Ahsha Safai
"Iranian Americans have excelled in business, engineering and academia for decades," says Ahsha Safai between gulps of bottled water at a Mission District restaurant. "But there was always an aversion to politics. Unfortunately, it was ignored at our peril. When the Patriot Act, 'special registrations' and student-visa restrictions were legislated after 9/11, we didn't have a voice. It was a wakeup call."
Iranian Americans were wide awake by the time Safai put some in a room with Gavin Newsom in 2003. He organized the meeting as deputy director of field operations for Newsom's first mayoral campaign. "We had a good turnout of 150 and Gavin continues to meet with our community at least once a year," he says. "More and more of us are becoming politically active." He notes that Bay Area Iranian Americans have hosted fundraisers for Hillary Clinton, whom he met while working for a year in the Clinton White House.
Newsom and the Clintons are not the only political heavyweights on his resume. His Marin County wedding last summer to Boalt Hall law student Yadira Taylor -- they live in the Excelsior district -- was attended by his mentors at Northeastern, MIT and the White House: Michael Dukakis, the former Massachusetts governor, and Loretta Avent, President Clinton's deputy assistant of intergovernmental affairs. Safai, 34, has in turn mentored several Iranian Americans in the three San Francisco mayor's office positions he's held.
Safai laughs when he calls himself a Texan Iranian, but it's true. His mother, Marsha McDonald, met Ahsha's father, Ata Safai, when they were college students in Texas, then moved with him to Tehran. They raised Ahsha there until he was 5, when his mother moved him to the safety of Cambridge, Mass., during the chaos of the shah's overthrow in 1979. His father still lives in Iran. "I went back two years ago to visit him," Safai says. "My old house was replaced by apartments, but it's still the big city I remembered."
Since arriving in San Francisco straight out of MIT, Safai has worked for Mayors Willie Brown and Newsom on a variety of projects: opening a teen center at the Sunnydale housing projects, pushing immigrant rights legislation through the Board of Supervisors, overseeing grants to revitalize the Fillmore district, and now hiring young, low-income city residents to clean up litter and graffiti in the city's busiest commercial corridors as a community programs liaison. None of it is glamorous work, but he says it's gratifying because the problems are readily fixable -- unlike, for example, U.S.-Iran relations.
"Americans have a distorted image of Iran," he says. "They know about the hostage crisis and Islamic fundamentalism, but do they know that Persia was the first country to codify human rights or that it has the largest Jewish community in the Middle East outside of Israel? They think of Iranians as terrorists, but none of the 9/11 terrorists were from Iran and there were candlelight vigils in Tehran the night after 9/11. As an Iranian American, I've had to live with the two governments being at odds since I can remember.""San Francisco Chronicle"
