Election Day 2016 held another victory that had been in the works for a while. We learned at listening sessions with our 2,600 members, whom we’ve cultivated through neighborhood teams and high school civics clubs, that they wanted us to fight for higher wages and paid family leave. Such sessions are where we and our members commit to standing with one another. Because we could not ignore their needs — even when our donors or party leaders pressured us to do so — we decided to try it ourselves through a ballot initiative.

Some influential progressives doubted the ability of a grass-roots organization, led by us, two young Latinos, to organize and pass a statewide ballot initiative. One person said its failure would set back progressive politics in Arizona for a decade. But we knew the signature-gatherers, most of whom were working for low wages in their regular jobs, would pound the pavement. In July 2016, activists delivered 275,000 signatures to the secretary of state to place the minimum wage increase on the ballot that year.

To build support, organizers talked to small businesses and found that most of them were already paying their employees far above the minimum wage. So about 350 small businesses endorsed the campaign, effectively countering the argument that the ballot initiative would hurt them.

On election night that year, Proposition 206 passed with 58 percent of the vote. The new law provides up to five days of paid sick time for all workers and will raise the minimum wage to $12 per hour by 2020. Contrary to opponents’ fearmongering, economic forecasters found that Arizona’s wage increase benefited the state’s economy, especially food service employees.

The 2016 victories allowed the movement to get stronger. In 2018, local organizations started the MiAZ campaign, knocking on one million doors and adding new tactics to contact voters by text, billboards and TV and radio ads. All of this helped elect a community organizer, Raquel Terán, to the Arizona Legislature and Kyrsten Sinema to the Senate, succeeding a Republican.

And since 2010, Republican legislators in Arizona have been less aggressive in pushing through harmful immigration-related bills, the noted political scientist Hahrie Han and her colleagues found. In February, enormous pressure from the Latino community forced the governor and lawmakers to decline to pursue bills that could have enshrined the ban on sanctuary cities into the constitution.