This Latina Socialist Doesn’t Want “The Lesser Evil.” So She’s Running for President

Growing up in the South Bronx, Claudia De la Cruz had a lot of questions. The daughter of working-class immigrants from the Dominican Republic — her father was a construction worker and her mother a teacher — she lived in the poorest congressional district in the United States. De la Cruz would watch TV and wonder why the middle-class lives she saw on the screen were so different from her own. Though conservative, her parents introduced her to a church that would inspire her worldview and politics. At 13, to answer her daughter’s questions about the world and its cruelties, De la Cruz’s mother took her to a church that was founded on the principles of liberation theology, where she came into contact with former members of the Puerto Rican revolutionary organization The Young Lords and socialists. 

“I moved from a space of being class-conscious, like I was conscious that I was working class because of my parents, to a political space that gave me clarity,” De la Cruz tells Refinery29 Somos. “And [it] gave me the language to articulate the experience of being working class.”

Karina Garcia had a similar upbringing. Raised by working-class Mexican immigrants in the U.S., she noticed the inequalities of capitalism early on. By the time Garcia went to college, she was already organizing. Her work with the United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS) collective helped her realize that even if some brands attempt to be sustainable, ethical, and equitable, there would always be others ready to exploit workers for profit. The problem, as she saw it, was much bigger than any single company. 

“That helped me understand it was about more than a few bad apples; it really was the system itself,” Garcia tells Somos. “The logic of capitalism doesn't allow for ‘good capitalist companies’ because there is the endless, unlimited drive for creating profit. That’s what got me into anti-capitalist politics.”

This election season, De la Cruz and Garcia are doing something bold: They are running for president and vice president, respectively, of the United States as candidates for the Party for Socialism and Liberation. It’s clear from their nascent campaign that De la Cruz and Garcia aren’t in politics to game the system or to change things from the inside. They hope to end capitalism altogether, promising a fairer and more equitable society in the ideology of socialism.

“Poverty, student debt, and the climate crisis aren’t going to be solved by wasting our time and our energy propping up a party that doesn't serve us,” Garcia says about the Democratic Party. “We have to build our own party, and we really don't have a lot of time to waste. We are trying to build up this movement that we know can actually change everything.”

With their run, De la Cruz and Garcia join working-class women of color who have historically challenged the two-party system because they feel the political parties are not serving them and their communities. Garcia is a Chicana organizer who has fought against landlord abuses, wage theft, and police brutality. Like De la Cruz, she believes organizing the working class is key to building a more equitable world where everyone gets their needs met. For them, a movement of working-class people who want a new system could help solve the current economic situation — where job loss is rising and inflation has made it difficult for many to buy basic necessities  — whereas following the status quo would only continue to benefit the richest companies and people in the country.

“The economy is boosting billionaires,” De la Cruz says. “So why is it important for us to run explicitly as socialists? It's partly ideological, and it’s also to actually build a strong movement that is independent of capitalist systems and structures.” 

Some mainstream political commentators argue that this is a naive and pointless campaign to run in a country where socialism is a marginal ideology. In 2022, Pew Research reported that 36% of adults in the U.S. viewed socialism as “somewhat” or “very” positively, down six percentage points from 2019. But when De la Cruz talks about the objectives of her campaign, her strategy is clear. Like most independent candidates, De la Cruz brings up the urgent need to challenge the two-party system with a radical alternative for voters who do not want to choose between Democrats and Republicans, but she also sees this campaign as bigger than a four-year election cycle. She wants socialism in the U.S. to become a full-fledged movement, and that requires long-term strategies rather than one-off campaign promises. 

“It's important to see the campaign as part of a larger strategy,” De la Cruz says. “We're not selling hopes and dreams. We have real intent in building a movement that has a backbone, and [is] very much grassroots and founded upon principles of educating, organizing, mobilizing, and agitating. [We want to make] sure people take control of their own future and that they are also participating in creating a new vision for this country.”

The new vision isn’t exactly innovative on paper — as De la  Cruz points out, she’s hardly the first socialist to run for president in a country that has historically had an unshakeable love for capitalism — but if put into practice, it would revolutionize the lives of millions of Americans. To end a political system that billionaire lobbyists control to protect the economic interests of the rich, De la Cruz and Garcia want to seize the 100 largest corporations in the U.S. and turn them into public property, like healthcare, education, and childcare.

“Anti-socialist sentiment has become like a second religion in the U.S., [and this happened] precisely because socialism speaks to working-class people, because it places working-class people's needs at the forefront and [because] we see the capitalist system that we live up under, that has been imposed on us as a dictatorship of billionaires who plays a political class, to advance ruling class interest rather than ours, ” De la Cruz adds. 

And, according to the candidates, the problem isn’t just the Republicans. Polls reveal that younger voters are leaning toward third-party candidates because of their disillusionment with Democrat President Joe Biden’s abandoned promises. “We see the advancement of the ruling class interest with Biden's actions in the last four months, in contrast to Biden’s campaign promises to working-class people,” De la Cruz says. “He promised more support for unions, and that didn't happen.”

A key issue for young people is foreign policy. In the last five months, as Israel has bombed the occupied territory of Gaza, killing 30,000 people with some U.S.-funded bombs, following a Hamas attack in October 2023, polls have revealed that young people are more pro-Palestine than previous generations. “A lot of young people between the ages of 18 and 34 are completely against another Biden term, and they are also understanding that the Democratic Party is part of a larger imperialist project,” De la Cruz says. “They are realizing that colonialism and imperialism are real things; they are not things of the past like we're often taught in schools. And it’s important to think about foreign policies as something that also impacts us domestically. It's not something that happens far away. It impacts us here. It impacts us to spend almost a trillion dollars, if not more than a trillion dollars, in military funding because that means that we don't have free education, that means that we don't have access to quality free healthcare, that means that we don't have our infrastructure updated or fixed.” 

International solidarity between the working class is a key aspect of De la Cruz and Garcia’s foreign policy. This also resonates with young people in the U.S., who face insurmountable student loan debt, stagnant wages, and a housing crisis. As De la Cruz puts it, many young working-class people feel that they are paying high taxes to fund the killing of other working-class people in poorer countries. She says, “We want to build foreign policy that is based on solidarity, that is based on collaboration, that is not based on destruction, war, and extraction of resources in other countries.”

For Garcia, the strength of the working class is inherently global. “We’re poor because billionaires have robbed us of our resources; they're rich because they have robbed us of our resources,” she says. “This system connects us to the global working class, and it's something that we have to unite to defeat.” 

Even if the chances of winning are low, De la Cruz sees this election as a first step toward showing Americans a different reality, demonstrating that it is possible to radically uproot the systems of oppression that keep them from thriving. “People ask whether voting for a third option is a wasted vote — what is a wasted vote is to continue to do what we've been doing historically, which is choosing from the neoliberal Democrats and the far-right Republicans,” De la Cruz says. “That is a losing strategy. It's been a losing strategy for many decades, and for as long as we continue to work in that duopoly, the far right is going to keep coming back. The threat is not going to be eliminated. We need to be able to create a third lane where people have real options and where solutions are actually concrete. ”

De la Cruz and Garcia aren't looking to reach across the aisle. They don't want to adjust our system to make incremental changes. They don’t want to game the system or work with what we already have to make things better. They want to address what they believe is the root of the problem — capitalism — and tear it down altogether. 

“We don't want to deal with the symptoms of capitalism,” De la Cruz concludes. “We need to deal with the actual illness, and the biggest illness that we are dealing with globally is a capitalist system. We need to be able to create another structure. Voting for the lesser of two evils is not a strategy we should continue to entertain.”