How a dog park helped Liz Monterrey earn historic win as first Latina on CMS board
It might be a stretch to say that Liz Monterrey’s three dogs are responsible for her election to the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools Board of Education.
But it’s also true that if not for Jade, Zoey and Baby Girl, Monterrey might never have wondered why she didn’t have a dog park in her Miami neighborhood seven years ago. She might not have learned how to create a community petition and lobby for action.
And the 34-year-old wouldn’t have used the knowledge from that experience after she moved to Charlotte in 2020 and worked to make her Plaza Shamrock neighborhood dog park safer from speeding motorists who crashed into it three times in two years.
If not for that experience organizing neighbors, she probably wouldn’t have been encouraged to join the Plaza Shamrock Neighborhood Association and then recruited by Latino leaders in Charlotte to run for public office.
So it might be a stretch to say that Jade, Zoey and Baby Girl led to Monterrey becoming the first Latina elected to the CMS board in early November.
But maybe it’s accurate to say Monterrey’s three dogs revealed how small things can make a big difference.
“It made me realize the power of local government,” Monterrey told The Charlotte Observer. “And I wanted to see how else I can give back to the community.”
‘Representation matters’
It might be an exaggeration, too, for Wendy Mateo Pascual to say Monterrey moved to Charlotte and had an epiphany about local government’s power at the right time.
But it’s also true Pascual, executive director and co-founder of Bethesda Health Center and Camino Community Center, and other Latino leaders have been looking to add representation to the city’s elected offices for years.
People on the Latino Civic Engagement Community noticed when Monterrey began to show leadership abilities in her neighborhood.
Monterrey was just the second such candidate on the at-large ballot for the CMS board. Dan Ramirez, who died in 2014, was elected to the Mecklenburg County Board of Commissioners in 2002 and again in 2006.
Susan Rodriguez-McDowell is a current commissioner for Mecklenburg County, and has said she was among one or two Hispanic or Latino elected officials in the entire state when she first took office in 2018. According to U.S. Census Bureau data, 14.9% of Charlotte residents identify as Hispanic or Latino.
“Representation matters,” Pascual said. “Representation is important in all levels — not only for Latinos, (but) for women, for minority groups, for everybody. Because if you are not at the table, even if you have allies, if it’s somebody that is not from that community at the table, most of the time the needs for that community are last on the list.”
Monterrey is the child of Cuban immigrants, and says she grew up in poverty. Her parents immigrated to the United States more than 30 years ago. Her father, Santiago, was a handyman and electrician who worked whatever job he could find in Miami. Her mother, Grisel, was an entrepreneur who “did all kinds of jobs to make ends meet,” Monterrey said.
The school board member-elect is the youngest of three children, and the first born in the United States. She heard stories of how her parents lost everything in Cuba when the communist regime took over, and it affected how she has lived her life. She was driven to value education and earned a master’s in business administration.
She works in marketing for Intuit. Her husband, Chris Duvall, and their 5-year-old son, Isaac, live a world away from her childhood in a family that primarily lived paycheck to paycheck, she said.
“I have a newly found privilege, is what I like to say,” Monterrey said. “And I just feel like people like me, it’s our duty to have a pipeline of people that we mentor, and that we will serve as role models (for) so that they can also go through the doors that we were able to go through.
“I’m a daughter of immigrants, and I’ve always felt like I needed to use my voice and my platform and my privilege for something.”
Santiago Monterrey has seen that drive in his youngest daughter for her entire life: “Every time, she is going for more.”
Cold-emailing elected officials
It might be an unusual analogy to say Monterrey approached running for an at-large CMS Board of Education position like a student researching a term paper. But it’s also true.
Monterrey said she contacted “almost every elected official in Charlotte” when debating whether to run for office.
“I cold-emailed them because I wanted to learn more,” she said. “I was just very curious.”
She heard back from Charlotte City Council members such as LaWana Mayfield and Dimple Ajmera. Mayfield invited her to a City Council meeting and asked what Monterrey had to offer and what her plans might be if she ran for office.
“She gave it to me,” Monterrey said, “the cold, hard truth.”
They talked about ways that Monterrey could differentiate herself in an election, and what the actual work of serving in public office was like.
“The effort, the hard work, the reality of it,” Monterrey said. “Just giving me the full picture of it — the good and the bad.”
When Monterrey realized she might have more to offer on the CMS Board of Education, she did the same thing with members on that board — emailing and talking and gathering information.
“My takeaway was that building relationships and working with people to drive things forward is most important,” Monterrey said. “And I think I’m really good at that because I’ve worked in corporate for a really long time. And you know, in corporate, you have to work with others, you need to prove your points, you need to use data, you need to be able to listen to others.”
‘A role model to all students’
In a field of 14 candidates for an at-large position on the CMS Board of Education, Monterrey won 12.42% of the vote on Nov. 7 — second-most. She will be sworn into office on Dec. 12 with her parents in attendance.
Her father, Santiago, said he is proud of his daughter and eager to see what voice she can give to a CMS student body population that is 30% Hispanic or Latino and has never had a representative on its board.
“We, the Hispanic people, we are the same, but we think differently,” Santiago Monterrey said. “If our community is an Anglo community, probably we do not have the right service to us. So we need somebody who’s Latino to understand what we need.”
Pascual is also eager to see what a Latina voice elevated to an elected position can do in CMS. She points to statistics that say 38.5% of Latino students are grade-level proficient in key subjects such as reading or math.
“You have 30% of the students who are Latino and you have schools that have a high Latino/Spanish/Hispanic population and you don’t have bilingual staff,” Pascual said. “You don’t have bilingual teachers. You don’t have any Latino in any of the leadership positions at the school system.
“That population is also one of the ones that is behind in everything.”
Monterrey agrees that simply having someone who natively speaks the same language might be an important step in connecting with Spanish-speaking communities through meetings and town halls “and making sure that they understand the school system,” she said.
“If I can start building that bridge, where parents feel empowered to go into the schools and advocate for their children, and learn about the school system even more than they do, I think that’s low-hanging fruit right there,” she continued.
But Monterrey also emphasizes she’s not just there as a lone voice for Latino issues.
“I want to make it clear that, yes, I’m representing Latinos, but I’m an advocate for all students,” she said. “It just so happens that I speak Spanish, and that I’m bi-cultural and I can straddle the two worlds. … It’s interesting for me to live in both worlds because in some cases, I feel like I don’t fully fit into being Latino and I don’t fully fit in American and so it’s like this new category that a lot of us are in — first generation — where we straddle these two worlds. It means a lot to be able to show that to people.”
It might be a stretch for Monterrey to say she represents a new generation of students and parents in CMS — one with humble beginnings, a drive to learn as much information as possible about her new job and three dogs who just might have launched her political career.
But it’s also true.
“I’m just happy to be able to bring that to light and give people a different view of what it means to be Latino and first generation in America,” she said.
This story was originally published November 28, 2023 at 6:00 AM.
