Los Angeles Council Member Raman Practices Spanish Before Univision Interview

WESTCHESTER, Los Angeles, Oct. 28: Nithya Raman stood in the green room at Univision's Westchester studios on Thursday and rehearsed a Spanish sentence with Lauren Perez-Rangel, her Latino outreach senior director. Raman repeated the line word for word after Perez-Rangel read it. "You got it!" Perez-Rangel told her. "I hope," Raman replied.

Raman serves on the Los Angeles City Council and is seeking the mayoral post. Anchor Guad Venegas asked each question in English and Spanish during the interview. Raman answered in English but understood the Spanish questions and said "si" to acknowledge his points.

She studied Spanish for four years at a suburban Boston high school, choosing it over French because she felt it "would be more useful for me in the world." She forgot most of it at Harvard and MIT, then resumed practice with her brother, a Spanish major at UCLA, after she moved to Los Angeles 13 years ago. She read beginner bilingual books and streamed "La Casa de las Flores" on Netflix and the podcast "Chill Spanish." She said the lessons continued "pretty regularly" after she joined the city council in 2020 and slowed once the mayoral campaign picked up.

Raman was born in India and arrived at age 6 speaking Tamil and Malayalam. If elected, she would be the first immigrant mayor since Canadian-born Frank Shaw in the 1930s and the first mayor whose native tongue was not English since Bernard Cohn, who grew up speaking German in Prussia and served two weeks in 1878.

In 2022, Raman co-authored a motion that added live Spanish translation at city council committee meetings. She also wants the city to study whether it can supply information that disappears as the Trump administration removes Spanish-language versions of federal websites.

"You have to show them that you're trying," Raman said. "And even if you go out there, and you speak broken Spanish, and you mess it up, and you don't conjugate it properly, and you get all the endings wrong, the fact that you show up and you say it, and you try it in Spanish, means something to the people that I've been talking to."

Critics call the Spanish outreach pandering. Raman rejected that view. "To try and communicate to people in the language that they speak doesn't feel like pandering. It feels like what the city should do," she said. "Why shouldn't elected representatives here also speak Spanish, or do their best to communicate to people in their language?" She added, "If there was a lot of Tamil speakers here, I would appreciate that for me and for my family and for my grandparents."

During a brief Spanish exchange, Raman said she was "bien, un poco nervioso." After a correction from the interviewer, she answered, "Si, si, nerviosa." She said she wanted to be with her family and that her children "son mi vida." Asked about a Spanish word she likes, she pointed to tomar and listed its meanings, including tomar bebidas and tomar su tiempo. When asked if that included taking City Hall, she laughed and said, "Yes."