COUNCILMEMBER Yesenia Muneton and Trustee Walter Muneton.

By Jim Tortolano
Orange County Tribune

They’re not exactly Barack and Michelle Obama, or Emily Blunt and John Krasinski, but they are Garden Grove’s newest “power couple.”

Walter Muneton and Yesenia Muneton, as members – respectively, of the Garden Grove Unified School District Board of Education and the Garden Grove City Council – these former Santiago High School students cover a lot of ground and have a lot of influence.

Together with Councilmember Joe DoVinh and school board trustee Dina Nguyen (also married) they represent an unusual combination in the public sphere.

Walter, 33, was elected to the school board serving Trustee Area 3 in 2016 and re-elected in 2020 and 2024. Yesenia, 31, won election to the council seat for District 5 in November.

“We met at Doig [Intermediate School] but we didn’t really connect until college,” said Yesenia. At Santa Ana College, she spotted him and barely recognized him. “I had long hair in high school,” said Walter.

While Yesenia had been an involved and active student at Santiago, Walter was … not. “My main goal was to get a high school diploma,” he said.

Now married for 11 years, they traveled toward their present roles in different ways. For Walter, it was a college assignment from Cal State Dominguez Hills that led him to attend a mayoral debate between incumbent Bruce Broadwater and challenger Bao Nguyen.

He approached Nguyen to offer his support. From there he sufficiently impressed the new mayor, who urged him to seek public office.

“In the span of a couple of months I went from doing a school project to running for school board,” he said. He won.

“I’ve always been involved,” said Yesenia. “I’ve always had a passion for service.” Impressed by her husband’s ability to have an impact in the community, she ran for the council seat being vacated by now-mayor Stephanie
Klopfenstein and won.

They have two children, a 5-year-old daughter and a 2-year-old son and seek to involve their children in their roles as public servants, taking them to family-friendly events.

Walter is a social worker with the Long Beach Unified School District and Yesenia is a teacher in the Magnolia School District and they’ve worked through pandemics and are now grappling with the impact of the immigration crackdown.

But that’s the job. Walter recalls the time when, as president of the school board, he was approached by a “sweet-looking old lady” after a particularly tense meeting.

“I pray that you go to hell,” she said.

Ouch. But just part of the price of power, of a being a power couple.