Councilwoman María Quiñones-Sánchez already made history and she plans to continue her legacy of firsts in the city of Philadelphia. Her experience as a member of City Council has been far from a walk in the park, but then again, she has never had a problem with that.

As Philadelphia’s primary elections get closer, she is preparing to do what she says she does best: run the most aggressive Latino voter campaign within her base. “I can say this because I have worked on everybody’s campaign, going back to Ángel Ortiz. We probably run the most aggressive voter outreach program,” Quiñones said.

She first challenged the status quo in 1999 by facing 7th District Councilman Rick Mariano. Although she lost the race, she came in second place over John Sabatina.

Quiñones believes it was her voter outreach what made her historic 2007 election possible, she won 78 percent of the vote. “We did everything, I knocked on doors, we had phone banks, our literature is professional and bilingual, we do tv commercials and radio.”

According to the councilwoman, her outreach to Latinos started before she set her eyes on City Council. “When I was working for the government of Puerto Rico, we had a voter registration campaign for three years in 12 cities across Pennsylvania, including Philadelphia, Reading, Lancaster, York, Erie, Harrisburg … we were able to increase Latino participation by 35 percent in all of our targeted divisions.”

Among other things, she learned that language was one of the main barriers for Latino voter participation, along with voter registration fraud. “The problem is that the people in power have learned — particularly ward leaders who benefit from the voter oppression — that chaos adds to confusion. If you create chaos in polling places, people won’t vote, they don’t want to be part of that,” Quiñones said.

After two terms in office, she said the biggest challenge of voter engagement is to get people to believe that their vote matters.

“If you go back in the last 20 years, every single voter fraud scandal has been in our community. We’ve had absentee ballot fraud and voter registration fraud … so it has created an environment where people don’t believe the system works,” Quiñones said.

Now as an incumbent candidate she plans to activate her base of voters through massive engagement with frequent voter and registration efforts. “Our community moves a lot, so I will do door to door campaigning and we always do voter registration and try to engage folks,” Quiñones said.

Back in a 2011 interview with AL DÍA, Quiñones described herself as a Democrat in philosophy, but not by the party. “It is a racist party, they have never truly supported a Latino candidate,” she stated that year.

For this election she expects a similar outcome on her campaign. “I have been the only incumbent the Democratic party never supports, and that happened in my last election. I expect some of the party leadership to select someone to run against me.”

“I think the beauty about reelection is an opportunity to tell your story. As Latinos we don’t tend to brag about what we do, but in this reelection more than any other, I am so looking forward because my legislative record can stand next to anybody’s,” Quiñones said.

Quiñones-Sánchez was the lead sponsor of the business tax reform legislation, expected to create an almost 50 percent tax deduction for small businesses, as well as the legislation that would create a Land Bank, an agency to tackle the 32,000 vacant parcels and abandoned buildings that blight neighborhoods across Philadelphia.

“These are important historic legislation that will change the course of the city. My ability to turn blighted properties into producing properties is important,” Quiñones said. “The fact that now in this city immigrants are welcome, that we said we are not going to cooperate with the feds and we are looking for way to further integrate them … those things are going to be long term changers for the city.”

For now, she said, May 19 is the most important day. After reelection, she said, “I have to look out where does Maria Quiñones best contribute to the city.”