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I worked for Bernie in 2016. We noticed then that Latinos liked Bernie because he was speaking on the issues that so many politicians refused to talk about that they worried about every single day. But even though we knew that from experience, I never like to make assumptions or guesses. Because ultimately when it comes to organizing, you get what you work for.

2020 was about scaling up, building on the foundation that we had built with Latinos in 2016. We were guided by this goal of not only having people come out to vote, but also empowering them to organize their own communities far beyond 2020. And we knew that was necessary because whether Bernie won or he lost, we were going to have to organize ourselves to win legislation like Medicare for All, free college, immigration reform.

The Bernie Sanders campaign invested a lot in Latino organizing across the board. Latinos have been ignored for so long by the political establishment. We decided to go directly to them. As Latino press secretary it was my job to ensure that our message, our vision, and our agenda were going to Latino outlets that had that broad reach among Latinos, the places that they were already getting their news, which included buying ads in TV, radio, and newspapers, paying a lot of attention to what Chuck Rocha calls “cultural competency.” We also had lots of materials in Spanish and a volunteer team texting in Spanish.

But I think that where we went above and beyond was that we established a physical presence in Latino communities. We left no stone unturned. We opened our first offices in very heavily Latino neighborhoods in California, Nevada, and Iowa. We established our California office in East LA. What other presidential candidate is going to open an office in East LA?

We had small house parties in Latino neighborhoods across different regions, and we had people invite their neighbors and their family and friends. We went canvassing at local Latino supermarkets. You may have seen in pictures of Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and Carmen Yulín Cruz canvassing a local Latino market in Las Vegas, for example, but it wasn’t just that one day. We had our organizers canvassing that supermarket every week.

So we never wanted to be too confident and say that we knew we were going to win the Latino vote, because the reality is you can never be sure that you’re gonna win anyone’s vote until they go out and vote for you. But we had a good feeling, because we saw the reaction to Bernie and his message in the community.

I will say that in Las Vegas on the day of the Nevada caucuses, at the precinct I was at, watching people stand up and walk into the corner for Bernie, I started crying. You could tell a lot of them had never voted before, because caucuses are confusing and naturally they didn’t really know what to do. It was multigenerational, young people and their parents and grandparents all standing up and walking over to the Bernie corner.

It made us so emotional. That was what we organized for. These people have been made to feel like they don’t matter for so long, and they believed in our campaign and went out of their comfort zone and cast their ballot because they felt it would make their lives better. I think that shows the strength of our organizing and of our message. The political establishment has long believed it wasn’t worth it to try to get Latinos to turn out, but I think we showed that isn’t true and built a blueprint for campaigns in the future.