Change takes courage.
We are fighting for an unapologetic movement for economic, social, and racial justice in the United States.
Mentors of mine were under a big pressure to minimize their femininity to make it. I'm not going to do that. That takes away my power. I'm not going to compromise who I am.
I believe that every American should have stable, dignified housing; health care; education - that the most very basic needs to sustain modern life should be guaranteed in a moral society.
Healthcare as a human right, it means that every child, no matter where you are born, should have access to a college or trade-school education if they so choose it, and I think no person should be homeless if we can have public structures and public policy to allow for people to have homes and food and lead a dignified life in the United States.
To me, what socialism means is to guarantee a basic level of dignity. It's asserting the value of saying that the America we want and the America that we are proud of is one in which all children can access a dignified education. It's one in which no person is too poor to have the medicines they need to live.
Women like me aren't supposed to run for office.
I was born in a place where your ZIP code determines your destiny.
Our democracy is designed to speak truth to power.
The biggest hurdle that our communities have is cynicism - saying it's a done deal, who cares; there's no point to voting. If we can get somebody to care, it's a huge victory for the movement and the causes we're trying to advance.
I don't think any person in America should die because they are too poor to live.
Before ICE, we had Immigration and Naturalization Services, but it wasn't until about 1999 that we chose to criminalize immigration at all. And then, once ICE was established, we really kind of militarized that enforcement to a degree that was previously unseen in the United States.
I wake up every day, and I'm a Puerto Rican girl from the Bronx. Every single day.
I just hope that more people will ignore the fatalism of the argument that we are beyond repair. We are not beyond repair. We are never beyond repair.
People try to identify who is the most likely person to turn out, and what we did is that we changed who turns out. And that changes the whole electorate.
Capitalism has not always existed in the world and will not always exist in the world.
Congress is too old. They don't have a stake in the game.
For me, democratic socialism is about - really, the value for me is that I believe that in a modern, moral, and wealthy society, no person in America should be too poor to live.
The only time we create any kind of substantive change is when we reach out to a disaffected electorate and inspire and motivate them to vote.
We have a political culture of intimidation, of favoring, of patronage, and of fear, and that is no way for a community to be governed.
