Good vs. Good

In 1998, Romero defeated a group of well-qualified candidates in the 49th Assembly District in Monterey Park. She has the support of labor, including the United Farm Workers.

She owes part of her political tenacity to such role models as United Farm Workers warrior-activist Dolores Huerta, Romero says. She also is inspired by the way her mother tried to help others improve their lives.

“Latinas don’t step aside anymore,” Romero says. “We have earned our credentials. We have a message to deliver . . . and it resonates.”

For Romero, public safety will remain a key issue. In the aftermath of the LAPD Rampart corruption scandal, she shepherded through a law that makes it a felony for officers to alter, plant or conceal evidence in an attempt to get someone charged with a crime.

As for Gallegos, part of his political philosophy comes from his mother. A single parent, she managed to put him and his older brother through medical schools working for $80 a week in a South-Central rubber-mold factory. “She always told us, ‘You got to go to college because you don’t want to end up like me, working in a factory for 30 years,’” Gallegos says. “It was hard work that she did.”

He grew up in Huntington Park, playing baseball and joining the Boy Scouts. He decided to become a chiropractor, in part because he was inspired by one who healed his mother’s neck injury.

Gallegos believes he is the first Spanish-speaking chiropractic doctor to set up a clinic in the mostly Latino Baldwin Park area, in 1985. During his off time he would do volunteer work for the city, cleaning up graffiti or vacant lots.

In 1990, Gallegos was elected to the Baldwin Park City Council, and he served for four years. In 1994, Hilda Solis left the 57th state Assembly District when she was elected as a state Senator for the 24th District; Gallegos ran for her vacant chair and won.

Last March, Gallegos announced he would run for the state Senate after six years in the Assembly, and he plans to continue to make health care a focus of his work. He’s lived in the San Gabriel Valley for 22 years.

Their offices filled with charts and maps of the 24th District, Romero and Gallegos have hundreds of volunteers and are battling it out for votes street by street, house by house. Gonzalo Molina, a veteran Democratic activist who is a friend of both candidates, says they are among the cleanest and most honest Latino politicians around, and that each one is exemplary. He says, “I consider them my friends. They are very intelligent. May the best one win.”