ThinkTech Hawaii
Ernesto Montemayor "Sonny" Ganaden is a 43-year-old Filipino Mexican-American lawyer and politician who has served as a member of the 30th district of the Hawaii House of Representatives since 2020. His father was born in Manila and excelled in business, his mother is Mexican-American and retired after 37 years as a special education teacher in public schools.
Ganaden calls himself “Mexipino” and “received constant criticism growing up in Orange County, California, where he was not truly Latino or Asian”.
He earned a bachelor’s degree in Political Science and Public Policy from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and in 2006 earned his Juris Doctor degree from the William S. Richardson School of Law at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa. As an attorney, Ganaden defended the rights of Native Hawaiian elders protesting the construction of the Thirty-Meter Telescope. In 2013, he was the lead writer of the Native Hawaiian Justice Task Force Report, which revealed the disproportionality and unfairness in the representation of Native Hawaiians in the state's prisons. Ganaden criticized the existence of private prisons and argued that communities with basic needs met tend to have low crime rates.
Previously, Ganaden taught in the departments of American studies and ethnic studies at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa. He also contributed an essay to “Detours: A Decolonial Guide to Hawai'I”, discussing the impact of King Kamehameha I on modern Hawaiian law.
Ganaden ran for District 30 of the Hawaii House of Representatives in 2018 but lost by a narrow margin of 51 votes to incumbent Romeo Munoz Cachola in the Democratic primary. In 2020, he ran again, defeating Cachola in the primary and Republican Tess Quillingking in the general election. During the campaign, Ganaden spoke out against the austerity measures proposed during the COVID-19 pandemic.
In office, Ganaden called for an investigation into the U.S. Navy for allegedly misleading regulators about a fuel leak at Pearl Harbor, which is part of his district. He is a member of the Progressive Legislative Caucus, a coalition of left-wing members of the Hawaii Legislature.
