The City Council met on Tuesday, May 6, 2025, at 1:30 PM in Council Chambers. The meeting began with ceremonial proclamations and an invocation, followed by a consent calendar, a joint meeting with the San Jose Financing Authority, and action on several policy and land-use items. All substantive votes were unanimous.
Sixth Tony, would you please call the role? Present. Cohen. Ortiz. Present. Mulcahi. Juan. Here. Candelas. Fully here. Casey. Mayhand. Sure. Great. Thank you, Tony. Now, if you're able, please stand and join us in the Pledge of Allegiance. Thank you. Today's invocation will be provided by Victor Vasquez, the co-executive director of Somos Mayfair. And Councilmember Ortiz will tell us more. Thank you, Mayor. Hello, everyone. Today's invocation will be delivered by Victor Vasquez, co-executive director of Somos Mayfair, a community-based organization focused on addressing historical inequality by empowering neighbors to become leaders and agents of change in their own right. Having come to the United States when he was eight years old, Victor has a storied career as a community organizer. Victor has helped lead Somos Mayfair to organize and empower working families with an eye towards addressing the needs of youth, developing strong alternatives to address violence and empower the community to make the changes necessary to meet the needs of San Jose's poorest communities. Now I'd like for Victor to come and please start us off. Thank you. Thank you so much to everybody here and for this opportunity. Um the language of the Aztecs in Solchi Siwa translates to flower and sound. This is a dual expression of central to Nawa poetry, philosophy, symbolizing the pursuit of beauty, truth, and the divine through artistic expression. To honor this legacy of Floricanto, I will share the concluding portion of I Am Joaquin by renowned Chicano civil rights leader Rodolfo Corki Gonzalez. It offers and I will offer a closing prayer written dedicated to the most vulnerable people in our community. Although we have a Hispanic Heritage Month, I think that it's appropriate that May is the Chicano Heritage Month. And I would like to honor that through a few words. I am Hidalgo, Zapata, Murieta, Espinosa. They are but a few. They dare to face the force of tyranny of men who rule by deception and hypocrisy. The Indian has endured and still emerged the winner, victorious, that mestizo must yet overcome, and the Wachapino will only just ignore. Now I bleed in some smelly cell or by the club or from the gun or the tyranny. I bleed as the vicious gloves of hunger cut my face and eyes, as I fight my way from stinking barriers to the glamour of the ring, the lights of fame, or the mutilated sorrow. My blood runs pure on the ice cake hills of the Alaskan Isles, on the coarse strong beach of Normandy, the foreign lands of Korea, and now Vietnam, Iraq, the Middle East, and Palestine. Here I stand before the court of justice, guilty from all the glory of my raza, to be sentenced to despair. Here I stand poor in money, arrogant with pride, bold and rich with courage, and wealthy in spirit and faith. My knees are caked with mud, my hands collars from all the work I have made the Anglo rich, yet equality is but a word. And the treaty of Guadalupe has been broken and is but another treasure is promise. My last is lost and stolen, my culture has been rampaged, and I left in the line, I'm left in the line of welfare doors and fill the jails with crime, and those then are the rewards that this society has for the sons and daughters of chiefs and kings and queens and bloody revolutionaries, who gave them foreign people all their skills and ingenuity to pave the way with brains and blood for those hung gold hungry strangers who changed our language and pleasurize our deeds, has feats of valor and claimed it of their own. They frowned upon our way of life and took what they could use, or art or literature or music they ignore, so they left the real things of value and grab at their own destruction by their greed. They overlook the cleansing fountains of nature and of our brotherhood and sisterhood, which is who is Joaquin, the art of our great senores Diego Rivera Cisqueros Orozco, and did I say Frida Lora di Cervantes, Cherry Moraga, Gloria and Saldua, they are but another act of revolution for the salvation of humankind, or Mariachi music, the heart and soul of the people of the earth, the life of the child, the happiness of love, the corridors of our people that tell us the tales of life and death of tradition, legends of the old and the new, of joy, of passion and sorrow, of the people, and that's who I am. I am in the eyes of brown of a brown woman, sheltered beneath her shawl of black, deep and sorrow, sorrow, agony, that bear the pains of sons and daughters long buried or dying, dead on the battlefield, or on the barbed wire of social strife. Her rosary she prays, her fingers endlessly like the family working down a row of beats to turn around and continue to work and work and work. There is no end.