San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Latina helps make history in District 2 runoff
Jalen McKee-Rodriguez and Jordee Rodriguez bonded three years ago as aspiring educators in the Teach for America program.
During a month together at Teach for America’s Houston institute, McKee-Rodriguez and Rodriguez (no relation) realized they had a lot in common. They were the same age, they were both LGBTQ and they shared a commitment to progressive political change.
Rodriguez, who grew up in Laredo, immediately made a deep impression on McKeeRodriguez, a biracial military brat who graduated from the University of Texas at San Antonio, with the way she had transcended a traumatic childhood.
“Her mother was a judge in Mexico who was really big on cracking down on the cartels,” McKee-Rodriguez said. “And her mother was eventually kidnapped about 15 years ago. We still hope that her mother is alive.
“Jordee was really young and was basically the parent-guardian for her siblings. What stood out to me when I met her was that she said to me, ‘If my mom was willing to die for justice, and die doing the right thing, I should be willing to live to do the same.’ ”
That kind of passion and commitment can knock down the sturdiest walls of resistance.
Over the past six months, Rodriguez applied that commitment to managing the District 2 City Council campaign of her old Teach for America colleague.
On June 5, McKee-Rodriguez pulled off the difficult trick of unseating a San Antonio council member — Jada Andrews-Sullivan — and did so in emphatic fashion, by a margin of more than 26 percentage points. He became the first openly gay man elected to City Council in San Antonio.
This stunning political triumph was produced by a 26year-old first-time candidate and a 26-year-old first-time campaign manager.
McKee-Rodriguez doesn’t hesitate to give credit to Rodriguez for enabling him to run a campaign that successfully defied the old-school political orthodoxy.
“She is incredibly intelligent, gifted; and she has a remarkable story. She is a young, queer Latina woman on a mission,” McKee-Rodriguez said.
“I was looking for someone young and scrappy who has passion about people and the policies that affect us. Preparing a better, more equitable world.”
Rodriguez recalls that when McKee-Rodriguez first told her about his interest in the East
Side council seat, she responded by asking him why he wanted to run.
“He let me know that he wanted to run because he believed that the vast majority of constituents in the district were not actually being represented or reached out to,” Rodriguez said.
Rodriguez had served as a fundraising intern for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. Last year, she worked for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee as a field manager and Texas voter protection deputy on the disappointing U.S. District 23 campaign of Gina Ortiz Jones.
“Coming out of the Gina Ortiz Jones campaign, I saw that the Democratic Party was not prioritizing outreach to communities of color — specifically at the border,” Rodriguez said.
“As a border woman myself, that upset me. I believed that systems and infrastructure needed to be laid down for foundations of representation to be effective.”
McKee-Rodriguez had briefly served on Andrews-Sullivan’s council staff, and he observed how the stale politics of District 2 worked: Ignore everyone but the established high-propensity voters and hope that a couple of mailers will be good enough to secure their votes.
McKee-Rodriguez and his campaign manager were determined to forge an alternative path.
“A huge focus for the campaign was equitable pay for canvassers and reaching voters 13, 14, 15 times. Especially those that had never been contacted before,” the councilman-elect said.
“We wanted to transform the influence of money in District 2 elections, and we did that by rejecting developer dollars, SAPOA (San Antonio Police Officers Association) dollars and corporate PAC dollars. She was instrumental in all of these decisions.”
On this campaign, style informed substance and vice versa.
McKee-Rodriguez and Rodriguez were determined to expand the District 2 electorate.
That meant knocking on doors in every single precinct. It meant speaking directly to about 12,000 residents, rather than settling for the consistent-voter base of 4,000. It also meant asking questions and building a platform around the biggest concerns expressed by voters.
On Tuesday morning, McKeeRodriguez will take the oath of office. As for Rodriguez, she’ll be moving to Austin in a couple of months to study at the University of Texas School of Law. But she’s still hoping to find time for political activism.
“If I can’t be doing that through campaign work,” she said, “then I want to be working in any other programming that also pushes forward the advancement of these marginalized communities.”