“No One Is Coming to Save Us”

I was born in Caracas, Venezuela, and my family moved to Miami when I was five years old. I grew up in Miami-Dade—specifically, the neighborhood of Doral, an area that is so Venezuelan that for most of my childhood I thought that Venezuelans were the majority in this city. I started organizing in college at University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, around the time of the Occupy movement and the killing of Trayvon Martin. For ten years in North Carolina, I did campus labor organizing and also worked to hold sheriffs accountable for collaborating with ICE and for police brutality, primarily against Black folks. But then Covid happened, and my dad got really sick, so I decided to come home. I was also watching the right-wingers make serious, really culturally competent inroads into the community that I grew up in, exploiting Venezuelans’ trauma. I remember hearing about Marco Rubio making a stop at this very popular arepa spot called Arepazo. And I remember the day that Mike Pence decided that he was going to come speak at the church that I grew up going to. It reminded me that I had a lot of work to do with my own people in my home state.

I spend a lot of time thinking about how to respond to attacks on our work on the basis that it’s “socialist,” which is a scare tactic used by the right. This has really been the question of my life. And my theory of change on this stuff is that you have to lead with issues. As campaigns director at [the progressive advocacy group] Florida Rising, I don’t work backward from elections or parties or ideology, I work backward from the things that are directly impacting people’s lives.

I’m originally from Philadelphia and ended up in Florida during my medical residency. Before coming here, I was looking forward to enjoying the beaches, the weather, things like that. But after I arrived, I realized that if I am going to live here, I really want to ground myself in working-class politics in the area. So as soon as I touched down ten years ago, I started organizing with [the racial justice organization] Dream Defenders.

In medical school, I learned that social and economic factors really decide which people live and which people die; in Miami this disparity is so stark that you can literally cross a street and the life expectancy goes down by 15 years. But medical professionals don’t really put this learning into action. So as I was grounding myself in Florida, I was thinking: What is the role of a physician as an organizer? That is how Dream Defenders began offering our trauma recovery center, which seeks to provide free medical care, therapy, and social services to people affected by gun violence. We also offered a mobile mental health crisis team, so that instead of calling the police—with whom you are 16 times more likely to be shot and killed when having a mental health crisis—people can call our number and get access to a therapist, an interventionist, and a medical worker instead. At the same time this trauma recovery center was getting off the ground, I was growing an organization called Dade County Street Response, which focuses on retraining medical professionals in advocacy and programming for poor Black and brown communities, including people who are unhoused.

There is a sentiment that I’ve noticed through my work over the last couple years that if you’re offering services that make it easier for marginalized people to survive, you are “encouraging laziness.” For example, during Covid-19, we set up a full-service shower site for those experiencing unsheltered homelessness because these individuals were having to walk miles to go to the bathroom, to shower, to wash their hands during a pandemic. But once we started offering this service where about 300 people a day were also getting clothes and Covid testing, we were reprimanded by city and county governments, community members, and even county-funded anti-homelessness organizations like the Miami-Dade County Homeless Trust, because they felt that we were encouraging living in the streets. Meanwhile, the Trust’s chairman, Ron Book, who runs one of the most powerful lobbying firms in the state and probably the country, was lobbying for the Florida Apartment Association, which is actively fighting against rent control—a measure that could actually materially lessen homelessness. Book is also the lobbyist for the GEO Group, which is the largest prison corporation in America, and which benefits from making homelessness a crime.

Indeed, in Florida, the criminalization of homelessness is proceeding apace. By 2019, a federal court had already over­turned Miami policies protecting the rights of the unhoused to sleep outside, and this March, DeSantis expanded this by prohibiting municipalities from allowing public camping. This means that we’ve had massive encampment sweeps in which individuals are told, “you either move, or you go to jail.” The city comes out with water cannons to spray where they had their tents. Now these folks are just sitting at bus stops, spread out in other places along the highway, or left to congregate in abandoned houses and other unsafe places, and we can’t get them the services that they need.

I came from Mexico to central Florida in 1999. I was harvesting oranges with a crew, but the pay was very little. We decided to move to Immokalee, in the southwestern part of the state because recruiters had been telling us about how great the working conditions and wages were there. But my welcome to Immokalee was harsh. After two weeks of work—waking up at 3:00 am to harvest tomatoes—my crew and I were fired on the spot because we had asked the boss for $20 for food and supplies. We were kicked out of the mobile home we were staying in. We had not been paid, we had no job, and no place to stay.

We didn’t know anybody, but we eventually found another job harvesting oranges. There, I met someone with an indirect connection to the United States v. Cuello case [a 1999 lawsuit in which workers were held in trailers west of town and forced to work off a large debt under violent threat]. I met these workers after the case wrapped up, and they became my roommates and my friends. They talked with me about how the [farmworker rights group] Coalition of Immokalee Workers helped them bring their employer to justice, and invited me to come to meetings. That’s how I first got involved.

Because farmworkers are excluded from the National Labor Relations Act, workers in Immokalee couldn’t form a union, and because we don’t have a lobby like the American Farm Bureau, the Coalition has never sought change through legislation or policy. Instead, we focus on moving the market. Specifically, around the time I got involved, we were realizing that big food brands—including fast food chains and supermarkets—were using their purchasing power to negotiate the lowest possible food prices with growers, who in turn were slashing production costs to try to protect their shrinking margins. But growers don’t cut costs by telling Monsanto, “we’re going to pay you the same for fertilizers as we did 20 or 30 years ago”; instead, the workforce became the place to squeeze. We realized that this was why farmworkers’ per-bucket pay had stagnated at 40 to 45 cents for decades.

Our first ever national campaign, a boycott of Taco Bell, was created with this theory of change in mind, and with the rallying cry “Taco Bell makes farmworkers poor.” When the Coalition announced the boycott in 2001, I was still working in the fields, but I went to every community meeting, retreat, and action. I would also go door to door to invite people to come and participate in those meetings. Over the next four years, we educated ourselves and then consumers around the country about how Taco Bell’s power in the market was fueling the poverty and abuse that we faced in the fields. In 2005, I was part of a delegation of 100 farmworkers who visited universities, union halls, and churches in 17 cities on the way from Immokalee to Louisville, Kentucky, the headquarters of Taco Bell’s parent company, Yum Brands, one of the largest restaurant companies in the world. And when we arrived, Taco Bell and its parent company were willing to talk. They agreed to only buy from farms that abided by our worker-drafted code of conduct, to pay a penny per pound that would go directly to workers in the form of a bonus on their regular paychecks, and implement a zero tolerance policy for modern-day slavery. This was the basis of the Fair Food Program, which we launched in Florida in 2011 and, in collaboration with participating growers, ex­panded across almost the entire tomato industry of the state. Since then, we have grown to cover more crops and regions. As a result, tens of thousands of farmworkers across ten states and three countries now have a say in how their fields are run.

I grew up in Miami, and I was already interested in organizing from the time I was in high school. I remember being inspired by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, who I invited to speak at my school about their campaign to boycott Taco Bell. I also worked with the climate advocacy group Catalyst Miami, and was involved in the fight against budget cuts in Miami-Dade County on the heels of the 2009 recession.

I now work as a nurse at Jackson Memorial Hospital, which is part of the county public health system. I’m also a member of SEIU Local 1991—a union of healthcare workers in Miami—and have worked as an organizer for the union. For us as nurses, staffing is the major issue. We have language in our contract around staffing ratios for nurses and patients, but enforcing these ratios is hard. There is also the enduring issue of pay raises. Overall, we are fighting for a better healthcare system for workers and patients alike.

But despite their crucial role in providing public services, workers in Florida’s public sector unions are themselves under attack. In 2023, the state legislature passed a bill to stop union dues from being automatically deducted from workers’ paychecks. This meant we had to re-register all of our members and ask them for their credit card information, which not only takes a lot of time and money but also gives people who have been paying dues for years an excuse to change their minds. The bill also required public sector unions to have at least 60% of the workers they represent signed up as members in order to avoid undergoing a new union election. In a “right-to-work” state—where people have the option of enjoying the benefits of a union without becoming dues-paying members—it is very difficult to reach 60%. So this bill has led to the collapse of organized labor in Florida’s public sector as tens of thousands of people across the state have lost their unions. On the other hand, this is forcing unions to do some really deep organizing. You’ve got to go back to basics and engage every member about the importance of the union, which has the potential to strengthen unions as well. By using existing leaders in the workplace and talking to members one-on-one, we have survived this anti-union bill.

As a kid, I lived in Florida’s Cocoa Beach area [on the central Atlantic coast] before moving to the northeast. I moved back down to Fort Lauderdale after college, then to Miami, and I’ve been here 19 years. I started TransSOCIAL with my husband in 2016 as a response to the difficulty we had finding resources—both for him and for our family—while he was transitioning. It was meant to be a social and organizing group for trans people outside of clinical settings and support groups, which were really the only spaces available at the time.

We started the group a few months before Trump was elected, so since we’ve been around, there’s never really been a great time to be trans in Florida, or the country, for that matter. Still, there was a lot of curiosity about trans people when we first started. In recent years, the climate has become a lot more polarized. Now, people think they know a lot—they have definitely formed their opinions about the trans community. In May 2023, the state legislature passed a law criminalizing gender-affirming healthcare for trans youth [in June 2024, a federal judge struck down the ban; DeSantis’s office has said it will appeal the decision]. So from last fall up until earlier this year, a lot of trans people chose to relocate out of Florida. If they had the means, they left, and I would say there was a feeling of defeat. Our entire staff is trans, so everything that’s happening affects all of us just as it affects our clients. But since the care ban, we’ve also had a lot more folks reach out just to get connected. They felt like they didn’t have a good source of current information, they didn’t know where to turn with their questions. We have a lot more active involvement in our organizing work than we did a year ago.

At this point, the organization assists with name and gender changes on official documents and hormone replacement therapy co-pays for low-income folks. We have also hosted a food pantry, clothing swaps, and an organizing space called TACO Tuesday—which stands for Trans Activist Community Organizing—where we met over tacos and talked about current bills and public policy, ways that we could engage to support each other through mutual aid networks and combat some of these bad laws. Since 70% of our client base are between the ages of 18 and 25, and a lot of them don’t have great relationships with their biological families—many also didn’t complete high school—we’re also trying to provide mentorship where we can. People have been asking for help with life skills, like basic car maintenance, financial literacy, and how to access healthcare benefits, so we’re going to incorporate that into the next iteration of TACO Tuesday.

I grew up in suburban Minnesota in one of very few Black families in my town, so I’ve always been interested in racial justice. I started focusing on climate after I learned how environmental harm disproportionately impacts African American communities. In 2016, I moved to Miami to take a job as the climate resilience program manager at Catalyst Miami, an organization focused on economic and climate justice, where I’m now the CEO.

There’s been a ton of progress in climate-related organizing since I started. Nine years ago, Miami-Dade County had little money allotted for climate action, but there are now multimillion-dollar investments in solutions to greenhouse gas emissions and extreme heat and sea-level rise. Advocacy groups have also successfully pushed to establish an Office of Resilience in the county, which works very closely with nonprofit organizations to address climate challenges. We’ve provided direct feedback on county climate initiatives. Initially, the Army Corps of Engineers wanted to build a giant concrete wall between Miami and the Biscayne Bay, which may have been able to stop a storm surge but would do nothing to prevent sea-level rise, not to mention that it would be very ugly. But after a lot of advocacy by Catalyst Miami and several partners, the county eventually agreed to consider different, community-led plans that would integrate nature-based solutions, such as earthen berms [raised barriers or ridges in the landscape], to protect from the storm surge. Our lobbying also got the county to improve its “Extreme Heat Action Plan” by focusing on things like retrofitting homes for greater efficiency, which can decrease emissions and protect against extreme heat.

One of our main challenges in Florida is that utility companies have a lot of power. Florida Power and Light (FPL) in Miami, for example, acts as a monopoly and has been consistently fighting against solar energy initiatives. Specifically, FPL-backed legislation would restrict access to net-metering, which requires utility companies to reimburse consumers for solar power that they put back into the grid. Worse still, FPL was accused of charging consumers millions in fees that were then used to lobby against net-metering at the state level. Because many people with solar paneling rely on income from net-metering to finance the installation, this policy shift would have disincentivized the switch to solar energy for everybody except the uber wealthy. The adverse impact on the solar panel industry in Florida could cost up to 40,000 jobs. So Catalyst worked with a number of partners and coalitions to get the governor to veto this harmful legislation a couple of years ago. We are also doing a lot of work to raise awareness about the Public Service Commission, the governor-appointed public body that oversees FPL, so that people can come to their hearings and make their voices heard in favor of affordable renewable energy.

Even though we’ve made progress, there are still challenges. There’s a saying that the most dangerous time of year in Florida isn’t hurricane season, it’s the 60-day legislative session. When I started working at Catalyst eight years ago, we used to work locally or regionally, but it has become increasingly critical for us to work statewide because of state-level preemption. For example, we partnered with Clean Energy for All and Florida Housing Justice Alliance to halt the raising of the ballot initiative threshold from 60% to around 66%, which would have made it even harder for citizens to directly amend the state constitution.

There’s more agreement about the issues than you might expect across party lines. For example, Floridians have affirmed a ballot initiative to restore voting rights for ex-convicts, and another to institute tax breaks for the installation of solar energy equipment, even if they have also voted for elected officials who do not support these policies. This tells me we have some shared values, regardless of how people define themselves politically. We have learned to work across the aisle. When it came to a series of state constitutional amend­ments regarding solar energy—including one backed by utilities and fossil fuel industries that would have restricted access—we even worked with the Tea Party, which views the suppression of solar energy as an infringement on individual liberty. Together, we won that battle.

I’m originally from Durham, North Carolina, and worked as a teacher there until 2018, when I moved to Florida for law school. I started volunteering with [the base-building organization] Power U and learning about reproductive justice. Eventually I took a full-time job as Power U’s reproductive justice organizer, with a focus on comprehensive sex-ed campaigns, efforts to provide period products, and advocacy for full-time nursing at schools.

Before DeSantis was elected, we used to have a sex-ed curriculum based on the three Rs (Rights, Respect, Responsibility) that addressed everything from sexuality and gender to contraception and abortion in age-appropriate and scientifically accurate ways. This has gradually been whittled away. After the “Don’t Say Gay” Bill and the “Stop WOKE” Act, Florida’s state education board removed from the curriculum images of the body that were deemed “inappropriate,” all references to gender and sexuality outside of heterosexual norms, and most references to pregnancy prevention. The syllabus still speaks about periods and condom usage, but it ultimately promotes abstinence and heteronormative ideas of the family. Then there is the direct attack on abortion rights—Florida’s six-week abortion ban came into effect on May 1st—which makes teach­ing youth about abortion even harder.

In this environment, we’ve only been able to sustain our work because we have built deep relationships with school administrators, teachers, and the youth. The schools understand that their students are still asking these questions, and we are cooperating with many of them to provide programming to address these issues. But the state-level restrictions mean that sometimes we can’t do this work on school time or premises, and we can’t put our names on flyers for fear of being criminalized.

The wave of new bills coming down every single month has felt like a never-ending battle. You’re always fighting the latest bad bill and the 15 others that came before it, and it’s difficult to muster the energy to keep fighting. We’ve always operated at a hyperlocal level, providing sex education and organizing people to lobby school boards in specific towns. But as a result of state-level attacks, we’ve had to go to Tallahassee and attend Board of Education meetings to understand what legislation is coming down the pike. This means that we have less time to do our actual work with students.

I’m from a working-class household in the Panhandle. I grew up not really caring about politics but I did have this attitude like, the man’s trying to keep me down. Then in 2015, I saw this video on Bernie Sanders’s YouTube page in which he talks about ending the forever wars, getting money out of politics, Medicare for All, and free college tuition, and I was like: That’s what I want. So I moved to St. Petersburg in 2017, joined the Democratic Socialists of America, and campaigned for a $15 minimum wage and restoring voting rights for ex-convicts.

When I ran for city council, we had a rose on our campaign literature, but democratic socialism wasn’t central to our messaging because most people don’t know what it is. We campaigned on issues like affordable housing, renewable energy, and protecting the LGBTQ community. Honestly, we didn’t experience the red-baiting you would expect. Some guys put out yard signs saying “Richie Floyd: Marxist Socialist,” but it never gained much traction. And with these right-wing people who think anything to the left of Trump is socialist, openly admitting your politics really disarms them—like “Yeah, I’m a socialist, what are you gonna do about it?”

One of the biggest challenges we face here is preemption, especially around attempts to regulate businesses, because state politicians don’t want us messing with their rich friends in the private sector. This means that cities can’t regulate the landlord-tenant relationship, wages, gun laws, or plastic use. But there’s other things that a city can do that I’ve been focusing on lately. One is providing high-quality public goods and services, like access to abortion, social housing, a decent sewage system, and a city-owned grocery store. The other is enforcing existing laws—around things like tenant eviction, wage theft, and child labor—that go unfollowed in Florida. So I pursue these avenues, and there are successes there. For example, in 2023 I pushed through a pilot program for the right to counsel in housing court, under which you’d get legal representation if you faced eviction. That hasn’t been preempted because all we’re doing is making sure that state law is not being violated.