“Leadership is a choice one makes.”

Once I learned about grassroots organizing, I got so enamored with it because I thought ‘Wow this is the way you do it!’

We must use our lives to make the world a better place to live, not just to acquire things. That is what we are put on the earth for.

Why is it that farmworkers feed the nation but they can’t get food stamps?

I call myself an addicted organizer.

My children grew up very resourceful and strong in spite of them having to live with different families and that I had to drag them all over the country with me.

My mother was a dominant force in our family. And that was great for me as a young woman, because I never saw that women had to be dominated by men.

The thing about nonviolence is that it spreads. When you get people to participate in nonviolent action – whether it’s a fast, a march, a boycott, or a picket line – people hear you, people see you, people are learning from that action.

We can’t let people drive wedges between us, because there’s only one human race.

Don’t be a marshmallow. Walk the street with us into history. Get off the sidewalk. Stop being vegetables. Work for Justice. Viva the boycott!

Going door to door and talking to people, convincing them to vote – this is what I call Organizing 101.

Walk the street with us into history. Get off the sidewalk.

Especially as a teenager, I was always being racially profiled by the police. You just see all this injustice, and you want to do something about it, but you don’t know how.

We know we only have about half of our population that’s voting.

It’s important to realize that we all need to work together. With Weaving Movements, we are all interdependent and we all have to work together. If we could just realize that and understand that, we’ll keep our country strong.

As a youngster and being a Latina, you see so much injustice.

I had been a Girl Scout from the time I was 8 to the time I was 18 years old. I had belonged to my church organization and youth groups. But, you never really found a way that you could make a change.