Why Pomona’s political imagination may be smaller than the community it claims to represent.
Julian Lucas ©2021
District 2 is often talked about during election season as if the demographic is treated as a simple category: “the immigrant district” or “the working-class district.” Labels make politics easier. Pomona politicians flatten the people who live in this district into statistics.
But if you actually walk the streets of District 2, you quickly realize it’s something else entirely, a dense web of families, languages, small businesses, and households that hold stories stretching far wider than Pomona.
Pomona itself reflects this complexity. Roughly 72 percent of the city identifies as Hispanic or Latino (I’ve never been fond of the term Hispanic), and about one-third of residents were born outside the United States.
District 2 sits squarely inside that reality.
Many residents here are first-generation Americans. Many are immigrants. Some households include parents who have lived in the United States for decades and children who were born here. Others are newer arrivals still navigating paperwork, language barriers, and the daily uncertainties that come with starting over in a new country.
That makes District 2 different from the way it’s often portrayed in political conversations. It isn’t simply a “community of voters.” District 2 is a community of families who live with a particular kind of vulnerability.
And recently, that vulnerability became visible again.
District 2 is not unique in this regard, but in recent months residents reported ICE activity in the neighborhood, the kind of presence that sends a quiet ripple through a community. Doors close earlier. Comadres, compadres, primos, primas, tias, tios, and vecinos text each other warnings. Kids hear conversations they’re not supposed to hear yet and school absences increase.
Whether someone supports immigration enforcement or not, the emotional effect in immigrant neighborhoods is unmistakable. People feel monitored. People feel exposed.
Many people in District 2 know this feeling well.
It’s also a district where many people work jobs that rarely show up in political conversations: warehouse jobs, retail work, service work, construction, caregiving. The kinds of jobs that keep the region functioning but rarely translate into political influence.
Which raises a simple question during an election year. What does representation actually look like for a district like this?
Not representation as a campaign catchphrase, but representation as something lived day to day. Someone who understands why ICE enforcement agents are parked on a corner can change the mood of entire neighborhoods. Someone who understands that for many families here, politics isn’t an abstract debate. It’s something that touches housing, safety, schools, food insecurities, and the basic feeling of belonging.
But there’s another dynamic that often surfaces during election seasons in Pomona.
A familiar line appears in speeches at commission, committee, and council meetings, delivered with the seriousness of a credential.
“I’m from Pomona.”
The Chest-Thumping Politics of Being “From Pomona”
In Pomona politics there is a credential that gets repeated with the seriousness of a law degree.
Sometimes the curriculum vitaé gets expanded.
“I’m from Pomona.” Or “I’m a lifelong resident of Pomona.”
“I’m a homeowner.”
You’ll hear it at council meetings, campaign announcements, and the occasional moment when a politician decides to pound their chest like a hometown King Kong guarding the city limits while planting trees.
From Pomona. Not studied elsewhere. Not exposed to different ways cities function. Not particularly curious about how other communities solve problems.
Just… from Pomona.
Now don’t get me wrong. Loving the place you grew up is admirable. Loyalty to a city is a good thing. I can even say Pomona could be a gem. But it has been just that for the last couple of decades.
Being from Pomona is not the issue. Some of the most thoughtful, caring, and understanding people in this city grew up here. Others arrived later and built lives here just the same. Cities are shaped by both. The problem begins when birthplace itself becomes a substitute for ideas.
However, in Pomona politics the phrase sometimes works less like biography and more like gatekeeping.
Because once someone declares themselves the authentic voice of Pomona, something subtle happens next: everyone else starts getting sorted into categories.
You’re either a “real Pomonan” or you’re not. Then comes the classist logic: homeowner or tenant. In many political spaces, tenants are treated as if they couldn’t possibly have a voice.
Question something? You must not understand Pomona politics.
Offer a different idea?
That won’t work, you must not be from Pomona. The idea will quietly reappear later with someone else’s name on it. And whatever they produce will come with their own Pomona-ass spin on it. It’s as if the Pomonans who end up claiming the ideas live behind an imaginary wall, with little lived experience beyond the city limits. That kind of insularity is never sustainable.
Or those not from Pomona but have money to invest will build something that isn’t aligned with the present culture, opening businesses as if the city were still living in the 1990s. It doesn’t last. It closes, reopens under another name, and the cycle repeats.
Suggest the city could learn something from somewhere else?
Then you become suspicious and they’ll think you’re running for office.
It’s a clever rhetorical trick. Declare yourself the hometown authority and suddenly disagreement becomes disloyalty.
But here’s the irony.
Pomona itself is one of the most globally shaped cities in Southern California. Immigrant families, first generation Americans, people whose lives stretch across multiple cultures and countries.
Many residents here carry more international experience in their family histories than the politicians lecturing them about what “real Pomona” is supposed to look like.
So when leaders beat their chest about being “from Pomona,” the question worth asking isn’t where they were born.
The real question is how much of the world they’ve allowed into their thinking since then.
Because cities don’t grow through insularity.
They grow through exposure, curiosity, and the willingness to imagine something bigger than the street you grew up on. Key word curiosity.
Otherwise politics becomes strangely performative. Leaders loudly celebrate their hometown while quietly shrinking the possibilities of what that hometown could become.
And that’s really not civic pride. It’s just a very small box with Pomona written on the outside.
District 2 doesn’t live inside that small box. The district is shaped by families whose lives stretch across borders, languages, and cultures. In many ways, the people politicians claim to represent already understand the world in ways far larger than the narrow version of Pomona politics sometimes presented at City Hall.
Which makes the real question for voters this year a simple one. Who actually understands the district as it exists today, not as the city imagined it thirty years ago?
From what I see, the council is mostly Latino, including the mayor, and the commissions include a mix of Latinos and whites. Yet there seems to be an assumption that because many residents are working-class, they only want certain kinds of businesses. When Burlington arrives and it’s framed as a big win, it suggests leaders believe this is what the working class wants. That kind of thinking can slip into stereotyping the very community they claim to represent.
At some point the question becomes whether this is really what the working class wants, or simply the limit of what local leadership imagines the city can be.
Julian Lucas is a darkroom photographer, writer, and a bookseller, though photography remains his primary language. He is the founder of Mirrored Society Book Shop, publisher of The Pomonan, and creator of Book-Store and Print Pomona Art Book Fair. And yes he will charge you 2.5 Million for event photography.
