By Maggie Scales, Lexington Observer staff
Editor’s Note: The Lexington Observer shared this story with The Belmont Voice.
Jonathan Paz, a 33-year-old Waltham native, Waltham City Councilor and son of Bolivian immigrants, is running to represent Massachusetts’ 5th District, which includes Belmont, in Congress.
If elected, Paz wants to take on big corporations, work to abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and incite a green jobs revolution in the Bay State.
Paz believes he’s a better candidate than incumbent and House Minority Whip Katherine Clark because he has first-hand experience with how many working-class Americans are struggling to get by.
“People deserve to have a fighter who is going to take on the billionaires and not take millions in their donations,” Paz told the Lexington Observer. “This is the time for strong progressive leadership; this is the time for working people to take back their democracy.”
Clark has been in Congress since 2013 and has risen to be one of the most powerful Democrats in the House.
Background
Paz was born in Boston and spent eight years growing up in Bolivia before returning to Waltham. He lived in the Boston suburb until high school, when his father, an undocumented immigrant, was deported. His mother followed his father back to Bolivia soon after.
“We had a taste of the American dream for a little while but after 9/11, things got really tough,” he said. “I always had this residual fear that my parents could be taken…so I’ve always understood these fears, these anxieties, these hardships, because I lived it.”
Paz’s aunt, who lived in Mansfield, took him and his brother in, and they graduated from Mansfield High.
Paz earned a scholarship to the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied economics.
Paz said he is a “union organizer by trade,” an educator, and a former Waltham city councilor.
He served as Waltham’s Ward 9 councilor from 2020 through 2023, upsetting 30-year incumbent Robert Logan in 2019. After two terms as councilor, Paz ran in Waltham’s 2023 mayoral election and lost to incumbent Jeanette McCarthy.
When Paz says he’s an educator, he means the online Spanish language courses he created so activists can practice conversational Spanish through real-world social justice scenarios.
Paz also worked as a public affairs manager for Flock Safety from February 2024 to July 2025, his LinkedIn shows. Flock is a technology company that makes automated license plate reader cameras and software, mostly bought or leased by local governments and law enforcement.
According to Paz, he worked at Flock because he wanted to work in the technology industry, Flock offered him a job, and they made him believe they cared about transparency. He left because he learned “companies like these, their only role is to help the government spy on you…to bypass public scrutiny and just surveil, surveil, surveil,” he said at a Waltham forum in March.
Issues
Among other goals, Paz hopes to challenge the hold big corporations have on the American economy.
“We can’t talk about affordability without talking about the monopolies that are rigging our economy,” he said.
If elected, he wants to investigate companies such as CVS, where many people get prescription drugs that are becoming increasingly more expensive.
“This is the difference between being someone who is an establishment incumbent and being a progressive member of Congress,” he said. “We need to go up against these corporations, these multi-billionaires, and they don’t want to do that. They’d rather patch a broken system and say, ‘we’re going to deliver some kind of tax credit.’ We call that putting breadcrumbs on the table.”
Paz wants the government to invest in “dignified” public housing so lower-income Americans can have more—and better—housing options.
“We need a Green New Deal for public housing,” he said. “That means we invest into our public housing stock, and that we create sustainable housing.”
Paz does not think the MBTA Communities Act, which then-Gov. Charlie Baker signed in 2021 to build more housing in transit-connected municipalities by right, goes far enough, and that private sector investment will not solve the housing crisis.
“There is a sense that the private sector is going to save us (people who are struggling to afford housing) and it’s not,” Paz said. “We need to stop private equity from buying our land.”
Paz wants to create more opportunity for people in the Bay State by igniting a green jobs revolution. He believes it’s important to fight the climate crisis, which he called “one of the underlying existential issues of our time.”
Paz imagines taking the local energy grid back from what he called “carbon-dependent monopolies” like National Grid and Eversource, and pushing to create a “federal green jobs program,” among other ideas.
“This is an opportunity to build green jobs, get people trained, educated, and bolster our unions in Massachusetts,” he said. “We already have an employment crisis that is being under-reported, and we need to get people back to work, and we need to have people doing work that’s meaningful.”
Paz founded Fuerza, an organization that records and verifies ICE activity around Waltham and educates the community on immigration rights and resources, in January 2025.
“We deserve to have an immigration system rooted in humanity, our neighbors deserve a humane pathway to citizenship, and we need to provide amnesty to many of our neighbors who have been living here for years, contributing to our society, and have been consistently denied citizenship because of a politicized and broken system,” he said.
Paz is proud to have a grassroots campaign. According to the Federal Election Commission, the largest donation Paz has accepted is $2,000.
“There is a lot of appetite for non-corporate, non-establishment candidates who actually stand for something,” he said. “We may not have the millions, but we have the people, and I think it’s exciting to provide that hope to people in a time that’s so dire.”
Clark and Paz are also challenged by Tarik Samman, a 27-year-old Lowell native and son of Syrian immigrants who has worked as an organizer with the Harvard Academic Workers Union.
The Voice hopes to have a story on Katherine Clark shortly.