Belia Ramos broke barriers to become Napa County Supervisor

Belia Ramos said her entry into public service in 1999 seemed “random and haphazard.” But it laid the foundation for the career he would build.

Ramos was 20 years old and had just earned his bachelor’s degree that summer. She was looking for a job.

She was staying at her parents’ Browns Valley home in Napa when she was awakened one day by a phone call from her mother, who asked accusingly, “What did you do?”

Rep. Mike Thompson, then in his first term in Congress, was looking for her.

It turned out that Thompson was looking for someone who spoke Spanish to work in his district office. Five community members had recommended Ramos. Thompson hired her on September 1 of that year.

Ramos said he eventually realized the experience was “absolutely how the stars were supposed to align.”

“It turned out to be the greatest experience because I got to really see what we do in public service,” Ramos said. “Some days it’s meetings and agendas, and it can be kind of simple. And on other days there are people who don’t know how to connect to services. There are people struggling to find solutions, people who have ideas and people who are scared, frustrated and worried.”

More than two decades later, Ramos, 46, is nearing the start of his third four-year term on the Napa County Board of Supervisors, representing District 5 — an area that covers American Canyon and other parts of southeast of the county.

She is set to be the only supervisor with more than one term on the five-member board, which, for the first time, will be made up entirely of women.

In 2017, Ramos became the first Latina to serve on the board, and with the upcoming departure of Supervisor Alfredo Pedroza, she will be the only Hispanic member of the board — in a county that is about 35 percent Latino.

Ramos — a Napa native and the daughter of a farm worker — also previously was the first Latina to serve on the American Canyon City Council and the first elected county official to give birth while in office.

Ramos said greater representation in government can help raise awareness by bringing in people with a range of life experiences.

“It’s almost like a form of empathy, really, if you will,” Ramos said. “If you haven’t experienced it and you don’t know someone who has, how do you get the understanding?”

In this way, representation also helps lay the groundwork for government to move toward the cultural competency needed to serve all populations, she said. But Ramos added that “the biggest catalyst to being able to achieve cultural competence is an open heart and an open mind.”

“It doesn’t matter who does the work as much as it matters that we do it in a culturally competent way,” Ramos said. “We understand the challenges of trusting the community we’re trying to reach.”

Personally, Ramos said, there are several examples of situations where she wonders what would have happened if she hadn’t been in her position. She recalled getting a random call on Facebook Messenger from a person who turned out to be a young, Spanish-speaking mother seeking help because her son had committed suicide.

“I’m grateful that I speak Spanish, that I can communicate with her, that I can understand her cultural struggles, her language struggles, and that I was able to connect with her as a mother,” Ramos said.

Ramos also recalled that during the 2017 fires, there were many vineyard workers sleeping in their cars and not going into county shelters. Someone pointed out to him that the county’s emergency messages were only in English — so Ramos decided to speak in Spanish during a news conference.

“Representation is really just one aspect of doing better to serve our community,” Ramos said. “It’s not the answer to everything, I’ll tell you that. It is not. But it matters.”

When he accepted the job with Thompson, Ramos had no plans to work long-term in government. She told Thompson she would stay with him for two years and then go to law school.

“I went to law school, I did the lawyer thing, I sold my soul for money and I wasn’t fulfilled,” Ramos said.

Ramos returned to Napa County from San Francisco in 2005. She bought an unbuilt house in American Canyon—her father encouraged her to buy it, and he would furnish the house and pay the closing costs.

And Ramos’ father planted the seed of involvement in politics. When she moved, on June 28, 2005, her father brought her an application for the American Canyon General Plan Review Committee, scheduled for 5:00 pm that night.

The housing market crashed a few years later, Ramos noted, so the committee never met.

“You look at everything that needed to be thought about for a growing community, it wasn’t happening,” Ramos said.

That pissed her off and, at her father’s urging, encouraged her to run for American Canyon City Council in 2010.

Ramos said her parents were active members of the St. Helena community while she was growing up, including in the city schools. The first political campaign he worked on was a school bond measure. Her parents did phone banking in Spanish, and Ramos joined after school.

She said that because it meant so much to them, her parents taught her “what it means to be an American, to be civically engaged, to give back to your community.”

“I don’t think I’ll ever fully understand what kind of socioeconomic hardship my father left in Mexico when he was the oldest child of nine to come to this country and provide, to send money back to his family.” , Ramos said. “But it definitely raised us in a way that is to give to others.”

You can reach writer Edward Booth at 707-521-5281 or [email protected].