Sunny Angulo, Part 2 (S9E3)

Trigger warning: Part 2 contains a story of domestic abuse.

In Part 2, we pick up where we left off in Part 1. Sunny arrived anew in her hometown of San Francisco. After that "talk" with her dad about her tattoo, she peaced out on her parents and went to stay with a friend in El Paso ahead of her move back to SF.

Before leaving, when she went back home to get the rest of her stuff, Sunny ran into her mom, who was upset. Sunny told her, directly, that she would make mistakes in her life, and that moving away was not one of them. She reminded her mom that her dad, Sunny's grandpa, disowned her years before. She and her parents were eventually able to close that chapter of their relationship.

Now in SF and going to school at USF, it was the era of the dotcom boom (in 2000, around the time I moved here). With everything going on around tech, Sunny found community as a founding member of the SF Indie Media Collective. She aligned herself with many women around here interested in an alternative to the onslaught of tech in The City (in hindsight, I wanna say, "Just you wait …").

It was also a time of warehouse parties. People who went to Burning Man were artists, not tech douches. It was peak bike messenger days.

Toward the end of her time in college, Sunny became more and more engaged in activism. I ask whether the school (USF) had an impact on her activism, or if it was The City, or a combination of the two. She points to the time when she was 8 and wanted to design fashion that would fight deforestation in Madagascar. All to say, she's had an eye for social and environmental justice since she was a kid. USF and San Francisco served to solidify that for her as a young adult.

Sunny speaks to two times in her life that she missed out: 1) being taken away from most of her high school years, and 2) having left San Francisco when she was young, despite visiting regularly, there was a lot of The City she needed to reacquaint herself with. She reminisces about some of the spots, especially around USF, that she and her friends would frequent.

Around this time, Sunny was involved in an organization called School of the Americas Watch. The group stood against the School of the Americas in Ft. Benning, Georgia, which trained paramilitary for dictatorships. That's an easy thing to oppose theoretically. But SOAW did the work on the ground. For Sunny, that meant traveling back to Georgia.

School of the Americas had existed long before 9/11. But after that, security ramped up.

Before she shares that story, Sunny retells her own Sept. 11 story. She was USF student body vice president at that time. Living off-campus, she ran back still in her pajamas when she knew something was going on that morning. She met with the student body president and they went to the Board of Trustees to try to secure protections for Arab and Muslim students. They tried, but the board wasn't too into that.

Back to School of the Americas, there was an annual protest there. 2001 shouldn't have been different, but it was. Prior to that point, there was no fencing. Celebrities would show up. The protest was always peaceful. Post-9/11, a chain-link fence went up. Little did protestors know, but leadership that year planned to make an example of them. The protestors decided to cut a hole in the fence nonetheless. A group that included Sunny was arrested and kept over the weekend. There's a side story here about her witnessing prison racism first-hand.

The end result of all that nonsense was that Sunny was released, but was told to come back to Georgia for arraignment. The judge told her to issue a written apology to earn "only" a year of federal probation. A Mission High teacher friend of Sunny's refused and served time in Dublin, California. Sunny, meanwhile, had lost her job and still had a pay a hefty fine.

Trigger warning: At this point in the conversation, Sunny shares the story of dating another member of the media collective, a man who turned out to be abusive toward her. It's a tough story to hear, and I'm sure tougher to have lived through. But it's an important story to share.

She moved into an anarchist co-op in Oakland with that guy. After putting her in the hospital following an assault, Sunny did what she knew would be the hardest thing—she told her parents what was going on. She did that and moved out to stay with a friend.

Soon enough, someone told Sunny to apply to be part of a new journalism school. She got in. That took her to Merida in the Mexican Yucután. Through the school, she was in Bolivia when Evo Morales was elected. Eventually, she came back, moved to The Mission, and got a job at Balazo Galleria. Their landlord was an immigration lawyer who eventually basically evicted them when she threatened to expose a roommate who was here on a visa. Ugh.

From there, Sunny moved to South of Market near Howard and Sixth Streets. She lived with fellow activists and a professor at New College. Another roommate was a tenant organizer in the Tenderloin and there were plenty of bike messengers. Sunny became the lead tenant after enough roommates moved out. She recounts various stories from that apartment.

She had a detour of sorts when she worked for a children's furniture-maker. A woman she nannied for opened a store and Sunny designed furniture. She also managed the store on Polk. Things were going well, especially when FAO Schwartz placed an order. But then, with the 2008 recession, the company filed for bankruptcy.

From here on out, the episode is very "inside San Francisco politics" that covers a time span from about 2003 to the present day. I consider it very important context for how we got to the point we're at, mere weeks before an election that could further erode the working and middle classes in The City.

Sunny had been volunteering for a friend she knew from the SFUSD School Board, board president Mark Sanchez. He was running for D9 supervisor. Sanchez asked Sunny to be his campaign manager, and she accepted. It ended up being what got her into SF electoral politics. Her candidate didn't win, but she was in.

Going back to 2003, when Matt Gonzalez ran for mayor and energized young voters (including me), Sunny learned about the Green Party. Sanchez was also a Green. This is when Sunny met Jane Kim, another Green Party member. Kim was on the School Board with Mark Sanchez at the time. When 2010 rolled around, Jane decided to run for D6 (where Sunny lived) supervisor, and tapped Sunny to be her campaign manager. It was a tough fight, but despite being an upstart campaign with few or no endorsements, Jane won.

Sunny stayed on to work in Jane's City Hall office. She lists other folks who worked in that office and with whom she grew close. From Day 1, the job was rough. Homicides, dissolved redevelopment agencies, the SF mayor becoming California lieutenant governor, and a new mayor (Ed Lee) coming in. Before leaving the Mayor's Office, Gavin Newsom cut a deal with Twitter, the so-called "Twitter Tax Break." (Sunny points out that it was actually Twitter's Market Street landlord, Shorenstein, who got the break.)

Ed. note: For years, I was under the assumption that Jane Kim was involved in crafting and being integral to the incentive to bring Twitter to SOMA. Please listen to Sunny's insider story of how that all went down for a more nuanced account of how events transpired. In short, it's complicated, as many things are.

Then the conversation turns to when David Chiu, then the D3 (Chinatown, North Beach) supervisor, ran for and won a seat in the California Legislature, vacating the D3 seat. Mayor Ed Lee appointed a woman named Julie Christensen to Chiu's vacant seat on the Board of Supervisors. This enraged Chinatown political boss Rose Pak, who felt Ed Lee had betrayed his community. And so Pak set aside her differences with ex-Supervisor Aaron Peskin and convinced him to run.

Peskin had a campaign manager that no one really liked. By "no one," I mean Chinatown. It's not 100 percent clear how this came about, but for Sunny, it was her boss, Jane Kim, telling her that people wanted Sunny to step in and run Peskin's campaign. She was reluctant for several reasons. Then two folks in Chinatown who worked on the Peskin campaign told Sunny that they were walking away unless she took over. It was that bad. She got a meeting with Peskin and laid out her rules. He brought her on. At first, Sunny thought she would be co-managing with the guy no one liked. Then the guy took offense and quit. Problem solved.

Sunny found a good friend in the Peskin campaign right away. She felt they ran a good race, but despite that, didn't think that they would win. She didn't go to the 2015 Election Night party at Club Fugazi. She stayed in the campaign office alone. Then a political consultant who was at the party called Sunny to let her know that they won. Sunny picked herself up and walked a few blocks to the party. On stage with Peskin, right there and then, he asked her to be his chief of staff. She said she needed to talk to her boss, Jane Kim.

Once she moved from one office to another at City Hall, it was like the two supervisors and their staff were a team. A journalist called them "the Splash Sisters," and folks in the offices joked that they were District 36 or 63, depending. Peskin and Kim were tight, indeed. Sunny has a story of Peskin wanting to skip the ceremonial part of rejoining the Board, and instead wanting to get straight to business. It was something of a wake-up call for Sunny, who wasn't used to working this way.

We go on a bit of a sidebar here to talk about how Kim and Peskin approached their overlapping time on the Board. Sunny describes both as "land-use nerds" and I throw in "policy wonks." Theirs was a progressiveness rooted in pragmatism.

In 2018, Jane Kim ran against fellow Supervisor Scott Wiener for California Senate. Sunny didn't work on the campaign officially, but considered herself a "super volunteer." She and some other women penned an open letter condemning Wiener and his campaign for a pro-Wiener super PAC's hit pieces on Kim, portraying her as a homewrecker (read: "whore"). The campaign itself, Sunny says, ran sexist/racist/misogynistic ads against their female Asian opponent. It was and is deplorable behavior, and Sunny and others felt a need to speak out against it.

To both Sunny's and my mind, there's a through line to the current race Wiener is in, against another Asian woman, Connie Chan, in which the campaign created an AI chatbot that generated racist responses. AI and big tech companies overwhelmingly support Wiener against Chan. At the very least, it's a bad look. At worst, it's despicable.

Sunny is pretty quick to give Wiener credit for being an incredibly hard worker inside halls of power. She simply disagrees with his tactics. I second that. And of course there are major policy differences.

I breeze through Aaron Peskin's 2024 run for mayor, which Sunny also managed, partly for time but also because it's been covered on this show. Then I ask Sunny what she's been up to since then, because Peskin was termed out of his seat on the Board of Supervisors. She says she spent time thinking about movements change and how communities reorganize themselves. She started to believe that there are people who are progressive and don't know it. She points to many California Democratic elected officials' being overwhelmingly corporate, meaning beholden to powerful corporate interests rather than their constituents.

Out of that inward examination of the outer world, Sunny arrived at the idea to start her own nonprofit progressive policy think tank and media lab. That entity's name is SF Propel. They develop policy proposals and create explainer-type videos (that I really love) to help folks understand a true progressive approach to the problems of our time. That includes everything from affordability to truly uplifting art and artists, actually regulating tech, and holding government accountable.

SF Propel was Sunny's brainchild, but with some seed money she obtained, she brought in some really skilled people to help her build it. They work with her to develop policy ideas and issue stances, as well as to make those videos and plan and hold events. For more info and to get involved yourself, head to SF Propel's website.

We recorded this episode in the Tenderloin Community Benefit District space in the Warfield Commons building in September 2026.