The undergraduate student government president’s office on
the third floor of Kerckhoff Hall will likely seem familiar to
Lucero Chavez if she is elected.
After all, she has spent the past three years at UCLA working in
that same office as a presidential staff member.
But the third-year American literature and culture and Chicana/o
studies student said if she is elected, the work she does outside
the walls of the office will be more important.
Chavez, the Students First! candidate for president, said she
considers community involvement a key component of her
campaign.
She said she would like to see the Undergraduate Students
Association Council become more involved in the greater L.A.
community to help it identify issues it needs to work on.
“On this year’s council I feel like there
wasn’t a lot of community outreach,” Chavez said.
“We need to understand how national and international issues
relate to students. We kind of have a responsibility to advocate on
behalf of students.”
Chavez’s background in involvement and outreach has helped
build her enthusiasm for community issues.
As a staffer in the office of the president, Chavez acted as a
liaison to the Student Initiated Access Committee, which has seven
groups that perform outreach work in the community, said External
Vice President Jeannie Biniek, who is managing Chavez’s
campaign.
“She’s been really successful in building community
relations and publicizing and raising awareness about community
service,” Biniek said.
Chavez is also involved with numerous student organizations on
campus, including MEChA and La Gente de Aztlán
newsmagazine.
Her father Roberto Chavez said that level of involvement is
nothing new for his daughter. “I used to take her (to work at
the YMCA) and pick her up at midnight because she was working with
the kids,” he said.
Chavez still has that YMCA job and has since taken on the role
of adviser to high school YMCA Youth in Government programs.
She said she hopes to continue her involvement with youth even
after she graduates from UCLA, possibly by pursuing a law career
focused on educational policy.
The native of Huntington Park, a city southeast of downtown Los
Angeles, credits some of her enthusiasm for leadership to her
family. “I had two older sisters and a very stubborn
mother,” she said. “They were very strong role models
for me growing up.”
Chavez hopes to apply her leadership experience toward a variety
of larger issues affecting students and the UCLA community,
including university admissions reform.
She cited the current concern over underrepresented minority
admissions as a cornerstone of her campaign.
“The diversity crisis is getting much more apparent, and
that’s really problematic,” she said. “We need to
have comprehensive review in all the campuses.”
Comprehensive review is an admissions policy that takes into
account applicants’ personal qualities and struggles, rather
than only test scores and grade point averages.
Chavez would like to see UCLA implement a form of the policy
more similar to UC Berkeley’s, where a larger percentage of
underrepresented minority applicants were admitted this year.
Chavez said UC and state officials must be involved in the
process of increasing diversity.
“We’re seeing a disconnect between those entities
and our programs,” she said, adding that the Undergraduate
Admissions Workgroup is an important first step in correcting the
problem.
The Admissions Workgroup, formed earlier this year, is a
committee of students and faculty who make recommendations about
how to change the undergraduate admissions process to help increase
diversity.
Biniek said she thinks Chavez is the right person to tackle
diversity in admissions.
“She’s not afraid to take stances, to stand up for
what she believes in,” Biniek said.
Chavez said she plans to involve high-level administrators and
state officials in other aspects of her campaign as well. For
instance, she said she thinks in-district lobby visits to state
politicians will help secure permanent statewide funding for
student groups, which is one of her campaign goals.
Roberto Chavez said he has always seen his daughter’s
political potential.
“I used to tell her, “˜You’re going to be an
assemblywoman someday,'” he said.
But she said right now she is only focused on UCLA.
“I’ve always been interested in student government
and leadership and what kind of voice that can give the
students,” she said.
“Then I found out recently that (if elected) I would be
the first Chicana president of UCLA, and that’s really become
a driving force behind my campaign. UCLA has a strong tradition of
women in leadership, and I would love to be part of that
legacy.”