“If there’s a day that goes by and I’m not thinking about identifying one more person to help with any aspect of the social justice work that I do, then I’m really not doing my job.” – Ada Briceño
Orange County’s transformation from the heartland of homogeneous Goldwater-era conservatism it once was to the diverse, increasingly progressive place it is today had many different causes, all of which needed to be brought together to achieve such sweeping change. Connecting people, issues, and causes together has long been a way of life for Ada Briceño, Co-President of UNITE-HERE Local 11 and Chair of the Democratic Party of Orange County—the first Latina to hold either office—so she’s a perfect representative of that transformation. But in a way, it all started in San Pedro.
Her family fled Nicaragua in 1980 when she was just 6, and because of a car accident, her father lost out on a longshore job he’d been offered here. So Briceño began working at a very young age. And that’s where her lifetime of activism, rooted in the labor movement, all began. Random Lengths interviewed her about her history of activism, how she became the first Latina president of her local at age 26, how her union activism broadened to working in and with other organizations, eventually AdaBriceno02leading to becoming party chair, all the way up through the 2020 elections, the recent recall election and looking forward to the future in the 2022 midterms.
Random Lengths: You wear two hats, as Co-President of UNITE-HERE Local 11 and Chair of the Democratic Party of Orange County. You’ve worn the first hat a lot longer, so I want to start there, with your experience in fighting for workers rights, which began here in San Pedro. I want to begin with your earliest experience in having someone else stand up for you when you were just a teenager working at Ports O’ Call. So, could you talk about what happened there and how that affected you?
Ada Briceño: Mr. Solorsano was his name, and he passed during COVID. So, it was a very good time for reflection when I heard of him passing, and I couldn’t help but really remember and cherish the moment when he stood up for me. Though, of course, my mother had stood up for me before,.
I don’t know if you remember, I’m sure you’re familiar with the place but there was like a banana dip chocolate I think it was Bob’s Old Fashioned Ice Cream or something, and the owner of the place—it was one of my first jobs, I worked at Ante’s too, before that as a bus person there, at a very young age—and I was working there, his son was very inappropriate. I couldn’t understand it because I was very naive and very young. But he was very inappropriate. He would say very inappropriate things. Do you remember the sex shop in Ports O’ Call? It was like a little sex store, with sexual things, I don’t even know because I never went in there. But the owner’s son would go in there and he would come back and show us stuff that was not necessarily in good taste.
So we were very young. And I wouldn’t dare tell my mom, because I new in some ways that there was something wrong, I just didn’t understand how wrong it was. But my friend who worked with me told her dad. And she called me one day, and said, “Dad is taking you up with me, and we’re going to Bob’s Ice Cream place.” I didn’t understand what or when, I just remember he picked me up; he marched both of us to the store, and he said, “They quit! And this is why.” And he was yelling at him. And we marched out, right in back of him with our heads down and we never looked back.
But that was then an important moment, an important lesson for me. And I’m not sure how much I understood then, because I wanted that job so bad. But I’m thankful for him, and I honored his life for having the courage of taking somebody else’s kid and standing up for them. That was important.
It was only a couple of years later that you first started standing up on behalf of others. Can you tell me about that when you were working at the Sheraton Hotel?
Do you remember that Sheraton, I think it was called Sheraton LA Harbor? The one that was fairly close to Ports O’Call, maybe it was Eighth or Ninth Street? It was walking distance from my home. I got a job there, and I made a couple more dollars an hour then I had either at Ante’s or any of the other places I had worked, and had my best meal of the day there, and finally had healthcare.
But the best thing that I understood that I had was the contract that provided me with my rights. Remember I’m really young at this time, I’m either 18 or close to 18 years old, and I had to find my voice first. I remember being so happy, and reading through it, and asking for the shifts that should have been coming to me, and learning how to stand up for myself at that time.
And then it was not difficult, because I quickly made friends with others around the hotel, the cooks and dishwashers. But the people who really took my heart in the hotel were the room attendants. As a front desk clerk I was often communicating with them. I was the only bilingual front desk clerk, therefore everybody would ask me, “Is room 1918 clean?” and so I had to call the room attendants and ask them. And at lunch time I made friends with them. They started telling me their problems.
The funny thing is that the hotel had hired me—in addition to working at the front desk—they had hired me for a part-time position at human resources, filing away stuff. So I was able to see people’s discipline. And it was a little boring and I was a little nosy, so I would look and read into disciplines, and I thought, “How unfair is this? Room attendants work so hard and were getting disciplined, for not finishing the room for example.” And I’d see how they sweat, and I’d see how difficult it is. So that really opened my eyes, and it wasn’t hard for me to want to stand up for them.
But I say “for them” because then I learned that it was even better than that, that I could teach them how to stand up for themselves. When we teach someone to stand up for themselves in one area of their lives, there’s other areas of their lives that are affected, and that’s every other part. You can’t just fight injustice in one area of your life, you learn to take leadership in others. So really, understanding that at some point in my career, early on in my leadership, is what really drew me and kept me in the labor movement, and specifically in my union.
You went on to become the first Latina president of your local in just 8 years, so that struck me as a very rapid rise that must involve some interesting stories. What can you tell me about that and what it says about who you are today?
I got to be truthful with you… When I was doing the soft serve ice cream at Bob’s shop I loved doing it, I enjoyed it. When I was a front desk clerk at the hotel, I loved every minute of it. And at Ante’s as well. I guess I’m very fortunate I have loved everything I’ve done, and I’ve done it at my best. Because I was so happy at the Sheraton, I was just excited to be there, I loved my co-workers, I finally found my voice and my passion.
When the union came to me and said we want to hire you to work at our office, as a receptionist, I really had to think about it. I remember I had a friend in management, the head room attendant was my friend, she was from my country, Nicaragua, and she told me, “Girl you’re going to make the worst mistake of your life, if you’re going to go work for a union, and you’re going to be blacklisted. Nobody’s going to want to touch you after that.” And I was a little frightened, but excited because I remember that conversation struck a spark. I was like, “Well, she thinks this is such a bad thing, I want to figure this out.”
So, I took the leap, I started working, answering phones. I taught myself how to translate contracts from English to Spanish. Our membership was mostly Latino—well a big part was Latino—yet our contracting communications were in English. and the then president gave me some leeway, and I was just hooked. People would ask me, and my job was to patch the calls into the organizers and the representatives of the union, and I just wanted to learn how to defend each and every single one of them.
So I started reading and reading and reading. And I just kept getting hungrier by the minute. I loved everything that the union stood for, I loved everything about standing up for working families, for room attendants, and cooks and other members. And so I began to get curious and worked in the dues department at some point, even though I was really young, I was given—I actually changed my work to different responsibilities, by going to different protests, and different things and earning the respect of the workers.
It was really when I went to different protests in LA that I decided that I wanted to run for the top leadership of the union. And the reason why is because there was this woman, she was a leader of the local, Los Angeles, her name was Maria Elena Durazo. And I watched her, get arrested in the middle of the street for making up beds along with other housekeepers, and bringing hundreds and hundreds of people into protests in the streets to really put pressure on corporations to give up money for workers. And I watched her in a hunger strike, at USC.
I thought that the tactics that were being used in LA, of pressuring the bosses, were the correct ones for us in Orange County. And so when I tried to bring those to Orange County it was hard, because the established leader at that time was concerned I didn’t think it was appropriate. And having seen women of color like myself be at the helm, I said, “Oh, I could do this too.”
I don’t know what I was thinking or why I felt like that but I did. And at 26 I became the first Latina leader of the union. But not without difficulty. This is early on in to the 2000s, and I was one of very few women leaders in the labor movement and even less Latinos than women. And that was really difficult for me, because here I was this person who wanted to provoke a little more then the labor movement had. So I had ideas—arrests, everything that I had seen in LA, I wanted to bring here. Protest for workers to finally stand up, because workers were starving, right? And that wasn’t seen very much in Orange County, at least not in those days.
It was tough because there weren’t many like-minded individuals, and little by little we started building. So it was a while before I had any credibility, and our members were starting to feel excited because they were feeling empowered to take on the bosses for the first time ever. And they started seeing more results as we were doing it successfully. I was in enlisting Los Angeles to come teach me the strategies that were done there. And their strategies were helping, it was yielding more benefits for our members, and so our members started believing and started supporting my leadership. And they started understanding that they were the ones who have the tools, that wasn’t me that was going to help go help them, and represent them, but that every one of them had a voice, and their collective voice was going to be the one that was going to win.
Over the years you’ve been involved with a lot of other organizations whose concerns overlapped with yours in your union leadership role. You’ve chaired Orange County CLUE, served on AQMD’s Environmental Justice Committee, served on the Board of Planned Parenthood of San Bernardino and Orange Counties, just to name a few. Could you pick one or two examples of organizations you’ve been involved with and explain how and why you became involved with them, and something about what you accomplished?
I’m not sure that I can pick one, but what I can tell you is that my goal is to make sure that workers are right in the middle, front and center, of the issues that affect them every single day. So at the AQMD, for example, our members are the ones that live in the areas where air pollution is at its worst, and so they are the canaries in the coal mine for that. So my leadership there is to ensure that our members have the information and get the benefits and understand what not having clean air means for themselves and their families, and what tools to use go help them, and for the AQMD to understand how much more that we have to do as a collective to ensure that everybody has clean air.
So I’ve enjoyed serving on the board at AQMD. I also founded an organization called OCCORD [Orange County Communities Organized for Responsible Development], back in 2005, where the idea was to bring workers and communities together to fight for responsible development, to make sure that if there were developments happening in the city, that it included its workers. So if there were jobs, that they would be strong jobs, if there would be communities, that they would be safe and healthy communities and I served there for 15 years.
One of the most notable things that we did, I think we paved the way for Orange County to turn blue and that I was serving as the executive director for part of the 4 years we had a contract dispute with the city of Anaheim, and it was my union and that organization that led the effort. It was hotel workers who knocked on doors to demand that there would be district elections in the city of Anaheim, and the city fought us off, because the current elected officials didn’t want people of color to serve along side of them.
It was a very difficult campaign, but we were successful in implementing one of the friendliest maps for our immigrant communities in Anaheim. The reason it was so significant for me is because that paved the way for other cities to go to district elections in Orange County—and therefore electing more people of color in places like Garden Grove, in places like Buena Park, in Fullerton, Anaheim, and Santa Ana went to districts. It’s part of what has been helping us see strong changes in Orange County. It was a joint project through the two organizations that I was working with.
I don’t think people really appreciate how important that is. Because you have to be on the ground and experience the frustration of powerlessness in having a large population and no representation. And then to go from that to actually having a part in the decision making—you have to experience that yourself, to really appreciate it how fundamental it is.
We went four and a half years going to the city council every single Tuesday and we were shut down at every conversation. We would give public testimony on the things that they were by passing the community on, and we would fill the chambers with 300 room attendants who had just come from cleaning 16 rooms. And their voice was shut down every single time. And I remember thinking, “How many more times do we going to have to do this so we can move every single vote?” And we just said, “This is crazy. We can’t do this every single time.” So what we did was we came up with a new game plan.
And what was that?
That was fighting them for district elections. Because then we would have our own there.
And what was key to your success in doing that?
We spoke to one person at a time and organized them. Our room attendants knock on people’s doors, and said, “I work at Disneyland and I don’t get a say in my city, whatever the issue was.” We also passed a minimum wage law in the city of Anaheim right after that. We won by 58% of the vote. So it’s organizing, it’s touching one person at a time, and changing the hearts and minds of people.
That’s at the core of every single thing that we do in the Union, and I’m a passionate organizer, I’ve been organizing and every single one of my positions whether it’s the party, whether it’s Planned Parenthood, I bring my organizing skills and there’s no shortcuts there. You have to build and connect with people, and move them to seeing the issues that are important, collectively between them and you. And then we can make magic happen, and that’s what my members have done. And that’s what keeps me, after 30 years, in the union.
You were unanimously elected chair Orange County Democrats in January 2019. Which I presume was a reflection of the collaborative organizing that you’ve been involved with. But what made you want to run to be chair at that time?
With my union taught me is it taught me my democratic values. I first went into politics because I cared about workers’ rights. But then what I saw women who were feminists fighting for workers rights it made me try to understand our plight. When I saw the LGBTQ community stand up with me, I then did the same thing for them. And what I noticed is that my passion in the union was around immigrants rights, was about workers rights, was about women’s rights and all those things all led to politics. Everything I ever cared about always took me to politics. And I felt that after the election of Donald Trump I needed to get even more involved. I was already doing everything I could to try to effect change—not only in Orange County but being involved in national politics–but it just wasn’t enough. And one of the places that was difficult for me, because many times I felt left behind was the Democratic Party.
So, even though I was working all these campaigns, with particular candidates, that I really saw eye-to-eye with, I never worked within the structures of the Democratic Party. And so it was a moment of reflection, and it was a lot of tears when Trump won, but I have to go where my union has taught me, that I have to look at where the most difficult thing is, and go confront that. And so the first thing I did was enter the doors of the Democratic Party of Orange County. And it was a little frightening, because very few people looked like me at that time. But again, I saw that there was like-minded individuals and I found my commonality with many many of them in that room.
When the position became available, when the chair announced that she was retiring, I knew simultaneously that I was going to run for that. I was texting people in the meeting, saying, “I’m going to be the next chair.” I felt that my background in organizing combined with work that I had already done here in Orange County, with different candidates would yeild me the experience of being successful in that position.
But you never know what you don’t know. So I have learned a tremendous amount, in this is now my second term, and I believe that I’ve shared some of the things I’ve learned throughout my career and I’m still learning from so many great activist today. What I know is that I love collective organizing, so I’m at my best when I’m working with a diverse group of people, all pulling towards the same direction, just like we were doing in the recall, all kinds of groups coming together, believing in the same thing. And I believe that that’s what America offers me. 2804
I want to get to the recall, but first I want to talk about the 2020 election. Your union played an important role in an historic outcome in Arizona, and also other key battleground states. Could you explain what specifically you did there, in contrast what others were doing, or not doing.
My union has been organizing in Arizona for the last 12 years or so, and one of the things that happened after Trump won is that the resolve of our members was that we wanted to merge with the Arizona. Because he wanted to give the tools that we’ve learned in Los Angeles do help it turn blue, because we were right in the middle of helping Orange County turn blue. So we wanted to give our resources and we have been building a coalition there for the last 12 years. So we merged and we began working there even stronger than we have before, building rthose blocks that we had been.
And in the middle of the pandemic when it seemed everything we had been working for was going to fall, we have committed hundreds of our workers to take time off of work, because we had negotiated into our contract that they can take time off of work, and then come back. But what happened is that instantaneously we lost 90% of our members due to the pandemic. They were home. So all those people who had committed to going to Arizona all of a sudden they weren’t sure that they wanted to go anymore, because they were afraid–just like we all were.
But then they found the courage and we sent, I don’t know, I think it was more than 300—two or three hundred of our members from LA, and more from Orange County—and then we moved them in to different places and we hired an epidemiologist, and we practiced the whole day with them, whether they were working or whether they were off. We had strict rules that they had to abide by. Our members knocked on over 800,000 doors when nobody would knock on doors, They were so afraid. The Biden campaign wouldn’t knock on doors. Nobody would block on doors. But 800,000 doors were knocked on by our members. And we were successful in making sure that Arizona turned blue.
And in Orange County the same members of my union along with thousands of Democratic activists, were moving Orange County forward to make sure that they voted for Biden and we took 22 seats from the Republicans in that election, an historic number. We took mayors of cities, city council people, we took two [state] senate seats and we’re on our way to continue our transformation in Orange County.
And then, because Georgia heard what we were doing on the ground, knocking on doors in Arizona, they invited us come walk with them in Georgia. So I think that for 4 weeks—4 to 6 weeks, I can’t recall–the people that we’re working in Arizona went to Georgia and helped turn those two [US] senate seats. And I couldn’t feel prouder. The most impacted industry—our members are still not back to work, we’re 40% out of work still—and they were the most vulnerable people, who live in close proximity to each other, they went, they helped save democracy despite their lives being at risk and all the tribulations that they were facing during a world pandemic. So these are the things that really keep me in love with organizing, in love with the particular program that we have at Local 11.
Turning back to what you accomplished in Orange County in 2020, you mentioned the seats you won, but there a few that stood out to me, one was about gaining majorities or super-majorities in city councils. Is there one or two that you would particularly draw attention to?
First I want to say that Democrats took seats in areas that wer super red. We could took a seat in the City Council in the city of San Clemente, we took two seats in the City of Huntington Beach, andwe took two seats–one in the city council, and one in the school board in Fountain Valley. Those are not our seats traditionally. And when we’re talkin about majorities, we swept Costa Mesa, Costa Mesa we have a supermajority. In Buena Park, we have a supermajority. And the most noticeable one, we got a recent majority in the city of Huntington Beach. We have a majority there with a special appointment that happened. We feel really proud in Irvine, a very important city, we have a woman of color, the first Muslim mayor her name is Farrah Khan. So I couldn’t feel luckier to be leading alongside so many fantastic activists and elected officials in Orange County.
Did you mention the mayor there were some other examples of diversity breakthroughs as well could you send me a couple of others?
Yeah I would good I really really admire the work that the city of Santa Ana is doing, led by a Bolivian man, his name is Vicente Sarmiento, who’s our mayor, and the shade of blue that is there is really great now. We have a very progressive council, we’re led by the first Vietnamese woman, Thai Viet Phan and two Latinos, a young Latina woman named Jessie Lopez, and Johnathan Hernandez, another young Latino. So looking really good in the city of Santa Ana, I feel really, really proud. Let’s go back to the City of Irvine, where we have Farrah Khan. But we also have a Korean-American woman and her name is Tammy Kim. And went from having two black electeds to I think having five black electeds in the county. We have a city council person in Aliso Viejo his name is Richard Hurt [he’s a black man. And on the Rancho Santiago Community College [Board], David Crockett, the first black man there. I mean, this is just incredible, amazing. The mayor of the city of Tustin, Letitia Clark, is a black woman, and we also have a trustee in Fullerton, Vicky Calhoun, is a black woman.
That’s an amazing transformation, but in contrast you still have a very entrenched Board of Supervisors that’s been really regressive, with regard to COVID policy especially. So, there’s two things I’d like to ask about—the way that they stood in the way of sensible COVID policy, and then the election of Katrina Foley.
There was no easier thing for me to work on than defeating the recall against the governor, because in the middle of this pandemic, we could not trust elected officials, the people that we should entrust with our health, we had nobody else we could rely on except for Gavin Newsom. And when our beaches were filled to the brim—I don’t know if you remember seeing pictures in the middle of the pandemic –
I sure do!
Gavin Newsom closed them down. And it was very early on, it was right in the middle of the height of everything. And there Republican-led supervisors have been so irresponsible with my health, with the health of my family, and the health of Orange County residents. And the mask mandates have been incredible, the silencing of our during such a crucial time not allowing our testimony to be via Zoom, the silencing our voices, we’ll never forget that.
So it has been really difficult and that’s why we all spoke with one voice for the election of Katrina Foley. That was one of the most beautiful campaign I’ve worked on. We said we’re going to knock on doors we’re going to call voters, and we’re going to organize and that’s exactly what we did. This is my supervisorial seat, and I feel so proud to have the first Democrat in more than a 127 years and I’m even prouder she’s the first Democrat to be a woman on that board.
She is making up for the lack of leadership that we have on the board. She’s speaking firmly. She’s saying what we want to hear. And she’s trying to protect us at every corner. She’s bold and she’s courageous. Just like she said, she turned the city of Costa Mesa from being anti-worker, from being anti- values I care about,turned it from being hostile to going fully Democratic, to having a supermajority. Snd that was sort of hard work. So she is one of the strongest and most courageous elected officials we have.
So the recall count isn’t yet complete, but it seems safe to say Orange County results are in line with most of the rest of the state, quite similar to 2018 and 2020. How do you feel about those results and what does that make you feel about going forward?
I’ll say that there’s 130,000 ballots yet to be counted, and in order for the “no” on recall to be overturned, I think they’ll have to get anywhere from 65 to 70% of the votes, so I feel very excited about that. I’m not going to count my eggs before they hatched, or however you say that, but I can’t say that I feel sad about our position. It’s beautiful. We won Hillary Clinton, in 2016, in Orange County. We won Biden, and the special election if we win this it’s going to be a big shot in the arm for us moving into 2022.
There’s energy, there’s county activists, Orange County Working Families, the people who are like-minded have felt the victory and now we’re not going to let it go. We know what it takes to win these elections, and we’re going to continue to develop our capacity, so we can win more of these seats and continue to makes changes in the constituents lives in Orange County.
Looking forward the 2022, redistricting is going to affect the congressional seats as well as the state legislature. So what are you doing now to prepare for 2022?
One of the things I’ve learned from my colleagues at the union is that we’ve got to be a strategic as possible and find every opportunity we can in order to make strides and jump on those opportunities even if they’re not convenient. So being bold in the actions we take, and pushing ourselves further even if it means no rest, right?
So we are developing every single day. We’re developing our basic candidates, we are fortifying our clubs every single day, we’re preparing because we know that the more more resources our clubs have, not only in finances, but also in people power, the more we can stretch in the number of campaigns were able to effect. And so our finances, our people power, our 1-on-1 organizing, our quality of candidates, all those things we’re working every single day, whether we’re working the recall to affect that, or incorporating everything in our everyday work, we’re not missing a beat.
But as far as what are the tangible things we want to get from the 2022 election is we want to take back our two seats. I say that proudly because we have to win them in order to be able to get them back. So, we’re going to be a Battleground corner a front, a battleground county, people are watching, but I know we’re building that capacity. In 2019, we overtook the Republicans in registration, and in the last 2 years we are now 65,000 voter registrations in the lead. So every day we are growing a little stronger and that’s what we want, we want to push through in the correct direction.
I’ll also say in addition to our two congressional seats we have set a goal and that is we want to take the district attorney. We’re going to work really hard to take that countywide seat in the middle of all of this. We have an incredible candidate in Pete Hardin, the caliber of candidacy and what he’s been able to do is really impressive, so I invite you to look him up. And we will take seats in our city council and the school boards, which is the cornerstone of what the local party does. And so we’re working in conjunction with the state party, and the national party to make sure that they know that we’re prepared and that we’re ready to receive and to give everything we’ve been building toward.
I see a lot more change coming in our horizon. because it’s been years in the making. So many people before me, but including me, with my other hat, but I remember a whole bunch of defeats as well. It’s only been recent that we’ve had all of these wonderful victories. So I look forward to continuing to win alongside with our clubs and our activists and our electids.
What’s the most important question I didn’t ask and what’s the answer
I’ve got to say I was really impressed with your questions and I’m really impressed with your knowledge around my work, and the work of my union, and my party, so thank you, thank you so much. It’s been a beautiful pleasant surprise.
Well, I’ll tell you something, my grandfather was a shop steward in the ILGWU (a forerunner to UNITE).
Oh, that’s fantastic.
So, I was historically well-prepared.
Well, thank you for wanting to tell my story and the story of my union, and I would just say the core of everything we do in the Union and what I would like to leave in the party, is that our job is to open and make the table wider. To find leaders in everything we’re doing. And if there’s a day that goes by and I’m not thinking about identifying one more person to help with any aspect of the social justice work that I do, then I’m really not doing my job. It’s not the victories it’s not how were affecting a campaign, It’s how many people we’re building as we’re doing it. In addition to our victories we’ve got to find the tangible victories in people power. It’s not sustainable unless we’re finding other people to help us do this great work.