In a still-crowded 15^th congressional district race, Samelys López has a clarity of vision for the Bronx that is rooted in continuity, inspired by personal experience, and imbued with a sense of urgency for social justice. A former intern of the incumbent, Congressman José Serrano, who is soon-to-retire after 30 years of service, López said she wants to continue Serrano’s legacy, while also recognizing the timely need for class warfare, and a true reckoning with what it really means to be a “progressive”.

It is this latter point that is central to López’s campaign and she is eager to show her stripes and distinguish herself in the primary race from what she calls Corporate Democrats. For starters, she is a co-founder of Bronx Progressives, a group of grass-root activists working to advance the agenda of progressives like U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders and Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, both of whom have endorsed López.

Like Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez, central to López’s agenda is getting big and corporate money out of politics, and in this regard, she walks the talk. With $205,168 in the bag, it is the fourth-highest total of campaign donations by a candidate in the race, after City Councilman Ritchie Torres, State Assemblyman Michael Blake, and former City Council Speaker Melissa Mark Viverito. However, it is her average campaign donation amount that López seeks to highlight.

“Right now, I am leading in the entire race as it relates to the amount of individual small, grass-root dollar donations,” she said of her latest fundraising surge throughout April and May. “I have an average contribution of $15 an hour, and I have the most amount of [individual] donations in the Bronx within the 15th congressional district.”

Like Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez, López does not accept corporate donations, a stance she also highlights to distinguish herself from her rivals. “I have rejected real estate developer funding. I have rejected the influence of big money in politics,” she said. “You cannot expect to represent a working-class neighborhood that’s as diverse as this community by selling your soul to the real estate developer luxury industry, and Vegas financing your campaign.”

The latter reference may have been a subtle dig at either Torres or Blake, both of whom received individual donations in Nevada, though a cursory check of their campaign financing records appears to show that they amount to just over $1,000, and $2,500 respectively.

The race itself is extremely tight and seemingly unpredictable, given the district is one of the most Democratic leaning in the country. It is also one of the poorest in the City, even more so as a result of COVID-19. In May 2020, polling group, Data for Progress, carried out a survey of 323 likely voters in the primary race and found that it was a two-way race between City Councilman Rev. Ruben Díaz Sr., at 22 percent of the vote, and Torres at 20 percent.

Blake, Mark-Viverito and City Councilman Ydanis Rodríguez came in at 6 percent, while López had two percent of the vote and Jonathan Ortiz, Julio Pabon and Tomas Ramos stood at 1 percent.

Describing her campaign as an independent, community-led, grassroots political movement, López’s top three issues are housing as a human right, universal healthcare in the form of Medicare for All, and getting money out of politics. When asked if a progressive agenda was too polarizing to some to succeed in 2020 given the current divisiveness in the country, López said it is unity among the working classes of all races that is needed right now to counter-balance the influence of Corporate America on politics.

Positioning herself as so diametrically opposed to Diaz Sr.’s politics that it’s off the charts, López said, like President Donald Trump, he is part of a larger symptom of what’s wrong with the country, and with the political parties. Diaz Sr. is the most conservative of the Democratic candidates in the race and has also caused offense in the past in relation to his views on LGBTQ rights.

López is critical of those who are now calling for Diaz Sr. to drop out of the race, saying this is being done now purely for political purposes whereas she had organized to remove Diaz Sr. from the Bronx Democratic Party long before she ever decided to run for office.

In terms of her healthcare policy platform, López favors a single payer, healthcare-for-all approach regardless of employment or immigration status, as well as the right to universal childcare. “You cannot do those things if you’re selling your soul to the big corporations and the real estate developer community because you’re going to be compromised,” López said. “And you’re not going to have the independence that you need to fight the fight to the extent that you need to fight it.”

When it comes to funding such programs, she is critical of her opponents who voted for $11 billion to be invested in the building of four new jails throughout New York City. “That’s insane to me,” she said. “Instead of using those $11 billion to fund NYCHA, to fund schools, to fund our parks, they use their power to vote against the best interests of the community.”

It is this mindset, along with personal experience that have shaped López’s political ideology. She is unequivocally loyal to the Bronx community she said once saved her. “Education, a combination of my mother’s courage, the shelter system, and the fact that we were able to have stable housing here in the Bronx in this congressional district saved my life and gave me my opportunity,” she said.

Born in Puerto Rico in 1979, López moved to the Bronx when she was 10 years old, having spent some of her childhood in the homeless shelter system with her mother, who is Dominican. “My mom was a domestic violence survivor, and she was also a seamstress,” said López, explaining that after divorcing Lopez’s father in Puerto Rico, her mother moved to the United States when López was still an infant.

Between 1980 and 2017, the population of the Bronx grew by almost a third (26 percent), driven primarily by the immigrant community which doubled between 1980 and 2017. After the arson epidemic of the 1970s, as parts of the South Bronx started to experience urban renewal in the 1980s, new and rehabilitated residential structures including subsidized multi-family homes were a welcome arrival.

Like many immigrant families, with whom López says she identifies, she was grateful for the fresh start this afforded her family yet she was also cognizant of how hard it was for her mother to make ends meet. She said there wasn’t always enough money for a babysitter, and so her mother would sometimes pick her up from school, and she would complete her homework at the sweatshop.

As a child she said she also spent much of her time defending her mother because she didn’t speak English. “I would always translate for her, help her fill out paperwork to go to appointments and things like that,” López said, adding that sometimes her childhood translation responsibilities even extended to helping her mother’s employer.

However, it was watching her mother face domestic violence, and seek out help from welfare when she was pregnant with López’s younger brother that left a deep impression on López. It created within her a sense of indignation and frustration that people like her mom who had worked so hard to make ends meet and contribute to society could be left without a social safety net when certain life circumstances presented themselves.

It is experiences like these, Lopez said, that make many Bronxites relate to her as a candidate because they are not new to them. “A lot of people in the 15th congressional district experience the same indignities,” she said. She lauds the resilience of those who survived that earlier 1970s era when the Bronx was burning, drawing parallels between the injustices caused by City cutbacks during that time and the hardships facing Bronxites today, including rising rental costs, poor-quality air and inadequate healthcare.

Her experience as an immigrant also makes her fight for what she calls language justice, seeing beyond the needs of her own Spanish-speaking community, and ensuring to connect with other non-English speaking residents. Her website is available in English, French, Arabic, Bengali and Spanish. “That’s the respect that I have for the diversity in the community,” she said. “I want everybody in the community to see themselves reflected in my campaign.”

Indeed, López views language as a critical component for engaging and communicating with the community, highlighting her bilingualism as yet another distinguishing factor from some of her opponents, including Torres who she said, to her knowledge, does not speak Spanish, and would therefore be unable to communicate with 70 percent of the Latino population in the district.

With such a density of immigrants living in the district, immigration policy is also high on López’s agenda. “I’m fighting for the abolishment and defunding of ICE which is terrorizing our communities, and creating pathways to citizenship for people that are undocumented, expanding the DACA program and fighting for undocumented workers,” she said.

She is particularly concerned about the consequences for undocumented workers like farmworkers when they organize to highlight poor working conditions. Lopez said that when they do so, in some cases, their wages get stolen and their bosses threaten to call ICE and have them deported. She said she is, therefore, fighting for a whistleblower app that will give workers some form of protection in such situations, as well as calling for the repeal of the 1996 immigration laws.

Norwood News asked López if she also supports the expansion of the T and U visa programs, the quotas for which often go unfilled each year. These programs allow certain victims of human trafficking and other crimes to obtain visas to remain and work temporarily in the U.S. if they agree to help law enforcement with investigations and/or prosecutions of certain crimes committed against them.

López said she would, adding, “Too often members of our immigrant community are incentivized to not report crimes because they fear being deported and being separated from their family and loved ones. The members of our immigrant community should not be punished with deportation for simply reporting crimes and cooperating with law enforcement.”

When it comes to political experience, though ostensibly and comparatively, López trails some of the main race frontrunners such as Mark Viverito, Diaz Sr, Torres, Rodriguez and Blake, it doesn’t mean she is not politically astute.

A graduate of both Barnard College and Columbia University, she completed a fellowship with the National Association of Latino Elected Officials, which she said taught her about policy and government and eventually led to the internship at Serrano’s office.  “After the internship ended, they hired me as a congressional aide where I would help out with housing and immigration casework,” she said. “So, I have an understanding of the inner workings of a congressional office.”

She is also a former member of Bronx Community Board 7, and a long-time activist in the Housing Justice for All movement, the statewide coalition which fought for and won, in June 2019, arguably the most important pro-tenant rent reforms the State has ever seen. In fact, from 2012 to 2019, López worked as Project Manager at Breaking Ground, an organization that develops and sustains affordable housing for communities, and creates programs for homeless and other vulnerable New Yorkers.

Patrick Bonck is Director of Communications at Breaking Ground and said of López’s time with the organization, “Samelys was a valued member of the Breaking Ground team. She was passionate about creating exceptional housing for people who have experienced homelessness”.

It is perhaps no surprise therefore that López is an advocate for the New York Homes Guarantee, the basic idea that every New Yorker has the right to a safe, stable, and affordable place to live, that no one becomes homeless, that homes are in good repair, and that no one suffers from the threat or consequences of eviction.

It ties in with her earlier views that everyone should be able to seek help from the government in a manner that is dignified when something unexpected happens in life that is outside of their control.

López is also a co-founder of Velo City, a youth cycling initiative that recruits youth from the South Bronx and Brownsville, empowering them to fight on their own terms for the dignity and needs of their communities.

In terms of other policy positions, López said it was Serrano, who incidentally has remained neutral in terms of his successor, who inspired her interest in environmental policy. When it came to cleaning up the Bronx River in the 1990s, she credits Serrano as being one of the most left-leaning members of Congress, someone, she said, who focused on solidarity and who was humble enough to be led by environmentalists on the ground.

“It was an eyesore in the community because it used to be a concrete plant,” she said. “There was a lot of rubbish, so Congressman Serrano was able to bring resources and funding to clean up the Bronx River to basically prioritize environmental justice and tackle environmental racism. I learned a lot of lessons from his leadership, that I hope to respect [that] as part of his legacy and take it to the next level.”

Education is another crucial issue for Lopez. She denounced the NYPD’s annual budget of $6 billion knowing that other City departments are short on resources.

“It makes me really angry that at the same time, education funding has been defunded over decades and years, and that has never been really given the importance that it deserves,” she said. “Reinvest it into education so that people can have like a real shot. Education, if we invest in it properly is something that levels the playing field for all of us. If I hadn’t gone to public education, or to public schools, after coming out of the shelter system and experiencing all the things that I’ve ever seen in my life, I wouldn’t be having this conversation with you right now.”

Voters go to the polls on Jun. 23.

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Welcome to the Norwood News, a bi-weekly community newspaper that primarily serves the northwest Bronx communities of Norwood, Bedford Park, Fordham and University Heights. Through our Breaking Bronx blog, we focus on news and information for those neighborhoods, but aim to cover as much Bronx-related news as possible. Founded in 1988 by Mosholu Preservation Corporation, a not-for-profit affiliate of Montefiore Medical Center, the Norwood News began as a monthly and grew to a bi-weekly in 1994. In September 2003 the paper expanded to cover University Heights and now covers all the neighborhoods of Community District 7. The Norwood News exists to foster communication among citizens and organizations and to be a tool for neighborhood development efforts. The Norwood News runs the Bronx Youth Journalism Heard, a journalism training program for Bronx high school students. As you navigate this website, please let us know if you discover any glitches or if you have any suggestions. We’d love to hear from you. You can send e-mails to norwoodnews@norwoodnews.org or call us anytime (718) 324-4998.