose Ugarte, the front-runner, of potential ballot tampering.

The Mazariegos campaign made the accusations Monday, saying it had filed a complaint with the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk. In a press release, the campaign alleged that representatives for the Ugarte campaign had collected voters’ ballots to drop off without signing the appropriate line identifying the individual who returned the ballot.

In one case, Mazariegos’ team accused Ugarte campaigners of filling out a ballot on a voter’s behalf without her knowledge of who she was voting for.

“Taking people’s ballots, filling them out, and not following legal voter assistance guidelines in a district that has faced so much disenfranchisement is disgusting,” Mazariegos said in a statement.

Mike Sanchez, a spokesperson for the L.A. County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk, said his office had forwarded the news release to the district attorney for review. He also pointed to the California Elections Code, which says that a “ballot shall not be disqualified solely because the person authorized to return it did not provide on the identification envelope their name or signature.”

Under California law, a voter can authorize another person to return their mail-in ballot — an approach also called ballot harvesting.

Justin Levitt, a  professor of constitutional law at Loyola Marymount University, told AirTalk Tuesday that there is no legal limit on the number of ballots an individual can turn in on others’ behalf, so long as they aren’t being compensated per ballot returned.

“Even if there were some sort of administrative wrongdoing, as long as there's no indication of fraud with the ballot itself, those ballots will all be counted,” he said.

Levitt said, however, that signing a ballot and then handing it to someone else to fill out would be illegal.

“ To the extent that there are allegations now that the DA may investigate, I suspect that's what they'll be focusing on,” Levitt continued.

The Mazariegos campaign also sent a collection of photos to the press, including one of a campaigner, USC student Amir King, returning a stack of ballots at a ballot drop box.

The Mazariegos campaign alleged that representatives for the Ugarte campaign had collected voters’ ballots to drop off without signing the appropriate line identifying the individual who returned the ballot.

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Courtesy of Estuardo Mazariegos' Campaign

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Ugarte’s campaign responded to the accusations by pointing to a post by King on Instagram in which he accused the Mazariegos campaign of bullying him and making false claims about him.

“Why is he attacking me? For participating in our democracy, as is my right under California state law and for helping others participate in democracy, as is their right under California state law,” King said in the post.

As of Tuesday morning, just under 300 ballots separate Ugarte and Mazariegos, with 44,000 ballots left to count in L.A. County. It’s not clear how many ballots in Council District 9 are left to count.