I’m a Mexican-Australian socialist and community activist. I first became involved in politics in Mexico during a 2014 campaign to demand justice for the families of 43 students killed by the state in Iguala, Guerrero.
In 2015 I moved to Melbourne, where I joined the Campaign Against Racism and Fascism - which aimed to counter the growth of far-right, Islamophobic and neo-Nazi groups like Reclaim Australia and the United Patriots Front. In 2016, when the UPF and others announced a plan for a march down Sydney Road in Coburg, I helped organise a community rally in opposition to them. Instead of going ahead with their march, which was consciously aimed as an act of intimidation in one of Melbourne’s centres of Arab and Muslim culture, they were forced to back down and disperse.
In 2018, I worked with young leaders of the Sudanese community to counter the racist hysteria whipped up by the Murdoch Press and the Liberal Party over so-called ‘African gangs’ in the lead-up to the state election. While studying at university I helped set-up Uni Students for Climate Justice, and in 2019 I worked with many other environmental activists to build a blockade against the International Mining and Resources Conference. More recently, I was part of the refugee rights campaign that rallied night after night in 2021 outside Carlton’s Park Hotel prison to end the torture of the Medevac refugees inside.
As a socialist, I believe that racism, Indigenous oppression, climate change, the housing crisis, and the many other big challenges we face as a society are grounded in the destructive, competitive nature of capitalism. If we’re to win a better and fairer world, it’s not enough just to win a small bit of reform here or there. We need to overturn all the oppressive, exploitative dynamics of the current system and build a fundamentally different kind of economy and society in its place.
To get there, grassroots organising and action is key. As we’ve seen throughout history, it’s where ordinary people come together and fight back, rather than just through negotiations behind closed doors in parliament, that real change can be won. I’m running for Victorian Socialists to help build this kind of resistance, and if elected I will use my platform to amplify the struggles of all those who are standing-up against the system, whether in Brunswick or beyond.