Madison Nguyen

Madison Phuong Nguyen (born 1975) is an American politician from California. She served on the San Jose, California, City Council from 2005 to 2014, representing District 7, and she additionally served as Vice Mayor from 2011 to 2014. She was the first Vietnamese American elected to the council. In April 2015, Nguyen declared her candidacy for the California Assembly representing District 27.

Born in Vietnam to Nho and Dang Nguyen, Madison and her family escaped Vietnam on a small fishing boat when she was four years old. Her family then settled in various refugee camps in the Philippines until a Lutheran church sponsored them to Scottsdale, Arizona. Her father worked as a janitor, receiving a stipend of only $500 a month to support his wife and children. Eventually, he moved his family to Modesto, California, in search of employment for his family in the Central Valley. Madison worked in the fields alongside her parents as a teenager. She is one of nine siblings.

Madison received her Bachelor of Arts in History from the University of California, Santa Cruz. She received a master's degree from the University of Chicago. She returned to California in 2000 to pursue a Ph.D. in sociology at UC Santa Cruz but did not complete the program.

Nguyen began to become more involved in politics in 2001, while working as a sociology instructor at De Anza Community College; inspired by MTV's "Rock the Vote" campaign, she and members of the Vietnamese community organized a voter drive in which nearly 5,000 new voters registered to vote for the first time. She followed that up with a run for a position on the Franklin-McKinley School District Board of Education, hoping that her election would encourage Vietnamese Americans to get more involved in local politics. Her win made her one of the first two school board officials of Vietnamese descent in the United States. The other, elected around the same time, was Lan Nguyen of Garden Grove, a city in southern California's Orange County. However, it was Nguyen's organization of protests in support of Bich Cau Thi Tran, a Vietnamese woman shot to death by a San Jose police officer that brought her to the forefront of people's minds in the Vietnamese American community. Nguyen, who felt the incident was being ignored by the public and the media, organized a rally to which nearly 300 people showed up.

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