The decision to run
Corona is only about a month younger than West Wendover, which incorporated in 1991.
Less than 8 square miles, West Wendover sits on the edge of the Utah border, so close that the city runs on Mountain Standard Time instead of Pacific Standard Time like the rest of Nevada. Prior to the pandemic, the dusty, desert city saw about 15,000 to 20,000 tourists, mostly from the Salt Lake City region, coming to its casinos each weekend.
A close-knit community in which everyone knows one another by one to two degrees of separation, West Wendover is a place where neighbors leave groceries on the doorsteps of families struggling financially without being asked, residents said.
When Corona told people in high school that he was gay, he was comforted by how accepting most of his classmates were. He found the same reception during his mayoral campaign in 2016, with few residents focusing on his sexual orientation. If anything, he said, they had more concerns about his age or that he still lived with his mother.
“Or they wanted to know more about how I was a Democrat,” Corona said, laughing.
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The city voted for Republican presidential candidates in 2008 and 2012 and has only recently begun to lean more liberal in local and national elections, as the number of registered voters rose from 661 in 2008 to 1,125 in 2020. Residents also say that the city's younger voters — the median age in West Wendover is 31 — became more active in the political process.
Corona became interested in politics at 16 when he heard a speech by Barack Obama. After high school, he moved to Salt Lake City and then Las Vegas to attend college, but he returned to West Wendover in 2015 to be closer to family.
Tired of casino interests influencing West Wendover’s local government — people in upper management at the casinos often won city council seats — and pledging to diversify the city’s economy, Corona signed up to run for mayor. During his 2016 campaign, residents saw him canvassing the city for months, knocking on almost every door, learning about what the community wanted.
“I’d never seen or heard of anyone really doing anything like that in town before,” Carolyn Santillanez, 51, who was raised in West Wendover, said. “I think a lot of people came out to vote for him because he was actually talking to people.”
‘They identify with him’
Corona believes he won over the city’s residents with his support for a 2016 state ballot initiative that legalized recreational marijuana, which he promised to bring to West Wendover as a new industry. While the initiative failed in Elko County, it passed in West Wendover with about 56 percent of the vote, and in Nevada as a whole.
By December 2019, Corona helped open the first marijuana dispensary in the county. The dispensary not only created at least 50 new jobs, but it has also generated $500,000 in tax revenue since it opened, even with a two-month Covid-19 closure, city officials said.
Corona also made local government more accessible — posting city news updates on social media — and exposed the community to more liberal viewpoints. In July 2019, Corona invited then-Democratic presidential hopeful Julian Castro to West Wendover, which marked the first visit of a presidential candidate.
In 2017, Corona spearheaded and passed a city resolution that supported the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, better known as DACA, which allowed immigrants who came to the United States as children but later lacked legal status to remain in the country, after President Donald Trump tried to shut it down.
“To me that really meant a lot that Mayor Corona and the city would even just put their support out there,” Alan Rojas, 25, said. A DACA recipient, Rojas was born in Mexico but had lived in West Wendover since he was a year old. “I still couldn’t vote this year, but I made sure that I told everyone I knew here that they should.”
West Wendover City Councilwoman Kathy Durham, who was elected in 2018, believes Corona inspired more civic engagement, especially with the city’s younger Latino voters.
“They identify with him and see that he can make changes,” Durham, who teaches U.S. history, government and broadcast journalism at the local high school, said.
Jorge Aguirre, 20, said that the recent changes in the city, from the dispensary to the promise of a dog park, made him excited to vote this year. He organized a Black Lives Matter rally in June with three friends, the first of any kind of protest in the city that residents can remember.
“We really wanted to make our own community aware of what was going around in the rest of the country even if they felt like it didn’t affect them,” Aguirre said.
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