Issue No.4. Ana-Maria Ramos: State Representative, TX

 

We want to dive right in to today’s profile: Ana-Maria Ramos, running for State Representative in Texas, House District 102. Ramos is an attorney, a teacher and a community leader, who has also bumped up against the system as a pregnant teenager and a child of Mexican immigrants. She’s part of an increasingly difficult to ignore population of Texas, a state whose image is slowly incorporating vibrant ethnic diversity and all that comes with it into the more classic Texas archetype of Stetsons and steer.  Keep reading to find out why North Dallas is a microcosm for America, how to find common ground with people who hate you, why education for all could fix the world, and she'll even make you feel better about picking a favorite of your dogs, even though you love them all.

Lightly edited for length and clarity.

E+A
Was there an “aha” moment that led to you registering as a candidate? 
 
Ramos
I grew up the middle child of seven. My mother was a single mom, my parents were Mexican immigrants. I grew up in the more economically challenged part of Dallas, and for many reasons that really affect struggling communities, I dropped out of school. I started missing school a lot, and by 15 I had my first child. I was terrified. Going to our county hospital to have my little girl I thought, “I got to get it together. I know how this story’s going to end.” I decided I needed to go back to school, so I started studying and I got my GED. Then I went to community college. I eventually got my bachelor’s, a master’s, and I ended up in law school. Throughout that time I worked in the community, knocked on doors, worked with people just like me. I started to become very active because there are many injustices going on, and I realized that there were many policy decisions being made that affected, or probably even dictated, where I was going to end up. Today I am an attorney, but I started teaching at the community college. I’ve been an educator for most of my career because I wanted to give back and save the little girls who were like me. Although I’ve always been active and worked in the community, I decided to run after I saw my neighbors and my family being completely vilified by the President of the United States. I thought, “No one’s going to buy this; this hatred for our community is not going to work.” And then he won. And it was devastating. But to add to that pain, our State Legislature, including the individual who is the current incumbent in this seat, was the second part to that initial blow. From the bathroom bill, to  anti-immigrant sentiment and vilifying our community. I thought, you know what, I can’t help from the back anymore, I have to step up front. Because this is wrong. We can’t continue to tear our communities apart. So I decided to run.
 
E+A
Texas is particularly interesting. Do you want to tell us a little about your district? Because Texas as a state is just gigantic, and the immigrant population is also massive. So what’s going on in your district that makes it unique and interesting?
 
Ramos
I grew up in the southern part of Dallas, and I would always hear, “Oh everyone in North Dallas, they’re the wealthy, they’re the rich, we don’t have to really worry about them.” But now that I live on the other side of Dallas, there are a lot of challenges here. I’m in a part of Dallas that is not only North Dallas, but includes three surrounding suburbs that encompass the district I’m running in:  Richardson, Garland, Addison, and North Dallas. So it’s four different municipalities if you will, in this district. But it is a majority minority district. It is a very rich immigrant community here that has been ignored. 40% of the people living in this district speak a language other than English at home. It’s amazing. We went to an elementary school, I read a Spanish book to a bilingual class, and the principal was telling us they speak over 30 languages in that elementary school. All of the children come from apartments and the turnover is extremely high. So there are some very unique needs. When I was growing up, you either spoke Spanish or you didn’t, there was no in between. Now it’s not just Spanish--it’s Arabic, it’s Mandarin, it’s Korean, it’s Vietnamese. There’s so much opportunity with that and we have largely ignored not only what we can do to help those communities, but the contributions they make in return. And that’s what’s the most beautiful, unique part of this district, that makes us very different from other parts of Texas. We are basically the new America.
 
E+A
It’s such a multicultural state, but that’s not represented in the state government? 
 
Ramos
Absolutely. The policies and policymakers are losing a great opportunity to grow by not addressing this changing community and not ensuring we’re servicing it correctly and adequately.
 
E+A
How is the right doubling down in Texas?
 
Ramos
My personal opinion based on what I’ve seen is that it’s a fear thing, an absolute loss of cultural dominance in our community. There was a town hall here that made national news, and I was there with neighbors and we created a Neighborhood Indivisible group and we were protesting. This man with his red baseball cap, Make America Great Again, came up to me--he was a big, tall, Anglo man, and I’m Hispanic of course, and he said, “Now that we’re finished you can get your paycheck and get back on your bus and go back to Houston or wherever you people are from.” I was shocked. It was so blatant. I’m an attorney here, my son goes to school here, I’m an invested stakeholder in this community, and it was assumed that I don’t belong here. And the most scary part of that was there was a school board debate and he was right there next to one of the candidates, supporting her. These are the people who are making sure they continue to dominate and intimidate voters from being part of the process. I don’t think it was an anomaly, that he’s never said that to anyone before, and that I just happened to be the one person he said it to. He’s said it to many others. And I cannot believe that it isn’t fear. It has to be, for there to be so much vitriol.
 
E+A
As a candidate, how do you speak to people who don’t think you belong here? 
 
Ramos
As a Democrat, it’s our nature, in our DNA of being a big tent party, we don’t like to exclude people. We are by the core of our beings all-inclusive. We need to have those conversations. I don’t know that I’ll ever get anyone to see my point of view, but I think there are many areas where we do have aligned values, we just have different ways of addressing them. There are many commonalities that right now are getting so lost because of the current person in charge. This man that yelled at me, if we sat down and we had dinner, he would like me. We would get along. I’m one of those people, I grew up in a very open community where you find a way to relate to everyone. And I think we would. But we’re not giving ourselves the opportunity to do that because of the current leadership. Maybe they wouldn’t vote the way we would, but I think the hate would be toned down a lot.
 
E+A
What are the issues you could find common ground on with him?
 
Ramos
In knocking on doors and talking with people, the number one thing is education. Whether you’re Republican or Democrat here in the state of Texas, educators and regular folk are terrified of where our state education is going. We’re devaluing education and educators. The second thing is that the Texas legislature this past session voted to take away local control from our municipalities. They’re saying that the state can decide better than our communities can. And that is one area where Republicans in our community completely disagree with the direction the state is going. There are many things if we just dig below the nonsense that Trump is feeding us, sit down and had a real conversation, we could find some solid common ground.
 
E+A
There’s a lot happening with regards to reproductive rights in Texas, including recently SB8. For you and your campaign, were you to win, what are your priorities for protecting and expanding women’s reproductive rights in your home state?
 
Ramos
Well, I believe we need to go back to medicaid expansion. Obamacare, the Affordable Care Act, is still the law of the land, and unfortunately because we’ve decided to not value our people, women are the hardest hit. If women are not insured, their children are not insured, and they’re missing work. We really need to go back to investing in Texans and making sure we have accessible and quality health care for women. And not only that, in Texas they started these healthcare clinics for women where they took federal funds and supposedly were going to offer alternative resources for health care for women. It’s not doing the work it’s supposed to be doing. In fact, it’s really hurting women. What I would do is reinstate the funding for Planned Parenthood. I had my daughter at 15, and I swear to you, I would have had one at 16, 17, and 18; I would have had more children if it weren’t for access to that healthcare. Planned Parenthood was the clinic that helped me with contraception so that I would not have another child. My child’s future is because of organizations like Planned Parenthood. When we deny women resources like Planned Parenthood and access to contraception, or really just the freedom to make decisions about their own bodies, we’re denying a generation of families and a lifetime of children and their future families the ability to really advance and succeed. The only reason I’m a lawyer today is because I had access to contraception at 15. That is the only reason I’m able to purchase a home. And my daughter who I had at 15, she’s teacher now. And she’s paying her taxes and giving back to the community. But it was because of that healthcare access. Today in Texas they deny us fact-based sex education, and they’re harming our families. If we don’t do something aggressive, whether it’s legislation, we’re really going to be in a bad place 5 to 10 years from now.
 
E+A
The number of clinics providing abortions in Texas has fallen dramatically, especially in the last decade. As of 2014, 96% of Texas counties had no clinics that provide abortions. And you have about 43% of women in Texas living in those counties. 
 
Ramos
Fortunately in my district we do have Planned Parenthood. This is more of an urban area even though it’s the suburbs, so the access to providers is so much easier than in the rural areas. And that’s the irony of it. Because the lawmakers in those rural areas are voting for things that hurt their communities by denying women access. Fortunately here, not only are the providers available, but we have the public transportation for those individuals to get those services. In Texas it’s a three day visit--they’ve made it so difficult to terminate her pregnancy that they’ve lengthened the process. You have to go back a couple of times. Fortunately, in this area it’s not too far away from you. The people here do have options. My biggest concern is people outside those areas, where there’s limited accessibility--fewer resources, less transportation options--those are the ones who are really getting hit hard, and we have to do what we can to really help those communities as well.
 
E+A
You mentioned Medicaid expansion. Beyond that, are there specific policy or legislative plans that you are going to support?
 
Ramos
Sticking with healthcare--the way we divert the funds. There’s an organization that was at one of our meetings talking about the rates of teen pregnancy in our region --we have one of the highest rates of teen pregnancy in the country here in the state of Texas. Imagine a world where there’s contraception for these young girls. Where these individuals did not have to get on Medicaid, did not have to go to the local hospitals, and leave with a $10,000 hospital bill. If we just went back to the basics of educating individuals and educating our youth, and providing them access to contraception--then we would address millions of dollars in uninsured health costs that end up driving costs for everybody else up, and driving our property taxes up as well. One of the most basic, fundamental things is educating the populace. It is going to impact our property taxes, our jobs--it’s going to make us better over all.
 
E+A
You’re running on three main policy issues: education, health care, and property tax relief. On the education front, what are your plans for education, and why do you care about it?
 
Ramos
Well, I’m an educator. I teach at the community college. But I started my career off teaching second grade. I have worked in public education, private education, for-profit and non-profit. I know how all those academic institutions work. Based on my experience working in every single one of those, it is really important to strengthen our public education. That’s going to dictate where we are as a state in the future. If we don’t have an educated populace, what good does it do that we’re the second largest economy in the country? Where we can’t even educate our people. Where we have corporations who come to Texas that can’t even hire Texans because we lack the skills and education, so they have to bring in people from all different states to do the jobs that Texans should be able to do. But because we haven’t valued education, we’re left on the sidelines. So it’s really important to me that we invest in our public schools and communities. We cannot be the greatest economy, or the second best economy, the biggest business driver in the country, and then leave our people on the sidelines without adequate education.
 
E+A
What role does property tax relief play in education reform? For our readers (and us), could you give an overview of the situation you’re facing in your district, and Texas in general, when it comes to property taxes?
 
Ramos
The state funds a proportion of public schools, and then the rest comes from our local property taxes. (And of course there’s some federal funds as well). In the past, the state has committed to paying about 40% of funding for our public schools. However,  they have decreased this amount to the point where schools need additional funds. So now, we’re probably at about 25% [state funding]. That doesn’t mean that our needs are not increasing. There are more students enrolled in school, there are more needs that need to be met, but the state has scaled back on its responsibility. We are still underfunded from before the recession in terms of what we spend per student. So as enrollment increases, as the community diversifies and those additional programs are needed--whether it’s after school programs or bilingual ed, the people are still coming, the needs are still coming, but the funding from the state is not. The state is mandating to districts, “You have to do this, this, and this….but we’re not giving you the money to do it.” So the schools are left with lower budgets, greater needs, and having to cut, and cut and cut. So they’ve turned to property owners to get some additional funding. And that’s how it effects me in my house, and my neighbors. Our property taxes are going up, but our students and neighborhood schools are still not getting what they need. In Texas, our state wants the authority to do what they want to do with our public schools, but not the responsibility to do what needs to be done in our schools.
 
E+A
That sounds like a pretty big hurdle to cross. Now, we want to put the wonkiness of the campaign aside and ask some more personal questions to help people get to know you on a more human level.
  
The first question we’re most interested in right now, what woman has had the biggest impact on your life thus far?
 
Ramos
My grandmother. My grandmother was a stay at home mom and had nine children. She was from Mexico, and she had the most influence in my life. She was very conservative, very much ‘mind your own business,’ but definitely ‘do your best, work hard, don’t give up.’ It was always really important to my grandmother that we always did our best. And if you got out of line, she’d remind us to get back in line. She was the most inspiring to me because not knowing the language here in America, she always voted, she was always a citizen. She was the reason I started learning about politics. I would walk to her house every day after school, and she’d prepare us rice and beans. Every single day for my whole childhood we had rice and beans, rice and beans. I remember walking to her house after school and she had an Ann Richards yard sign, and I was taken aback. Who was this lady Ann Richards? My grandmother was a supporter of Ann Richards, and it was inspiring to me. After that I really started asking questions, because of my grandmother.
 
 
E+A
She sounds awesome. Do you have a most embarrassing story? Something where you’re like, “That was a really epically embarrassing day for me?”
 
Ramos
The most embarrassing...hmm...I probably shouldn’t.  It was back in the day, and this is totally dating me, but I’m okay with that. I had MC Hammer pants. MC Hammer had these pants that had these elastic waists and they’d wrap over and kind of carry low. And I just thought I was so fly that day with my MC Hammer pants and I thought I looked so cool. During lunch I was talking to friends and somebody came up and pulled my pants down. I was mortified. It was so embarrassing. What I did, which I shouldn’t have, was I yelled. It brought more attention to me, because before that no one was necessarily looking at me. But because I screamed everybody then looked at me and everybody started laughing at me. So I never wore MC Hammer pants after that.
 
E+A
That is the drawback to elastic waistbands for sure.
 
Ramos
And the drawback to MC Hammer pants.
 
 
E+A
So were you an MC Hammer fan, or did you just like the look? We’re fans of harem pants as well, so we wouldn’t even judge you for liking the look.
 
Ramos
I was kind of a fan, absolutely. Everybody was. “Can’t touch this.” Like are you kidding?
 
E+A
Do you have a favorite song now? Or a personal theme song or something that really pumps you up at the moment?
 
Ramos
Maná. It’s Spanish rock & roll. They have a song in Spanish called “Me Vale,” which is basically “I don’t care. You can make fun of me because I have long hair, but I don’t care. And who are you to judge me?” It’s a cool rock song they play at the Spanish clubs from time to time.
 
E+A
What do you like to do when you’re not talking about all of this stuff?What do you do for fun?
 
Ramos
I’m in heaven  when I’m with my family. I have lots of nieces and nephews and they’re all teenagers or millennials and love to come argue with me about things. My nephew loves Kanye West (and it was before Kanye got really crazy) but we’d argue all the time about Kanye running for president or something. They like to poke at me, and call me the crazy tia. My all time favorite is letting them make fun of me. We were playing Drake the other day and my son was like, “Mom, that’s 2013 Drake. Really?” It’s just so cute. Because I think I’m cool, and then the kids remind me that I’m not. That’s my favorite, just hanging out with them.
 
E+A
If you win, what are you going to do to celebrate? We imagine it might be family adjacent?
 
Ramos
Yes, that’s exactly right. Hanging out with the children. My nieces and nephews, not knowing anything about politics, still went knocking on doors because they believe in their tia. It’d just be going back to the basics and thanking them for enduring my craziness all of these months and having an appreciation dinner for them. My family is amazing, and has helped me get through this at times when I don’t feel that I can. I would love to just celebrate with my family and spend quality time with them.
 
E+A
We’re going to wrap this up, but first: Dead or alive, who would you take to dinner, what would you ask them, and why?
 
Ramos
I would take my grandmother. She passed away a few years ago. I would just ask her, “How is heaven? How is the afterlife?” That’s what I would ask her. If I could even get through the tears.
 
E+A
Inquiring minds want to know.
 
Ramos
Yeah, what’s really going on over there?
 
E+A
We’ve been tipped off to  the fact that your campaign has events called “Dem Doggies Pawtry.” We are taking it as a sign that you might be a dog fan. So do you have a drink, and or dog, of choice?
 
Ramos
Yes. My dog of choice is a shitzu. I have a shitzu that I sleep with every night that my grandma gave me. She’s very temperamental, so she’s just like mom. We have three dogs, but she’s my favorite. The other dogs kind of know that and get jealous. And my drink of choice would be a Cuba Libre--rum, diet coke, and lime.
 
E+A
Finally, if we were to give you a silver bullet to solve any problem, and it can’t be world peace, what would it be? And why?
 
Ramos
It would be access to education for everyone, all over the world. In communities, and villages, and jungles. Access to education, to books. That’s what I would fight for. And why? Because at the core, if everyone is educated or informed and aware, that’s where change really happens. They say knowledge is power, and it’s absolutely true. So by empowering our people through education, we’d solve our own problems. We wouldn’t need a silver bullet because we would be our own problem solvers.