Sonia Rodriguez brings a fresh perspective to Yakima City Council

For those who have never been there, Borderland is a mythical place in America where the children of minorities and immig-rants live. The ambitious ones, anyway.

One foot in, one foot out. Catch a break but don't blow it. Try hard to get ahead, shrug off the stares and snide comments when you get there.

It's where Sonia Rodriguez has always lived.

"That's what they called it when I got to school -- Borderland," says Rodriguez, a newcomer to politics who last week became the first Latino on the Yakima City Council.

"People would say to me, 'You're here because you're Mexican.' Well, I didn't grow up around Mexicans. I grew up in Gig Harbor."

Rodriguez, a 34-year-old family law attorney and divorced mother, knows she is in for a sometimes bumpy ride following her surprise appointment to replace outgoing Councilman Norm Johnson. She'll be sworn in at the beginning of the city council's regular meeting Tuesday night.

A shy risk-taker whose talk of a fresh perspective found traction with the council, Rodriguez understands she has her supporters and her detractors -- and has met hardly any of them.

"I guess I kind of put myself out there," she says, "but somebody had to step up."

She owns her own law firm and is the mother of an increasingly independent 13-year-old girl who plays soccer year-round. That's usually enough for most people.

Now Rodriguez has to get up to speed on civic issues and municipal policy while also dealing with the expectations of being an ethnic icebreaker.

It's the kind of thing Henry Beauchamp, who was elected to the Yakima City Council in 1977 and served for 24 years, can relate to.

Beauchamp was the second African-American to serve on the council -- Dr. William Simmons served from 1975-77 -- and in the process became one of the most revered civic leaders Yakima ever produced. So it comes as high praise when he says he has made Rodriguez's acquaintance in the past and is confident she's the right person at the right time.

"If she can hang in there and apply herself, she can turn into a tremendous councilwoman," he says. "I wouldn't be surprised if she couldn't go to the Legislature someday."

But not everyone in Yakima is convinced Rodriguez is the right person at the right time. Among them is Dave Ettl, co-host of a popular morning radio show on KIT-AM and one of the 29 applicants for Johnson's seat who lost out to Rodriguez.

Ettl says he doesn't necessarily dispute the logic of appointing a Latino to the council decades after Hispanics became a sizeable minority in Yakima.

Instead, he questions whether the selection of Rodriguez -- a total unknown in city politics -- was more politically expedient than politically smart.

Conservatives, he says, are already sharpening their rhetorical swords for Yakima's newest council member, who they've deemed a "liberal trial lawyer."

"Can she do it? We'll find out," Ettl says. "It doesn't have to play bad if she can deliver the goods. Whether it works or not remains to be seen."

Mayor Dave Edler, however, thinks the council, which voted 4-2 to approve Rodriguez, made the right decision. He says he's received nothing but kudos for the selection of a Latino, which he championed publicly.

"She seems to understand the weight of being a Latina in this situation," he says. "I think she knows she's not going to solve that all by herself in this community."

His advice? "Think big and take small steps to get there."

Rodri-guez says she is well aware of
the press-ure she's under. At the same time, she says she's always been under pressure.

The daughter of a single working mom, Rodriguez was born in Los Angeles but grew up in a rural area 10 miles outside of Gig Harbor, a suburb of Tacoma.

Rodriguez says her relationship with her mother, Debbie, was not the tightest, largely because her mother worked long hours as a legal secretary at one of the biggest law firms in Seattle.

The family's fortunes began to change, however, when her mother began going to night school and eventually emerged as Debra A. Morales, now one of the best known immig-ration attorneys in the Northwest.

By then, Rodriguez had followed her mother to the University of Washington, got a degree in philosophy and took the LSAT (the law school entrance exam) just before she became a mom. All that and barely 21.

As tough as it was, she wanted to finish her education and pursue her career while her daughter was still young.

"Raising a baby, going to school and working at the same time, it's like, 'What the heck was I thinking back then?'" Rodriguez says. "But I did it because I wanted to get that stuff behind me. I didn't want my daughter to be like I was when I was growing up, with the way my mom struggled."

During law school, she interned for the state Attorney General's Office, working on mediation and consumer issues. She also interned for The Defender Organization and Columbia Legal Services in Seattle.

After she got her law degree, Rodriguez says she decided she didn't want to be known forever as "Debbie's daughter" and felt like Yakima was far enough away from Seattle to start out on her own.

It helped with custody issues, too. Her ex-husband, the father of her daughter, Reina, lives in the Lower Valley.

She started out as a staff attorney at Columbia Legal Services in Yakima, working on family law and immigration cases. In 2002, she went to work at Contreras and Morales Inc., where her mother was a partner. Two years later, she and her mother formed their own law firm, Morales Rodriguez, where Rodriguez is managing partner.

It was her growing record of leadership in the legal community that caught the attention of Edler and other members of the City Council when she applied for the vacancy created by Johnson's election to the state Legislature. She serves on the governing body for the Young Lawyers Division of the Washington State Bar Association and has served on the Commission for Domestic Violence for the American Bar Association. She's also been a board member of the YWCA in Yakima and the Washington State Hispanic Bar Association.

It's for that reason and others -- her education, her experience running a small business, her youth, gender and, yes, her ethnicity -- that everything lined up right for the council opening.

Despite her determin-ation to bring a new perspec-tive to the otherwise all-white council, Rodriguez says she has no interest in
being The Mexican Council-woman.

Latino residents could never be represented by one voice, she says. They are as varied in their interests and concerns as everyone else. And for years, there has been infighting among some advocates.

Still, Rodriguez is interested in giving voice to a community that has lived largely in the shadows in Yakima.

"There are always going to be people who don't agree on certain things," she says. "But the one thing we should have as a common goal is political empowerment."

* Chris Bristol can be reached at 577-7748 or cbristol@yakimaherald.com.

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