Radicals or Progressives? Two Members of the Calexico City Council—Including the First Transgender Latino Mayor in the State—Face a Recall Election

If you can’t beat them, recall them.

That could be the unofficial motto in California. The Golden State leads the nation in recall attempts—including the most recent attempt in Calexico, a border town with about 38,000 residents 90 miles southwest of the Coachella Valley.

A coalition led by a former mayor has forced a recall election against two City Council members—including the first openly transgender mayor in Calexico’s history—and is attempting to recall a third City Council member. The campaign has been rife with rumor, internet bullying and accusations of misconduct on both sides.

Raul Ureña was a popular candidate when he ran for the Calexico City Council in 2020 and 2022, but now he will have to defend his office at the ballot box on April 16. His opponents were successful in getting more than 4,000 signatures to bring the recall to a vote.

Ureña believes he is being targeted for his progressive politics and his gender identity. (Ureña said he doesn’t have a preferred pronoun, but most often uses he.)

“In 2022, we were able to get a progressive majority in the City Council,” Ureña said.  “Now after literally nine months of governing, we’ve had tremendous headways, (getting funding to build) a transit center and (starting) the New River environmental project in the most polluted waterway in the nation. However, I’m the first transgender Latino mayor in the state, and I’m the second-youngest mayor in California. Our progress is being threatened by this recall. They’re using transphobia and using a whole bunch of hate. But the bottom line is, this old political group—not old in age, but old in mentality, and old in how long they’ve been there—wants to take back power from the progressives who won the power fair and square through the election.”

At the May 3, 2023, City Council meeting, Ureña was handed a notification of intent to recall. He was just months into both a full four-year term and his one-year rotating term as mayor. Ureña dramatically tore apart the document.

That didn’t deter Maritza Hurtado and the others backing the recall. At the same meeting, they notified City Councilmember Gilberto Manzanarez that he, too, was a target for recall. Eight months later, on the day she became mayor of Calexico, the group notified City Councilmember Gloria Romo they would be seeking signatures to remove her from office.

Hurtado denies the recall is about Ureña’s gender identity. She claims Ureña did not mention any instances of transphobia when he filed a response to the recall. Instead, she said Ureña and Manzanarez are bringing in “radical” ideas that do not align with the city’s needs, and that with Romo, they’ve formed a voting bloc that overrules the other two councilmembers. The recall petition accuses them of not supporting the interests of business owners and being unresponsive to the needs of city police and firemen.

Manzanarez responded that gender-identity bigotry has been part of the recall campaign, and that it can’t be separated from politics.

“The bottom line here is, they want to flip the council back to where they used to have the power,” Manzanarez said. “However, I do believe that they are dog-whistling to people who are upset by Mayor Ureña’s sexuality and lifestyle choices. It’s very evident by the amount of things that have been posted on their recall page—just so many people making disgusting comments.

“The very person who served Ureña the recall papers was the very person who attacked him at an LGBTQ flag-raising event. In fact, (other recall proponents) tried to distance themselves from that person at the time. That’s the moment when Maritza Hurtado, former mayor of Calexico, came into the spotlight. She was pretty much forced as the leader of the recall, because prior to that, it was mostly Ms. Rebecca Lemon.”

A video posted to the Facebook page for the Beyond Borders Gazette shows Lemon at the aforementioned pride-flag-raising event on June 15, 2023. She approaches Ureña yelling profanities before she is detained by officers; the video has 222,000 views. A public Facebook page for Lemon has multiple anti-trans posts.

Hurtado responds that the recall committee warned members against bigotry toward Ureña and has taken down slurs and hate speech that were posted to the group’s page. During her interview with the Independent, she did not acknowledge Lemon as a member of the recall group, nor did she acknowledge Lemon’s role in delivering the recall paperwork to Ureña and Manzanarez. Instead, Hurtado reiterated her view that the recall is only about the way Manzanarez and Ureña are conducting city business.

“Raul had done two years (on the City Council),” Hurtado said. “He and Mr. Manzanarez and all their followers belong to a social justice group called IV (Imperial Valley) Equity and Justice. They were already out there trying to be active in the community, (and Manzanarez) was a natural candidate to join Raul and run together.

“(The people) realize they elected two individuals who are anti-police. They’re radicals. That knowledge was not known, that they were going to push their ideologies through our teeny tiny budget. They call it progressive, but they’re not. They’re extremists.”

Hurtado was on the Calexico City Council from 2010-2018, including a stint as mayor in 2017-18, and she has remained active in city politics. She said she has run her family-owned tax business in Calexico’s “tiny” downtown for more than 35 years.

Hurtado said she also objects to council meetings being conducted in Spanish, and claims Ureña and Manzanarez sold city properties to establish homeless housing near her office. She believes this will exacerbate lewd behavior and drug use.

“I participate all the time with homeless programs; however, we have to be realistic in the city,” Hurtado said. “If you’re in support of businesses, why would you think that economic development includes bringing a 300-bed (homeless) facility to your downtown?”

Hurtado said she wants the City Council to instead focus on cleaning up the city’s parks and downtown spaces.

“We’re not a city that has a budget for homelessness; that’s why they had to seek the funding somewhere else,” Hurtado said. “And the thing is, when they got that money for homelessness, (they were) funneling it to someone else. The city wants parks, and the children and parents have been there to tell them that they need to focus on things for the families.”

Hurtado said that when she heard about the 300-bed homeless facility, she felt she had to action. “I figured that … we needed to remove these two people, because their ideologies were going to kill our city,” she said.

Manzanarez said the timing of the recall is suspicious. He’d only been on the council for several months following his election in November 2022 when he was notified of the recall attempt. Calexico was dealing with the results of a state audit at the time, and once elected, Manzanarez said, he and Ureña made the audit their primary focus.

The lengthy audit’s opening statement summarizes the city’s financial status: “Our office’s audit of the city of Calexico (Calexico)—conducted as part of our high-risk local government agency audit program—concluded that Calexico faces significant risks related to its financial and operational management. For several years, the City Council approved spending despite indications that the city’s budgets were based on unreliable financial data. As a result, the city’s general fund was in a deficit from fiscal years 2014-15 through 2018-19.”

Manzanarez cautioned voters to remember that he and Ureña were not in office during the financial crisis.

“In the recall statement, they cite that it’s because of the condition of the city,” Manzanarez said. “They throw just about every possible issue the city has—the amount of homelessness, the state of downtown deterioration, all of these things which are very much real problems. But how can I, in four months, destroy the city? That’s a little ridiculous.

“To say that we created this is just such a false statement to the community. I’m in disbelief that the people of Calexico might have forgotten, or they simply don’t know, that the city went into negative $8 million dollars in reserves pretty much during those years (that were the focus of the audit). The city of Calexico was taking ill-advised and non-accurate financial information, approving multimillion dollar budgets of money that we didn’t really have.”

He said their progressive agenda reflects the needs of Calexico’s citizens.

“We tend to look at things a little differently, because the state of the country is not so forgiving toward the younger generations in terms of housing and the economy,” Manzanarez said. “We are pro (in favor of) the working-class people. We’re going to push for affordable housing. We are a generation that cares more about police accountability, and that has seen the effects of the post-George Floyd protests. It doesn’t mean that we are anti-police. We’ve certainly not made any ‘defunding police’ measures like the recall movement has claimed. I feel like we are all aiming for the betterment of Calexico. We just have different views to go about it.”

The citizens of Calexico will have the last word. The special recall election is set for April 16. The city will foot the bill. The tab, including the funds to verify more than 10,000 individual signatures, is estimated at $150,000.

Manzanarez wants the voters to focus on the work he and Ureña have done. He said the City Council, working with city manager Esperanza Colio Warren, has already resolved some of the issues in the audit.

“Because of mismanagement of grants funding, we have millions frozen from the state,” Manzanarez said. “In the last couple of years, they’ve started to unfreeze some of these funds for us. The transportation center was stuck because the City Council at the time didn’t want to provide the Imperial County Transportation Commission with the power of eminent domain. So I get (elected), and in my very first City Council meeting, we approved that eminent domain, immediately triggering the state to look at the project and seeing that (it) can move forward. Congressman Raul Ruiz comes in and does a ceremony, and there’s $18.5 million secured now for the project.”

Ureña admitted that he didn’t take the recall seriously at first. He never thought the effort would get the required signatures—but it did, and come April 16, he wants voters to remember why they elected him and Manzanarez in the first place.

“A lot of people ask me: How were you able to win?” said Ureña. “What I tell them is, ‘You don’t understand that the people I represent are the products of some of the most radical movements in United States history.’ … My grandma and my grandpa on both sides of the family, most of them marched with Cesar Chavez, so these people know how to change society. They’ve done it before. Maybe they don’t know about LGBT issues, but once they have someone who shares their language and comes from them, they’ll understand it. And that’s exactly what happened. They’ve embraced me.”