UO

Social justice was not a part of my life, activism wasn’t a part of my life, until I got to college. I had always cared about politics, but I cared about electoral politics. I saw it as different from activism — rather than how I view activism and electoral politics now, as part of the same apparatus for achieving the liberation of black, brown, and working-class people.

My freshman year of college was when the Black Lives Matter movement began. It was the first time that social justice became proximal to me. I knew that if I wasn’t taking part in the Black Lives Matter movement that [it could be] me that was in the grave with my parents crying over it on the 5 o’clock news. I knew I had to be a part of the struggle.

When you’re on a college campus and you get into these kinds of spaces, you also get pulled into all of the other activism that is going on. Because of that, I learned more and more about the movement for BDS on our campus, I learned about the wider realm of social justice. I knew I had to be part of the greater struggle for liberation for all marginalized people: “We ain’t free until we’re all free.”

I joined up with Anakbayan Chicago, which is an organization dedicated to the liberation of the Filipino people here in United States and in the Philippines. That was where I learned even deeper about the struggle for international solidarity and how a lot of the capitalist forces that subjugate us in the United States subjugate people across the world. After that, I became the chairman of Fuente del Sol, which is an organization on the Southwest Side of Chicago that [fights] for violence prevention and immigrant rights. In all that time, I was also gaining government experience. I was working in the Chicago City Clerk’s office, working for a congressional office.

After the [2016] election was over, I was with someone who was undocumented at the time. She was on the phone with me that night. She was crying, because she wasn’t sure about the future of her family and her siblings, who were also undocumented. I knew that it wasn’t enough for me to continue telling people to go out to vote. It wasn’t enough for me to continue to organize. We needed to have a government filled with people who care about workers — activists, organizers, nurses, teachers — so that government isn’t this thing where the people who are at the bottom are fighting with government to get the things that they need, but are working alongside government to make the world a better place.

And so I decided [to run], listening to Bernie Sanders’s call for people of color and young people and progressives to run for office at all levels of governments, not just president, Senate, or US representative. I wanted to make a change in my community and fight at the ground level to bring socialism from the bottom up.