Guereca relishes new role at the Unicameral

Above: Sen. Dunixi Guereca in Athens, Greece, during a visit in the fall of 2021.

You may wonder how someone who grew up near the ocean in Los Angeles and once intended to spend his days as a merchant marine ended up in landlocked middle America. Chalk it up to the allure of Kearney, the central Nebraska seat of Buffalo County.

Sen. Dunixi Guereca of Omaha explained that the quarterback from his LA high school found his way onto the University of Nebraska at Kearney football team about a dozen years ago and the freshman lawmaker decided to check it out for himself.

“I have a deep, abiding love for UNK, but it was just a little bit too small,” Guereca laughed.

While his own stint at the university only lasted a semester, Guereca said he met a lot of great individuals, some of whom have become his closest friends. Those Nebraskans showed him that people’s core values are the same regardless of where they live, he said.

Guereca’s first roommate at UNK, for example, was someone he found on Craigslist — “that was how you did it at the time” — who invited Guereca to spend Thanksgiving with his family at their acreage outside of Milford. The two ended up joining his roommate’s father at his union president’s home that weekend.

“We went down to the basement of his house in Seward and it was half Husker red and half Budweiser red and I thought: I’m in it now,” Guereca laughed.

The evening stuck with him, though, as he listened to the union president explaining that he just wanted to put in an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay, keep a roof over his head and give his kids a better shot at life than he had.

“That’s basically the same thing my dad used to say to me,” Guereca said. “That’s when I started to realize how alike we all are, no matter where we’re from.”

The desire to help people achieve that dream of security for their families through hard work led the District 7 senator to take a job as a labor organizer for the Service Employees International Union when he left Nebraska for a few years. He came back to the state to lead a nonprofit focused on strengthening public schools.

The segue from those positions to public life seemed natural, since Guereca already had spent time at the Capitol testifying on bills and becoming familiar with public policy. When he’s not working hard for his constituents in South Omaha, Guereca tries to find time for his other loves: cooking, traveling and talking to people.

“To me, food is really how you get to know people. When I’m traveling, I like to find the local places — the little mom and pop places, not the fancy restaurants — because their food is their history,” he said. “It’s their culture.”

One of Guereca’s favorite destinations is his paternal grandfather’s hometown of Zarautz in the Basque region of Spain. His parents immigrated to the U.S. from the Mexican state of Jalisco, and his Mexican heritage is hugely important to him, but home-cooked meals among his family in the Basque region have Guereca’s culinary heart.

The challenging pace of the legislative session means he won’t be traveling any time soon, but the freshman senator has managed to carve out some time to build relationships with other members of the new class of lawmakers.

“We have a tremendous class this year,” Guereca said. “We all get along really well and I’m looking forward to working with them to do the best we can for all Nebraskans.”