It’s summer break in the late ’80s, and Tucson’s future mayor is doing what many in the small farmworker community of Somerton do: working the fields.
Born in Yuma to farmworker immigrant parents, Regina Romero grew up as part of afamily of eight. They often lived in farm working camps and followed the crops back and forth between Arizona and California. As young as 10 years old, Romero and her siblings would help in the fields during school holidays, watering crops and putting out boxes for the lettuce.
“It was horrible living conditions,” Romero, 50, recalled in an interview with The Arizona Republic about the farm working camps.
In one farm working camp, the eight members of her family lived in a tiny home with two rooms. There were no doors, air conditioning units, or private washrooms. The showers were communal.
The summer of 1990 was particularly challenging, Romero said.
She was working in the fields: packaging lettuce and lifting boxes onto a conveyor belt, trying to make enough money to buy a car. Romero teared up as she harkened back to that “hard summer,” remembering how the pesticides in the fields gave her rashes, and how much weight she lost.
In the shower after a hard day’s work, Romero saw bruises all over her legs and realized they came from how she had to contort her body to lift the lettuce boxes. That experience helped forge her.
“I was like, ‘OK, that’s it. I am going to go to college,'” Romero said.
It pushed her to leave her farmworking community and go to the University of Arizona, eventually working for the county and becoming Tucson’s first Latina mayor.
Romero garnered national attention last year, from speaking at the Democratic National Convention to being the only mayor invited by the White House to join a federal delegation to Mexico during the inauguration of the country’s new president. Her name was also mentioned as a replacement for Sen. Mark Kelly when he was being considered as the Democrats’ pick for vice president during the 2024 election.
Laura Dent, who worked for Romero from 2010 to 2018 first as her policy adviser and later as her chief of staff, applauded her former boss for breaking barriers.
“She doesn’t forget her roots in her service and in her work,” Dent said.
Who is Regina Romero?
Romero is the youngest of six children, and the only sibling to be born in the United States.
Romero’s parents grew upin the mountains of Sonora, Mexico and migrated for a better life. They first moved to the border town of San Luis Rio Colorado, Mexico, and then to the United States, where they worked in agriculture fields in Arizona and California.
The lettuce-packing job she worked in the summer of 1990 made her enough money to buy a car, a 1984 Toyota Celica. That car allowed her to continue working during high school. The next summer, she worked at McDonald’s and eventually got a job at a bank.
Teachers at Kofa High School in Yuma helped her through the SATs, and guided her in seeking scholarships and applying to colleges like the University of Arizona and Arizona State University.
Romero graduated from UA with a bachelor’s degree in communications in 2001, according to her staff. Her first job after college was for Pima County as a neighborhood reinvestment coordinator, connecting communities to resources.
She is married to Ruben Reyes, who works as a district director for Rep. Raul Grijalva. They have two children.
Romero said political discourse was always present in her childhood, but she never planned to be in politics growing up.
That changed after college when she got a job working for the county and then worked for Councilmember Karin Uhlich. After a decade of working in public service, Romero eventually decided to run for city council. Serving Tucsonans was her passion, she told The Republic.
She previously cited community members calling on her to run for the council, given her role in co-founding Las Adelitas, an organization that encourages Latinas and other women of color to run for public office.
In 2007, she was elected to the Tucson City Council. In 2013, she earned a certificate in state and local government at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.
Romero served on the city council until 2019, when she was elected to be mayor of Tucson.
Ahead of that mayoral campaign, Romero weighed running again. She considered shifting to a full-time role at her job with the Center for Biological Diversity, which she began in 2016 as the organization’s first national director of Latino engagement.
“I started working when my daughter, my second child, went into kindergarten, to pay bills,” she said. She noted how her $24,000 salary as a council member and her husband’s public servant salary meant they at times had to live paycheck to paycheck.
That all changed when former Mayor Jonathan Rothschild decided to retire. As with her initial council race, Romero said there was a groundswell of support before she decided to put her name in the running.
“The reason I decided (to run) is because I put in 12 years, I have so much to give and so many ideas,” she said.
She ran against Ed Ackerley, an independent, and Green Party candidate Mike Cease, garnering 56% of the vote. She ran again in 2023 garnering 60% of the vote, beating Republican JL Wittenbraker, Ackerley, and Libertarian Arthur Kerschen.
Romero’s history of coalition building
Romero won praise for her efforts in investing in historically underserved areas, leading initiatives to fight climate change, and focusing on needs like transportation that touch everyone in the community.
People close to Romero, who either hired her or worked for her, said the mayor’s success comes from her ability to galvanize people and build coalitions to fight for important issues.
“There was no way to say no to Regina once she got her grassroots organizing and getting everybody … on board,” said former staffer Diana Rhoades, noting how Romero motivates people to send letters and attend meetings. Rhoades worked for Romero from 2007 to 2014 as her chief of staff.
“She shows up when people need her. She builds a coalition and brings everyone together,” Rhoades said.
One of the mayor’s early successes as an elected official came when she was still a council member. Romero won praise for efforts connecting communities on the west side, a historically Latino and working-class area, to the university and downtown with the launch of the streetcar and extending the streetcar’s route.
While the plan was always to build a route to the city’s west side, a shortfall in funding spurred battles about ending the route before it reached the area.
Romero refused to see the west side left out of the project and built a coalition to fight for the issue.
“That was a great example of her, navigating difficult conversations, but also standing by what she knew was important, which was to make sure that we didn’t continue to see disinvestment in the same neighborhoods that we always see,” Dent said, Romero’s former chief of staff who more recently worked as a campaign manager for Yes on 139 Arizona for Abortion Access.
Along the streetcar route, the city has seen over $1 billion of private investment since the streetcar launched in 2014.
Uhlich, the Tucson city council member who hired Romero to be on her staff in 2005, said Romero is an effective leader and fights hard on issues important to Tucsonans.
“She is an incredibly bold, unapologetic leader who’s driven by her values. And she’s real effective. She gets things done,” Uhlich said. She pointed to Romero’s efforts to get Tucson’s needs addressed on Pima County’s Regional Transportation Authority board, a panel consisting of mayors and tribal leaders, among others.
After Romero became mayor, her peers on the board did not take her seriously at first, Uhlich said. Since then, Romero has fought to have Tucson’s transportation needs addressed in a regional project plan slated to go before voters in May. With Tucson’s needs being vastly different than the other rural towns represented on the RTA board, it can be challenging.
“The city does not have a weighted vote. So, we’re one vote,” Uhlich said. “She has been just a tireless advocate for Tucson to make sure that the interests of the majority of the population here are integrated into that plan.”
Romero said she has often had to go to bat for Tucson on the board because the city has not had a fair return on investment of the funding that taxpayers put into Pima County’s regional transportation plan. She often has to interrupt or repeat herself just to be heard.
“I don’t take it personally. I have been in this elected office long enough, and I’ve been the only woman in many rooms where I’ve had to elbow my way in and many times jump in and interrupt to be heard,” Romero said.
Carolyn Campbell, who recently retired after decades as the executive director of the Coalition for Sonoran Desert Protection, has worked with Romero on various initiatives throughout the years. She said Romero is a leader on environmental issues and likened Romero’s coalition building to that of another prominent southern Arizona Democrat: Grijalva.
“He brought up a whole community of leaders and she came out of that,” Campbell said. “I give Raúl Grijalva a lot of credit for educating so many of us to see those connections between people and the environment and public health and safety.”
Raúl Grijalva:Arizona’s long-serving US representative says this election will be his last
Some lack trust in Romero, citing past actions
Romero also has her detractors and people who disagree with past actions.
Some community members brought up a recent experience that left them feeling ignored and criticized how challenging it can be to reach her.
Romero and Councilmember Lane Santa Cruz attended a public meeting in May held by the city about the South 10th project, an effort to build housing on the site of a former transfer station on South 10th Ave. The project seeks to increase affordable housing, especially on city property. The plot of land in the project is near a library, the freeway and a recreation center.
Residents are worried that disturbing the ground for the project could be risky as the soil contains trace amounts of arsenic, barium, chromium and lead, reported the Tucson Agenda.
Residents said when they began to speak about their concerns about the project, both Santa Cruz and Romero left the room.
“People were pretty much not allowed to speak. And then they were encouraged to come outside and do the table routine,” said Collette Altaffer, a community advocate. “This was a standard operation that the city uses. It’s: ‘Come around to the various tables.’ That way you don’t get to hear the comments and concerns that anybody else is saying.”
Romero said she walked out because people were acting aggressively and didn’t want to listen to city officials.
“If you’re unwilling to sit down and have a discussion, especially with a mayor that is willing to sit down and listen to your ideas, I’m not going to stay there for you to scream at me,” Romero said.
But she said she understood their skepticism of the project and the negative feelings toward the city given how residents in the area had been displaced decades earlier during the construction of the Tucson Convention Center in 1971.
The city continues to meet with neighbors about the project.
Others question her transparency after a failed sale of a golf course in 2013. The controversy began when the city tried to sell the El Rio golf course to Grand Canyon University in 2013.
Romero, a council member at the time, was a key supporter of the deal. However, she quickly changed her mind when public opposition became fierce.
“The problem that I had with her and many other people had with her was her lack of transparency and not being forthright with us,” said Scott Egan, a longtime community member.
In the fallout from the failed sale, Romero was one of almost two dozen elected officials and city staff named in a public records lawsuit filed against the city on behalf of the El Rio Coalition II, a neighborhood group against the project. After a judge sided with the group, records showed the city was willing to sell the golf course for about $13 million over 50 years. Critics say the deal undervalued the golf course and exaggerated the benefits.
“They did everything they could to prevent us from getting the documents,” Egan said.
He reiterated the importance of the golf course as a green space in an urban and growing Latino neighborhood.
“That kind of highlights my relationship with her: very untrustworthy,” he said. “I don’t think she has the peoples’ interests at heart.”
Romero was a council member at that time. She said the golf course was losing money, and with GCU looking to expand to Tucson, she wanted to present the idea to the community. GCU ultimately stepped back from the idea.
“I wanted to make sure that we at least presented that opportunity … and the input was resounding ‘no,'” she said.
Since then, she said she’s learned the importance of engaging residents. She pointed to the development of the city’s climate action plan, and a “roadmap” for Tucson’s future, known as Plan Tucson.
“Since then, it’s always been my policy to engage residents,” Romero said. “That’s why I’ve been hell-bent in terms of engaging community.”
What could be next for the mayor?
It comes as no surprise to those in Arizona’s political sphere that Romero was one of the names floated as a potential replacement for Kelly if he would have joined former Vice President Kamala Harris’ ticket.
Democratic Consultant Stacy Pearson said Romero’s name comes up whenever there is a statewide or congressional vacancy.
“You’d be hard-pressed to find someone who doesn’t like her on the left,” Pearson said. “That spectrum runs from the farthest left progressives to the most purple moderates.”
Pearson pointed to Romero’s wide range of supporters and allies, from the Tucson business and education communities to abortion rights activists and environmentalists. Her “superpower” is being able to connect to a wide range of donors, funders and voters, Pearson said.
What Pearson finds most interesting about Romero’s “humble” approach to politics and the lack of a “power grab vibe” to her career moves.
“If she goes from mayor to a higher elected office, it’s going to be to better serve the community,” Pearson said. “She’s not the press conference-holding, chest-beating, look-at-me elected official.”
Romero said she doesn’t know what the future has in store for her. But one thing is certain: She wants to continue in public service.
Whether she sees herself being mayor in 10 years, or moving on to other roles, remains to be seen.
“I don’t know,” she said about the future. “Right now, I’m 1,000% having so much fun, enjoying so much.
“It’s been such a privilege to be mayor of Tucson.”
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