Meet Marie Alvarado-Gil, Stanislaus’ new state senator; her surprising political ascent
She can castrate goats and inseminate dairy cows.
In her youth, she learned to love reading from trashy paperbacks picked up at garage sales while resisting recruitment into gangs and human trafficking.
Marie Alvarado-Gil survived poverty, abuse and domestic violence as a child, and two kinds of cancer as an adult.
And a few weeks ago, this 48-year-old Democrat from Jackson who attended high school in Mexico got herself elected to represent one of the most white, Republican districts in the California Senate. Can this be real?
“Here I am,” Alvarado-Gil said, reflecting on her fascinating life path in a part-policy, part-personal interview with The Modesto Bee Editorial Board.
“People ask me how I’m going to do this. I’ve been hit by harder rocks and I still get up,” she said. “The question isn’t how I’m going to do this, but how can I be part of it?”
Senate District 4, the size of Delaware, stretches across 13 mostly eastern California counties, from Truckee in the north to Death Valley in the south. A finger juts west to take in Stanislaus County, the largest of the 13. Its three biggest cities — Modesto, Turlock and Ceres — are the district’s most populous.
I’ve said it before and it bears repeating — the Fourth District without doubt was designed in recent redistricting to be a red bastion in an otherwise blue state. But six Republican candidates with stars in their eyes ran in the wide-open June primary and diluted the GOP vote, leaving two Democrats with more votes each than any of the rest. By failing to coalesce when it counted, Republicans shot themselves in the foot, leaving voters to choose between two Dems in the November runoff.
Right-leaning voters figured that Tim Robertson of Keyes, a labor union leader and Democratic party darling, might be too progressive for their taste. Alvarado-Gil — a cowboy boot-wearing gun-rights supporter — seemed more palatable.
Alvarado-Gil also comes from a labor-boss background, having negotiated multimillion-dollar deals for Southern California unions. She was a delegate to the 2012 Democratic Party Convention, and most recently, vice president of the Democratic Central Committee of Amador County.
She was elected without the party’s blessing, relying instead on recommendations of local Republicans such as Modesto City Councilman Dave Wright and Stanislaus Supervisor Terry Withrow.
Alvarado-Gil downplays political machinations.
“It’s not about individual layers of policy,” she said. “Strip out the partisan politics and bring it back to the people. We all drink water, we all need clean water. We all need to eat. We need the economy of California to thrive around food sources. Yes, we have different ideologies, but it comes down to more unites us than divides us. If we focus on what’s divisive, we’re not going to get anything done.”
Intriguing backstory
More interesting, if you ask me, is her backstory.
Alvarado-Gil was born in Mountain View after her parents immigrated from the Mexico state of Jalisco to California. She found herself in foster care by the fifth grade, a result of what she calls a “chaotic” home life fraught with instability. Her high school years were spent back in Mexico with her maternal grandmother, who ran a tortilla factory brimming with sustenance and chisme, village gossip.
At 17, Alvarado-Gil returned to California, determined to pursue animal science at UC Davis. A job with the city of Vacaville had her working with children facing “the same cycle of abuse, alcoholism and domestic violence that was prevalent in my family growing up,” she said, and she switched career goals to help young people in education.
Later, she was a single parent raising three children, two with special needs, moving from city to city as she researched and discovered better special-ed programs with residency requirements. That led her to explore alternatives to traditional public education, and she founded three charter schools.
She was waylaid by cervical cancer in 2018 and by metastatic thyroid cancer the following year, and beat both by Christmas 2019.
Now she lives on 2 1/2 Mother Lode acres with her husband and three pugs. She thinks she’s talked two of her daughters and a grandchild into moving to Modesto where her senatorial duties might allow her to see them more often. Alvarado-Gil’s district office should open here in February, she said, followed shortly by another in El Dorado County, the second-most populous in the Fourth District after Stanislaus.
Fun facts: Alvarado-Gil prefers nonfiction biographies these days, and goes to the movie theater alone for self-care reasons. Also, “I don’t like sharing my popcorn and Red Vines,” she said with a smirk.
Uphill climb ahead
I wonder if she’ll soon need more mental-health trips to the cinema, trying to represent an impossibly large district whose voters might not always receive her warmly.
On the other hand, she won’t face the same frustration as would a Republican office holder in a legislature long dominated by a supermajority of Democrats. In that respect, she stands a better chance at actually getting stuff done.
Alvarado-Gil had fun on the campaign trail, she said; her most popular commercial had her saying, “My granddaddy was a bull fighter in the arena, and I’m fit to fight bull in Sacramento.” Her favorite slogan, though, is the more pensive mantra “Listen, then lead.”
From constituents she heard “a common thread of fear,” she said — of being able to afford housing, food and gas. Of finding quality child care. Of losing freedoms, Second Amendment rights and reproductive rights. Of not coming up with enough money for fire insurance premiums in foothill communities. Of wildfires and other effects of climate change. Of failing water and sewer lines.
“That sense of fear breeds anger and frustration,” Alvarado-Gil said. “A lot fear that Sacramento just doesn’t get it. Voters want to be heard and have a voice in Sacramento. They don’t want to be drowned out by the Los Angeleses, the San Diegos and the San Franciscos.”
Her message, Alvarado-Gil said, “may not always resonate with colleagues, be they Democrat or Republican, but that’s not my goal. My goal is to represent District 4. It’s not about making friends; it’s about representation.”
This story was originally published January 5, 2023 at 7:00 AM.
