Jarret T. Barrios '90 may be one of the fresh faces in the Massachusetts House of Representatives when his term begins in January, but his face is familiar on the streets of Cambridge.

Since June 1997, the 30-year old lawyer has been walking door-to-door chatting with Cantabrigians, sometimes six or seven days per week, as he says, out-working the competition.

"We had a voter list. We went door to door. We got involved," Barrios says. "I think the voters realized that we were actually going to work on the issues. We were doing more than saying."

Barrios, an openly gay Latino Democrat, beat his Republican rival Ronald W. Potvin in a landslide on Nov. 3 with 88 percent of the vote. He won the September primary with 48.7 percent of the vote, more than 20 percentage points higher than his closest rival and almost 30 points higher than incumbent Alvin E. Thompson.

The fall election was Barrios' first as a candidate, but his travels on foot through the city have given him a crash course in local politics.

A social studies concentrator at Harvard, Barrios went on to graduate from Georgetown Law School in 1995. He has since worked as a housing attorney for the Boston law firm Hill & Barlow, and was named 1997 Pro Bono Attorney of the Year for his work representing immigrants.

Barrios, who is originally from Tampa, Fla., said he first become interested in civil service through his involvement in community service and "issues politics" while at Harvard, including serving as chair of the bisexual, gay, lesbian student association and as a night supervisor of a Harvard Square homeless shelter.

During the summer of 1990, Barrios worked on the campaign of David Scondras for City Council because of their shared interests in progressive issues. He says his work on the campaign gave him the idea that he himself might like to run as well.

"He's the perfect man for the job--he's energetic and he knows how to convince people," says Ari M. Lipman '00, a resident of Mather House who worked on Barrios' campaign from May through the election season.

Lipman says Barrios' work as an attorney in the area of housing is the ideal qualification for a representative whose district faces a severe housing crisis, as he says Barrios' does.

Lipman says he was drawn to work for Barrios' campaign because of similarities in their political beliefs, especially the importance of minority representation in the House.

Barrios says he plans to continue working part-time at Hill & Barlow during his term, but that he is eager to make an impact on his community.

"My hope is to treat [being a representative] as a full-time job," he says, adding that he continues to walk door-to-door from time to time to keep a pulse on what his constituency is interested in.

"I want to be the voice for our neighborhood at the state level," he says. "If you can't have a progressive voice advocating effectively on the issues, then it's a real loss."

Affordable housing, quality child care and quality education are a few of the many issues to which Barrios says he will devoted his time.