During a huge reproductive rights protest she attended as a student, Marianna Anaya looked around and had an “epiphany.”
As a young person, she thought that creating legislation around such a controversial issue should be simple: If everyone working on the issue would just look at what the data and research supported, then the legislative solution should be apparent.
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But, she told LGBTQ Nation, “I saw that best practice wasn’t always what got passed, which really led me into this curiosity for politics.”
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“We didn’t necessarily have to protest policy,” she remembers thinking, “if we were the people in charge of making it.”
That realization set the young, gay Latina activist on a path running to represent District 18 in New Mexico’s state House. The district is located in Albuquerque and is mostly white even though the state’s population is mostly people of Latinx descent.
Anaya is one of several LGBTQ+ state Latinx and Hispanic politicians in southwestern states whose constituents’ identities don’t always match their own. These politicians have to balance the values of their lived experiences with the needs of their state’s residents, presenting a unique challenge, especially during an election year when race and other identities become highly politicized.
District 18’s Latinx community is a key demographic for Anaya to win, just as it is for many candidates in the 2024 presidential election. However, the ethnic group is not a monolith.
Latinx and Hispanics have typically supported Democrats in previous decades, but more Latinx people are voting Republican, receptive to former President Donald Trump’s message about restricting immigration and his appeals to family values among a largely Catholic constituency. Ironically, the better off Latinx Americans are economically, the further they move away from a Democratic Party that continues to champion their basic human rights and integration into U.S. society.
Those facts are a consideration for both Anaya, in safely blue New Mexico, and two other candidates that LGBTQ Nation spoke to from Arizona, a key swing state in the presidential election. In Arizona, appeals to Latinx voters of could make the difference between a win or a loss for Trump and his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris.
In Arizona, high turnout is expected for both presidential tickets along with a referendum on abortion access and a contentious U.S. Senate race between Rep. Ruben Gallego (D) and MAGA Republican Kari Lake, who denied President Joe Biden’s win in 2020 as well as the results of her own, losing run for governor in 2022. All 90 of Arizona’s state legislative seats are up for grabs as well, threatening Republican control as Dems seek to flip at least one chamber.
Donald Trump won Arizona in 2016 by 2.5%, while the state flipped for Biden in 2020 by just 0.3%. Next door, New Mexico voted Democrat in four of the last six presidential elections; Trump lost both his races there by nearly 10 points.
Along with Anaya, LGBTQ Nation spoke with Arizona state Rep. Lorena Austin, running for reelection from the Tempe area, and Arizona Rep. Oscar De Los Santos, the second-ranking Democrat in the Arizona House seeking a second term from Phoenix. The politicians discussed the diverse political landscapes they’re navigating in their campaigns, and how they incorporate their intersecting identities as Latinx and LGBTQ+ candidates.
All three politicians adamantly believe they can equitably represent constituents who don’t share their sexual and ethnic identities, maybe even feel a little indignant at the implication they possibly wouldn’t.
“Absolutely,” answered New Mexico’s Anaya, a 34-year-old community organizer in her native Albuquerque who identifies as lesbian. Among her constituents, just over half are white and about 35% are Latinx.
“I ran as a very out individual and worked on a lot of LGBTQ policy issues before,” she said, noting that she helped organize efforts to repeal the state’s 1969 abortion ban and also to protect abortion and gender-affirming care.
“When I talked to constituents in my district,” she continued, “what they were really concerned about was who was able to get the job done. For them, seeing that I had a history of being able to help pass even some of the toughest, or most controversial, legislation, I think really gave them a sense of security that I was able to walk in on day one and carry the torch.”
Arizona’s De Los Santos, 30, who grew up gay in a first-generation, working-class Mexican American household, agreed “100%” that he could serve all of his Phoenix constituents, saying the proof is in the polls.
“We saw that in 2022, when I came in first in a six-way primary, and then came in first again in the general election,” he said. “I’ve served for two years, and my constituents gave me my first report card this year in the primary, and again, I came in first. So, if we take the vote as my report card, it seems like they’re happy with the work that I’m doing.”
That “report card” showed that De Los Santos bested his primary opponent in his majority-white district by almost 11 points.
While he’s running to represent all of his constituents, De Los Santos said his intersecting identities give him a unique “lens” on legislation and the ability to ask, “‘How does this affect Latinos? How does this affect LGBT people?’ Because sometimes inadvertently and sometimes on purpose, bias is written into legislation that other people may not see,” he said.
For Austin, 36, a former educator who identifies as genderqueer and nonbinary and who represents another majority-white district in the Arizona House, questions about identity go beyond the rainbow and ethnic background.
“Being queer is just like — and you probably hear this a lot — but it’s just one part of my identity, right? We’re so intersectional as people. So I’m not just queer, I’m also a farmer, an educator, right? I’m the granddaughter of farm workers. My parents were active in social movements,” they said.
The “duality” of being raised in a conservative Catholic family by parents who worked in the Chicano movement has allowed them to look at their constituents’ concerns from different perspectives, they said.
“But,” Austin added, “I think being queer in general does give you a broad experience of hardship and acceptance, but also working hard and working on yourself and navigating difficult situations… It brings a relatable quality to a community.”
Anaya’s upbringing, too, has been foundational to how she interacts with her constituents. Raised in Albuquerque by a matriarchy of eight aunts, including her mother and grandmother, family “has really shaped who I am and the values that I carry with me,” she said.
Foremost among those values is respect.
“My grandmother was actually a Republican,” Anaya recalled. “She was your typical New Mexican, multi-generational grandmother, and I feel like my grandma maybe had just as many intersecting identities as I do.”
Respect especially matters, she said, when dealing with hot-button topics like immigration.
“When people are talking about immigration, it gets so divisive and so racist,” she said. “But I think about my grandma, and I think about our neighborhood, and I think about the fact that when we were having dinners, my grandma would make enough for everybody in the neighborhood. She would never say, ‘These people can’t come.’ We always made room for other people. These are values that I live out every single day in policy. They were values that we learned at a kitchen table.”
But MAGA Republicans don’t always share those values. Trump and his running mate Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) continue to demonize immigrants — legal and undocumented alike — as criminals and rapists. Lately, they’ve lied about Black Haitians eating Ohio housepets, while acolytes like Kari Lake in Arizona tow their party line, citing a racist “replacement theory” plot hatched by Democrats to justify shutting down the U.S border.
“I knock a lot of doors where we have families of mixed status, and also really, really hard-working families that own small businesses, and they’re both greatly affected by the immigration policies that happen or don’t happen,” said Austin, who earned a degree in U.S. and Mexican Regional Immigration Policy and graduated summa cum laude from Arizona State University in their district of Tempe.
A “really important” part of her job as a representative, Austin said, is to “explain to people what’s currently happening.”
Austin pointed to Proposition 314, a referendum to reboot Arizona’s notorious “show me your papers” law of 2010, which required law enforcement to ask for immigration documents from people they had reasonable suspicion of being undocumented. The law was partially upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court, but lower courts in Arizona blocked it. In 2016, the state settled with immigrants’ rights groups and announced that it would no longer enforce the provision.
“For people in our community, it was such an indelible stain that was left around our state, and to imagine that that has an opportunity to come back and be codified into law is really alarming,” Austin said.
For De Los Santos — who earned a political science degree from the University of Southern California as a Truman scholar before earning a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford University — the value of hard work has been a motivating force.
“My parents came to this country from Mexico in the 1970s with basically the shirts on their backs and busted their asses off in this country,” he said. “They worked in factories and on farms, picking citrus — sometimes for pennies a bushel. And everything that they have, that our family had, was never handed to them. It was won through extremely hard work.”
He said that’s why it’s disappointing when “I come in here and I see Republicans in the legislature more concerned with pleasing the corporations and the special interests and not working-class families like mine.”
Among the many issues in voters’ minds this election season, the three candidates’ constituents share an overlapping list of those they’re most concerned about: education, the high cost of housing, and immigration policy.
Anaya, with a degree in education from the University of California in Los Angeles, has been addressing her soon-to-be constituents’ concerns about New Mexico’s education system for years. The stakes were clearly defined, she said, by a district court ruling in 2018 which found that her state was providing an unequal and inequitable education to bilingual, bicultural, native, and indigenous communities.
“For me, this is something that I hold close to my heart,” Anaya said, “because, for one, I was a graduate of our public schools, through and through. The public schools that I went to, I love. They raised me, and they were actually the schools that made me believe that I could be more. So I have a big sense of compassion for our public schools.”
“And two, it’s actually my background. I got my degree in race and ethnic studies and education, and that was actually where I first entered the policy world.”
Now, with more political and organizing experience under her belt, she said that even though the data is clear, how that’s translated into policy is another question altogether. She’ll find out soon enough — the first-time candidate is running unopposed in the November general election.
De Los Santos’s constituents talk to him most about the high cost of housing in Phoenix. There, a shortage of available homes, ballooning rents, Wall Street landlords and greed have conspired to deny many of his constituents housing security.
“We are seeing corporations come in and buy a vast number of homes on the market,” he explained, “and what they’re doing is, they’re turning around and renting them out at exorbitant rates, which does two things: one, obviously it jacks up the cost of rent, not just for that family, but increases the cost of rent for everybody else. Number two, though, they are robbing an Arizona family of the opportunity to own their own home and build generational wealth.”
“That is a problem confronting everybody in this district,” he said.
His constituents are also facing an issue specific to LGBTQ+ people in housing and a host of other areas: discrimination.
De Los Santos is the prime sponsor of House legislation to prohibit discrimination based on gender and sexual identity in housing, public educational institutions, employment, and public accommodations. So far, the Republican majority has refused to bring it up for a vote.
The young legislator said his “lens” on this issue was focused while studying at Union Theological Seminary in New York, where he earned a master’s degree in Christian social ethics in 2020.
“For far too long, religion has been used as a cudgel and a weapon against LGBT people, and what my training in seminary and in theology has shown me is that LGBT people are a blessing. We are made just like everybody else, in and as the image of God, and are therefore owed dignity and respect, and in the political arena, owed fundamental freedoms and rights,” he said.
“When I talk about non-discrimination protections: yes, I’m talking about it because I think that’s what the American Constitution owes us. Yes, I’m talking about it because I think that is the moral and ethical and right thing to do. But I also fundamentally believe that, from a theological perspective, if we believe in the dignity and equality of every single human being on this planet, there is a strong theological basis for that kind of legislation.”
That focus on human dignity was a common theme among all three candidates, embracing and elevating their intersecting identities.
“What we know is that folks who are either marginalized because of their LGBTQ identity or marginalized because of their ethnic background — when we fix problems for them, we fix problems for everyone,” said Anaya.
“What the election comes down to is not necessarily our identity,” said De Los Santos. “It’s about our values. Putting the working class over corporations, ensuring reproductive freedom for women and not making politicians the decision-makers over women’s bodies, making sure that we’re bringing down the cost of housing and health care. Those are the things that I’m fighting for.”
“People need to understand how we got here and how we can proceed in a way that is humane and helpful,” said Austin. “When I entered the legislature, I really think some people wanted me to be the thing that they perceived about queer people, and then that didn’t happen, right? Like, I’m not shoving a rainbow in your face. I just do the work.”
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