{"id":38687,"date":"2025-05-02T13:50:06","date_gmt":"2025-05-02T19:50:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/update.legislature.ne.gov\/?p=38687"},"modified":"2025-05-02T13:50:06","modified_gmt":"2025-05-02T19:50:06","slug":"guereca-relishes-new-role-at-the-unicameral","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/update.legislature.ne.gov\/?p=38687","title":{"rendered":"Guereca relishes new role at the Unicameral"},"content":{"rendered":"

Above: Sen. Dunixi Guereca in Athens, Greece, during a visit in the fall of 2021.<\/em><\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cI have a deep, abiding love for UNK, but it was just a little bit too small,\u201d Guereca laughed.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s core values are the same regardless of where they live, he said.<\/p>\n

Guereca\u2019s first roommate at UNK, for example, was someone he found on Craigslist \u2014 \u201cthat was how you did it at the time\u201d \u2014 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\u2019s home that weekend.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe went down to the basement of his house in Seward and it was half Husker red and half Budweiser red and I thought: I\u2019m in it now,\u201d Guereca laughed.<\/p>\n

The evening stuck with him, though, as he listened to the union president explaining that he just wanted to put in an honest day\u2019s work for an honest day\u2019s pay, keep a roof over his head and give his kids a better shot at life than he had.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s basically the same thing my dad used to say to me,\u201d Guereca said. \u201cThat\u2019s when I started to realize how alike we all are, no matter where we\u2019re from.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s not working hard for his constituents in South Omaha, Guereca tries to find time for his other loves: cooking, traveling and talking to people.<\/p>\n

\u201cTo me, food is really how you get to know people. When I\u2019m traveling, I like to find the local places \u2014 the little mom and pop places, not the fancy restaurants \u2014 because their food is their history,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s their culture.\u201d<\/p>\n

One of Guereca\u2019s favorite destinations is his paternal grandfather\u2019s 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\u2019s culinary heart.<\/p>\n

The challenging pace of the legislative session means he won\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have a tremendous class this year,\u201d Guereca said. \u201cWe all get along really well and I\u2019m looking forward to working with them to do the best we can for all Nebraskans.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":38742,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"colormag_page_container_layout":"default_layout","colormag_page_sidebar_layout":"default_layout","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[18],"tags":[301],"class_list":["post-38687","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-senator-features","tag-sen-dunixi-guereca"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/update.legislature.ne.gov\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/05\/Guereca_blog.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/update.legislature.ne.gov\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38687","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/update.legislature.ne.gov\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/update.legislature.ne.gov\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/update.legislature.ne.gov\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/update.legislature.ne.gov\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=38687"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/update.legislature.ne.gov\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38687\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":38689,"href":"https:\/\/update.legislature.ne.gov\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38687\/revisions\/38689"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/update.legislature.ne.gov\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/38742"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/update.legislature.ne.gov\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=38687"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/update.legislature.ne.gov\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=38687"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/update.legislature.ne.gov\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=38687"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}