A18 eZ re the washington post.monday, february 24 , 2020
solely on race, however. During
the 2018 Democratic primary for
governor, Jolt endorsed Andrew
White, who owned a company
that developed border security
technology, over Lupe Valdez, the
former sheriff of Dallas County
who had cooperated with Immi-
gration and Customs Enforce-
ment officials and allowed undoc-
umented immigrants to be de-
tained in her jail.
“representation matters and
lived experience will often lead
you to a different result... but
above all, it matters where you
stand on the issues that matter to
people’s everyday life,” Tzintzún
ramirez said.
for months, Tz intzún ramirez
has bounced around the state
with a small group of young
female staffers. A recent weekend
took her from a county party
meeting in the fort Worth area
where she waited more than an
hour to speak to the group for just
a few minutes, to the Latina
networking brunch where all of
the women wore nametags la-
beled with their super power
(Tzintzún ramirez’s superpower
was helping others to see their
power) to a meet-and-greet in a
fort Worth bar that attracted
dozens of former o’rourke volun-
teers, and eventually to an inti-
mate gathering with black and
Afro-Latino voters at a coffee
shop in Houston, where tears
flowed amid a discussion of sys-
temic racism and poverty.
“for so long we have had politi-
cians that don’t represent us at
all, especially in Te xas. I know
people like to say that Latinos are
a minority but in Te xas they’re
not, they’re the majority,” said
Krissia Palomo, 19, a college stu-
dent who brought two friends to
the fort Worth meet-and-greet.
“This might be a little bit of
identity politics, but I do like
seeing myself in somebody that’s
running for such an important
office.”
[email protected]primary, and he regularly talks
with several of the candidates,
including Hegar and Tz intzún
ramirez.
Tz intzún ramirez wrote
o’rourke’s Latino outreach strat-
egy in 2018 — and then watched
in frustration as he waited for
voters to come to him instead of
sending paid canvassers into La-
tino neighborhoods, diversifying
his staff and campaigning more
heavily in urban areas. She cred-
its him with listening to her and
making last-minute changes.
many o f those who worked on the
campaign said that o’rourke
would have had a better shot at
winning had he courted diverse
communities sooner in his race.
In h er own campaign, Tz intzún
ramirez’s staffers are nearly all
women and people of color, and
she has focused on campaigning
in Te xas’s major cities, especially
those with large Latino popula-
tions. If she were to become the
Democratic nominee, Tz intzún
ramirez said, she would invest
much more heavily in voter regis-
tration and mobilizing communi-
ties of color than o’rourke did.
Hegar’s campaign says that it
plans to amplify and build on
voter registration efforts of non-
profit groups.
Tz intzún ramirez said she has
long been frustrated that the
Democratic Party has failed to
fully engage Latino voters. fol-
lowing Trump’s election, she
founded Jolt, a nonprofit focused
on helping young Latinos and
other voters of color become ac-
tivists on issues that matter to
them. Jolt couples politics with
culture, setting up photo booths
at quinceañera celebrations and
pushing young women to see
voting as another way to honor
their commitments to their fami-
ly and their communities. Jolt
became a gathering place for
young Latinas, especially those
who are of mixed ancestry, like
Tz intzún ramirez.
It does not base its decisionsents ran a fair-trade mexican
jewelry business, and the family
frequently traveled to mexico.
Tz intzún ramirez said she often
felt pulled between two vastly
different worlds and wasn’t sure
where she fit.
She moved to Te xas after high
school and s uddenly “felt at
home” amid its wide diversity of
Latinos. After her parents di-
vorced, she legally took her moth-
er’s last name, Tz intzún. “ramir-
ez” comes from her former hus-
band, manuel, whom she di-
vorced in December.
Her name prompted a dust-up
in January that proved the
fraught nature of identity poli-
tics. The name Tz intzún is not
well-known outside of her moth-
er’s home state, so she explained
to voters that “Tzintzún is more
mexican than any Garcia or Lo-
pez” and that “we are the only
indigenous group not defeated by
the Aztecs in mexico.” She was
joking but was accused of rank-
ing cultural identities.
“I have always said that there’s
no wrong way to be Latina/Lati-
no/Latinx,” she wrote in a tweet-
ed apology, “and I truly believe
that.”
At the Latina networking
brunch, Tz intzún ramirez said
that for many years she thought
her role was “creating space for
other people to speak — that my
story wasn’t Latina enough.”
“I slowly got over that and said,
you know, I may be a Latina that
prefers junk rock to bachata, but I
love my people,” she said. “That
makes me Latina.”
In trying to win over voters,
Tz intzún ramirez urges Te xans to
think ahead to the general elec-
tion and the stark contrast that
she could provide if put up
against Cornyn. Tz intzún ramir-
ez often campaigns with her 3-
year-old, Santiago, whom she
calls “Santi” and talks openly
about struggling to pay bills and
piecing together child care when
she became a single mother. Shesented and ignored and were
actually the majority of the Dem-
ocratic Party in Te xas.”
DSCC officials said that the
decision was based on which
candidate had the best shot at
beating Cornyn, who has held the
seat since 2002 yet is not well
known in the state, especially
compared to Sen. Te d Cruz (r-
Te x.). Hegar got into the race
months before the other major
candidates and has raised $3.
million — more than all of the
other candidates combined. Tz -
intzún ramirez has raised more
than $988,000, while West has
raised $1.1 million and Edwards
more than $935,000.
Tz intzún ramirez has been
tapping donors who gave to
o’rourke and those who helped
support her organizing work over
the years. She has been aided by
actor Alec Baldwin, an enthusias-
tic supporter whom she first met
in 2013 when she was the execu-
tive director of the Workers De-
fense Project in Austin. She has
been surprised that some donors
who long supported her organiz-
ing work were hesitant to support
her running for office.
“So many donors ask: ‘How do
we get out more Latino voters?’
Then some of those same donors
say: ‘oh, I don’t t hink a Latina can
win [in Te xas],’ ” she said. “You
can’t want our votes and not our
voices.”
Tz intzún ramirez’s identity is
at t he center of her campaign. She
opens her stump speech with her
story: Her mother, Ana Tz intzún,
is the oldest of nine children from
a poor farm-working family in
southern mexico. Her father, To m
Costello, is “a white American
hippie” who met her mother
while traveling through mexico
in the 1970s.
She grew up in ohio, where she
says she usually didn’t know any
Latinos who weren’t her relatives
and saw how her brown mother
was treated with far less respect
than her white father. Her par-person to be doing this,” Tzintzún
ramirez said at the brunch.
“I am the right person to be
doing this. If we don’t step up,
then maybe no one else will. We
as Latinas are the right people at
the right moment in the right
state to actually step up.”
This year’s Texas Senate race —
which has attracted a dozen Dem-
ocratic candidates looking to un-
seat incumbent John Cornyn (r)
and who will face off in the state’s
march 3 primary — displays the
tension playing out in the Demo-
cratic Party as its leaders and
activists try to figure out what the
party s tands for, who leads it and,
most importantly, which voters it
prioritizes.
Calls for more candidates who
look and think like the party’s
emerging base of young, non-
white and more liberal voters are
inevitably colliding with a desire
to win seats and states that have
long been held by republicans
but are seen as gettable if candi-
dates appeal to more moderate —
and often more white — voters.
Those collisions are particular-
ly difficult in places like Te xas,
where voters of color are crucial
to any Democratic victory but
diverse candidates have strug-
gled to raise the money and atten-
tion needed to become the nomi-
nee.
The party’s presidential race
has also shown the limits of
identity politics. The field was
once the most diverse in history
— yet a ll but one of the remaining
candidates, and all of the top tier,
are white and many have had
difficulty connecting with diverse
Democratic constituencies. Add-
ing more complexity, many non-
white voters have backed white
candidates over candidates of col-
or, either due to policy positions
or perceptions of which candi-
date could compete more strong-
ly with President Trump.
To win in Te xas, Tz intzún
ramirez says Democrats need to
focus on issues that matter to
working-class families and regis-
ter hundreds of thousands of new
voters, especially young people of
color. She has staked out the most
liberal positions in the race, in-
cluding supporting medicare-for-
all, the Green New Deal, decrimi-
nalization of illegal border cross-
ings and a mandatory buyback of
assault weapons. Last week she
cast an early ballot for Sen. Bernie
Sanders (I-Vt.) in the presidential
primary and earned the endorse-
ment of rep. Alexandria ocasio-
Cortez (D-N.Y.), whose blunt and
passionate politics she would like
to emulate.
“Let’s go make history for Lati-
nas,” Tzintzún ramirez said in an
Instragram video on the first day
of early voting.
The front-runner in the race is
mJ Hegar, a tattooed 43-year-old
combat veteran who lost a con-
gressional race in 2018 in the
heavily republican Austin sub-
urbs but garnered national atten-
tion for a campaign ad about her
boundary-breaking military ca-
reer. Hegar, a former republican
who is white, has been more
cautious in her positions and
supports a public health insur-
ance option, banning assault
weapons and not allowing “ag-
gressive action on climate change
to get overly politicized.” She has
focused on winning over inde-
pendent voters and former re-
publicans — and late last year
received the endorsement of the
Democratic Senatorial Campaign
Committee, which is led by mas-
to.
That endorsement angered Tz -
intzún ramirez and other candi-
dates of color. royce West, a
longtime state senator from Dal-
las, called it “slap in the face” t o
black Te xans and his spokesman
accused the national Democratic
leaders of “trying to lock African
Americans out of the process.”
Amanda Edwards, a former
Houston city council member,
accused the committee of at-
tempting to “put a thumb on the
scale.”
“Democrats talk about diversi-
ty in their party, yet this latest
move proves they are all talk and
no action,” Texas GoP Chairman
James Dickey said in a statement,
seizing on the division. “Last we
checked, there was an African
American State Senator, African
American City Councilwoman,
and a Latina liberal activist run-
ning.”
Soon after Tz intzún ramirez
entered the race last summer, she
traveled to Washington to meet
with the committee’s executive
director and Te xas organizer and
urged them not to endorse before
the primary.
“I let them know that in Te xas,
we are hungry and desperate for
representation,” Tzintzún ramir-
ez said. “I let them know that if
they did endorse [Hegar], I would
hate for it to backfire on her in the
general election to voters of color
who had already felt underrepre-
identity from A
Latina hopeful challenges diversity vs. electability dynamic
Photos by sergio Flores/For the Washington PostCLOCKWiSe FROM tOP: Cristina tzintzún Ramirez, who is among a dozen democrats running to unseat incumbent Sen. John Cornyn (R-tex.), has a staff that is almost all
women and people of color. tzintzún Ramirez considers herself a “true progressive” and has staked out the most liberal positions in the race, backing Medicare-for-all, the
Green new deal, decriminalization of illegal border crossings and a mandatory buyback of assault weapons. A staffer helps her with a live stream on instagram at her home
in Austin. And s he puts her 3-year-old son, Santiago, who often accompanies her to campaign events, down for a nap. tzintzún Ramirez is open about her struggles to pay bills
and lock down child care after becoming a single mother.recently showed her staff mem-
bers one of Cornyn’s 2008 cam-
paign videos, titled “Big John,”
that featured him in a cowboy hat
and a leather coat with fringe.
“I do not think John Cornyn
reflects the Te xas of today. And I
think that there is no better way
to show that than me being the
candidate,” she said. “Trump is
going to run his campaign villain-
izing, targeting people that look
like and have last names just like
me. This race is going to get
heated real fast, and I think it’s
going to become the race thatreally is reflective of who we are
becoming as a country and who
we’re making space for.”
o’rourke opted not to join the
Senate race despite widespread
calls for him to do so. His advisers
believed that running against
Cornyn in a presidential year
would be more difficult than run-
ning against Cruz in 2018 — plus,
o’rourke had a strong working
relationship with Cornyn and
would struggle to cast him as a
villain as he did with Cruz.
o’rourke has made clear that he
will not endorse ahead of the“There are many
moments when I still
doubt myself, that I
think maybe I’m not
smart enough, maybe
I’m not the right
person to be doing this.
... I am the right
person to be doing this.”
Cristina Tzintzún Ramirez,
texas Democrat in U.s. senate race
to unseat incumbent John Cornyn