WFPeople (Issue 2) Of Dreams and Motorcycle Diaries
WFPeople is a periodic guest post from the Working Families Party, highlighting stories at the intersection of our staff and our changing country. Interviews by Kristin Witting.
Guillermo Fernando Mogollan-Diego is a member of Washington state’s MLK County WFP branch. The 22-year-old Dreamer moved with his family from Mexico to Washington when he was 9 years old. Now he is a junior at the University of Washington majoring in political science. This summer and fall he was the campaign manager for WFP-endorsed city council candidate Pedro Olguin, who became one of the first Hispanic city council members in Burien, Washington, in November.
Kristin Witting: How did you become involved with WFP and Pedro Olguin’s campaign?
Guillermo Mogollan: I became involved with Working Families in June, when someone invited me to a WFP meeting. I thought it was really cool. I was doing an internship called Union Summer, which involved endorsing candidates for local office. That’s how I met Pedro. He was one of WFP-endorsed candidates, and we invited him to come talk to us.
He won. On election night, he was about 300 votes behind, but on the third day after all the votes were certified, he won by about 300 votes.
After the campaign I focused on school and finals, but the WFP local branch retreat is coming up in early January, and then we’ll decide how to help local electeds.
KW: Why did you choose political science as your major?
GM: I started college with the idea of getting a degree that would lead to a good job. Then I started to learn about power dynamics, hierarchies, and how things worked. I chose political science to get an understanding of institutions, laws, to learn about structures, and especially local governments, the role of local officials.
I got interested in local politics when I saw what was happening in my high school [in Mt. Vernon, WA]. My school was 50% Latino, but we had only one Latino teacher. And this was because people in my community lack access to the places where decisions are made. They need access to representation and the opportunity and ability to run for office and represent.
I decided that my major would be less about getting a job and more about doing the most that I can with the resources and knowledge available to me through the university — as well as through the community. I want to work in a space where I can make a difference, hold elected officials accountable, and make sure my community has a seat at the table.
At the end of the day, I come from a community that I can’t turn my back on. If you’re not bringing people into the spaces where you work, then you’re not doing your job well. I want to continue to work in Seattle, but ultimately I want to move back home to Mt. Vernon and cultivate local candidates and build an infrastructure that will make it possible for others to run for office.
Carlos Valverde joined Working Families in late October to lead the effort to help build the Colorado WFP, our newest chapter. He previously worked as an organizer and then executive director of Colorado Progressive Coalition and spent the last six years in Nicaragua.
Kristin Witting: You joined Working Families in late October. What were you doing before you came on board?
Carlos Valverde: I was in Nicaragua for the last six years. When I was in college I fancied myself a revolutionary — I dressed like Che Guevara and I even grew some spotty facial hair. I imagined I might actually become a revolutionary and perhaps die in the jungles somewhere fighting for a socialist democracy. Then I met my wonderful partner who wanted to join the Peace Corps and go to Latin America, and I thought “Great, maybe I can go and do work in the jungle without having to die!”
We didn’t go right away, though. Right out of college our careers took off, but after 10 years we decided it was time to enlist in the Peace Corps and fulfill our dream to work in Latin America. We did our two years of service in Nicaragua and then reenlisted for a third. After we finished Peace Corps we did our own “Motorcycle Diary” trip. We started in Nicaragua and worked our way south, hopped on buses, and met people from the beautiful mosaic of countries that make up Latin America. We made it to Peru, but we promised our families we’d be back for the holidays, so we hiked the Inca Trail and then returned to the US.
We weren’t in the States long before we returned to Nicaragua to run an international organization [Project Gettysburg-Leon] to see if our development approach and philosophy could be applied to international development more broadly: A lot of international development organizations are based on an old charity model that creates dependency, but we had a model that used an asset-based community organizing approach. Our philosophy is that Nicaraguans are intelligent, resilient, and hardworking people — and with just a little support could be leaders of their own development.
KW: What is the link between your previous work and WFP?
CV: At the tail end of my Peace Corps service I took a bus trip to Managua with a friend and I asked him, “What is the best project or thing a person like me, working in international development, can do?” He said, “Your work developing cooperatives and small businesses is excellent and helpful, but the truth is, Nicaraguans can do it themselves. The one thing we can’t do is change the policies of greed in your country. Only the people in the US can do that, so the best thing you can do is go home and change those policies.” It took a few years for that sink in…
Then, last year we invited all our Peace Corps friends to have an election night watch party. We were really planning a party — we had beer and wine, we were excited. Even though a lot of our guests weren’t huge Hillary fans, everyone supported her and thought it would be a step forward to have a woman president. But as the night went on and the election returns came in, the party turned into a funeral. I watched the faces of these altruistic volunteers — people who really wanted to help and who came to Nicaragua representing the highest ideals of the US — and it sad to watch our country fall apart before our eyes.
The next day, my partner and I looked at each other and said it’s time to go home. We couldn’t sit on the sidelines thousands of miles away. The US is our country too — the people who voted for a man who sexually assaulted women and who used bigoted language, those people are the minority. When you look at all the people who could have voted, [Trump supporters] represent only about a quarter, so a majority of Americans don’t agree with him.
KW: More than half of WFP’s endorsed candidates in Colorado won in the November elections. How did you have so much success in such a short time?
CV: I can’t take any credit, I just came on board. I was just a spectator and cheerleader in the last few days. Colorado is a weird purple state with lots of people who were energized by Obama. And there’s been a big population influx — Denver gets 1,000 new people every month — including many newcomers who were fired up by Bernie. So when WFP showed up earlier this year it was easy to form a coalition. The organization committee is made up of 30 volunteers — they formed a candidate questionnaire and did interviews, and did all the work on a volunteer basis.
KW: What makes you angry, and how do you stay inspired in the face of Trump’s impact?
CV: I tend to be fairly even-tempered, but a few things make me grit my teeth. After being abroad for six years, I forgot how to deal with the subtle microaggressions of racism, and I’m relearning how to deal with them. When we see someone like Obama, who had such great qualifications and despite so many obstacles was able to become president, and then you see a white man with no experience and he’s able to reach the same level — it’s institutional white supremacy that allowed that to happen, and that gets me most upset.
I used the word institutional, which sounds unbeatable, but it’s really an ideology, and we can change people’s ideology.
What inspires me? It’s funny because even when I was an executive director, people thought of me as an organizer, but I didn’t really learn grassroots organizing until I was in Nicaragua. [At Colorado Progressive Coalition] the issues that I was working on were personal, because they directly affected me and my family. For example, when we worked on anti-racial profiling legislation, I testified because it happened to me. It wasn’t until I was in Nicaragua and worked on issues that were separate from me that I became an agitator, like Alinsky talked about. I didn’t experience poverty like people in Nicaragua, so there was a clear difference, and that sharpened my ability to organize.
What inspires me is seeing that moment in a person’s eyes when they realize they have power. For example, we were working with a community in Nicaragua that wanted to fix potholes where water settled and mosquitoes grew, increasing the spread of the Zika virus. The community was made up mostly of women, and they were facing layers of oppression. They told us about the mosquitoes, and how the mayor was not doing anything and how he wouldn’t meet with the leader of the group. I asked them, “Do you have an hour to go to mayor’s office tomorrow?” The next day, about 20 people went and sat at mayor’s office until he spoke with them — and a week later he sent a truck to fill the potholes. So that’s what inspires me: When you can see people realize they have the power to make a tangible change.
