in conversation with organizer Gabriela Santiago-Romero
Last month, I spoke with Gabriela (Gaby) Santiago-Romero at Detroit’s Techtown. Gaby is the Policy and Research Manager for We The People Michigan.
I first met Gaby just after the 2017 Women’s March in Washington, D.C., where she was training with EMILY’s List. A mutual friend let Gaby know I had an extra seat in my car back to Detroit. Despite how draining the post-2016 election world felt, her unwavering passion for social justice shone through during the long drive home.
More than two years after I started following her work and her activism, Gaby hasn’t stopped growing, educating, and fighting for the people in her communities. My hunch is that she’s just scratching the surface.
OCTOBER 2019 UPDATE: Gaby is running for Wayne County Commissioner! Donate to her campaign here.
[semi]political: So, we know you’re a Detroiter. Tell us more about yourself!
Gaby Santiago-Romero: I am a proud, queer, immigrant woman of color. I was born in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. My mom made a huge risk and commitment by crossing the border to LA when I was a year old. She started housekeeping, cleaning, and nannying to make money. My aunt lived in Southwest Detroit, and told my mom there was a lot of work there. So we moved to Detroit, where my mom worked a lot of odd factory jobs.
I don’t think she would say this herself, but my mom was the biggest feminist ever when I was growing up. She would tell me, “don’t get married, don’t let a man tell you what to do, be independent, and go to school.” I grew up seeing my mom struggle as a single mother. It really instilled in me that I have to know how to do things on my own.
SP: When did you first get involved in activism?
GSR: I went to a progressive feminist all-girls middle school called Our Lady of Guadalupe. I loved it. We had after-school programming embedded in the school. We were even exposed to petitions and protests. That’s why I do a lot of work with young people: someone believed in me. Get them while they’re young, because then you’ve got them for life.
I became involved in the social justice movement in the fifth grade, and I’ve been protesting since then. By the sixth grade I knew what sweatshops were, by the seventh grade I knew about human trafficking, and by the eighth grade I knew that capitalism was destroying the planet.
SP: How was your experience getting your M.S.W. at the University of Michigan? How has some of that carried over to your work today?
GSR: It made me feel a deeper kind of way about higher education. The School of Social Work attracts a lot of really awesome people who work really hard. But if anything, I feel like it challenged us to barely survive for 16 months: make the bills and make your classes. You cry through it because it’s just an end goal, which is unfair. My experience there made me want to be a professor someday, to help make things better in higher education.
I was the Graduate Student Instructor for an undergraduate organizing class, which I was very excited for. The week before class started, the professor scrapped his curriculum and decided the class would read and discuss five books. All five were really good organizing and mobilizing texts, but were not for beginners. The students couldn’t connect the readings to real situations because they hadn’t seen those yet, and they grew bored. This all opened my eyes to where higher education currently stands. How do we hold universities accountable when they say they’re the best? What are they “the best” at, and who are they best for?
SP: You’ve been involved in many incredible organizations. What’s a social justice program that was formative for you?
GSR: Young Nation and working with Erik Howard. While I don’t think they would say that they work towards social justice, they work towards building inclusive and thriving communities where we have to fend for ourselves. Erik is a white man who taught me what white privilege was and what patriarchy was like. Erik instilled in me the importance of stories and capturing people’s voices. He helped me practice being guarded and asking the right questions, and how to not trust folks until they have shown their receipts.
Erik saw that I was taking photos at community events but that I wasn’t affiliated with any organizations. At that time, I thought I was the only one yelling on Twitter about social justice. Erik told me, “no, this is a thing: what you’re doing is documenting issues, and you should do it here in the community.” He broke down how to identify issues, how to talk about them, and how to invite, involve, and engage people in our own solutions.
SP: What did you learn through documenting in your community?
GSR: I went from valuing speaking out to listening more. There are so many people with different ideas that I don’t always agree with, but that I need to understand. I think that’s why I’m interested in doing this research because, for me, I think the theme is finding out the many truths. It’s very important to research and to understand the many truths for us to be able to hold people accountable and start to actually strategize change.
SP: What are your goals for this year? What are you looking forward to?
GSR: So this is the first year that we have policy and research at We the People. I want to take it as a year of learning and documenting what I think will be important pillars of this work moving forward.
My spring and summer are full of research, education, and outreach with our folks in different regions across the state. This year, Gretchen Whitmer announces the state budget. WTP is going to educate people on what the budget process is and how to engage in it, through webinars and workshops. In the Fall, we really want to expand our People’s Lobby. We did that during lame duck and it was a really crazy fun time.
You should be able to lobby confidently and just as well as anybody else on the other side. You should be able to say, “you can’t screw me over because I’m going to vote for you or get you out of office.” My goal this year is for people to feel like they have the tools to do their research, to educate themselves, and to advocate for themselves. While that probably won’t happen this year, I think I’m going to learn a lot and see how to make things better as the years go on.
SP: So, when are you running for office?
GSR: Lately when people ask me this, I don’t always know what to say. I don’t want to run for office until there’s a group of people behind me who understand the system and who would tell me what they want to change. I would love to run for office if the seats look different, and if I could get in there and actually do something.
I know some women who are in office now. They all tell me to wait until it’s the right time. So I think there really is a “right time.” And they would know! They know how difficult it is. They also know what politics look like right now, and the work that I’m doing. In the meantime, I have like ten other friends who are planning to run.
SP: Who are some people who you see in public office right now who you look up to?
GSR: Stephanie Chang, Rashida Tlaib, and Raquel Castaneda-Lopez. They’re all amazing. As for anybody else who comes to mind, I can’t say they inspire me because I don’t know them. At this point, the process has been so demystified to me that I can’t run by how cool you are. As much as I want to say, “AOC is really dope,” I want to understand where she’s coming from. I want to get those stamps of approval from other people she works with. That said, AOC’s still doing great things.
SP: What is your community?
GSR: I’m an immigrant. I’m a woman. I’m a Detroiter, an activist, a photographer. Those are my communities, I’m in those spaces.
The LGBT community is a new community for me because I’ve been closeted since middle school. I just came out in grad school. It got to a point where I was dating the type of people and the type of men that I was “supposed” to be dating. Men would turn around and say, “I can’t offer you what you need.” And I would think, “okay, thank you for telling me that.” So I asked myself, what do I need? What I need is someone who’s funny and good at communicating their feelings, or who is willing to go through the grueling process it can be to communicate about an issue. I chose to run with that, to focus on the qualities of a person instead of finding a man I’m supposed to be with, and I met my partner the very first week of grad school.
The generation after me is the gayest generation we’ve seen, and it’s awesome. We should all begin to understand this community because it’s everyone’s at this point. We should be inclusive and engaged.
SP: Anything I missed?
GSR: I mentioned earlier that a part of my narrative is that I am an immigrant. I’m also a naturalized citizen, which is a weird thing in itself. If you’re undocumented, you have no other issue. That’s your one thing. I still have family that’s undocumented, so it’s very important to me. But since I am documented, it would feel weird leading that fight. The whole thing feels like a cruel joke. So I guess, find an issue and fight for it. We have many fights we need to win.
Donate to Gaby’s campaign for Wayne County Commissioner here.
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