RRS

Remember the story about finding the valve and the water? The people who found that valve were the socialists in my neighborhood.

The word “socialism” was around since I was very little. The socialists were the people that organized in the community so that we could have things like schools and a basketball court and a festival in the neighborhood.

I was in college in Puerto Rico and an activist fighting privatization, and the socialists were always the ones that were at the head of the movements for those things. When I moved here, I continued to call myself a socialist. I don’t call myself a “progressive,” because lots of people call themselves progressive, but they aren’t ready to push for policies that are actually going to get us transformation and will actually mean progress for the working class.

Because we are humans, we have the right to a good life. We have a right to the resources that we create. We work. The majority of us are working-class or poor people. We create the wealth — we create everything that we have. And yet we don’t have access to those things. That doesn’t make any sense. So, to me, being a socialist means fighting so we can benefit from what we create.

It also means building power. Because in the system we live under now, we’re often too broken to fight or too scared. Building people-power so we can access the resources that belong to us is at the core of what socialism is.

I am endorsed by DSA, and I am a proud member of DSA. To me, that means a lot. Because being a socialist always used to mean you had to hide. Being a socialist has been a bad word. Not for me — I’ve always thought that being a socialist is great. But that’s how it was perceived. And all of a sudden, we have this historic opportunity to come out and say, “We are socialists, and this is what we stand for.”