Consuelo Ramírez doesn’t let the fact that she’s not a U.S. citizen get in the way of making her voice heard come election season.
“I have brought a lot of people and motivated a lot of young people to vote,” Ramírez, 57, said in Spanish. She’s so passionate about citizens casting their ballots, she’s even threatened to withhold food from her adult children until they show her proof that they voted.
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“If you don’t make it to vote, forget it,” Ramírez said, “You’re not going to see any tacos from mom.”
On a muggy Thursday morning, Ramírez picked up 84-year-old neighbor Carmen Hernández and drove the homebound senior to her early voting location at Moody Park. Ramírez and Hernández walked hand-in-hand up the sidewalk to the polls, slowly bypassing political signage.
“I don’t drive. I’ve never driven, so I need someone to give me a ride,” Hernández said in Spanish. She got to know Ramírez when the activist was blockwalking in her neighborhood.
“That’s when I met her and she’s who takes me,” said Hernández, who said Ramírez has taken her to the polls for several years. Hernández immigrated to the U.S. from El Salvador more than thirty years ago, fleeing her country’s civil war.
Ramírez said she takes dozens of abuelas like Hernández to the polls each election – she keeps a list of them in a colorful notebook that says “list of grandparents who are active voters” in Spanish. It’s what Ramírez said she can do to influence policies as a long term resident of the United States, who is not yet a citizen.
“My life is mine and I decide what to do with my life,” said Ramírez, who came to Texas from Chiapas, Mexico.
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She brings seniors to the polls before she goes to her job as a domestic worker, something she’s done for more than thirty years, work that she said many people don’t recognize.
“We continue to be invisible in this country and even more in this state,” Ramírez said, “We don’t have rights. It’s us, domestic workers, who clean the house, who take care of seniors… who care for children.”
Ramírez isn’t shy about her feelings about Gov. Greg Abbott.
“I’m not going to leave it in the hands of a racist,” she said.
A longtime advocate for better wages and conditions for domestic workers, Ramírez has block walked for Democratic candidates for years. This election, she said she wants people to vote against Abbott. She said as an immigrant, as a mother, as an activist she thinks the governor has humiliated and steamrolled the community.
She is a diehard supporter of Beto O’Rourke, whom she’s met in person. She even asked him a question at one of his town hall meetings.
She grins as she shows a clip from TikTok where she asks him a question in Spanish in Houston’s Second Ward about what he would do to improve the lives of domestic workers in the state. In response, O’Rourke told her the minimum wage needed to be raised to $15.
The original TikTok of the back-and-forth exchange in Spanish is posted on Beto O’Rourke’s page. It has more than 200,000 views.
“I feel like he listens to all of us,” said Ramírez, who sees this as the year when workers like her have a voice.
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And she said she hopes others will follow in her footsteps, pledging to bring others to the polls – because it just takes a few minutes to help another person vote.
“If today you propose to bring your neighbor or an elderly person, a person who can exercise that right (to the polls), do it. It’s the moment to do it,” she said.
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