CLAUDIA DE LA CRUZ
Claudia De la Cruz is a mother, popular educator, community organizer and theologian. Being at the nexus of many different projects, organizations and social movements, Claudia connects different groups of people to link and merge struggles together in the overarching fight for justice.
Born in the South Bronx to immigrant parents from the Dominican Republic, she was nourished by the Black and Caribbean working class communities of the Bronx and Washington Heights in the 1980s and 90s. At an early age, she was already questioning the conditions of poverty, violence, and oppression in her neighborhood, and what she saw and experienced served as her first entry point to understanding working class consciousness.
When she was 13, Claudia began her political organizing work at her home church—Iglesia Episcopal Santa Maria (later the Iglesia San Romero de Las Américas–UCC), grounding her work on principles of liberation theology. She actively participated in campaigns to free political prisoners; to get the U.S. Navy out of Vieques, Puerto Rico; to end the U.S. blockade against Cuba; for the freedom of Palestine; against police terror—to name a few. In high school, she became a peer educator, conducting workshops on reproductive health and safe sex at community hubs and progressive churches, particularly for youth in the Bronx. It was through this work and her experiences as a working class Black Caribbean young woman that she understood there was only one solution to our collective problems: to fight for a better future, a socialist future.
She traveled to Cuba for the first time at the age of 17 during the Special Period of extreme economic hardship, and the resilience, conviction, and revolutionary spirit of the Cuban people transformed her. Seeing their resistance reaffirmed her commitment to fight for a world free from the domination of Washington and Wall Street.
As a young woman, she was exposed to many other communities in struggle from around the world: from the Puerto Rican independence movement, the Palestinian struggle, and the communities of exiles from Chile and Colombia; to the solidarity struggles with Haiti, peasant struggles in Brazil, and the grassroots leaders from Venezuela organizing the Bolivarian Circles; to Black liberation struggles, the progressive and leftist Dominican community. Seeing people from all over the world standing up for their dignity and sovereignty only fortified her commitment to build international solidarity and political organization inside the United States.
This commitment extended to her work with youth and young adults. Through her time completing her studies at the City University of New York (CUNY), she coordinated Palenque, a project that brought together teenagers from across the city to study histories of struggles and resistance through popular education, arts, and culture. In 2003, she participated in mobilizing youth from this program, along with church and community members to participate in rallies against the war in Iraq, including the historic mass marches in Washington, D.C.
A year later, while working at a community based organization in Washington Heights, Claudia, along with a group of four teenage women co-founded and directed Da Urban Butterflies (DUB). DUB was a youth leadership development project and center for young women from the Washington Heights community and the Bronx to build sisterhood, learn histories of struggle and resistance, and engage in collective action for justice. For 13 years, DUB was a space where young women were able to learn about collective action and struggle, organize study circles, summer programs, conferences, summits, rallies, cultural festivals, participated in solidarity brigades, as well as build coalitions and collaborations.
Claudia completed seminary in 2007, and became the pastor of her home-church, Iglesia San Romero de Las Américas–UCC. In her commitment to sustain such a significant space for solidarity, internationalism, working class politics, culture and values—grounded on the faith, principles and traditions of liberation theology and grassroots organizing—she served the church in her position as pastor for eight years.
Most recently, she has served as the Co-Executive Director and co-founder of the The People’s Forum in New York City—a political education space and cultural home for working-class organizers, leaders and intellectuals from all over the country, and around the world. In her role at The People’s Forum, Claudia continued her work towards building internationalism and people to people solidarity. She has led and participated in numerous international gatherings and events all over the world. Claudia has been a key convener of groups and social movements, and contributor to the overall conception and development of political education and cultural programming.
For nearly 30 years, Claudia has demonstrated a fierce commitment to building people power. She has actively participated and contributed to collective grassroots initiatives, particularly in the Black and Latino neighborhoods of Washington Heights and the South Bronx, communities that continue to play a special role in her political development and journey.
Claudia lives with her eight year old son. She considers herself blessed to learn from and grow with him, and to have a community of family, friends, and fellow fighters for justice to help nourish him.
She is running for President of the United States with the Party for Socialism and Liberation with a steadfast and clear conviction that there is a need to build political organizations and a mass political movement independent from the two party system of the ruling class.
KARINA GARCIA
Karina Garcia is a Chicana organizer and popular educator who has been fighting for a better world since she was 17 years old as a high school student in California. From El Barrio in New York City to the border areas of Texas, she has helped lead campaigns against landlord abuses, wage theft, and police brutality, as well as fights for reproductive justice, immigrants rights and student financial aid reform. She is a founder of the Justice Center en El Barrio in New York City and is a member of the Central Committee of the Party for Socialism and Liberation.
Karina’s father migrated to the U.S. from Mexico when he was just 16 years old, and the will of working-class immigrants like him to survive and thrive inspired her to take on life with determination. This served her well when Karina received a full scholarship to study at Columbia University. She moved across the country by herself, knowing that she had to seize upon every opportunity to give back—a single year of tuition was the equivalent of her family's entire household income. As soon as she arrived, she joined every conceivable progressive organization on campus. She led struggles to expand financial aid for low-income students, for immigrant and worker rights, and to speak out against the Iraq war. In 2006, her activism received national attention when she led a campaign to confront and shut down the anti-immigrant fascist militia, the Minuteman Project.
When Karina took a semester off to do a speaking tour in California, she met with high school and college students to keep building the movement for immigrant rights. That same year, she joined the Party for Socialism and Liberation. Graduating with a degree in Economics, Karina went on to become a New York City high school math teacher. After school, she advised a student group that protested against budget cuts, the Iraq war, police brutality and anti-immigrant laws. In 2012, she moved into a national organizing position for the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Justice where she worked for nearly a decade training immigrant women and working-class Latina activists in New York, Texas, Virginia and Florida.
Karina believes above all in organizing the power of the working class, organizing with domestic workers and trafficking survivors in building their anti-wage theft and anti-trafficking campaigns, fighting alongside immigrant communities in NYC against ICE raids and Trump’s vitriol, and representing her fellow educators in the United Federation of Teachers. Karina writes for Breaking the Chains magazine, a unique socialist and feminist magazine and most recently she organized mobilizations against the Supreme Court decisions that eviscerated abortion rights with the goal of rebuilding a working-class women’s movement.