Bay Area immigrants’ achievements celebrated at American Dream Awards

A Sonoma City Council member. Winemaker and owner of Mi Sueño Winery. Founder of Equilingual and leader of the AmeriCorps program in Lake County. Founder of PreetiRang Sanctuary and an animal rights advocate. An advocate and scientist working in the field of viticulture and enology.

All immigrants, all acclaimed in their fields of study and advocacy and business.

And all were honored Sunday as winners of the American Dream Award for California’s Fourth District in a ceremony at Mi Sueño Winery in Napa hosted by U.S. Rep. Mike Thompson, D-St. Helena.

The award and luncheon celebration recognized immigrants who have excelled professionally, in entrepreneurship and innovation.

Sonoma City Council member Jack Ding, who was elected mayor by his fellow council members in 2021 and served until December 2022 when council elected a new mayor, was born in China. He immigrated to the U.S. in 1993, when he was 34, to study business administration at Dominican University in San Rafael.

Ding started working as a tax practitioner, an enrolled agent with the Internal Revenue Service, in 2007 but later opened Unicom Tax Services and helped establish a free tax clinic at La Luz Center in Sonoma.

Ding has been an advocate for taxpayers, according to Thompson, traveling regularly to Capitol Hill to speak on amending the Tax Cut and Jobs Act, as well as advocating for increased funding for the IRS.

Ding, first elected to the Sonoma City Council in 2020, is the first Asian American to be elected mayor of Sonoma.

Ding’s “advocacy, and service as an elected official have greatly enriched the Sonoma community,” Thompson’s statement read. “His readiness to help others is evident in his impactful work in the district and on Capitol Hill. It is therefore fitting and proper that we honor him here today with the American Dream Award.”

“I’m so grateful,” Ding said Sunday. “I think I started as a teenager, when I listened to the radio ‘Voice of America’ and I know there was a different world on this planet. I work hard and finally I come to this point with everyone and witness this American dream.”

Rolando Herrera, at whose winery the event was held, was honored for his decades of work in winemaking in the Napa Valley.

Herrera, who was born in Mexico and first moved to St. Helena in 1972, where he began working as a night dishwasher at Auberge du Soleil during high school.

His career in wine began as a harvest laborer at Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars in Napa, but after 10 years at various stops he became cellar master for winemaker Warren Winiarski.

Herrera has held the posts of assistant winemaker at Chateau Potelle in St. Helena, winemaker at Vine Cliff Winery in Napa, and director of winemaking at Paul Hobbs Consulting in Sebastopol.

In 1997, Herrera launched what he called a “side project,” which became Mi Sueño Winery.

Together with his wife, Lorena, Herrera has seen Mi Sueño wines served at the White House during the administrations of Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama.

Gilbert Rangel, like Herrera, was born in Mexico and immigrated to the U.S.

Rangel was working in San Joaquin County in migrant educational services when he was tapped by then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to work in the development of AmeriCorps in California. He continued that work under Gov. Jerry Brown.

Rangel worked to develop the AmeriCorps program in Lake County and also provide support and translation services during a number of wildfires between 2015 and 2022. In 2021, he founded Equilingual, an agency that supports communication between organizations and the Spanish-speaking community.

In 2022, he joined Lake County Tribal Health to help implement heath education programs.

Also honored on Sunday were Madhulika Singh of Solano County.

Singh was born in India but moved to the U.S. to study for her master’s degree in electrical engineering at Yale University. She went on to earn two additional master’s degrees in Business Administration and information management from Washington University in St. Louis.

She is co-founder and president of PreetiRang Sanctuary in Solano County and is active in animal advocacy.

Anita Oberholster of Yolo County was born in South Africa.

She earned her doctorate in wine science from the University of Adelaide in Australia and moved to the U.S. in 2011 to work at UC Davis as a professor in the extension program. There she conducted research into the wine industry including Grapevine Red Blotch Disease and how smoke from wildfires affects grape and wine quality.

This story has been updated to clarify Ding’s work as a tax practitioner.

You can reach Staff Columnist Kerry Benefield at 707-526-8671 or kerry.benefield@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @benefield.