Latino group addresses county redistricting

My name is Ricardo Favela and I was born and raised in Fallbrook and Valley Center.

I am currently serving on the County Service Area 81 Advisory Board for parks and recreation in Fallbrook and am a trustee for the Fallbrook Unified Elementary School District.

However, today I am speaking on behalf of a group known as VOCES de Fallbrook and came here to share a message from our group.

There are members of our group and residents of Fallbrook online including Morayma Flores, Luis Higinio, Elizabeth Ramos and Leticia Maldonado.

VOCES de Fallbrook is a union of Latino community leaders dedicated to amplifying the voices of Latino working families, farmworkers and students together to address the needs of Fallbrook residents. We have been very involved in the formation of voting districts in Fallbrook.

For the past few months, Fallbrook residents from greatly diverse backgrounds serving our community in different ways have been consistently expressing the profound desire for the greater Fallbrook area (Fallbrook, Bonsall, De Luz, Rainbow), with a combined population of over 56,000 people, to be included in the North County Supervisorial District 5 along with Escondido, San Marcos, Vista and Oceanside.

Map 13A at this point is the map that best represents the interests of North County, respects the communities of interest and so we stand in support of Map 13A, preferably v. 1-6 or v. 5. We urge a further working of the boundaries to the east to include tribal lands. The communities of interests shared by these cities and communities are historical, strong, wide-ranging and obvious.

Many issues bind the communities of Fallbrook, Escondido, San Marcos, Vista and Oceanside and contribute to these communities identifying together. We share Fire Protection services, hospital services, we are in the same Palomar Community College district. We are in some of the same sports league divisions sharing rivalries with Vista and Escondido, and we share in social activities such as attending the Escondido World Marketplace, also known as the Escondido Swap Meet, or spend the day at Dixon Lake, or watch a movie in Vista or Oceanside. We do our regular shopping in these communities and travel along major routes like the 15 and the 76 or ride public transit to visit these locations.

We share labor and economic ties especially as it relates to the agricultural industry. Fallbrook and Escondido have been where the packing houses have received the produce coming from Valley Center, Pauma, Pala and De Luz.

We have already been working and living together as a district for decades. We need representatives who know this region the way we know them. We need representatives from our communities.

We have often heard the phrase that you all “will not be able to make everyone happy” at the last few meetings. As a protected class under the California Voting Rights Act, we are not requesting to be made happy – our request is to be heard, to be recognized, to be given full and proper consideration, and treated fairly under the law. The end result of your work should be the strengthening of voting rights and mitigation of racially polarized voting. Map 13A is a step in that direction. We are speaking for ourselves and we ask you to listen to what we have to say.

We appreciate that you have an enormously difficult job and as it comes to a close, it is only getting more difficult. But at the same time, what an awesome opportunity to right a decades-old wrong! In two weeks, your job will be done and ours will just begin and will continue for the next 10 years. We look to you to create the path that will allow us to get to a more fair and just county election process by adopting Map 13A preferably v. 1-6 or v. 5, with further working of the boundaries to the east to include those tribal lands.

This is a copy of a speech delivered by Richard Favela at the Dec. 2 meeting of the volunteer commission determining the new county district boundaries.