SAN DIEGO – It will be very interesting to see what City Councilman-elect Sean Elo-Rivera and his wife Angela will be doing come November 2021.
The early part of November has been uncommonly meaningful for them the last several years. In November 2018, at a party to watch election returns attended by his and Angela Rivera’s family, Sean Elo dropped to his knee right after the initial vote for the Board of Trustees of the San Diego Community College District showed him winning, and asked Angela to marry him.
The following November, they were married. They decided to take each other’s last names, becoming Sean & Angela Elo-Rivera. He explained that if and when they have children, grandchildren, and descendants through the generations, he’d like them to know about both sides of their religiously and culturally diverse family. He follows his father’s Jewish religion; Angela follows her mother’s Catholic religion; and one of his mother’s aunts converted to Islam years before he was born.
Just this November, Elo-Rivera was elected as the 9th District Councilmember of the San Diego City Council, besting Kelvin Barrios, who suspended his campaign after discrepancies appeared in Barrios’ campaign finance reporting.
So, who knows what next November might bring?
Elo-Rivera lives in the City Heights neighborhood of San Diego, which is almost as culturally diverse as the United Nations. Its residents include immigrants and refugees from different parts of the world reflected in the various kinds of cuisines that were readily available prior to the onset of the Covid19 pandemic.
In an interview, Elo-Rivera told San Diego Jewish World that his paternal line is comprised of Sephardic Jews who immigrated generations before to Syria and later to the United States. Here in the U.S., his grandfather married an Ashkenazi Jew from the Ukraine, their children being hatzi-hatzi , half and half, as they say in Israel.
Elo-Rivera’s father, Ron, married Carole, who was born in the U.S. to parents who immigrated from Nicaragua and Panama. Ron and Carole Elo created a home in which the future city councilman grew up with an appreciation for various cultures and religions. As a child, he was exposed both to Catholicism and Judaism but found himself drawn more to Judaism. “Once I connected to the Jewish wisdom that I received, that stayed with me,” he said. Should he and Angela be blessed with children, he said he would like them to learn about both Judaism and Christianity, as he did.
He went to Hebrew School and to Sunday school, but did not have a bar mitzvah because his family moved from place to place including Orange County, California, and Jupiter and Palm Beach, Florida, interrupting the course of his Hebrew studies. Today, he admits, he feels a little bit shy about his unfamiliarity with synagogue ritual, but feels very comfortable in his knowledge of Jewish history and philosophy, especially the concept that Jews have an obligation to try to repair the world (tikkun olam).
He credits such friends as Bernie Rhinerson, who serves with him on the San Diego Community College Board; Rabbi Laurie Coskey, and Lisa Black, a professor at Cal Western Law School, from which he graduated, as people who helped expose him to Jewish life in San Diego County.
Before coming to San Diego to attend law school, Elo-Rivera received a multiple-major bachelor’s degree in history, psychology and sociology from Chapman University in Orange County. Then he became an international volunteer, teaching English and working with children with special needs in Peru, volunteering as an environmental preservationist in Ecuador, and teaching English in South Korea.
While in law school, Elo-Rivera distinguished himself as president of La Raza Student Association and the campus Amnesty International chapter, and also served as a Student Representative. He also participated in the law school’s City Heights Community Law Project which conducted legal clinics at Hoover High School, Rosa Parks Middle School, and Rosa Parks Elementary School.
“That program was incredibly meaningful,” he said. “I truly loved it, but it made me think very quickly that the practice of law was something that I would become fairly frustrated with. I would see people struggling with the same circumstances on a daily basis.” Rather than fight the cases one-by-one, he decided that he could have a greater impact if he entered the political arena and tried to make laws and policies more amenable to people living in poverty.
For example, “with respect to housing, there were a lot of people who were dealing with affordability and habitability and from one day to the next, you’d hear very similar stories about people who were struggling. Similarly, immigration was an issue, where every single day we had folks who were struggling because of immigration issues.”
Changing policies is “like winning a whole bunch of these cases at once,” he said.
His interest in politics led him to become a volunteer for Scott Peters’ successful campaign for Congress in 2014, and later went to work for Mid-City Can, “where I led civic engagement work.”
Elected in 2018 to the San Diego Community College Board, Elo-Rivera worked closely with Rhinerson on a subcommittee charged with evaluating the district’s goals.
Meanwhile, he served as executive director of Youth Will, an organization that “works with young people to help make San Diego a world-class region where children and youth can thrive.”
In his campaign for City Council, Elo-Rivera was backed strongly by City Councilwoman Monica Montgomery Steppe, whom he met in 2016 as part of a cohort of community leaders brought together by RISE San Diego, a civic improvement group that preaches urban involvement, engagement and empowerment. He and Montgomery Steppe were part of a RISE delegation that attended a November 2016 conference in Atlanta on “Facing Race.” The following year, 2017, they went to through the RISE Urban Leadership Institute together, and the year after that, 2018, Montgomery Steppe and Elo-Rivera won elections respectively to the City Council and Community College Board. Montgomery Steppe endorsed Elo-Rivera in his City Council race, and Elo-Rivera says he plans to vote for her in upcoming contest for the San Diego City Council presidency. Montgomery Steppe is opposed by Dr. Jennifer Campbell of the 2nd City Council District, who, like Elo-Rivera, is Jewish.
Asked what committees or external agencies he would like to serve on, Elo-Rivera said he would be content during his freshman year to serve on whatever committee the new City Council President will assign to him. He said to his way of thinking, every Council committee was created because a need existed, and wherever he goes he will be able to serve his district which includes the communities of Alvarado Estates, City Heights, College Area, College View Estates, El Cerrito, Kensington, Mountain View, Mt. Hope, Rolando, Southcrest, and Talmadge.
He said that “systemic racism impacts the Black community specifically and people of color more broadly. I have always loved history and I think our nation was founded on some beautiful ideals. The more I have learned how far we have been from those words and ideals being a reality, the more committed I am to seeing them realized. That was a lesson my dad taught me about the history of the Jewish people, who very much desire justice for people who are oppressed.”
As a council member, he said, he wants to address disparities with respect to race in the arenas of housing, homelessness, and environmental pollution.
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Donald H. Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World. He may be contacted via donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com