San Jose’s historic Mexican American population — which predates the State of California — is finding common cause with an upstart congressional candidate who is taking on one of Washington’s oldest political bosses. Charlene Nijmeh is the Chairwoman of the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe, the indigenous people who are aboriginal to the Bay Area, and has been demanding that 30-year incumbent Rep. Zoe Lofgren answers for her longstanding failures on housing affordability and homelessness.
Santa Clara County has one of the highest homelessness populations in the nation. It’s also one of the least affordable housing markets, with a stunning housing shortage that is the result of exclusionary zoning policies that prevent the market from bringing new housing supply into the market, largely by prioritizing the interests of single-family homeowners over the interests of renters and young people in municipal zoning laws.
The housing shortage sends prices skyrocketing, forcing significant factions of the community into homelessness or out of the region altogether.
“Gentrification is an existential threat to my people. The Bay Area is our Tribe’s 10,000-year old homeland, and are young people can’t afford to stay here,” Nijmeh explains on social media. “What’s happening to my community is also happening to the Latino community. To be frank, it’s also happening to the Vietnamese and Filipino communities as well.”
“I feel the American dream slipping away for our young people, who feel that home ownership will never be attainable to them,” she says. “We need to bring it back.”
Nijmeh’s message — of her people’s struggle against displacement from its ancient homelands — is in many ways the same struggle faced by all marginalized communities that struggle more against global capitalism than they struggle with it. In the Bay Area — where the tech industry’s biggest giants dominate — that struggle and those divides are particularly visible.
San Jose’s Mexican-American community identifies as being Indigenous, recognizing its Mexica (or Aztec) heritage. The community acknowledges the parallels between its experience of conquest and subjugation (being conquered first by Spain, and then again by the United States during the Mexican-American War, when California was ceded in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo) as being similar to that of the Muwekma Ohlone people, who experienced conquest and subjugation through colonialism first by Spain, and then again by the United States.
Today, San Jose’s Mexican American and Muwekma Ohlone communities face the similar circumstances of economic marginalization. No two ethnic groups are more closely aligned in their socio-political circumstance. Both populations suffer from being targeted by law enforcement in a pattern of structural ‘ghettoized’ racism.
Both populations struggle with housing affordability and are at risk of being gentrified out of the city by the growth of the tech industry. Both communities are very under-represented among the tech industry’s labor force, creating an enormous dis-alignment of interests between the growth of the tech industry and the well-being of the Latino and Ohlone communities.
Preventing the ‘ethnic cleansing’ of the Muwekma Ohlone and Mexican American communities from San Jose will require the same policy solutions, creating a profound alignment of political interests, like ensuring that local law enforcement adopts anti-racist policies. Many Latino and Muwekma Ohlone residents are often treated with disrespect and suffer indignities in their own neighborhoods. Leaders in both communities have long complained of the egregious rates of the incarceration of Latino and Muwekma men.
“Ensuring that the region has an ample supply of new affordable housing units will help prevent the displacement of marginalized populations from San Jose. We must demand that the Bay Area tech giants create local workforce training programs that create pathways to job opportunities in the tech industry for local residents. Social mobility and economic integration should be important regional priorities. We just need leadership,” Nijmeh wrote in a message to supporters on social media.
Despite decades of lip service and commitments of support, Lofgren openly betrayed the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe’s four-decade long struggle to affirm its federal status. This, despite the fact that the Tribe donated large sums of money and volunteered heavily to get the congresswoman elected in 1994.
Similar lip service and commitments of support for the Mexican American community go largely unfulfilled, as Lofgren ignores the most pressing issues of the day. That she allows some crumbs of federal funding to fall from the table in Washington, DC, is little more than an artful distraction designed to placate the masses, critics argue.
Critics say that Lofgren’s plan to make housing affordable is non-existent and that she puts her husband’s financial interests ahead of the policy priorities that working families need to keep a roof over their heads. Lofgren’s husband is an attorney who practices real estate law and is paid by many of the region’s biggest real estate developers.
They also point to her record on incarceration reform. Lofgren has served on the House Judiciary Committee since 1994. That year, the United States had an incarcerated population of 1.25 million people. Today there are nearly 2 million people incarcerated – a 60% increase over her tenure on the Judiciary Committee. Today, she is the Chair of the Subcommittee on the Courts.
“It’s 2024 and our prisons do nothing to rehabilitate people,” one critic argued on social media. “We should be so much farther along as a society, but out institutions archaic. We need younger leadership.”
Lofgren’s role in the global sex trafficking epidemic is being questioned
Under Lofgren’s leadership as the top regulator of the tech industry in Congress, she has allowed a global sex trafficking epidemic to spiral. Latino and indigenous communities are among the most victimized populations in the global sex trafficking epidemic.
Native Americans are victimized by human trafficking at rates higher than that of the general population. Though statistics are few and far between, testimony from experts, activists, and tribal leaders – as well as independent investigations – have revealed a disproportionate impact. One study focused on four sites in the continental United States and Canada, revealed that up to 40% of sex trafficking survivors in those communities were Native American or First Nations women. Another report found that American Indian and Alaska Native women face the highest rates of rape and other sexual assaults and the second highest rates of homicide victimization. This report also accounts for the criminal justice responses to violence against American Indian and Alaska Native women.
Similarly, the Latino Community, and migrants in particular, are also victimized by sex trafficking at higher rates.
That’s why these communities are particularly sensitive to the issue of human trafficking — which they largely blame Lofgren for, citing her unwillingness to regulate Big Tech, which serves as her principal donor base.
Lofgren is the Ranking Member of the House Science, Technology, and Space Committee, where she function’s as the Congress’s top regulator of Silicon Valley. This, while her daughter serves as Google’s general counsel.
Lofgren is also the second-most senior member of the House Judiciary Committee. She is the Chair of Antitrust Subcommittee, which has the power to break up monopolies and hold companies accountable for unfair commercial practices. She is also the Chair of the Subcommittee on the Internet. Under her leadership, the tech industry has gone largely unscrutinized — despite their social media products being linked to skyrocketing rates of youth bullying, depression, and suicide.
That Lofgren also Chairs the Subcommittee on Border Security, Immigration, Refugees, and Citizenship, demonstrates a stunning depth and breadth of culpability in enabling this humanitarian catastrophe.
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