In July, in the midst of messy negotiations to send billions in emergency funding to the border, a fight over the future of the Democratic Party bubbled into view. For months, Democrats had been demanding more robust protections for the children in overcrowded detention centers, but, cornered by moderate Democrats, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi suddenly backed down. Members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, including the four freshman congresswomen who make up the Squad, were outraged. Mark Pocan called moderates the “Child Abuse Caucus,” and House leadership fired back, tweeting an insult at Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s chief of staff.

By the following week, the fight had largely subsided. Behind the scenes, Pramila Jayapal of Washington state, who, along with Pocan, chairs the Progressive Caucus, had reached out to Ocasio-Cortez and House Democratic Caucus chair Hakeem Jeffries. The tweets were deleted, and an uneasy truce was called.

Jayapal often works to balance the needs and demands of House leadership with those of her own caucus. Unlike some members of the CPC, Jayapal doesn’t want to dismantle the system; she wants to reconstruct it to work for the people left out of the political process. That transformation might require compromise; it might not. She spends her time figuring out when to fight and when to hold her fire.

She didn’t put it to me this way, however, when we spoke in July. Instead, she talked about “power maps,” a term she learned from her years as an activist. “I’m very methodical about what I take on and what I do,” she told me. “I work really hard at a strategy.” Determining where power is, how to build it, and how to spread it around has been the work of her life.

Jayapal was born in India, but her family moved to Indonesia when she was four. She went to Georgetown University, where she hung a poster of the Taj Mahal on her wall, a quick answer to, but where are you from. After college, she went to work as a financial analyst, before moving into public health. In 1995, she spent two years in India with the Institute of Current World Affairs and later published a book about the experience. It concludes with Jayapal, in Seattle, becoming an American citizen. “In understanding India’s influence on me, I no longer needed to try so hard to maintain it,” she wrote. “I no longer needed to prove anything.”

