New Latina Leadership: An Interview with Gina Hinajosa & Nydia Cardenas

And Tarrant County, we knew from the very beginning was ground zero.

We were just talking about this, that people thought...

the win for the Senate seat, Taylor Romance, was a fluke.

But it turned out to be the canary in the coal mine, right? It's what we are seeing across the state, really across the country, where people want change.

This is a change election year.

And there is great early voting numbers.

It is young people who are turning out to vote.

Young people are back.

And that's that's good.

That's good for our state.

And it's good for a win.

Yeah, well, I know what's really special about this podcast.

I feel like we get a perspective from two Latinos, one who's at the local level and the one thinking at the state.

So I would love to hear your perspective of what are you hearing from the Latino community as they go out and vote?

Well, I think locally here, I want to say that a lot of the response at the door is what you're saying of when I ask people, OK, well, what are the issues that are motivating you to vote this year? And they're just like everything, you know, like, can we just get something different than this? Like I just that anger that sort of especially in Fort Worth, I actually have the two two districts that were taken over Lake Worth and Fort Worth ISD by the state.

So you have a lot of families talking about.

especially around that time that school started where there were some parents who couldn't even take their kids into school like they're you know kindergartners and all this stuff so there was a lot of energy around like public schools education like i'm worried about that for the future and i know you've been such a um your whole career started as an advocate for that so i think people are connecting the dots of like, okay, I need to go vote for Gina.

So then our job is then to say, and all the way through, because it's going to take a team to solve a lot of these problems.

And we need people at the local, state, and national level.

Why couldn't they take their kids to kindergarten? There were some schools that were, that was put into a policy, but it was not communicated to parents.

Oh, it was

just chaos.

Yeah, it was just chaos with the takeover.

Yeah, what are you seeing

with people who are dealing with state takeovers across the state? You're also seeing 100-plus school closures since Governor Abbott's been here.