Blanca Figueroa is the mayor of South El Monte and a proud Mexican American who sometimes signs off her e-mails with the Spanish translation of her official title -- "alcaldesa."
One of the first things she'll tell you about herself is that, as a teenager, she met Cesar Chavez. And that when her family moved from East Los Angeles to South El Monte in 1960, they endured the racist comments of certain neighbors who soon joined the "white flight" out of that place.
Now she's running a city where Latinos outnumber Asians by more than 10 to 1.
So when Gil Cedillo, a Chicano with roots in the Eastside, ran against Judy Chu, who is Chinese American, for a seat in Congress, what did la alcaldesa Figueroa do?
Naturally she voted for Chu.
"To me, it's not about race or ethnicity," Figueroa told me. "It's about the person who's most qualified. Judy has her finger on the pulse of the San Gabriel Valley. Her agenda is the agenda of the people."
Something really monumental happened last week in the San Gabriel Valley and Eastside, where people voted to fill the seat of Hilda Solis, who left Congress to join the Obama administration as Labor secretary.
The district has been represented by a member of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus since the early 1980s. In private, a lot of Latino leaders said the seat should remain in Latino hands. Some believed it was improbable that a Chinese American woman could win a seat in a district with a hefty Latino majority.
In the end, about one in three Latino voters chose Chu, helping give her a 9-point victory over Cedillo for the Democratic nomination. They were following the lead of several local and regional Latino political leaders, including Figueroa, L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and L.A. jefa Maria Elena Durazo.
To understand how remarkable the Latino embrace of Chu was, consider some recent history.
A generation ago, the trauma of decades of powerlessness and discrimination still defined Latino politics. Civil rights groups were fighting in court to increase Latino representation in local government. They persuaded a federal judge to redraw the boundaries of the Los Angeles County supervisor districts to create a seat with so many Latinos that a Latino candidate would be sure to win.
Today the boundaries of that "safe" Latino district on the Eastside and the San Gabriel Valley overlap, roughly, with the congressional district that is expected to send Chu to Washington after a July 19 runoff election.
