ZORA and The Blackness present Moonrakers 2020

The Squad Is On The Frontlines of Our Current Political Battle

These freshman congresswomen have made their voices heard — and changed the political conversation

Jose Antonio Vargas
ZORA
Published in
4 min readOct 8, 2019

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Illustration: Ashley Woods

TThe year 2020 will be unprecedented in American history. It’s not only a presidential election year — arguably the most important in modern times — it’s also the year of the 24th United States Census. Our government is tasked with calculating its ever-changing population at a time when President Donald Trump has challenged, through his racist rhetoric and White nationalist policies, who counts as an American. If this feels like a recipe for unmitigated disaster, that’s because it is.

We are living through the early stages of what must be called Civil War 2.0, one for which immigration is the catalyst. This war is being fought over who gets to define what an American is and who represents America at a time of seismic demographic shifts caused by a variety of political, economic, and environmental factors — be it farm workers from Mexico finding work in the South, tech workers from…

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Jose Antonio Vargas
ZORA
Writer for

Founder of @DefineAmerican. Author of “DEAR AMERICA: Notes of an Undocumented Citizen.” Journalist. Filmmaker. Theatre producer. Entrepreneur.