Election Day

Mira here. It was a huge honor and a powerful experience to be one of over 1,500 hundred Election Day volunteers getting out the immigrant vote as part of the New Americans Initiative (a project of the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights). My small group was assigned to a couple of precincts in La Villita (Little Village), the largest Mexican-American community in the midwest, where we knocked on the doors of registered voters to encourage them to get out and vote if they had not already.

Here are some of the folks with whom I walked the neighborhood: Jim, Maria, Susie, Candice and Rogelio:

After a long day, we gathered from all over the city at this ginormous Mexican restaurant called Mi Tierra, and it was only then that I realized just how expansive this collaboration had been. The NAI volunteers knocked on more than 51,000 doors and hung 72,000 door hangers, as well as serving as poll watchers and judges and making phone calls! And many of the predominantly immigrant precincts we targeted had enormous increases in voter turnout. If you'd like, you can read the ICIRR press release.

Although a few people on my route were rude or uninterested, most folks enthusiastically told us that they had already voted or they planned to do so soon. We had some really neat conversations and it was so cool to see new citizens so excited about having voted for the first time. A few people even proudly produced their voting receipts!

Here we are at the "after-party" (I think the sweater/t-shirt combo is classy, don't you?):

Eric's parents came out with us on their final night in Chicago:


Quite an event!


It was an exhausting, but very fulfilling day! It was so life-giving to realize that I was a small part of something really big!