Hotel workers campaign among Latino voters in Arizona

Hotel worker and UNITE HERE member Maria Romero canvassing in 2020. | Photo courtesy UNITE HERE Local 11

Maria Romero became a U.S. citizen in 2016 to vote against Donald Trump, offended by his characterization of Mexicans as criminals and rapists. Adversity motivates her, she said.

Now, the hotel housekeeper is pounding the scorching Phoenix pavement, pushing back against growing support among Latinos for Trump, who now leads polling in the key swing state Biden won in the last presidential election.

It was 104 degrees as she made her way, clipboard in hand, along the empty sidewalks of Maryvale, a working-class neighborhood on the city’s west side. “It’s this one,” she said in Spanish, approaching a house on her list of registered voters.

Without warning, two large dogs leaped at Romero from the dusty sideyard, stopped short only by a rickety chain link fence. Undeterred, she took a smooth white rock from her pocket and rapped loudly on the door.

“Hello, housekeeping!” she called, breaking into a laugh upon realizing her mistake. The 57-year-old is a member of UNITE HERE, the hospitality union, and had taken a leave of absence from her job at a nearby Hilton to go door-to-door to keep Arizona blue. “I like to step back and wait, so they think I’ve left,” she said. “Then they open the door and here I am.” (Disclosure: The union is a financial supporter of Capital & Main.)

On this Sunday in September, Romero is one of 350 canvassers, mostly UNITE HERE members, who are spread out across Phoenix and Tucson trying to convince voters, and especially Latinos, to turn out for Kamala Harris. The stakes are high, the margins tight. In Arizona, Latinos represented one in four voters in 2020, while Biden won by just 10,400 votes.

The union’s ground game dwarfs anything offered by the Republicans, but Harris faces a stiff challenge. Nationally, Latinos have drifted rightwards, while a recent New York Times/Siena College poll found that Trump leads Harris by five points in Arizona and has made inroads among Latinos.

Which means that the results in Arizona — and, depending on how other states go, even the presidency — could hinge on places like Maryvale and the efforts of housekeepers-turned-doorknockers like Romero.

Worker Power, the organization overseeing the canvass, has deep connections with UNITE HERE and has developed an increasingly sophisticated voter education and mobilization infrastructure in Arizona. The group helped to defeat the notoriously anti-immigrant Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio in 2016 and knocked on more than 750,000 doors to help elect Biden in 2020 when most groups eschewed door-to-door work due to the pandemic.

This year, the organization’s goal is to knock on 1.3 million doors in Arizona in what Worker Power Executive Director Brendan Walsh calls “the largest field effort” in the state’s history. When we spoke in mid-September, the canvassers had already knocked on 500,000 doors and talked to 90,000 voters. “The Latino neighborhoods in west Phoenix are a top priority,” said Walsh. “It’s where we have the most voters who share our values but don’t vote proportional to their population, so we invest in more attempts to reach voters [there] than anywhere else.”

Back in Maryvale, at the house with the barking dogs, a middle-aged Latino man finally opened the door. He was glad to hear Romero’s message and pledged his support for Harris. Romero confirmed his phone number to ensure he’d receive a reminder to vote. In subsequent days and weeks, the canvassers would be returning to the house until they spoke to every registered voter and encouraged them to vote for Harris.

Romero, originally from Chihuahua, Mexico, took a leave from her job to spend two months canvassing for Biden. She prefers her work at the Hilton, where she doesn’t have to worry about sunstroke, dogs or doors slammed in her face. But she doesn’t mind a challenge. “Sometimes people get angry, but that makes me want to knock on more doors,” she said, a sly smile on her face.

Like the other canvassers, Romero aims to knock on 80 doors a day and speak to at least 17 registered voters, the same goal she was given in 2020. By Election Day, she will have knocked on more than 8,000 doors and spoken to about 1,700 registered voters in the last two presidential elections. Between the campaigns, she kept her lucky white rock — the one she uses to rap on doors — in her purse wherever she went.

So far, she’s heard a lot from voters about abortion, with passions running high on both sides. After the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, Arizona reverted back to a Civil War-era abortion ban, which was eventually repealed and replaced by a 15-week restriction on abortion. In November, voters will decide on a proposition that would enshrine the right to abortion.

Romero said that one man had yelled at her to leave and declared Harris an “assassin” who was in favor of murdering babies, echoing Trump’s false claims during the presidential debate. She stuck around, however. She learned the man had a daughter, and talked about what abortion bans have meant in places like El Salvador, where women have been imprisoned after delivering stillborn babies.

“What’s going to happen if your daughter is pregnant and her life is in danger?” she asked. Half an hour later, the man said he would give Harris a chance. The conversation had likely cut into her overall productivity for the day, but it was those types of interactions that remained with Romero.

“One reason workers are so good on the doors is that they are used to having hard conversations at work,” said Maria Hernandez, a communications staffer at UNITE HERE Local 11, which covers Arizona and Southern California. Romero, for example, had helped lead the drive to unionize the Hilton where she worked back in 2008. “When you’re trying to convince someone to go on strike or take risks, that’s not easy to do, but they are used to doing it,” Hernandez added.

The Harris campaign has made major investments in Arizona that include a focused effort to reach the state’s Latino voters. The Arizona campaign has 19 offices in the state staffed with nearly 200 employees. The first office to open was in Maryvale, and the campaign holds three Spanish-speaking phone banks a week, along with canvassing.

There is no comparable Republican ground game in Arizona. During two days spent trailing canvassers in Phoenix and Glendale, the only two other people I spotted who were also braving the heat to go door to door were Christian evangelists. The Trump campaign did not respond to questions about its campaign in Arizona, though a recent New Yorker article reported that the Republican ground operation has been taken over by Turning Point Action, a right-wing group, which is not reaching out to undecided voters and instead focusing on Republicans.

There is certainly an effort to target Latinos, however, and particularly first-time voters. Marisol Garcia lives in Phoenix and is the president of the teachers’ union the Arizona Education Association, an affiliate of the National Education Association. She said that her 18-year-old son, who recently left for college, had received seven Trump mailers in the past two weeks.

While Arizona is in the midst of a construction boom, whose workforce is disproportionately Latino, the group also faces “unique economic challenges,” said Lisa Sanchez, an assistant professor at the School of Government and Public Policy at the University of Arizona. High housing costs make it difficult for them to purchase homes, while “they are also likely to have a rent burden higher than their non-Latino peers.”

The same Times/Siena poll that reported Trump gaining an edge with Latinos in Arizona also found that their top concerns were the economy, immigration, and abortion — which dovetails with what canvassers hear in the field. Manny Cahauntzi, a canvasser and UNITE HERE member from Los Angeles, said that inflation was a common problem identified. One young Latina told him she was undecided but that her parents, who worked in real estate, were supporting Trump because they felt he was better able to manage the economy. Another canvasser, Adriana Rojas, who works at the Phoenix Convention Center, listened to a Latina woman bemoan the Venezuelan gangs that were taking over cities — a reference to Trump’s false claims about Aurora, Colorado.

And Romero knocked on one door to be greeted by a Latino man shouting about how it was time to “seal the border and send everybody back.”

But those responses, according to campaign staff, are in the minority. Thus far, most Latino voters who have been reached said they support Harris, and an even higher number back Ruben Gallego, who is running for Senate against Trump acolyte Kari Lake. The question, however, is whether the impressive ground game, as it enters the final month of the campaign, can deliver a large enough margin to overcome what the latest polling indicates.

The ground game can be dispiriting. The heat beats down. Many people aren’t home or refuse to come to the door, likely spying the canvassers through their Ring cameras, which are ubiquitous.

On a recent Sunday, that did little to discourage Alviany Dominguez, who had drawn an especially tough assignment: knocking on doors in Glendale — within sight of the State Farm Stadium, home to the Arizona Cardinals — at a time when the team was playing there.

Dominguez rapped a stone on several doors, to no effect, though I could hear the game broadcast through the door. A Venezuelan immigrant, he had moved to Long Beach, California, earlier in the year, after becoming a legal resident through marriage. He got a job as a housekeeper at the Conrad Hotel in Los Angeles but was inspired by the union to come to Arizona. “There are always people who try to take advantage of the vulnerable,” he said, referring to Trump’s villainizing of Venezuelan immigrants.

He pointed to a house flying a U.S. flag. “Sometimes that means they are supporting Trump, but not always,” he said. A white man came to the door who did not speak Spanish but listened patiently as Dominguez struggled his way through broken English. He was eventually able to ascertain that the man was the registered voter he was searching for and that he would vote for Harris, and he confirmed the man’s phone number so they could remind him via text to vote.

“You see, there are lots of nice people out here,” he said, heading to the next house, where a dog was already barking vigorously in anticipation of his arrival.

Article reprinted from capitalandmain.com. Pictures from UNITE Here.

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CONTRIBUTOR

Gabriel Thompson

Gabriel Thompson is an independent journalist who has written feature articles for The New York Times, Harper's, New York Magazine, Slate, Mother Jones, Vice, Virginia Quarterly Review, and The Nation. His articles about labor and immigration have won a number of prizes, including the Studs Terkel Media Award and the Sidney Award. He is the author of five books; his most recent, "Chasing the Harvest," is an oral history collection of California farmworkers.