Jessica Ramos Knows Her District Wants Change. Now She Just Needs Their Votes.

From ELLE

I

t arrived on my phone like an unexpected text from a crush: curious and disarming. But it wasn't a text, and it wasn't from anyone I knew. Instead, while standing in the subway's collective morning huddle, someone, who had changed their name to "NY Dem Primary Tomorrow," wanted to AirDrop me a familiar photo, one I had seen on Instagram the night before. It was a list of progressive candidates running in New York's primary election on Thursday, Sept. 13, and among them were a number of Democratic women who are about to go up against long-time incumbents, challenging the system once more this primary season.

Just days before, I had met one of these women, Jessica Ramos, a mother and the City of New York's former director of Latino media, who's running for the state Senate's 13th district. At that point, the primary election was still six days away. There was a lot to think about, a lot to do, voters to talk to and flyers to give out. It was 10 A.M. when we met, and Ramos was wearing a beige skirt, a red top, and pink eyeshadow. That day's location? Door knocking in Woodside Houses, situated in one of her district's six neighborhoods.

Ramos does some version of this every day: door knocking, fundraising, events. She’s currently up against Jose Peralta, who’s been in the state Senate since 2010. He’s a Democrat, though he was also a former member of the Independent Democratic Conference, a group of eight state senators that allied with Republicans.

It’s Ramos' first time running for office, and she happens to be running in a state Senate district that's almost entirely included in Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's congressional district. Ocasio-Cortez, who won her Democratic primary earlier this summer, beating out a 10-term incumbent, gave Ramos a true snapshot of her district: "Seeing that we were right, that people really want to see the status quo changed was very validating and very inspiring, absolutely. People are tired of the same old, same old."

Ramos most recently served the City of New York, but working for a progressive administration taught her there were certain things that were ultimately controlled by Albany, things like school funding, rent reform, fixing the MTA. She learned that her kids' school was owed $2 million. "Then I found out my state senator didn’t even show up to vote for that funding. He did not show up for my children. That infuriates me."

Now, she’s been endorsed by the New York Times, Mayor Bill de Blasio, and Senator Kirsten Gillibrand. She’s formed a friendship with Alessandra Biaggi, who's running for the state Senate's 34th district, and is also going up against an incumbent and the former leader of the IDC. When they both received the Times endorsement, they texted each other.

"Not many people understand what we’re going through, the pressure," Ramos says. "You have to always be on. Even if you have cramps and it’s the worst day of your period, you have to be pleasant and smiling."

Biaggi, who worked on Hillary Clinton's campaign and in Governor Andrew Cuomo’s counsel’s office, echoes the same sentiment when we talk on the phone just a few days after I meet Ramos. "Running for office is a very lonely experience," she says. "The fact that myself, and Jessica, and the other anti-IDC candidates, and honestly the other women across the country, are running in districts that have not had female leadership before or have definitely been part of a boy’s club, to be doing this same effort in different districts, very close by, it really has made me feel less alone because I know on the most difficult days, I’m not the only one going through that particular challenge. And there have been a lot of difficult days."

Like Biaggi, Ramos has gained momentum. But there’s still the act of balancing, of running for office while also being a mom to two boys. She takes them door knocking sometimes, partly so they can spend time together but also so they can see what strong women in their communities can do. That’s important to her, she explains, almost tearing up.

We step into one building, and we pass a little girl, no older than 4 or 5, walking outside with an older woman. She says something incomprehensible to us, in the bumbly, adorable way that toddlers do, and Ramos, upon seeing her, stops responding to my question and tells her to have fun today and do lots of playing. For her, this is the point of door knocking, of running at all.

"Running for office is so about your name and your image and your history and your credibility and your experience," she says. "But at the same time, running for office has nothing to do with you and everything about your neighbors and what they need and what message resonates with them, what it is they would like to see addressed in the community what their concerns are, what their hopes are. That is enough to inspire you and keep you going. Seeing that little girl, I want to make sure that little girl has access to fully-funded pre-K. I want to make sure her parents are able to keep a roof over her head. I want to make sure that by the time she makes it to college, maybe CUNY and SUNY will be free because of the work that we’ll be able to do in the state Senate. Forget about my opponent. It’s all about her."

She comes to this area a lot; she’s been here to hand out pizza and ice pops on a hot summer day. Ramos knows the senior center nearby has aerobics classes and bingo before lunch; she’s tried the aerobics warm-up before and can report it’s "no joke." As we go around, she switches between Spanish and English, occasionally saying hello in other languages. ("I learned how to say, 'Please vote for me,' in Tibetan," she tells me, explaining that people speak over 160 languages in her district.)

And even though there are so many neighborhoods-she's lived in nearly all of them- she believes her message has resonated with the district’s voters. She’s found that everyone can relate on certain issues, things like affordability and a working MTA. She chose to focus on school funding because "education is the cornerstone of absolutely everything in society." And she wants to organize.

In late June, when there was a huge march in Manhattan at Foley Square to support keeping immigrant families together, she helped organize a march from Jackson Heights to Corona, where there’s a large undocumented population, to show solidarity. It’s an issue that hits particularly close to home for Ramos, who’s a first-generation American. I ask her about the recent news surrounding immigration, the zero-tolerance policy and those very separations. How have they affected her? She tells me a story of a young woman who, some months ago, was shot and killed by a Border Agent.

"I cried for hours," she says. "My mom crossed the Mexican border to come here. She flew from Colombia to Mexico, crossed the Mexican border. She was 24 years old. It took her three days. She did it all by herself. That [woman] could’ve been my mom." It’s one of the few times she chokes up during our hour together. She can’t imagine what it would be like to have someone rip her children away, and she knows what detainment looks like first hand; when she was only a baby, her father was arrested in an immigration raid in a factory in New Jersey. It took her family days to find out what happened, locate him, and get him out. "At the end of the day, people come to this country looking for a better life because many times we have made it nearly impossible to live in the countries they come from. I can’t change foreign policy from the state Senate, but I sure as hell can fight to make sure New York is a sanctuary state."

Ramos is one of many New York women who are part of the pink wave, a nationwide wave that's bringing women of color, queer women, Muslim women, and Native American women to the shores of our political system. At the very least, Ramos says, this year's historic number of women running is the start of something big. "We’ve always elected people who have managed to thrive in the system and then we elect them to go fix the system, and yet for women, for people of color, the system hasn’t really worked. It wasn’t a system that was designed for us to thrive, so for us to have the opportunity to go in there and matter is huge. We’ve never had that before."

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