Alejandra Campoverdi’s life is an American success story.
“Her mother, Cecilia Medellin, the daughter of a rootless laborer, emigrated from Mexico. She worked in a factory in Compton and got by with government food vouchers that made her daughter blush with embarrassment in the grocery store checkout lines.
In 1994, when Campoverdi was 14, she wrote a play about suicide and depression for a nonprofit theater program that paired at-risk youth with established actors. The main character was named Nothingness.
That year was tumultuous in California because of the passage of Proposition 187, a measure that denied government services to undocumented immigrants and provoked tensions among Latinos and native-born white Californians. It served as a political awakening for Campoverdi. She remembers people yelling, “Go back to Mexico.”
Alejandra grew up in Santa Monica, but even in that prosperous zip code she and her mother shared a small, government subsidized apartment with six members of her extended family. Alejandra did well in school, and won a partial scholarship to attend The University of Southern California’s Annenberg’s School for Communication and Journalism, graduating cum laude. She then took her Master in Public Policy from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.
She supported herself while in school by waitressing, taking student loans and, almost predictably, given her stunning good looks, modeling.