Gallatin alum Andrea Gordillo has long been committed to the importance of education in her career. However, it wasn’t until she was a student at NYU that she considered a career in local politics, from getting involved with union organizing to realizing how to create change in her community.

Now, Gordillo is running to be the next City Council member in Manhattan’s 2nd Council District. The area encompasses Greenwich Village, the Lower East Side, the East Village, Midtown South, Flatiron, Union Square, Gramercy, Murray Hill and Kips Bay — and with that, much of NYU’s campus. After living in lower Manhattan for over a decade, she developed aspirations to combat the affordable housing crisis, foster local Latinx artistry and more as a City Council member.  

In an interview with WSN, Gordillo discussed growing up in an immigrant family, her time as an NYU student and her campaign for New York City Council. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

WSN: What inspired you to pursue a career in public service? 

Gordillo: My family came to this country in 1987 with nothing but the promise of a better life. My father especially was interested in public health and medicine, and the United States was a center of innovation for that. My mom didn’t speak any English at all. She was navigating a new world by raising a family. When my father came here, he was a construction worker and a taxi driver here in the city, trying to make ends meet. They achieved the American Dream, but that dream I saw when I was growing up was not the reality for most people. I lived in the East Village for more than 10 years, and during that time — despite my love of the culture, the history of the people of this neighborhood — I’ve seen the cost of living, the rents and the climate crisis worsen in ways that make it so much harder for the working families to survive. 

Gordillo graduated with a master’s degree in culture and media from the Gallatin School of Individualized Study in 2017, and has worked as a public service leader in New York City ever since. Since December 2023, she has been the chairperson for Manhattan Community Board 3, which represents a part of Chinatown and the Lower East Side. In 2020, Gordillo became the development director for The Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural & Educational Center, an organization that aims to support Puerto Rican and Latinx artists in fostering cultural diversity through art in downtown Manhattan. Two years before attending NYU, Gordillo graduated from Northeastern University with a degree in international affairs. 

Gordillo said that her civic engagement while at NYU motivated her to run for New York City Council 2nd Council District and succeed Carlina Rivera, who has held the position since 2018. She said that as a Gallatin student, she served on the organizing committee for the graduate student workers’ union and was involved in Occupy Wall Street, a movement against corporate greed in Manhattan’s Financial District. 

WSN: What inspired you to run for New York City Council?   

Gordillo: With Carlina Rivera’s term ending after this year, I felt it to be a responsibility to build on the trailblazing women’s leadership, which has a 25-year history here in this community, and be a messenger for change. But before that, I had been involved in politics in a lot of different iterations — including at NYU. I was lucky to do some events with the NYU Viva Peru student group, and if elected, I’d be the first Peruvian council member. There’s only one other Peruvian representative in the state legislature, Marcela Mitaynes, and there are about 90,000 Peruvians in the city, so we’re a growing demographic.

With a love of the public education system, Gordillo said she decided to attend NYU in hopes of becoming an educator someday. She described that one of the most fulfilling parts of her experience in graduate school was working as a research assistant at the university’s Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service for its Walter Stafford Project on Racial Inequality in New York City, which focuses on researching racial inequality in the city across fields including health care, education and housing. 

WSN: How did the Stafford Project impact your career?

Gordillo: During that time, I really became more interested in — for lack of a better term— making the sausage. So, I started doing applications of that work in my own community. I had been living in the East Village since 2012, so I was interested in applying those things to my community work and things I thought were effective ways of making change. Before that, I had studied international relations. I wanted to be a diplomat, but I realized that wasn’t an effective avenue for the change that I wanted to do, so I turned a little bit more inward. The East Village is a model community. It’s an epicenter of immigration in this country, numerous political and social movements — from immigrant rights to labor movements —  and a lot of that is as a living history. So, I wanted to transmute that in the ways that I saw fit.

Gordillo said that one of the key points of her campaign for City Council is affordable housing. She aims to make District 2 more livable with initiatives such as expanding access to housing vouchers and increasing community land trusts. As a village resident for the past dozen years, she said that she has seen housing prices in the area skyrocket, making it impossible for New Yorkers to make ends meet. 

Additionally, Gordillo has also built her platform on promises to mitigate the threat of climate disasters and create opportunities for local artists to showcase their work in schools, senior centers and other public spaces in Greenwich Village, Union Square and Gramercy, among other neighborhoods in the district.

WSN: Do you have any aspirations for NYU’s campus area specifically as a City Council member? 

Gordillo: Washington Square Park is one of the most iconic and important places in the city, and keeping it a place for free expression — keeping it a place where people have dignity to share the space there together — is important. I want to make sure that residents there have homes, and it’s a clean and friendly place to be. Making sure that Washington Square Park stays the way that it stands is a top priority for me in the council. In New York City, park usage has gone up enormously since COVID, and I want to make sure that we keep it fully funded so that it’s safe and a place that people want to be in together.

Amelia Hernandez Gioia contributed reporting.

Contact Aashna Miharia at [email protected].