With the election nearing, I wanted to interview students within a student advocacy group at American University to get their thoughts on the upcoming 2020 presidential election. I had the pleasure of interviewing two student officers from American University’s Latinx and American Student Organization (LASO), Campbell Urrutia (President) and Helen Kovary (Co-Communication Director). I asked them about their experience with LASO at AU, the issues that are most important to them politically, and about their views on the candidates’ ability to deal with these issues.
Each student leader detailed how much LASO has done for them in their time at American University. Kovary said that LASO has given her a space to talk about her identity. “I’m half White, half Latina since I am half and half it’s like ‘what are you,’” Kovary said. She expressed that she felt alone at first, asking herself if she was the only one who felt that way. “One of my first LASO meetings I talked about my identity and the struggles that come with it,” she said. “There are a lot of people who are understanding, and there are also a lot of people who weren’t part of the Latinx community who were there and listening to me so that was very nice to see. Sometimes you feel alone with it– I think if you give people a chance and people are empathetic enough, they’ll be able to hear you out and try to understand you.”
Urrutia said that his friend introduced him to LASO initially. He said that she described LASO as a community that makes you feel like you’re at home. He explained that the organization tries to balance between social events—like the food trucks on the quad in the November and then more serious political ones, such as when LASO organized their members to attend the march on the Supreme Court for DACA recipients. “I would say generally we do a bit more of the social aspect, because there are organizations like LULAC that are explicitly political Latino affinity organizations,” Urrutia said. “But of course, as time has gone on especially in this administration, we have seen that anyone identifying as any minority, but especially as Latino, is going to have to be political.”
LASO’s President Campbell Urrutia is a third-year CLEG major (Communication, Legal Institutions, Economics, and Government—a major specific to AU), and he is currently residing in his hometown of Dallas, Texas. He believes that the most important issue in the 2020 presidential election is racial injustice. “Especially issues pertaining to Black people in America because I think that’s something that has been ignored for way too long,” Urrutia said.
“Too many people are comfortable with going about their days and their lives as if all those problems and all this terrible history has never happened because it doesn’t impact them directly,” Urrutia said. He expressed the importance of how much things need to change.
With the presidential election so close, Urrutia is concerned that change will not come quickly enough for minorities. “I’m going to be honest: I am not very optimistic at all,” he said. He feels that too many older politicians are stuck in “a mindset that just is not progressive and isn’t going to move us forward at all.”
“I think the country needs to face those problems [racial injustice] and confront those issues and do what it needs to do to correct them: reparations, police reform. Whatever that is and whatever that looks like,” Urrutia said.
One of LASO’s Co-Communications Director is Helen Kovary. She is a third-year sociology major at AU. To her, the most pressing issue of the 2020 election is the polarization of the political parties. “I don’t know much about the Republican Party, but I feel like within the Democratic Party we are very polarized,” said Kovary, “then also, [polarization] between Republicans and Democrats.”
Only recently did she start getting involved in politics, largely because of the political climate at American University. This has led her to see the increasing polarization within the election and the political system. She said that she has noticed there is demonization from each side about the other.
Despite the polarization, Kovary remains optimistic about the election. “I think it’s important to be somewhat optimistic because I just don’t really see, without any optimism, how things will get changed,” said Kovary. She admits that at one point even she was pessimistic. “I know that this will be a slow process,” said Kovary.
Both Urrutia and Kovary plan to vote in the election. Since Urrutia is home, he said he plans to vote in-person at the polls, but Kovary said that she applied for an absentee ballot since she is in D.C., away from her home state of New York. “I think it’s very important to vote,” said Kovary. “This is my first general election that I’ll be voting in so A) it’s very exciting, and B) I think it’s important to vote, especially with our current President.”