Especially as a teenager, I was always being racially profiled by the police. You just see all this injustice, and you want to do something about it, but you don't know how.

Organized labor is the only way to have fair distribution of wealth...

If you don't know, your labor unions and community organizations, there's somebody you can ask to guide you. A lot of people, especially in the Latino community, they have this big ballot and all these names and propositions on it, and they say 'Oh my God'. They don't know which of these to vote for, so they don't vote.

When you talk about sacrifices, the ones in my family who have sacrificed are my children, because I love what I'm doing. I love the work. I love to go out there and talk about organizing the people. To me, that's something I really enjoy.

If we don't have workers organized into labor unions, we're in great peril of losing our democracy.

There's just so many facets, I think, of the ignorance in our society that have to be corrected if we're really going to have a democratic society and a society that is just and that respects all of the members of this society regardless of who they are, what color they may be, what sexual orientation that they have or what gender, you know, they happen to be.

We criticize and separate ourselves from the process. We've got to jump right in there with both feet.