Volunteers Take Message Door-to-Door

Braving ferocious dogs, security gates and sometimes-surly homeowners, Juan Mena trudged door-to-door through a working class Sylmar neighborhood last week seeking converts.

Success isn’t a baptism or a signature on a sales order.

For Mena, it is a promise to consider his candidate for the Los Angeles City Council, Corinne Sanchez, in the election April 13.

One of dozens of precinct walkers deployed by the six candidates in the race, Mena is a true believer. He credits one of Sanchez’s clinics with saving him from addiction to alcohol, and he now volunteers for her. He said she deserves to be elected because of what she has done for people like him.

“Otherwise, I wouldn’t be walking, I wouldn’t be doing this for her,” he said as he worked a section of Aztec Street one afternoon last week.

Like the Persian Gulf War, the struggle for votes in the 7th Council District may be won on the ground. Campaign volunteers are the foot soldiers for candidates trying to win over neighborhoods in the huge district.

Armed with precinct maps and lists of people who vote regularly, volunteers spend hours ringing doorbells and talking to residents, many of whom know nothing about the candidates.

“They carry the message of the campaign to the voters,” said candidate Raul Godinez II, who has a dozen volunteers walking the district on his behalf on any given day.

Candidate Ollie McCaulley spoke of the importance of volunteers. “They help get your message out to the people.”

McCaulley said eight volunteers spend their afternoons walking neighborhoods on his behalf in the northeast San Fernando Valley district.

People like Cesar Garcia, who figures he has been to about 300 homes, hand out campaign brochures and talk up McCaulley’s candidacy. Garcia, a printer and the chairman of the Latin Business Assn. of the San Fernando Valley, said he volunteers because he believes in McCaulley.

Like many others, Garcia has strong motives for spending hours on the street.

“I’m a businessman, and we were looking for a place to locate in the 7th District, but we couldn’t find a place that we felt was safe for our customers to come by,” Garcia said.

He heard McCaulley, a former police officer, speak two years ago at a forum for state Assembly candidates and has been a supporter ever since.

“I felt he was going to be somebody, with his police experience, who could take a look at the district and implement programs to make things safe and good for business,” Garcia said.

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A similar moment of inspiration came for Tamara Benefield when she heard candidate Barbara Perkins speak at a minority recruitment conference at Cal State Northridge.

Benefield, who like Perkins is African American, liked Perkins’ message on the need to bridge differences among ethnic groups in the northeast Valley.

“I think what distinguished her for me, what pulled me to her, was she had a message of unity,” said Benefield, 22, who has relatives from Puerto Rico. “She was the only one speaking about that gap. She wanted to create a bridge between blacks and Latinos.”

A philosophy major who plans to go to law school, Benefield has spent 30 days walking northeast Valley neighborhoods.

Philip Siordia has made a similar effort for Godinez, whom he coached on a Santa Rosa Catholic Church basketball team when the candidate was 11.

Siordia, a manager for Anheuser-Busch, said Godinez’s five years on the San Fernando City Council, including three as mayor, make the candidate an easy sell to voters, many of whom know of him already.

“He has the experience people are looking for,” Siordia said, sounding the theme of the Godinez campaign.

Working just as hard for his candidate is Juan Carlos La Torre, 41.

La Torre’s girlfriend dragged him to a rock concert organized by candidate Tony Lopez, who spoke of the need to provide better education so young people can have job skills to compete for quality work.

“When I went to the rally, he hit me where it hurt. He talked about things I was thinking about, about breaking the cycle of a lack of education,” said La Torre, who said he has been hampered by the poor education he received.

So La Torre is stumping district neighborhoods encouraging people to vote for Lopez.

He does not get discouraged when residents who are home don’t answer the door.

“I’m in real estate, so I’m used to knocking on a lot of doors,” he said.

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The two best-financed campaigns in the 7th District, those of Sanchez and Alex Padilla, also have a small percentage of paid workers who are walking precincts, campaign spokesmen said.

Two or three paid workers will supplement the 10 volunteers on any given day working for Sanchez, said spokesman Jorge Flores.

Dalila Perez, 24, a political science major at Cal State Northridge, is walking precincts without pay for Padilla. She saw Tony Cardenas speak at her university when he was running for Assembly two years ago and volunteered for that campaign, which was run by Padilla.

“The fact that he’s young and understands the concerns of youth are important to me,” Perez said of Padilla, 26.

Like Padilla, Perez worked in Cardenas’ office after his election, but she left after six months and is now a full-time student closing in on graduation.

Meanwhile, Mena--now 35, sober and employed in a steady sales job--remains enthusiastic about Sanchez. He finds someone who will listen to his pitch at about six of every 10 homes he visits.

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Mena said he started drinking alcohol at 7 in his native Mexico and had a serious problem by the time he was 18 and a new immigrant to Los Angeles.

Sanchez is president of El Proyecto del Barrio, a health and job placement agency that helped Mena recover from alcohol abuse and find a job with First Interstate Bank.

Like so many others, Mena said he volunteers because he believes in his candidate.

“I think she has done a lot of things for the community,” Mena said.