CACrown ArchivesThe cinema collection
Menu
Research dossier · People & Ideas

John Avalos

American politician

Correspondence, annotated notebooks and portrait silhouettes prepared for research
People and ideasInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionSep 4, 2026
Entity authorityQ6219785
Source-derived summary

John Avalos (born March 11, 1964) is an American politician. He served two terms as a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors from 2008 to 2016. Avalos represented District 11 in San Francisco, consisting of the Crocker-Amazon, Excelsior, Ingleside, Oceanview, and Outer Mission districts. Avalos was elected on November 4, 2008, in the 2008 San Francisco election and took office on January 8, 2009. He was re-elected in the 2012 San Francisco election with 94 percent of the vote, and termed out of office in January 2017.

Early life and education

Avalos is Mexican-American/Chicano and was born in Wilmington, California. Along with his three brothers and two sisters, he was raised by his mother Erlinda, an office worker, and his father Hector, a longshoreman and member of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union. His parents divorced when he was young, and his mother cared for them on her own. Avalos moved to Andover, Massachusetts as a teenager and graduated from Andover High School in 1982.

After graduating from Andover, Avalos moved back to California, where he soon attended the University of California, Santa Barbara and earned a bachelor's degree in English.

Editorial summary

Begin with the source’s own compact description: “John Avalos” is american politician. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through John, Avalos and American, not as a finished interpretation.

Editorial reviewStrongest as a route into the people, institutions and dated events that shaped the subject’s public record. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1964, 2008, 2016, 2009—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1964-03-11. For this dossier, John, Avalos and American is the immediate research focus.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The phrase “american politician” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.

Evidence profile

Chronology provides the most reliable spine for this subject; interpretation should follow only after identities and dates are secure. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 4, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6219785. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1964, 2008, 2016 and 2009.

Critical limits

Public reputation and documentary evidence do not always develop together; absence from a summary is not evidence of historical absence. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Read biographical claims against dates, named institutions and the cited references. Distinguish a subject’s later reputation from evidence produced during their lifetime.

Best used for
  • Establishing names and roles
  • Building a first chronology
  • Locating cited institutions
Verify next

Personal papers, civil or court records, institutional files and the scholarship cited by the source.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “John Avalos”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow John Avalos primary sources, John Avalos archive and John research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “John Avalos”?
  2. Which primary records establish identity, chronology and institutional ties?
  3. How has the subject’s reputation changed across later accounts?
Subject index

Search terms from this dossier

Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from John Avalos” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.