1199 Debbie Mucarsel-Powell and Wajahat Ali + News and Clips

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I have your headlines and sound clips and my conversation with Waj starts at about 35 mins

She Represented Florida’s 26th district in the US congress.

Debbie Mucarsel-Powell is the first Ecuadorian American and the first immigrant from South America to serve in Congress. She moved to the United States when she was 14 with her mother and sisters, and as a teenager worked the morning shift at a doughnut shop before school to help her single mother support the family. In 1996, after earning her bachelor’s degree in political science from Pitzer College and a master’s degree in international political economy from Claremont Graduate University, Mucarsel-Powell moved to Florida. There she raised money for nonprofits like the Hope Center, the Zoo Miami Foundation, and the Coral Restoration Foundation. Before entering politics Mucarsel-Powell held various posts at Florida International University, including associate dean of its College of Medicine, where she contributed to efforts to expand health care services in the state. “I was always very passionate about being involved, helping people in the community because I was very grateful for the opportunity I got when I came here,” Mucarsel-Powell told McClatchy. She was elected in 2018 on a platform of health care expansion, gun reform, immigration reform, and a commitment to addressing climate change. She sits on the House Judiciary Committee and is a member of the Gun Violence Prevention Task Force. The issue of gun violence is particularly personal to her because Mucarsel-Powell’s father was murdered outside his home in Ecuador when she was 24. She has invoked her family’s experience in advocating for gun-safety measures such as universal background checks, explaining how it drives her to “take action to do what you can so that no one has to go through what you went through.”

35 minutes

Wajahat Ali is a Daily Beast columnist, public speaker, recovering attorney, and tired dad of three cute kids. Get his book Go Back To Where You Came From: And, Other Helpful Recommendations on Becoming American which will be published in January 2022 by Norton. He believes in sharing stories that are by us, for everyone: universal narratives told through a culturally specific lens to entertain, educate and bridge the global divides.

Listen to WAj and DAnielle Moodie on Democracy-ish

He frequently appears on television and podcasts for his brilliant, incisive, and witty political commentary. Born in the Bay Area, California to Pakistani immigrant parents, Ali went to school wearing Husky pants and knowing only three words of English. He graduated from UC Berkeley with an English major and became a licensed attorney. He knows what it feels like to be the token minority in the classroom and the darkest person in a boardroom. Like Spiderman, he’s often had the power and responsibility of being the cultural ambassador of an entire group of people, those who are often marginalized, silenced, or reduced to stereotypes. His essays, interviews, and reporting have appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The Guardian, and New York Review of Books. Ali has spoken at many organizations, from Google to Walmart-Jet to Princeton University to the United Nations to the Chandni Indian-Pakistani Restaurant in Newark, California, and his living room in front of his three kids.

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