Violetta Aguilar-Wyrick was welcomed to the UCR Visitor and Alumni Center on Wednesday, Feb. 28. She presented “Como Los Monarcas: Building power to advocate and create a better opportunity.” The event featured an array of photos throughout Aguilar-Wyrick’s life from her high school graduation to her time advocating for healthcare rights at the State Capitol in Sacramento.
As the Principal Consultant of Xara Public Affairs, Aguilar-Wyrick is responsible for engaging with client objectives and building relationships. This includes project management, quality assurance and client engagement. Xara Public Affairs has broken barriers leading successful strategies, field communications, public policy and government affairs efforts at the local, state and federal level for candidates, labor unions and corporate clients.
Director of External Engagement for School of Public Policy, Mark Manalang, organized the event with other dean’s brand ambassadors as part of the external engagement program. Manalang explained how he hopes that students will engage in these seminars with open eyes and find something to take away, “The Alumni Spotlight Series is part of our community seminars. All of these are geared towards external spaces. I really want to see more people from outside, off campus, alongside folks on campus, to join us to spotlight more alumni for doing great things. A lot of these folks have blazed the trail for our current students talking about some really inspiring stuff and my hope is that we have students who sat in this audience today and a fire got lit.”
Manalang has hosted an abundance of seminars but this is his second time featuring an alumni at the Alumni & Visitor Center. He explained, “At the School of Public Policy, we are training tomorrow’s future leaders, community leaders, regional leaders, policy leaders and we understand that sometimes it takes you seeing inspiring figures to kickstart your show.”
Aguilar-Wyrick’s presentation begins with a girl from Michoacán immigrating to California. As an immigrant herself, Aguilar-Wyrick has always wanted to give a voice to people who are typically unheard. Her efforts to give people a voice pushed her to join a labor union out of college and give a voice to workers.
Aguilar-Wyrick’s commitment to advocacy and overachievement followed her into her teenage years. In high school, Aguilar-Wyrick joined Movimiento Estudiantil Chicana/o de Aztlan (MECHA). A notable accomplishment of hers was when she opened a library by coordinating with other city council members to advocate for students to send cards in support of the idea.
In 2009, Aguilar-Wyrick graduated with a bachelor’s in women’s and labor studies from UCR; in 2015, she returned, completing her master’s in public policy in 2019. Aguilar-Wyrick secured employment post-undergrad by talking to her labor studies professor and getting hired at Service Employees International Union United Healthcare Workers [SEIU UHW]. She mentioned, “I was an English tutor, as part of the staff union, I was interested in continuing to organize. I love organizing … She sent out my resume and she talked to folks and then I got a phone call and they became my boss. So ask for help. Ask your professors and ask folks.”
While Aguilar-Wyrick was employed at SEIU UHW, enrollment plans for the Affordable Care Act were being rolled out. As part of her work, she was able to ensure Riverside residents were eligible for a healthcare policy, she described how “Healthcare policy was one of the areas I covered so we need to figure out how to enroll people. In the Inland Empire, Riverside specifically, we were one of the very first ones to start organizing ourselves and creating round tables. We were very much ahead before Covered California brought analogous staff to help us go into doing enrollment clinics.”
One source of her consulting skills came from her skills in collective bargaining. Her job as a Collective Bargaining Director for SEIU Local 121RN was to assist in employee contract negotiations with employers and supervise the implementation and enforcement of these employee contracts. In describing job expectations, she said, “In the process of bargaining a contract with the employer, you can use that as an opportunity to organize. There’s no better opportunity to organize your workers than when there’s arguing because everybody wants to know what they’re getting paid.”
One of her most recent projects is with industrial real-estate developers called Howard Industrial Partners. Howard Industrial Partners wants to take 341 acres in the city of Perris for mixed-land use and attract workers for construction jobs to repurpose the land. Titled Harvest Landing, the project started back in 2021 when Xara Public Affairs was hired. The firm went door-to-door collecting thousands of surveys for community members’ input. Those surveyed said they wanted the space to be used for open space, commercial use or affordable housing.
When asked about community input, she replied, “We have collected over 1,800 surveys, 65% of those surveys were collected from actual conversations either from door-to-door conversations or phone banking. Out of those we found that over 1,600 people in the community of Perris supported bringing in a commercial space and what they really want [are] amenities like a shopping center where they can work or hang out with their families.”
Aguilar-Wyrick has had a long journey and has accomplished a lot with many more challenges to follow with many more accomplishments to come. When asked how she balances the work of organizing to starting her own firm, she responded, “There’s times where I focused more on my career and my work and right now I’m finding that balance and spending more time at home and spending more time with my kids.”
