Who is Ysabel Jurado? Progressive candidate battles incumbent for eastside LA council seat

Ysabel Jurado, a first-time candidate for Los Angeles City Council, admits she’s had a steep learning curve in her quest for public office.

“That’s required me to call people relentlessly and be OK with awkward conversations… and a lot of people telling me personally that they don’t believe in me,” she told LAist.

But, it turns out, a lot of people do believe in Jurado. In the closely watched race for Council District 14, she finished first in the March primary, with 25% of the vote in a crowded field of candidates.

Incumbent Kevin de León finished second with 24% after a scandal that involved him participating in a secretly recorded conversation that included racist and derogatory comments.

“We have got to do better,” Jurado said of De León. “My lived and professional experiences can meet this moment.”

Jurado spoke to LAist while seated at her dining room table in Highland Park — a sort of informal campaign headquarters — and wearing sweatpants and her own campaign T-shirt. Because she was recovering from COVID-19, she was wearing a mask.

Jurado is the latest progressive seeking to unseat an incumbent on the L.A. City Council largely by using grassroots activists walking door to door. She has excited L.A.’s burgeoning progressive movement, with supporters saying she would be a valuable voice on rent control, police spending, and homelessness.

De León says his opponent is too far left politically, and that voters should stick with him as a reliable elected leader who has brought more city services to the district.

Both are Democrats running in the non-partisan race, although Jurado has the backing of the party.

Who is Jurado?

Jurado, 34, was born and raised in Highland Park and lives with her father in the same house she grew up in. She became pregnant at 18, but that didn’t stop her from graduating from UCLA in 2012, and going on to earn a law degree in UCLA’s public interest and policy and critical race studies programs in 2019.

Now a tenants rights attorney, she is a queer, single mother who describes herself as “very Catholic.”

“I was trained in a Jesuit education at Immaculate Heart [High School], so service is so key to our faith,” she said.

Jurado said she was inspired to run for office by the election of three progressives to the council over the past few years. She wants to become the fourth — and the first person of Filipino descent to hold that office.

“I saw my values reflected,” she said.

She said she was also prompted to run because of the scandal that exploded around De León two years ago. The councilmember was caught on a secret audio recording, participating in a conversation that included racist and derogatory remarks by colleagues.

In 2022, when the tapes surfaced, there were calls from a wide range of political and community leaders on De León to resign — including from President Joe Biden. But De León refused.

He said he has made his apologies.

In an interview with LAist earlier this year, he said he was “profoundly apologetic and deeply sorry to those I hurt.” He also said he should have stopped the conversation when racist comments were made by his colleague, former Council President Nury Martinez, who did resign.

“We have done a lot of healing for the past two years,” he told a forum last week. “Folks may not have seen it, but I have worked very closely with the president of the City Council Marqueece Harris Dawson.”

Harris-Dawson is Black.

De León accused Jurado of trying to “scratch” old wounds “for political purposes.”

“Let’s move on,” he said.

Jurado has called De Leon’s apology “politically convenient.”

De León, 57, is of Mexican, Guatemalan and Chinese descent. He was raised by a single mother in San Diego and earned his bachelor’s degree from Pitzer College in Claremont.

He was an immigrant rights activist and labor organizer before being elected to the state assembly in 2006. De León served in the state Senate from 2010 to 2018, where he rose to become leader of the Senate as pro tempore.

He unsuccessfully ran for the U.S. Senate and L.A. mayor before being elected to the City Council in 2020.

Differing views on issues

The two candidates differ sharply on several key issues.

De León has accused Jurado of wanting to abolish the police, noting she has the support of the Democratic Socialists of America, which has called for defunding the Los Angeles Police Department.

Jurado denies it, but said she is in favor of shifting some money from the Police Department to city services like youth development and street lighting.

“The safest cities in America invest in our youth, our recreation, our city services,” she said, criticizing the fact that a quarter of L.A.’s budget goes to the LAPD.

Jurado said she would have voted against Mayor Karen Bass’ budget for this fiscal year that funded an increase in the size of the LAPD. The candidate also said she would have voted against a labor contract that provided raises to police officers.

De León supported both of those measures.

“We are at a dangerously low number of police officers,” De León told another recent forum. The LAPD has about 8,800 officers — down from a high of 10,000 about five years ago.

The two also differ on how to tackle the city’s homelessness crisis, most pointedly on use of a city ordinance that allows police to clear encampments away from schools, daycare centers, parks and other areas.

“What it does is just allows everyday folks to walk on our streets… free of homeless encampments, of syringes on the sidewalks, buckets of feces,” said De Leon, who backs the city law.

Jurado said it “criminalizes homelessness” and “just shifts homeless people from one street to the next.”

Another major point of contention is rent control. Last year, De León supported a measure to allow 4% rent increases in rent-stabilized apartment buildings, noting “mom and pop” landlords had not been allowed to raise rents in more than three years because of the COVID pandemic.

Jurado has said working families are struggling too much in this economy to allow rent increases.

The race has turned nasty during recent debates, which have been marked by shouting matches between supporters of the candidates.

In one of his more colorful attacks, De León said at a debate last week that because of Jurado’s association with the Democratic Socialists of America, she would have to get approval from a “socialist politburo central committee” before making any decisions as a council member.

Jurado called the accusation “absurd.”

“Let me be clear: My decisions won’t be dictated by some ‘central committee,’ and I don’t take orders from any organization or political party,” she said.

Polarized community

In some ways, the race has surfaced generational divides around race in the 14th District.

“It's really sad to see the polarization that’s happening in my community right now,” said Jennifer Maldonado, who volunteered for De León during his first run for City Council four years ago.

She no longer supports him because of his participation in the racist conversation caught on tape. She said she's surprised at the continuing support for him.

“There’s a lot of older generation Latinx folks that obviously support him regardless of his racist comments,” Maldonado said after one recent debate. “They’re just misinformed and ill-educated about what it means to be an anti-racist in this time.”

But Boyle Heights resident Areceli Caiuech, who attended one of the debates, said De León deserves another chance.

“Everybody makes a mistake,” she said, adding she likes the councilmember’s support of police and efforts to house homeless people.

“The work that he’s doing is what matters now,” she said.

For others, Jurado is a frightening figure.

“When you say progressive, to my age, that’s scary,” said Rosa Rivas, 69, of the Garvanza area in Highland Park. Rivas is particularly concerned about Jurado’s desire to shift money away from police.

Emergence of progressive left

On a recent Sunday morning, a group of about 75 people gathered outside the Highland Park Recreation Center to show their support for Jurado. The crowd included an all-star list of the city’s progressive leaders: City Controller Kenneth Mejia, as well as Councilmembers Nithya Raman, Eunisses Hernandez, and Hugo Soto-Martinez.

They were joined by labor and Democratic Party leaders and a cadre of young volunteers ready to walk door-to-door campaigning for Jurado.

Jurado later said she’s a “tried and true Democrat” and that she has “built a wide tent, a big coalition of supporters.” The Democratic Socialists of America is just “one flavor” of her backing, she said.

She is endorsed by traditional Democratic groups, including the county Democratic Party and L.A. County Federation of Labor.

De León has the backing of the police and firefighters unions.

But for progressives, Jurado is part of their own growing power.

“You see the emergence of the progressive left,” said Fernando Guerra, director of the Center for the Study of Los Angeles at Loyola Marymount University. “If you do polling for the last 10 years, you see all of L.A. residents moving in that direction, voters as well, and now candidates catching up to that.”

Raman, the councilmember, called the battle for District 14 "a very, very important race.”

Editor's note: Guerra is a lifetime trustee on LAist's board of directors.