“I am so angry at Representative Barrios,” said former state representative Sandra Graham, who held the 28th district seat from 1976-1988. “It probably would not have been on the chopping block if he had not let people know that he was running for State Senate.”

But in a joint statement, the current Representatives of Cambridge—Alice K. Wolf, Timothy Toomey and Barrios—stated that they “worked tirelessly to preserve our Cambridge districts.”

Wolf said that the decision to cut Barrios’s district violated two unofficial rules of districting.

“There are three tenets of redistricting,” Wolf said, which she enumerated as maintaining communities of “common interest,” maintaining “minority representation” and assuring that “incumbents don’t run against each other.”

“What has happened in the city of Cambridge is that the first two tenets were thrown aside for assisting the third in the city of Newton,” Wolf said.

Representative Paul Demakis—whose precinct gained a large chunk of Cambridge under the new redistricting—was the only member of the Cambridge delegation who voted in favor of the redistricting. Demakis also implied that Barrios was to blame for the drastic redistricting.

“Historically, the legislature has tended to focus on districts being vacated by the current representatives,” Paul Demakis said.

But Toomey, whose district is slightly more Somerville than Cambridge, disagreed.

“No individaul owns and representative seat in any part of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts—these belong to the citizens,” Toomey said.

—Staff writer Lauren R. Dorgan can be reached at dorgan@fas.harvard.edu.