Forced by a lawsuit, the Kern County Board of Supervisors converted a largely white, Republican district south of California’s Central Valley into a majority Latino district. To avoid diluting the vote, influential Latino politicians gathered behind closed doors and agreed to support a unity candidate: the mayor of the farming town of Delano. In a surprising move, the president of the Lamont Chamber of Commerce, a naturalized Mexican immigrant who began in politics as a Republican, also announced his candidacy. This opens up the possibility that this historic district could continue in the hands of a conservative supervisor who opposes the state sanctuary law and has proposed denying services to the undocumented.
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