This story was co-published in partnership with Somos Tucson and supported by the Pulitzer Center.
Gabriela Torres Luna stares at the pile of political ads and propaganda that came in the mail about two weeks before the midterm election. Stuck between campaign flyers — with names and faces she doesn’t recognize — is a thick, light-green envelope with her own name on it. She picks up the Pima County mailer, tears off one end and pulls out something she’s never seen before: a U.S. ballot.
Gabriela is sitting at her dining room table in the south side of Tucson home she shares with her mother, her two children and her brother. Her 91-year-old grandmother, visiting from Sonora, México, is embroidering in the living room.
This is not the first ballot the 43-year-old mother has received. A year earlier, shortly after becoming a naturalized U.S. citizen and registering to vote, Gabriela says she got a ballot for a local election.
She didn’t even open the envelope.
A co-worker at Tucson Unified School District later asked her whether she had voted.
“She scolded me. ‘You have to vote,’ she told me. But I don’t know how to vote. I don’t know how it works,” Gabriela says in Spanish. “I got a little green envelope in the mail, and I didn’t know what to do with it.”
It’s common for immigrants who recently became citizens to struggle with voting, and additional factors like language barriers make the process an even more daunting social responsibility, said Lisa García Bedolla, a professor of education at the University of California, Berkeley.
“The first time you vote in a new system is quite complicated,” García Bedolla said. “Or can feel complicated in the sense of not knowing what the process is.”
Gabriela came to Arizona from Cananea, México, just 38 miles southwest of Naco, a small border town whose port of entry is commonly used by people traveling to Tucson. She was 28 and engaged to a U.S. citizen. They were married for six years and had two children before divorcing in 2018.
She had been a lawful permanent resident with a green card since 2013. President Donald Trump’s second term motivated her to finally pursue citizenship.
Last year, her then-10-year-old son asked her in Spanish, “Mom, do you have papers? Isn’t Trump going to deport you?”
Gabriela told him that he did not need to worry because she had a green card. The truth was that it was about to expire.
“Either I renewed it or applied for citizenship — just like that, with my basic English,” she says. “Oh well,” she remembers thinking, “We went for it.”
It was July 2025. “With the way things were going with the president … I said, ‘No. Before something happens, for my children or whatever the reason may be,’ I said, ‘I’d rather become a citizen,’” Gabriela remembers.
She did it quietly. She had no money to pay an immigration documents preparer, so she filled out the naturalization application on her own. The day she passed the test, she called her mother, who was with her children, and shared the news through tears.
“Mom, they’re not going to deport you anymore,” her son told her.
On the day of her naturalization ceremony, Gabriela, her children and her mother went to a Tucson restaurant to celebrate. Afterward, she dropped her family off at home, drove to the Motor Vehicle Division office to update her driver’s license and, while she was there, remove her ex-husband’s last name.
She registered to vote, too.
Gabriela says she voted only once while living in México. She did not trust the electoral system. “Because you think, ‘What’s the point of voting? So-and-so is going to win anyway,’” she says.
She doesn’t feel the same distrust about voting in the United States. She thinks “it’s much more fair” here.
Like Gabriela, approximately 1 million Hispanic adults became naturalized U.S. citizens between 2022 and 2026, and now have the opportunity to exercise their right to vote as U.S. citizens, a recent Pew Research Center report said. Naturalization is the process by which lawful permanent residents who meet residency and other requirements become U.S. citizens and take the Oath of Allegiance.
Ahead of the 2024 presidential election, campaigns across political spectrums fought for Arizona’s Latino electorate — roughly one-quarter of the swing state’s eligible voters. They were younger compared with the overall electorate. They were among the highest labor force participants. And they had language skills — nearly half 50% were bilingual, according to a 2024 UCLA Latino Policy and Politics Institute report.
But less attention was paid to the almost one in five Latino eligible voters in Arizona who were naturalized citizens. That share was second only to Asian and Pacific Islander voters, according to the report.
“Newly naturalized citizens might require more support to understand and participate in the U.S. electoral process,” the report stated.
Studies show that the path to becoming a citizen is cost prohibitive, time consuming and confusing for many immigrants.
Surmounting those barriers and becoming a naturalized citizen is only the first step toward the ballot box. Political and elections experts stress that hurdles to voting include understanding how to register, understanding the ballot measures and races at stake, and having the time to fill in and mail a ballot or make it to the polls.
Adding to the stress for new citizens who are registered to vote, like Gabriela, is a wave of unfounded allegations under the Trump administration of widespread fraud involving noncitizens voting.
Warnings have come from the U.S. Department of Justice, which announced it will place monitors across the nation during the midterm election. The federal agency sent monitors to Pima, Maricopa and Apache counties during the July primary election, as it has in past elections.
Political rhetoric from the highest office in the U.S. has compounded that stress. “They caught thousands of votes in New Jersey where illegal aliens were allowed to vote. Thousands and thousands of votes,” Trump said in a July speech in Georgia. PolitiFact found neither federal nor state data to support Trump’s assertion.
An estimated 25 million naturalized citizens are eligible to vote in the midterms — a key election that could shift power in the U.S. Congress, where both the House and Senate are controlled by Republicans.
About 33.2% of naturalized citizens who can vote are Hispanic, as of 2024. They are coping with historic levels of xenophobia and mass deportations that have largely targeted Latinos. Despite fear, many remain motivated to vote in the U.S. — some for the first time and for deeply personal reasons.
“What for?”
Rocio Gallegos, a 55-year-old mother who has lived in the United States for more than 35 years, simply did not feel the need to acquire a new nationality. Until she began to worry about her legal status as a permanent resident.
The sense of security she felt living in the United States with a green card began to fade, as she perceived increasingly aggressive statements about immigrants from Trump when he announced his second presidential bid.
“‘No,’ I said. ‘I need to become a citizen because Trump really is going to send me back to México,’” Rocio recounted in Spanish. “And I literally can’t go back to México because I have Valeria, who depends on me … who depends on all the advanced medical care available here.”
Sitting inside Rocio’s home, a few steps from the front door in southwest Tucson, Valeria Gallegos’ eyes are fixed on a jigsaw puzzle. She is wearing a yellow dress, her straight, shoulder-length black hair looks freshly styled, and her bangs frame her green eyes.
It’s mid-October. A brutal summer heat is finally fading in Southern Arizona, and Valeria’s mother, Rocio, is decorating for fall. From a speaker, a song by Camilo Sesto plays. The Spanish singer rose to fame in México and Latin America during the 1970s and 1980s.
Valeria is 32 and was born with spina bifida, a condition that occurs when the spine and spinal cord do not form completely during the first weeks of pregnancy.
Valeria is the main reason her mother Rocio chose to become a U.S. citizen two years ago.
Rocio left México at 18, the minimum voting age in that country. Like Gabriela, she also didn’t trust the voting system in her native country.
On Nov. 3, Rocio plans to vote for the first time in her life.
However, she still does not know exactly how to vote in Arizona. The naturalization process prepared her to understand the history and values that the United States upholds, she says. But not how to make her voice heard through the vote.
Originally from the Mexican state of Chihuahua, which borders Texas and New México, Rocio met her husband, Joel Gallegos, more than three decades ago, in Nebraska. Joel is of Mexican descent and was born in the United States. They had Valeria and then their son Aminadab, 24, in the U.S.
“I was a permanent resident for 28 years,” Rocio says. “I was reluctant. I didn’t want to become a citizen. I would say, ‘No, what for? I don’t need it.’”
She renewed her green card twice, each time receiving a 10-year extension. “I was already about to go for the third one,” she says.
Data shows that Rocio’s lengthy stay as a permanent resident, while longer than usual, is not an isolated case.
México ranks first among all countries of origin for new U.S. citizens, followed by India, the Philippines, Dominican Republic and Vietnam. At the same time, Mexican nationals top the list of applicants who spent the longest time as lawful permanent residents before naturalizing, averaging 10.9 years, according to 2022 federal immigration statistics.
A 2017 Pew Research Center study found Mexican lawful immigrants were among the least likely to become U.S. citizens. An estimated 67% of lawful immigrants eligible to apply for U.S. citizenship had naturalized by 2015, compared with only 42% of eligible Mexican lawful immigrants. And a 2026 analysis by the Migration Policy Institute shows that 34% of Mexican immigrants were naturalized citizens in 2024, compared with 51% of all immigrants in the United States.
Nearly all Mexican immigrants with permanent residency surveyed in the Pew study said they wanted to become citizens eventually, but like Gabriela, many cited concerns about limited English proficiency. Others worried about the cost of applying and a lack of time as obstacles.
“You have to become a citizen”
In east Tucson, another Mexican-born woman, mother and entrepreneur has spent years working to find a balance between her rights and her obligations as a resident of this country.
Inside Delicias de Michoacán, a strip of purple LED lights leads to lilac-colored walls. Three bright screens display a menu of Mexican treats, including elote and raspados. It’s halfway through the workday, and Magda Barragan sits in the middle booth, her hair pulled up, her sharp black eyeliner and arched brows give her a look of precision.
A television plays the news in Spanish. Magda is wearing a T-shirt that bears the name of the Tucson business she owns with her husband. She remembers what led her to become a U.S. citizen.
One turning point came during an encounter with a border officer in Nogales. Magda, then a permanent resident, was trying to bring catering carts from México into the United States for her business when an officer refused to let her cross with them.
“The officer treated me really badly. She told me, ‘Because I don’t want to.’ And then she told me to go back to México,” Magda says in Spanish.
The following day, Magda’s husband, a U.S. citizen, retrieved the carts without any problems.
“That’s when my husband told me, ‘You need to become a citizen,’ because it’s never going to be the same being a permanent resident as it is being a citizen,” she says.
But Magda’s journey to citizenship — and eventually to vote — had begun decades earlier.
Originally from Guadalajara, México, she first moved to the United States with her U.S.-born husband in 2001. The family moved between California, Texas and México before returning to the U.S. in late 2013. After multiple attempts to establish themselves, including a brief stay in Wisconsin, they settled in Tucson, where her husband’s father lived.
“We made the decision to stay here because my children were already in school and were growing up,” Magda says. “I always told him that we should try to give our children the opportunity to learn English and that maybe, sometime down the road, we could go back.”
Magda is 42 years old now. She became a permanent resident in 2015. Four years later, she and her husband opened Delicias de Michoacán, drawing on her family’s experience operating ice cream shops in México.
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, their business was barely six months old. She says they struggled to qualify for government assistance, first because their business was so new and then, she was told, because she was not a U.S. citizen.
She found it unfair that she could operate a registered business and pay state and federal fees but still face restrictions on the assistance available to her.
“We all pay taxes, right? I mean, everyone equally. They’re not going to ask you about your legal status. If you have a business, you have to pay taxes,” she says.
Those experiences stayed with her. Another push came during a personal development seminar, when a speaker encouraged longtime permanent residents to pursue naturalization rather than continue renewing their green cards.
It was time. Magda enrolled in citizenship classes and supplemented her lessons with YouTube videos, studying American history, government and the questions she would face on the civics exam.
She applied for citizenship in April 2023 — five years after becoming eligible — and completed the naturalization process that fall. She remembers her interview being surprisingly brief. The immigration officer asked her six civics questions but spent much of their conversation asking about her ice cream business, like if it was homemade and if she used local fruit.
This November, Magda plans to vote in person. Her preference stems partly from concerns about election integrity shaped by her experiences in México, although she emphasized that she is not saying the same problems occur in the United States.
Old doubts, new fears
Rocio’s distrust in elections now applies to both countries she’s lived in — México and the U.S.
“What’s the point of voting if they’re just going to give the win to whoever they want anyway, or if the people in government are all working together?” she questions.
That echoes the observations of Linda López-Stone, senior director at MomsRising, a national organization that works on issues affecting families, children and mothers, including immigration, health care and child care. She has been coming to Tucson to promote voting among Latina women.
López-Stone said one factor she has identified affecting the electoral participation of newly naturalized Latina citizens in the United States is distrust of the electoral system in their countries of origin.
“They come with a lot of preconceived ideas from their home countries about how voting works, believing that voting isn’t secure,” she said. She added that first-time voters find the process exceedingly complicated, something Rocio and Gabriela also emphasized.
López-Stone also identified a third factor that could affect the electoral participation of newly naturalized Latina citizens: fear.
“There is a fear of going to vote because of ICE. People think ICE could be present because of racial profiling, and we already know that more than 500 U.S. citizens have been detained,” she said, referring to the actions of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Finding their voice at the ballot box
Three years after her naturalization, Magda is preparing to vote in her first midterm election. She cast her first ballot in the 2024 presidential election — an experience she approached with the same determination to learn that had helped her become a citizen.
“I didn’t vote just for the sake of voting,” she says.
For Magda, becoming a U.S. citizen means more than gaining the right to vote. It also means having a greater say in decisions that affect her family, her business and her community, including those who cannot vote themselves.
Citizenship has already changed the way her household approaches elections. What began as a decision to protect herself and her business has become an opportunity to participate in civic life, and to encourage her family to do the same.
Her experience reflects a broader trend among naturalized Latino voters, a growing segment of the U.S. electorate whose political participation is shaped by their experiences with immigration, economic pressures, caring for their family and the responsibilities they feel toward their communities.
The number of Latinos eligible to vote nationwide is projected to reach nearly 40 million in 2026, an increase of 5.2 million since 2022, or 16%, said Mark Hugo Lopez, director of race and ethnicity research at the Pew Research Center.
While most of that growth comes from young U.S.-born Latinos reaching voting age, newly naturalized immigrants, like Rocio, Gabriela and Magda, account for about 20% of the expanding Hispanic electorate.
And once they become citizens, Lopez said, Latino immigrants have historically voted at higher rates than their U.S.-born counterparts. Part of the reason to naturalize is to earn benefits like Social Security.
And “part of it is to vote,” Lopez said.
Political advocates, elected officials and community leaders understand that the more people who naturalize, the more people who can vote and make a difference, especially in swing states like Arizona with large Latino populations.
“This is yet another source of potential voters for Latino groups who might be looking to activate and to mobilize Latinos,” Lopez said.
However, Lopez said federal data shows a sharp decline in the number of immigrants becoming naturalized U.S. citizens since the start of the Trump administration.
A report from UCLA’s Luskin School of Public Affairs found that naturalization processing times have increased significantly, while monthly approvals have fallen 83%, from a peak of 88,000 in April 2025 to fewer than 16,000 in August 2026. Researchers linked the decline to changes in the naturalization process.
“The data that the federal government has reported suggests fewer naturalizations because they’re doing more background checks,” Lopez said. “So I think we have a little bit of a low because of the new process.”
The National Partnership for New Americans went further, alleging in an October news release that the delays are deliberate and part of “an apparent effort to deny otherwise eligible people their civil and voting rights.”
Magda says that what activates her to vote is her interest in policies affecting older adults, health care, schools and immigrants. In the weeks leading up to the November election, she reviewed Arizona’s ballot propositions, reading their language before searching for additional information on YouTube and the internet.
For years, Magda lived in the U.S., raised her children, paid taxes and built a business without being able to cast a ballot. Now, as a naturalized citizen, she has a say in local, state and federal policies. And she wants others to recognize the value of that opportunity, before they feel the consequences of a decision they had no part in making.
Her perspective is shaped partly by the conversations she has with Tucson customers at Delicias de Michoacán. Many have become familiar faces over the business’s seven years. Fellow small business owners, she says, have described a difficult economic year.
“It affects all of us. Not just a few people. It’s like the domino effect. When one falls, we all fall,” she says.
Magda encourages her three children to take voting seriously. She believes civic participation requires more than registering or showing up at the polls. Voters should understand, she says, how their decisions could benefit or harm their neighbors.
“We should do more to teach our children about the importance of voting because, when they become adults, they’re the future,” she says. “If we don’t teach them, it’s like a little path, like a wheel. If you turn it, it keeps turning, but if you don’t, it stays right where it is, and they won’t teach their children either.”
She also has noticed more political conversations among her customers and more people asking how to register to vote. The election materials arriving in Spanish, she says, make it easier for voters to learn about candidates and propositions.
Magda believes that too many people begin paying attention to politics only after a government decision directly affects them. She wants to see that change, particularly among Latino voters, whom she encourages to become more informed and involved.
“Because a lot of people don’t do that, even if they’re already U.S. citizens. They don’t educate themselves about how we can actually have a say in the laws that are passed,” she says. “Especially with everything that’s been happening lately. These things might not affect me personally, but they affect the community. So, in one way or another, all of this affects all of us.”
“A collective enterprise”
Magda says her husband, who was born in the U.S., has never been particularly interested in voting. After becoming a citizen herself, she began encouraging her family to participate in elections and made a habit of reviewing ballots and propositions together.
García Bedolla, the Berkeley professor, said she has observed similar behavior among naturalized Latina voters, who often approach voting as a shared responsibility, gathering with relatives or friends to discuss ballot measures and candidates before casting their votes.
“Particularly the women, have made voting a collective enterprise,” García Bedolla said.
Women now make up the majority of people becoming U.S. citizens, accounting for about 55% of naturalizations nationwide in 2024, according to federal immigration data. That shift extends to ethnic groups.
“The majority of Latinos who are naturalizing right now are women and that actually is a change,” said García Bedolla. Families historically prioritized men’s immigration applications but that trend has shifted as more women immigrate independently, she said.
Lisa Magaña is a professor at Arizona State University who studies Latino politics and immigration. She describes this process as political socialization, in which family relationships and household habits influence whether people participate in elections.
For newly naturalized citizens, that influence can extend to relatives who have held citizenship their entire lives but rarely exercised their right to vote. While naturalized Latino voters are increasingly important to U.S. elections, researchers caution against treating them as a single political bloc.
“Latinos are not monolithic,” Magaña said, adding that their political preferences vary by geography and country of origin. In Republican-dominated Texas, she said there are a lot of Republican Latinos. In Florida, Puerto Ricans were more likely to vote for Harris while most Cuban Americans went for Trump.
In the 2024 presidential election, Donald Trump made significant gains among Hispanic voters, receiving 48% of their votes compared with 36% in 2020, according to a Pew Research Center analysis. Kamala Harris received 51% of the Hispanic vote, down from Joe Biden’s 61% four years earlier.
But those changes were driven largely by differences in voter turnout rather than voters switching parties. Among eligible Hispanic voters who participated in 2024 but not 2020, 60% supported Trump, while many Biden supporters from 2020 stayed home.
Lopez said the distinction matters when examining Latino political preferences, which vary by national origin, generation, income, education and immigration history.
Latino voters could play an important role in this year’s midterm elections, especially those who support Democratic candidates, as they show higher levels of engagement and motivation to vote than they did in 2022.
According to Pew Research Center, 77% of Latino Democratic voters say it “really matters” who wins control of the House, up from 58% in 2022. Additionally, 53% say they are extremely motivated to vote, compared with 41% four years ago, and 45% say they have given a lot of thought to the upcoming elections, nearly double the 24% who said the same in 2022.
For naturalized citizens, the political landscape is also shifting.
An October 2026 survey conducted by the U.S. Immigration Policy Center at UC San Diego and the National Partnership for New Americans found that 74% of Hispanic naturalized registered voters surveyed felt less secure in their citizenship than they did a few years ago. And 85% said the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement had gone too far.
The survey included 1,000 registered naturalized citizens nationwide, out of which almost half were Hispanic.
García Bedolla said immigration issues can be especially significant to Latino voters because it raises questions about their place in U.S. society, even when other issues more directly influence their daily lives.
“Immigration tells me how you think about me,” she said. “Your feelings about immigration tell me whether you think that I belong here.”
Economic concerns also were prominent. Across all respondents, 78% rated grocery prices as extremely or very important to their voting decisions, followed by health care and housing costs at 75% each. Among Hispanic respondents, 56% said their family’s financial situation had worsened over the previous year.
Despite the attention naturalized voters receive during election season, the survey found that 65% of respondents had not been contacted about voting by a political party, candidate or community organization.
Working, starting businesses and then voting
Rocio and Gabriela want to exercise their right to vote in the United States for the first time, but they feel lost amid the amount of information they need to find and process. And finding answers on top of their busy lives is difficult.
Rocio says that before becoming a U.S. citizen, she had not paid enough attention to the election system because she knew she couldn’t participate.
“Today, I’ve been a citizen for two years, and I see elections differently,” she says. Although her biggest motivation is being able to continue caring for her daughter, Rocio doesn’t think it would be ethical to worry only about issues that might affect her personally.
“What’s the point of becoming a citizen if you’re not going to fight for a better quality of life for yourself, your family, immigrants and everyone else?” she reflects.
García Bedolla said that motivation is familiar among the naturalized immigrants she has studied. Citizenship can offer a sense of security, but also the opportunity to advocate for relatives and neighbors who cannot vote.
“People feel more, because of the ways in which enforcement is affecting families and affecting people’s lives, that if you have the opportunity to naturalize and vote that you should so that you can speak for the people who can’t,” García Bedolla said.
Rocio plans to use her vote as a way to express herself. She is simply trying to educate herself and to make sense of the ballot — figuring out how to choose among names she doesn’t recognize, offices she doesn’t understand, and proposals she knows nothing about yet.
What concerns Rocio most is “primarily the cost of living, the economy, because every day it’s harder for many families to get ahead,” as well as access to health services and the tightening of immigration laws.
“I believe that most of us here are not bad people; we come here to work, and we come here to strive, day in and day out,” she adds.
She recognizes that immigration is a complicated issue. She does not oppose having clear rules.
“We really need to find a balance,” she says. “I think laws should also be respected and that the country has the right to have a secure border, but I also believe people should be treated with dignity and humility.”
Her husband, Joel, owns a construction business. Their 24-year-old son, Aminadab, sometimes helps him, although he spends most of his time studying at the University of Arizona and Pima Community College.
Rocio remembers Aminadab and his father spending time discussing what the best path forward for the country was. That was two years ago. Aminadab was drawn to Trump’s economic plans. He was interested in politics and the presidential election was a frequent topic of conversation at home. But the election came. And Aminadab did not register to vote.
In the lead-up to this year’s midterm election, Aminadab said he wanted to follow in his mom’s footsteps and vote for the first time. He missed the Oct. 5 registration deadline.
Gabriela has been busy.
She not only passed her citizenship test last year, but after nearly 10 years working in housekeeping at hotels and as a custodian at a Tucson school, she applied for a teacher assistant position. The role would provide her the opportunity to work with children with special needs at a Tucson Unified School District school.
Once again — just like with the U.S. citizenship test — she worried that her “basic English” would be an obstacle. She got the job after the first interview.
As a single mother, Gabriela’s day starts around 6 a.m.
She drops her children off at middle school and high school, goes to work, waits for them to finish their extracurricular activities, and returns home around 6 p.m. When she has time before dinner, she sets aside an hour for herself by hiking to the top of Tumamoc Hill with a friend.
Even with the new position at a local school, her earnings are not enough to make ends meet. Like many school employees who choose this option, part of each paycheck is withheld so Gabriela can receive paychecks throughout all 12 months of the year.
“Wages are rock bottom, and bills are through the roof,” she says.
To increase her income, Gabriela is once again looking for a night job in the cleaning industry, where she says she never imagined working when she lived in México. She also worked at a school in her native country.
The second job would likely be an overnight shift, from 10 p.m. to 2 a.m., leaving her with only 4 hours of sleep at night. She says she has done this before, and added that many of her Tucson educator colleagues have side gigs or a second job.
With overloaded schedules, both Gabriela and Rocio say they would appreciate having better access to systems that provide more information about how the U.S. electoral system works.
Neither Rocio nor Gabriela know which congressional district they live in, who their Pima County supervisor is or who represents them on the Tucson City Council. They don’t know about the propositions in the ballot.
When Gabriela opens her ballot she sees something unexpected: her voting materials include descriptions of propositions in Spanish and a voter guide she can also read in her first language. “I thought it was only in English,” she says.
When Rocio opens her ballot she learns there are more than two U.S. political parties, including Libertarian, Green and No Labels.
Rocio believes citizenship preparation for naturalized people should include less history and more training on how to vote.
“There are so many of us Hispanics who literally don’t understand all of this. For example, the ballots list senators, this and that. It’s not like México; it’s completely different. And for me personally, it’s difficult to understand because this is the first time I’m going to vote. But there’s no one to explain it to you or guide you,” she says. “So you’re left with a question mark, not knowing what you’re supposed to do.”
“I think I’m going to start studying,” says Gabriela, with a wide smile that seems to always accompany her.
“Mom, it’s all right”
In addition to caring for her daughter, Rocio ran a cleaning business for several years, but put it on hold early this year. In January, Valeria underwent surgery — the 40th of her life, Rocio says — this time on her gallbladder. Her recovery took several months.
Now, Rocio is preparing to start a business again. She is making artesanal jam named Delicias de la Vida to sell at community markets and stores. She is also trained as an eyelash technician and is converting a room in her home into a space where she can see her clients.
Rocio says that she learns from Valeria. “She motivates me.”
She’s “taught me how to live with pain, how to face things as they come, and reminds me: ‘Mom, it’s all right.’”
Sitting at the table, showing off the beautiful nails Rocio had done for her, Valeria doesn’t miss a single detail of her mom’s conversation about voting, about their future. “She understands everything I’m saying,” Rocio says, her eyes focused on her daughter.
Patiently, Valeria waits for her mom. So, together, they can finish a new jigsaw puzzle — something they do almost every day, sometimes for four or five hours at a time.
In the evening, Valeria will sing karaoke with her dad. They’ll pay homage to some of her favorite artists — Yuridia and Vicente Fernández. “That’s what she enjoys the most,” says Rocio, quickly pushing her husband’s Pima County ballot back in the light-green envelope with his name on it.
“Let’s see if he understands it,” she says of her husband, a U.S. citizen born with the right to vote.
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