Nation Building

Thirteen thousand people. Four thousand square miles. Meet the activists fighting to organize one Arizona reservation.

- Tim Murphy

GABRIELLA CAZARES-KELLY is obsessed with voting. A Democratic Party precinct committee member for her Tucson, Arizona, neighborhood, she keeps a block-walking app on her phone and the Pima County Recorder’s Office on speed dial. When she turned 36 this spring, Cazares-Kelly passed around a petition for a statewide ballot initiative for education funding and told friends and family not to show up to her party if they weren’t registered to vote. She was joking. Sort of.

“Anyone who’s friends with Gabby is already registered to vote,” her friend Rebecca Cohen says.

So not long after the 2016 election, when the executive office of the Tohono O’odham Nation, where Cazares-Kelly is a high school teacher, stopped funding the voter education program she’d been part of, she, Cohen, and a small group of allies filled the void. They formed Indivisible Tohono, inspired by the national resistance organization, and made plans to jump-start small-d democracy among the roughly 13,000 tribal residents on the Connecticut-size reservation. Meeting once or twice a month in members’ homes or at gas stations, they’ve led workshops to train voter registrars, held candidate forums, and recruited members to fill local offices.

“We discovered that there are 24 vacant precinct committeepeople spots and not a single one was filled,” Cazares-Kelly told me. “Not only did we not have a seat at the table; we didn’t know what tables we were not being invited to.”