A Day in the Life: Being a state legislator requires ambition, commitment and a willingness to put in long hours--all the more so if you're new to the job. We followed two first-year California lawmakers--one a Democrat, the other a Republican--through a typical April day at the office.

• Author: Griffin, Kelley
• Position: Esmeralda Soria and Tri Ta

Freshman year.

Most people encounter it only in the context of school, but legislators get to be in that newly minted state after their first election. They join an institution with a long history and formal rules covering procedure and protocols.

There are unwritten rules, too, that can be learned only from the people--legislators and staff--who have a few years under their belt. First-year lawmakers face a steep learning curve while trying to hit the ground running, hire a staff, develop their own processes and prove to their constituents they can deliver for the district.

These are day-in-the-life stories of two rookies in the California State Assembly--different from their counterparts in many states because they are full time, have large personal staffs in their capital and district offices and nonpartisan fiscal, legal and IT staff at their disposal, too.

But their days have a familiar feel: weighing budgets and policy with their district and the state in mind, holding meeting after meeting with constituents asking for help and organizations asking for a yea or nay on bills. And fundraising as often as possible.

These two are freshmen in another sense: first-generation Americans, a daughter of migrant workers, a son of political refugees, both inspired from a young age to serve.

Esmeralda Soria

When California Assemblymember Esmeralda Soria arrives at her capital office at 9:30 this April morning, her hand is in a splint, and she had to miss her early morning boxing class.

Pounding a big punching bag no doubt caused the injury, she admits. She'll have to find another way to shake off the stress of her freshman session in the Statehouse while it heals.

Soria has time to check in with staff before wall-to-wall meetings with constituent groups the rest of the day, capped by an evening fundraising dinner. She has also promised to stop by another dinner sometime after 8. Soria thrives on the demanding pace--she laughs and calls herself "a woman of action"--so she waves aside concerns about her hand as she looks over the day's schedule.

Soria is new to the job of legislator but not to the Capitol or political life. In high school, she spent time in Sacramento through the Chicano Latino Youth Leadership Project. She worked for a state senator after college, and after law school she had a fellowship in the Obama White House. She won a seat on the Fresno City Council in 2014. In 2022, the final redistricting maps offered the Democrat an opportunity to win the Assembly's 27th District seat.

Soria grew up in the Central Valley's farming community, the daughter of undocumented farmworkers from Mexico. They migrated mostly with the citrus and grape harvests when Soria and her four siblings were young. The family eventually settled in the Fresno area, where Soria's mom, Maria Obeldina Soria, created stability for her children by buying a run-down house in Lindsay.

Soria grew up aware of efforts to gain better pay and living conditions for farmworkers, but she says her parents weren't ones to go to protests or talk much about it. She became attuned to the idea of rights and participation when she was 10, watching the presidential debates of 1992--the first to be translated into Spanish--with her grandfather on Univision.

"And so that moment, me sitting with my grandpa, someone who didn't speak English but had just become a citizen and was so intrigued and so excited that he could vote for president," she says, "I connected the dots. I thought, 'Oh my God, that's important. I'm a citizen.'"

When Soria ran for a seat in the Assembly, she was excited about her list of priorities for the district, including public safety, housing and agriculture. That got blown out of the water on Dec. 23, when Madera Community Hospital and its clinics serving a rural area of the San Joaquin Valley went bankrupt and shut down. That left many people in a bind for health care and gave Soria a new legislative priority: getting a hospital back on line. It's a goal front and center on this day of meetings. She jumps on every opportunity to turn the conversation to the abandoned hospital and the people who need care.

10 a.m.

Soria meets with James Schwab, state director for U.S. Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.). She launches into how the hospital situation is causing a cascading list of problems: The nearest ER is 30 miles away in Fresno, and people can't get follow-up or specialty care because clinics attached to the hospital are closed. Not only did medical staff lose their jobs, but support staff like janitors and kitchen workers can't find work elsewhere.

"This hospital (closure) definitely created an emergency health desert," Soria says. It's something people in her district talk about every time she visits, like at a recent meet-and-greet at a coffee shop that drew a crowd of 50 people. "To a coffee. Wow. Crazy. But this issue was the No. 1 issue," she says.

Soria has a bill that would fund rural hospitals, many of which are on the brink financially.

"It's like a safety net for struggling hospitals and rural communities," she says. "It would create this emergency loan program for distressed hospitals and hospitals that have been closed but want to reopen. That's the goal for Madera Hospital. We need to reopen it. This funding would help us."

Soria has also proposed a bill that would study how to increase the pipeline of nurses for rural hospitals. And she'd like to find a buyer who...