SL

One of the things people have been saying at the doors is they feel I am connected to their struggle, that I understand what they are going through. So my personal story is something viable in and of itself because people connect to it. People want to see somebody who has gone through what they’ve gone through. This is what we’ve been told time and again: “She understands what I’m going through because she’s been through that struggle. She knows what it feels like to be oppressed, to not have enough food, to not have a good education for my children.”

My brother has asthma because of the way highways have cut up our neighborhoods, and the way that trucks go through our neighborhood. People understand that. It’s someone like me who can be a partner and have the humility to center their stories, somebody who has the ability of using politics to build community across racial and ethnic lines. The representative this district deserves is someone who’s going to talk to everybody and make sure that everybody is connected to this campaign.

There are a lot of people in the Bronx establishment who want to say, “this is a Black district,” or “this is a Puerto Rican district,” or “this is an ‘x’ district.” Instead of using race as a divide-and-conquer tactic, we need to highlight our diversity and figure out what we have in common — which is poverty, worker exploitation, white supremacy. These are all things that unite us and that we need to be fighting against collectively. People understand that and gravitate toward it. They feel we’re speaking to them in a way that none of these campaigns can speak to them.

The establishment has used the community for their own political gain, and people see that. They want someone who is going to be a servant-leader in the role, someone refusing corporate PAC money. They appreciate that I prioritize movement-building above all else. If you are raising money from private companies, from bosses, real estate developers, from anyone that is opposed to the struggle of workers, you don’t need to be in office.

No one else in this race has taken that perspective. There are a lot of people in this race who have pushed for rezoning in Washington Heights and East Harlem, and I’ve never wavered. I was against that. I was against the Jerome Avenue rezoning. I was against the FreshDirect warehouse coming to the South Bronx while the political establishment was for those things.