I'm Running for Mayor of Edinburg
Working people need to become the new ruling class!
I have decided to run for Mayor of Edinburg this year.
After more than ten years of political activism and journalism, as well as several years working in industry, seeking office was never a priority or even a second or third consideration. I did serve in the student government association at the University of Texas Pan American from 2013 to 2015 but that was in response to historic events regarding the merger between Edinburg and Brownsville campuses, not some kind of preparation for political office, as it was and remains for so many young ambitious careerists. Seeing global events and class struggles in my own life in recent months, I knew deep down that this year was the year.
I’ve supported many campaigns throughout the years, beginning with leftist Democratic Party candidates, and ending with support for the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) of the United States. I should be clear that I am not a member of the SWP. I am a supporter of their political message as well as a subscriber and reader of their literary publications. I support the party’s platform in its entirety on all matters, from war and peace, to economic and political questions. I therefore am running to express the views of the American Socialist Workers Party, and its affiliate communist leagues worldwide, as an independent working-class socialist candidate in this year’s Edinburg Mayoral Race.
A recent SWP conference was titled “2025 is not 2024.” Seeing the intensified crises of the capitalist rulers worldwide and developments within one’s own eye-sight, that slogan activated something in me that said, ‘We’re not living in “ordinary” times.’ After fiddling around with the idea for the last two to three months, time came to finally decide in late July, which by then became easy.
I currently work as a server and dish washer, and have been living in Edinburg since 2017. I worked my way through college as a retail, fast food and call center worker, having graduated from PSJA North High School in 2009. After university—having studied psychology and philosophy—I worked as a writer and journalist, and in the nonprofit sector. After the pandemic, I turned back towards industry and have not looked back ever since. During this period I worked as a delivery driver, factory/retail worker and call center rep.
I am a working-class person, and a renter. I have faced eviction threats and proceedings from my landlord and successfully fought back. Taking inspiration by revolutionary fighters throughout history and in recent memory, I successfully defended myself in eviction court without an attorney, over the summer. As a working-class person who has to clock-in and clock-out, pay rent, and pay debt taken out to survive, I know what working people go through every day.
I’m running to advance the class interests of working people and rural farmers in Edinburg, with the hope and intention of encouraging other working people across the Rio Grande Valley, South Texas, and Northern Mexico to rise up and gain the confidence to run for office and show (by example) that working people have the power to be the new ruling class. Neither the Democratic or Republican Party, nor their third party reformers, have any real solutions to the problems that working people face on a daily basis.
The problems faced by working people in Edinburg are not too different from the problems faced by workers in every city and town in this country. The capitalist system, which is propped-up by dozens of police and secret police agencies alongside their fascist goons and gangs, is what guarantees that exploitation of working people for profits continues. It is a global and international system.
Likewise, unless working people take political power worldwide, the capitalist and imperialist rulers of the world stand to destroy the human race with nuclear weaponry. No international treaty or agreement will disarm any armed rulers, as only the working people of those countries can disarm their respective capitalist rulers. This makes the coming to power of working people much more urgent.
American capitalists don’t content themselves with only selling their commodities in the United States. The U.S. market is actually just a fraction of their entire dominion. Working people—whether in Bangladesh, Croatia or Argentina—are caught competing for scarcer and scarcer jobs, for scarcer and scarcer wages.
I am and will be the only working-class candidate in this race. With my entering the race, the total amount of candidates will equal four. The others—former mayor Richard Molina, former councilman Juan Garcia, and former City Attorney Omar Ochoa—represent different segments of the local ruling class. All or most own property, run businesses, and serve the interests of the rich and the well-off middle-classes. Molina used to be a police officer, and Ochoa prosecuted defendants for the police.
The three capitalist candidates are running on vague slogans that focus on capitalist development and increasing profits for local bosses, compared to their competitor cities. In the Valley, as in other places, municipal capitalist cliques compete against the cliques of other cities (and the families which comprise them) for tighter and tighter markets.
But, here in the Valley again as in other places, working people just have each other. Whether we were born in Guatemala, Mexico, or Canada, we’re exploited in the same way and for the same wages, regardless of the owners’ skin color.
If elected, I would turn the office of mayor into an instrument to advance the class interests of working people in Edinburg, regardless of immigration status. The question of amnesty for undocumented workers is an important question for me individually and for the labor movement as a whole. Capitalist bosses here in Edinburg as in every other city in the RGV use immigrant labor to superexploit them, always dangling the threat of deportation and unemployment over their heads, should they dare to speak-out or (even worse) unionize.
Immigrant workers here in the RGV are forced to work 14 hour shifts at produce factories, or work 12 hour shifts in hot kitchens at every favorite local restaurant in the RGV. You don’t usually see them as a customer because they’re told to walk in through the back, and they work behind a wall. Whether it’s Indian, “American,” or Asian food, the same genre of Mexican cumbia music is what’s playing through a radio in the kitchen.
This campaign is about spreading the message that working people in Edinburg need to unite with other working people in the region, and in Mexico as well as the U.S., along class lines and on a class-versus-class basis. No single election—in one city or another—is going to fundamentally change the conditions working people face world- or nationwide.
For that to happen, working people in every city and town in the United States will have to rise up by their millions to replicate what this campaign (and others that are operated by the SWP) intends to do, and that is to show other workers that we can be the new ruling class!
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Jonathan Salinas is not a member of the American Socialist Workers Party or affiliated in any official capacity. Salinas is only a longtime supporter of the party and subscriber to their publications. This campaign was not coordinated with the party or any of its organizations.