Nithya Raman is learning Spanish. What that says about her vision for L.A.

Nithya Raman slowly recited the start of her handwritten message to Angelenos.

Llegué de la India con mi madre a los seis años. Sé lo que cuesta empezar de nuevo.

I came from India with my mother when I was 6. I know what it takes to start over.

The mayoral hopeful was in the green room of Univision’s Westchester studios on Thursday, waiting for an interview with anchor Guad Venegas. He would ask each question in both English and Spanish, and Raman could respond in English.

But she hoped to do better than that.

Since the start of her campaign, Raman has sprinkled Spanglish into her speeches and sometimes offered whole sentences in softly accented, lightly stilted Spanish. It’s part of an effort to win over Latinos, nearly half the city’s population and a crucial swing vote , with less than a week to go before election day.

“Can you say the whole thing for me?” Raman asked Lauren Perez-Rangel, her Latino outreach senior director, who read the full message in effortless Spanish. Raman repeated it word for word, accent for accent, with no flubs or pauses.

“You got it!” Perez-Rangel told her boss.

“I hope,” Raman replied.

It was showtime.

California

A final face-off in the L.A. mayoral race

Tuesday’s televised debate could be the last time Raman and Bass go head-to-head before the Nov. 3 election.

Oct. 10, 2026

Raman, who serves on the L.A. City Council, grinned when someone said “me vale madre” — I don’t give a damn — on the walk to the studio. She cracked in English, “I doubt that’s true!” when I told an Univision producer in Spanish that no one likes my work.

A cameraman proclaimed “¡Muy bien!” when Raman rattled off an “uno, dos, tres” mic check. Venegas responded in English, “It’s always like that” to Raman’s comment in Spanish that her pronunciation is better than her comprehension.

During the interview, Raman raised her eyebrows when Venegas talked about streets filled with “basura,” the word for “trash” that became an insulting pun on Bass’ name hurled by then-candidate Spencer Pratt during the primary. Raman answered questions in English even when Venegas only asked them in Spanish, fully understanding what he said. And she kept saying “sí” to acknowledge Venegas’ points, as a native speaker would.

She never got a chance to read her Spanish-language statement, but that was OK. I saw enough to know that while she isn’t going to write the next “Don Quixote,” she isn’t limited to ordering at Casa Vega.

Supporters have praised her efforts en español. Critics dismiss them as pandering. I see something more interesting at work.

Raman spoke Tamil and Malayalam in India before moving to the U.S. as a child. If she wins, she would be the first immigrant mayor since Canadian-born Frank Shaw in the 1930s. She’d also be the first mayor whose native tongue wasn’t English since Bernard Cohn, who grew up speaking German in Prussia and served as mayor for two weeks in 1878.

Having a non-native English speaker in charge of a world capital such as L.A. — and one who wants to express herself in the city’s second tongue — wouldn’t just be symbolic. A person who’s earnest about learning a language is forever trying to decipher something new, failing far more often than succeeding in the early going — yet always working to master the task.

Isn’t that what we want from any politician, especially in a city where 56% of residents live in a household that speaks a language other than English?

Los Angeles mayoral candidate and city councilmember Nithya Raman prepares to speak at a “Latinos Con Raman” rally at La Cita Bar in downtown Los Angeles on Sept. 18.

(Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)

Familiarity with Spanish has become a prerequisite for L.A. mayors. Antonio Villaraigosa famously took classes to improve his assimilated Spanish. Eric Garcetti described his fluency as “good community meeting Spanish” and often delivered remarks in Spanish. Bass, who was married to a Chicano and treats her ex-husband’s children as her own, isn’t fluent but has a robust Spanish-language outreach for her campaign, complete with ads, mailers and websites.

For Raman, though, learning Spanish isn’t just a way to reach out to constituents. It’s a reminder of “what it means to grapple with a bureaucracy that wasn’t intended for you.”

We spoke outside Univision’s studios after her interview. I asked to speak about her experience with Spanish as a way to show a private side of her to Angelenos. (I had asked Bass to sit down with me and talk about food. The interview was initially scheduled, then campaign spokesperson Alex Stack said it was canceled so Bass could attend a news conference assailing Raman for saying that former LAPD Police Chief Daryl Gates was a “gold standard” in protecting immigrants. Bass’ campaign didn’t reschedule the interview and didn’t provide comment on her Spanish skills in time for publication.)

In 2022, Raman co-authored a motion that introduced live Spanish translation services at city council committee meetings. She wants the city to research whether it can provide the information that’s being lost as the Trump administration increasingly deletes Spanish-language versions of federal websites.

“You have to show them that you’re trying,” Raman told me. “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 — ‘a’ versus ‘o’ — 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.”

Her Spanish journey began with four years of classes at a suburban Boston high school. She chose Spanish instead of French because she felt it “would be more useful for me in the world.”

Raman forgot most of it while attending Harvard and MIT but started practicing with her brother, a Spanish major at UCLA, when she moved to L.A. 13 years ago. She read bilingual books for beginners and streamed shows such asNetflix’s dark comedy “La Casa de las Flores” (“The House of Flowers”) and podcasts such as “Chill Spanish.”

Those lessons have happened “pretty regularly” since she joined the city council in 2020, Raman said, although she scaled back once the mayoral campaign intensified.

I wondered what languages are spoken in her household. Her husband, whose Tamil-speaking parents are immigrants from India, only speaks English. Her twin 10-year-olds “can kind of follow along” when she speaks to her parents in Tamil, but she is no longer fluent in Malayalam.

“I have friends like who speak a different language, and they’re, like, religious about speaking it to their children,” Raman said. While she would love for her children to learn other languages, “life is too stressful trying to make every moment of your time with your family into almost a chore.”

I asked about the pandering charge. Throwing out Spanish phrases in an effort to appeal to Latinos is a political cliché as weak salsa as eating tacos in East L.A. or cruising in a lowrider.

Raman shook her head.

“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?

“If there was a lot of Tamil speakers here,” Raman continued, “I would appreciate that for me and for my family and for my grandparents.”

Mayor Karen Bass speaks during the “Latinos Con Bass” campaign at Ernest E. Debs Regional Park on Sunday, Sept. 20, 2026 in Los Angeles.

(Kayla Bartkowski/Los Angeles Times)

Then I tested her Spanish.

Had she heard of one of my favorite words: convenenciero? Someone who goes with what will help them and doesn’t stand for anything but themselves. Haters have never outright called Raman a convenenciera, I said, but that’s what they’re insinuating in almost every other sentence.

In fairness, most politicians have a bit of convenenciero in them.

“People say, ‘She doesn’t stand for anything,’ but people also criticize me for being ideological, so which is it?” Raman calmly responded. “I try and learn. And I don’t come and say, ‘I know what you want.’ I say, ‘I’m trying to learn what you want, and I want to make the city work for you. How can I make it work?’”

So you’re not a convenenciera?

“I don’t feel that,” Raman said, repeating the phrase two more times.

I told her I’d ask three questions in Spanish. First: how was she doing?

“Bien. Un poco nervioso.”

“Poca nerviosa,” I corrected. A bit nervous. She thanked me for correcting her and said, “Sí, sí, nerviosa.”

What was she doing to try and relax during this campaign?

“Yo quiero estar con mi familia. Mis hijos …” I want to be with my family. My children …

She thought about the right phrase.

“... son mi vida.” Are my life.

What’s a word she loves in Spanish?

Perez-Rangel suggested chisme — gossip.

“I do like chisme!” Raman said with a laugh. But that wasn’t it.

“I like the word tomar [to take] and how many different meanings it has,” she said in English, then rattled off definitions and tenses in Spanish. Tomar bebidas. Tomar su tiempo.

“Tomar City Hall?” I asked.

She laughed again and said something that needs no translation: “Yes.”