Well, my name is Claudia De La Cruz
and I'm an educator community organizer and a theologian.
I'm also the Executive Director
of The People's Forum in New York city.
I was born a second generation immigrant
in the United States, born and raised in the Bronx.
My parents migrated
from the Dominican Republic about 40 years ago.
I know that my grandmother was a peasant.
She lived during the dictatorship
of Trujillo in the Dominican Republic.
She worked the plantations
along the side of Haitian immigrants.
So she worked the sugar plantations
and also the rices plantations in the Dominican Republic.
And my grandfather
from my mother's side was also an agricultural worker.
Every time I speak in Spanish
there's a certain connection to
my heart and what my mother land is.
And I think also doing the education
and organizational work that I do, I try to,
connecting a lot of the struggles of the Dominican Republic
with the Haitian struggles and the struggles of other people
across the continent connects me a lot to where I come from.
I started doing organizing when I was 13 years old.
I started doing organizing through the church
and it was a a church that was founded
on the grounds of liberation theology
which is a Latin American way
of doing church
and doing theology
the 1960s and seventies in Latin America.
So a lot of dictatorships.
And so liberation theology came as a space
of being able to that the church needed to take
a preferential option for the poor
and dispossess and place them at the forefront
of their work.
The People's Forum is a space
that serves as an incubator for the working class.
It kind of converges social movements
from within the United States
and also from parts of the world.
I think having the possibility of creating spaces
and making the time to build community, to build collective
then that's the only way we are able to advance.
It may not necessarily be,
then folks will change the world in one meeting
but they will make connections
that would advance the struggles of the poor
and dispossessed.
And so I think having a space of convergence is important.
What we need to be able to do is be struggle together
and not see each other as our enemy
or not see each other as fragments of a group.
But if we are able to, at some point,
some days struggle together, I think would be able to access
and advance more
our agenda, not only as Latinos,
but as working class people.
I'm part of a collective of people
that are contributing to the,
the history or the collective memory of this nation.
Because I'm part of a lineage
I think there have been organizers throughout history
from W. E. B. Du Bois to people who,
organizing the 1960s and seventies, again, Richie Perez
and the Young Lords
and other folks from the Black Panther Party,
like a chairman Fred Hampton, Assata Shakur
people who have raised their voices
and have understood the need to build a collective dream
and have actually fought and died.
And many of them have been incarcerated as well
for being able to push the agenda of the poorest
and most dispossessed and marginalized communities.
And so I'm part of that history.
I'm part of the history of Latinos
and Latinas who have made it really clear
that we are here and we're not going anywhere.
I'm part of a collective voice
of people who are willing and committed
to put their energy, time to create spaces
for collective construction of the worlds we want to see.