Candidate's Cuban Ethnicity Targeted In Wash Heights Election

WASHINGTON HEIGHTS, NY — Frustrated by hateful rhetoric surrounding her campaign, city council candidate Johanna Garcia took to Facebook last month to appeal for it to end.

In a five-paragraph post, the nonprofit founder and Chief of Staff to State Senator Robert Jackson claimed her campaign to take the Washington Heights and Inwood seat was being attacked because of her ethnicity.

Garcia was born and raised in Northern Manhattan. Her family is Cuban.

But she says, just days before New York's primary election, her ethnicity is still being forced to the forefront of her campaign to replace the term-limited Council Member Ydanis Rodriguez in District 10 — an area heavily populated by people from the Dominican Republic.

"I don't talk about my ethnicity in my campaign, not because I'm ashamed of it, but because I felt like it has no relevance other than I'm here to support the entire community — but my ethnicity became an issue," Garcia told Patch last week.

"It's hard for me to describe because the hate has been so pervasive in everything," she added.

In 2019, there were an estimated 204,000 people who lived in Washington Heights. About half of that population is of Dominican descent, according to the most recent studies on the topic.

"I don't see this community as something that needs to be divided, I see it as being high need, and we have people dividing us and saying, 'No, forget about housing, food insecurity, and the issues of our community, vote on something based just on Dominican versus non-Dominican," Garcia told Patch.

Garcia points to several examples of what she described as her non-Dominican heritage and Cuban descent being targeted.

On May 11, La Hora TV held a forum billed in Spanish as "the first great conversation with the candidates for the City Council of NYC District 10."

District 10 candidates Carmen De La Rosa, Angela Fernandez, Tirso Pena, and Josue Perez were all invited to participate in the forum. Garcia was not invited and not referenced as a candidate.

La Hora TV did not respond to multiple requests for comment from Patch.

Ten days later an article posted on May 21 by El Nuevo Diario — a Dominican newspaper popular in Northern Manhattan — discussed donations in the Washington Heights and Inwood city council race.

The article listed all of the candidates' names. Garcia was the only candidate who had her ethnicity listed in front of her name, with the paper referring to her as "la Cubana."

Attempts to contact El Nuevo Diario were unsuccessful.

Longtime Northern Manhattan community leader Carmen Rojas told Patch that she recently received an anonymous call telling her not to vote for Garcia since she wasn't Dominican.

Rojas, who is Dominican, said Garcia was referred to multiple times on the call as simply "the Cuban."

"For me, I find these kinds of calls to be discriminatory and racist because it should not matter where you come from but rather the community's needs and whether the candidate can bring about change that will benefit the wellbeing of everyone," Rojas said.

Tanya Bonner, the second vice chair of Community Board 12 in Upper Manhattan, says that these issues of racism and xenophobia also exist in Washington Heights and Inwood outside of the city council race.

"I’m originally from Chicago - a strong immigrant city with a history of segregation based on ethnicity and race," Bonner, who is Black, told Patch. "So I know. But it is still always sad to see it play out in the various parts of the country in which I have lived in my life. Washington Heights has been no different."

"I spent my first few years in Washington Heights absolutely disturbed by the anti-Blackness," Bonner added. "I’ve created an almost Jim Crow era-like mental Green Book to remember for myself which places to avoid because these particular places have been so unwelcoming toward me in comparison to non-Black and Dominican people."

In some instances, Garcia's volunteers say they have been confronted on the street about supporting a Cuban candidate and not a Dominican one in the City Council race.

Maria, a woman who moved to Washington Heights from the Dominican Republic when she was 15 and raised her four sons in the neighborhood, the oldest of who is now 42, was passing out fliers for Garcia recently in the community when a man approached her on the street.

"Who is this? She's Dominican?" the man asked, Maria told Patch.

Before she was able to answer, the man continued.

"Don't tell me she is Dominican, because she's not. She is Cuban and this neighborhood is Dominican," he added, according to Maria.

"Do you think everyone in this neighborhood is Dominican?" she said back.

"She will not go anywhere," Maria said the man exclaimed before walking away.

Election day for the City Council primaries is June 22, but early voting in New York City started on June 12.

“I’ve spoken in a lot of Northern Manhattan school auditoriums with parents and children, and the majority of them are Dominican," Garcia told Patch. "But not all of them are, and I don’t believe even if there is just one person who is from an ethnicity other than Dominican, that one individual isn’t less valuable than the majority — and that’s a problem.”

"What are we saying? If you ever want to run for office you can’t do it," Garcia added. "We’re running a purity test you can’t represent this community where you have lived, where you have failed, where you have pulled yourself up from the bootstraps, where you have helped your neighbors, where you have cried, sung, laughed, danced — what are we saying as a community what our values are?"