NO JUSTICE, NO PEACE

Everyone must register to vote in the November election by Monday, Oct. 5. It is easy to do at votetexas.gov/ register. Vote early, from Oct. 13-30, at any Dallas County polling location, or at your precinct on Election Day, Tuesday, Nov. 3. And may these Oak Cliff activists inspire even more community involvement.

Interviews by RACHEL STONE | Photography by DANNY FULGENCIO

wo Oak Cliff women are among those who made American Indian Heritage Day happen in Texas.

Peggy Larney originated the bill in the Texas House of Representatives calling for the last Friday in September to be a day to recognize the historic, cultural and social contributions of American Indians.

Jodi Voice Yellowfish helped write the bill in 2017, and the Texas Legislature approved it so quickly that they were surprised with congratulatory calls. After that, Yellowfish lasered in on Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women.

She stays home as the fulltime parent in a household that includes her husband, her older sister, a niece and two nephews.

The rest of her time is spent watching city council meetings and doing volunteer work for Our City Our Future, a coalition of women of color who advocate for their communities at city hall.

She grew up in Arcadia Park after her family wound up here as part of the Indian Relocation Act of 1956, which encouraged Native Americans to leave reservations and assimilate into urban areas.

Listen to her explain that legacy on episode No. 44 of De Colores Radio podcast.

There was this need to celebrate the culture but also to uplift contemporary victories and work. That was something we hadn’t seen. It’s not just a celebration of culture and heritage. We’re often relegated to this very romanticized past. And we have to deal with this education exhaustion. We can’t just talk about our struggles today and what our communities are fighting for, we also have to educate and explain our history, and I don’t see that for anybody else. People want to know about the sad struggle of our history and show the regalia and song. But the contemporary struggles and victories are often overlooked. It’s something people don’t realize. We’re not just what our culture has been in the past. We’re an ever-evolving group of people.

Our country was colonized with violence, and it’s never really stopped. We still have to deal with these issues of violence. We still have these historical traumas, but being in a huge city like Dallas and sometimes not having the resources is a struggle that we continue to deal with. We’ve really opened a lot of doors and found resources to help MMIW families fill in the gap. It’s sad, and it’s very traumatizing work for groups like ours, but there are small victories every time we help a family.

There was a grandmother in our community. I didn’t know her personally, but I knew of her, and her granddaughter went missing. That really sparked the conversation. We were raising awareness, but we weren’t prepared for a rapid response protocol. We just went with our gut, and by that evening, I was with her and her family trying to figure out how we could help. She needed her people to help because she was reliving past trauma that happened to her. Her granddaughter [was later found and brought to safety] but we saw that we needed to look at the broader picture. There was trauma that had been passed along through generations. Not only were we having to navigate her case, but we were also having to see what we could do for the grandmother as well because it was triggering and re-traumatizing. She’s now an active member with our group, and she’s become a very beautiful and strong voice in this work. We deal with a lot of people running away, and that’s deeply rooted in sexism and racism that doesn’t get handled in a meaningful way. We’re raising awareness on domestic violence and helping people find resources. Sometimes people are fleeing for their lives, and they’re looked at as runaways.

I’m seeing for the American Indian community, but also for everyone, a lack of resources in so many ways. I see a lack of getting basic needs met and constantly being in survival or crisis mode. We shouldn’t all have to live with that stress. Living through a pandemic and the domestic violence situations that can come from that is very worrisome.

I’ve always been fortunate and blessed to have resources for my family. A lot of people can’t handle the stigma around mental health and needing to handle emotional and stressful situations. I see how my family needs that kind of help. And it breaks my heart thinking about people who may not have the strength to ask for help or the ability to find resources.

amiro Luna Hinojosa became an activist 12 years ago in support of “dreamers,” undocumented residents who immigrated to the United States as children.

Luna, who was reared in Oak Cliff, spent more than four years on “hard-core activism,” he says, going on a seven-day hunger strike, performing civil disobedience and getting arrested for the cause.

But when the proposed Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors, or D.R.E.A.M. Act, failed by five votes in the U.S. Senate in 2010, he had a “shift in consciousness,” he says.

“We can do almost anything under the sun, and these elected officials are not going to change their minds. Their beliefs are fundamentally different from ours,” Luna says. “I thought, ‘Why don’t I get involved in trying to get them out of office?”

He spent a decade working on political campaigns, going after some of the most antiimmigrant politicians in America, including Maricopa County, Arizona, Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who was unseated in 2016. Luna also helped Democrat Victoria Neave win a longheld Republican seat in the Texas House of Representatives in 2017.

This year, the 36-year-old started Somos Tejas, a nonprofit that engages voters in overlooked neighborhoods.

I decided to take my 10 years of experience in campaigning and help create a nonprofit where we did campaigns but without a candidate, focusing on the ’hoods and the marginalized communities.

Ultimately, I want to see South Oak Cliff turn out just as much as North Oak Cliff. We want to see Pleasant Grove turn out just like a Highland Park precinct would. As a 10-year campaign manager, campaigns are not necessarily designed to focus on the precincts with the lowest turnout. I’ve seen that happen time and time again, and those were the same neighborhoods that I grew up in. To me that was always bothersome.

A lot of times there’s a big gap of knowledge to understanding basic information on why it’s important to vote, what City Council does, what state representatives do. Where do I need to vote? What does voting by mail look like? We’re nonpartisan. We don’t tell them who to vote for, but we explain how to vote and that voting is necessary.

We look at precincts that that have below 8% voter turnout, precincts that are typically 10% lower than neighboring precincts.

Our goal was to knock on more than 50,000 houses the first year, and then COVID hit, and we had to restructure ourselves. We took a break for several months, and then we started knocking on doors again [in June]. The same precincts we’re hitting are the same communities that are hardest hit by COVID, and it’s so telling about how this is systematically made this way. They’re the ones with less broadband, less access to fresh food, fewer resources overall. Our people have so many barriers to overcome, and I think one of the best ways to overcome them and uplift your voice is through voting and civic engagement.

We’re dropping off care kits with a surgical mask, hand sanitizer, a one-pager on COVID safety and information on voting and the U.S. Census.

Typically if you run a campaign, you have a few thousand dollars at least to be able to purchase all of the things you need, so you can pay a team, pay for literature. For us, since it’s so new, and we’re not backing any candidates, everything is coming out of pocket. Everyone is working for free. I decided to get another job [this summer] because the resources are not there to survive. But eventually, I would love for this to be a fulltime job.

We are always looking for any type of support. If you can’t donate, volunteer to block walk. If you have any other resources to provide: face masks, stickers, even coming out to events, sharing our work. Doing anything to spread the word.

hen Leslie Cannon found out in early summer that her ZIP code had the highest number of COVID-19 cases in Dallas County, she had to do something about it.

Her two children attend Louise M. Kahn Elementary, and one is medically fragile.

“This felt really personal,” she says. “Our community already has more high blood pressure and diabetes.”

So she created a flyer with the latest statistics on COVID-19 for the 75211 ZIP, tips on prevention and information about testing sites.

“I printed it on my home printer, and with a mask on, walked around to my neighborhood and passed them out,” she says. “That was the first thing I did, and then I was like, ‘What are the resources that I have that can help people?’ ”

Cannon works in community engagement for Be the Match, which connects patients who need bone-marrow or blood stem-cell transplants with donors. She knows people.

So she reached out to friends at El Centro’s nursing school and the Martin Luther King Jr. Family Clinic in South Dallas to find a way to provide more testing in her neighborhood.

The MLK clinic had tests and a mobile unit available, and 30 El Centro students volunteered their time. City Councilman Chad West’s office provided generators, tables and chairs for a pop-up testing site at Super Mercado Monterrey on Westmoreland Road.

They tested 178 people.

“The numbers from our site will be released, but they were really high, and I was shocked,” she says. “This community has to have more testing. And if we’re going to be sending our kids back to school, it’s imperative that we all get tested so that we can know our status.”

More recently, she arranged testing for teachers and staff at Arturo Salazar Elementary.

Cannon also got the Better Block and Methodist Health System to donate six handsanitizing stations to be placed at shopping hubs in her neighborhood.

All of this started because of a project she and her kids, ages 10 and 4, started to engage their community on answering the U.S. Census.

“It’s my responsibility to be that advocate because I have the resources to do it,” she says.