Earlier this year the IQ Latino Team had the distinct honor of meeting up with Delegate Elizabeth Guzman in Richmond, Virginia, to learn about her journey and work. Later, the team attended a House Session and toured the State’s Capitol Building.
Delegate Guzman is the first Hispanic female immigrant to join the 400-year-old Virginia General Assembly. She proudly represents Virginia’s 31st House District that covers Fauquier and Prince William County, where she has lived for over 15 years. First elected in 2017, she is up for re-election this year.
All the seats in Virginia’s House of Representatives are at play in this year’s election. In 2017, Republicans won the majority with 51 out of 100 seats. This year, Delegate Guzman believes the Democrats will be able to flip at least the 12 districts where Tim Kaine won the 2018 U.S. Senate election. This year’s Virginia primary is coming up on June 11th, and the general election is on November 5th.
Delegate Guzman might be the only Hispanic female immigrant to represent a district in the Virginian Capitol, but she is one of many immigrant single mothers who moved to the U.S. looking for a better future for her family. After Elizabeth graduated from high school with honors in Peru, her family could not afford to send her to college. Already a single mom, she took a chance and moved to the U.S. thinking about her baby. There, she worked many minimum-wage jobs just to pay rent for the two of them.
Through her hard work and love of learning, Guzman enrolled at Northern Virginia Community College and obtained her degree in Office Administration and Management. Later she got married and had three more children. During her last pregnancy in her thirties, the doctors told her to rest and take it easy. “It was the first time I stopped working since I was sixteen years old,” she told the IQ Latino Team. Never one to rest, she quickly engaged in online learning and today holds a Bachelor’s in Public Safety from Capella University, a Master’s in Public Administration from American University, and a Master’s in Social Work from the University of Southern California.
Delegate Guzman is now a mom, public administrator, and social worker. She was inspired to run to office in 2016 when she heard Bernie Sanders insist on the importance of engaging at the local levels of government. Important groups endorsed her campaign, such as Latino Victory. On November 7, 2017, Guzman won the district over incumbent Scott Lingamfelter by 10 points.
“We need to start engaging at the local and state level in an unprecedented way. Hundreds of thousands of volunteers helped us make political history during the last year. These are people deeply concerned about the future of our country and their own communities. Now we need many of them to start running for school boards, city councils, county commissions, state legislatures and governorships. State and local governments make enormously important decisions and we cannot allow right-wing Republicans to increasingly control them.
I hope very much that many of you listening tonight are prepared to engage at that level.”
—Bernie Sanders, June 2016
We are immensely grateful to the Delegate and her team for welcoming our team to Richmond and spending time with us. Leaning about Latino Leaders like the Delegate demonstrates community representation is possible!