Social Crusader Now Part of the Establishment

If Maricela Morales had followed the path she laid out as a little girl, she’d be a nun or a doctor today. Instead, the petite, once-shy woman is revving up for the decidedly secular, often brutal world of local politics.

On Wednesday, Morales will be sworn in as Port Hueneme’s newest City Council member. An official with the Ventura-based Central Coast Alliance United for a Sustainable Economy, a group that lobbies for the living wage and other issues, Morales will become a member of the establishment she is trying to sway.

She won the council position in her first bid for local office. In this financially stable, relatively quiet seaside community, Morales stood out by making social issues a part of her platform. She talked about recreational opportunities for the poor and a living-wage ordinance, while other candidates talked about financial reserves, sewer systems and beach erosion.

Morales was one of six candidates vying for three seats on the Port Hueneme City Council. She placed third behind Mayor Tony Volante and Councilman Jon Sharkey, edging Steven Kinney by about 65 votes.

She raised more money than the other candidates, and most of her support came from the older, less-affluent areas of the city, Sharkey said.

Morales credits her unlikely win to a combination of her political platform and old-fashioned, street-level campaigning.

“Finances and sewers are very important issues, but these are the mandatory things all councils everywhere must do,” Morales said. “I’m interested in beginning a dialogue about pressing issues, and I think the voters responded to that.”

Morales is the first Latina elected to the council in decades. And at 32, she’s practically a baby, politically speaking.

“When I was her age, I was still playing at punk-rock clubs in L.A.,” Sharkey said. “We’re looking forward to the perspective she’ll bring to us. I mean, if you don’t want to change things, then what’s the point of running for office? That said, there’s a lot to learn once you get on the council.”

But Morales has always been a quick study. The daughter of immigrant parents who owned a grocery store in Fillmore, Morales learned English, breezed through high school and got accepted to Stanford University. For a long time she wanted to be a nun but decided that medicine would probably be the more direct route to helping people.

“What I wanted to do was somehow be of service,” Morales said. “It was what drove me.”

She was a senior in college when she realized that the title Dr. Morales didn’t have such a great ring to it after all. For years, she had volunteered as a medical assistant and patient advocate at clinics, and knew that what she most enjoyed was making patients feel at ease.

“I hated my science courses and loved my social sciences classes,” she said. “For the most part, Western medicine separates the mind from the body. I realized that it reduces the person to a machine, and that’s not how I wanted to view people.”

After graduating with a degree in biology, Morales lived and worked at the Covenant House Faith Community in Hollywood, where she led “a life of simplicity” and tried to help teenage runaways find jobs. Although she had ruled out life as a nun, her religion and spirituality were still “at the core” of who she was, and she wanted to immerse herself in full-time volunteer work, Morales said.

The Covenant House volunteers “each got paid $12 every two weeks,” Morales said, smiling. “We would all go grocery shopping and actually have discussions on whether we would buy peanut butter and jelly or live simply and just get the peanut butter.”

For the next several years she worked at various Ventura County educational and nonprofit social service agencies, doing everything from giving presentations on drug abuse to creating programs encouraging parental involvement in the schools.

She wound up working at El Concilio del Condado de Ventura, an Oxnard social service agency, and that’s where she began to see that she could best help people not one by one, but policy by policy.

“It was a total paradigm shift,” Morales said. “All along, I’d been working on serving the individual, doing the emergency-room work when I could be doing this at another level.”

In her present job as associate executive director of the Central Coast Alliance United for a Sustainable Economy, Morales uses research to fight what she sees as economic inequalities. Health coverage for the uninsured, living-wage ordinances and the economic status of women are the alliance’s main issues at the moment. They are issues she hopes to address in Port Hueneme as well, she said.

Morales said the indifference of some local politicians to the living-wage issue convinced her to run for office.

“I became very discouraged with the lack of social consciousness of local officials,” Morales said. “Socially conscious individuals are needed everywhere. Voters know this and they’re with me.”