A long-time leader of Latino Democrats in the San Francisco Peninsula area, Fernando Vega is a past member of the Redwood City Board of Education and City Council. In 1992, he was chosen by the Clinton-Gore campaign to lead their regional drive among Latino voters in the Peninsula, turning out 18,000 Latino voters, contributing significantly to the Democratic victory that year. While on the Redwood City Board of Education, he helped to establish "bilingual education" programs in the local schools, but later decided that the programs were a failure, and turned against them in the 1980s. After years of struggling against local "bilingual" programs, he joined the "English for the Children" campaign as a Regional Honorary Chairman in August 1997.
