Sandra Sepulveda photographed at Plaza Mariachi
On Sept. 12, Sandra Sepulveda — after a long day of a long campaign spent knocking on doors and making phone calls — was brought back home by her campaign staff. They hid her away in her bedroom while a viewing party of friends, family and supporters watched the election results on a projector screen on her front lawn. They were all waiting to see if she’d be the new Metro Councilmember representing District 30 — the southeast Nashville district she grew up in — and feeling cautiously optimistic.
“I didn’t know what to expect,” says Sepulveda, who is 26. “I didn’t know if my message had connected.”
Campaigning isn’t easy: She had to sit her parents down and prepare them for the challenges ahead. Politics can be particularly tough on a young Mexican American woman, she notes, especially when straddling two cultures. Sepulveda says some people thought she wasn’t “white enough” to win the seat, while others told her she needed to wear more makeup and start drawing on her eyebrows to make herself “look more Latina” to win supporters. She also says strangers hurled anti-Mexican insults at her family on election night. But she and her supporters knocked on thousands of doors, worked the phones, put in the work. On election night, all she could do was wait.
And she won.
“It was hard to believe,” she says. “It really was.”
Sepulveda’s victory was historic: She was the first Latina elected to the Metro Council. And the night saw other milestones — the first Muslim councilmember, Zulfat Suara, was elected, and the most women in Nashville history now serve on the council.
“I think you’re starting to see the city want something different and want something that reflects them,” says Sepulveda.
Sepulveda says she knows what life is like for people in her district — not enough textbooks in Metro schools, no sidewalks or bike lanes, no parks or even a library. Thirty percent of residents live below the poverty line. Her parents are immigrants, like many of the district’s residents. They came from Mexico and began working factory jobs, and when Sepulveda was 5 years old, her family moved from California to Nashville. Her parents sometimes struggled to pay bills on time, but Sepulveda says they made it work: “My dad always said, ‘We might not have enough money, but we’ll always have food on the table.’ ”
Sepulveda was the first in her family to go to college. She attended Trevecca Nazarene University, where she majored in history and political science, and graduated in 2015. She soon got a job with the Tennessee Democratic Party, where she now serves as operations director and finance administrator.
For a long time, she still couldn’t see herself campaigning. That’s partly because there weren’t many politicians who looked like her or her neighbors, she says — not until Fabian Bedne, former councilmember for District 31, became the first Latino and first immigrant to win a seat.
As Sepulveda looked around her district, she saw the same old struggles facing her neighbors, and the continuing disparity between her community and others. She decided to run.
“I was tired of seeing the same thing and feeling like we weren’t being heard and [that] other parts of the city were having more resources than we were,” she says.
As a councilmember, Sepulveda says she’s trying to get more funding for her district, and is also interested in broader issues like workers’ rights. She often says the people of her district have long felt forgotten and voiceless, and that means she can’t take her council seat lightly.
“It means a lot to me because they had enough faith in me to believe that I could be that voice.”
