Letter To The Brown People Running For Office
Dear brown people running for office,
We’ve known some of you for a long time and we can’t express how proud it makes us to see you thrive in power.
We have witnessed the work of some of you for more than a decade and it feels good to see that it is paying off in more than one way.
Some of the pay offs include ridding our state of the likes of Joe Arpaio and Russell Pearce; getting DACA for our undocumented youth (that was in large part accomplished thanks to young organizers from La Phoenikera, let that story get on the books); increasing the minimum wage so that the heads of our families don’t have to choose between work and seeing their children, so that our children can grow up with parents that are part of their lives; and of course, mobilizing to get Latinx leaders into office.
These are just a few examples of the great work some of you have significantly contributed to in the last decade and we are so grateful.
As a community, we are at a historical moment in which we are gaining respect for our dignity. There are more brown people, especially brown women, running for office this year than we’ve seen before. This goes all the way from school board to the governorship.
Women and people of color are occupying spaces and positions in powerful organizations, though it’s not easy, the micro and macro aggressions are real and the burn out even more so. But it is a pain we know we must endure for the betterment of our people. Our parents and grandparents endured it on the fields, from sun up to sun down; best believe we can endure it sitting in an office battling misconceptions and stereotypes instead of dehydration and fatigue.
The Latinx population of our state surpasses 30 percent and in La Phoenikera, we are close to being half of all people…42 percent is no small number. There are more than 120,000 Latinx-owned businesses in Arizona and at the end of last year, Latinxs spent close to $45 billion in our state.
We are gaining power, we are reclaiming our space, we are contributing significantly to the economy.
Yet, this advancement is not coming without pushback and resistance from the powers that have kept us oppressed for so long. We are living in the middle of chaos, with fires popping up left and right that act only as distractions meant to slow us down, to stop us. It’s busy work. They want to keep us working to prevent us from thinking up a vision for ourselves that goes beyond being resilient.
For this reason it is imperative that the brown people running for office work together to win the seats they are pursuing and to help think up a common vision for our community that we can all work towards.
As brown people running for office you have a responsibility towards your community. If you’re operating based on ego, you have to check that ego at the door because this is not about you winning, it is about us thriving.
As brown people running for office you have to remember that we know you. We have worked for you and with you, we have cried and celebrated together and we will hold you accountable. We will hold you responsible for the success or failure of the people you are representing.
If your heads get too bloated, we will deflate them, if your rhetoric becomes fake, we will keep it real, if you work harder to get re-elected than to realize the common vision for the community, we will vote you out.
Why? Because egos create division and we cannot afford to be divided. If we are we will be conquered and we’ve been there and done that.
From now on, more brown people and other people of color are going to run for office and we will choose the best ones to represent us.
We are at a crossroads in which we have to choose between our own advancement and the advancement of our community, and no, they don’t always go hand in hand.
We have an unprecedented opportunity to come out of the chaos triumphant and deliver what we have been fighting for so long. As a brown person running for office, we urge you to choose the advancement of our community.
We write this letter to let you know that we are paying close attention to these races. We are keeping an ear on the ground to see who is acting in good faith and who is not. We want you to know that we will be critical of your work because growing involves critique and constructive feedback.
We are excited for the moment we are living in and for the amount of good people that will be involved in creating policy moving forward. We hope that you go down in the books being on the right side of history.
