Arizona democrat’s tough past fuels pitch for a key House seat
- The San Juan Daily Star
- 2 hours ago
- 5 min read
By ANNIE KARNI
JoAnna Mendoza, the Democrat running to represent a southern Arizona congressional district that could determine control of the House next year, remembers with painful clarity the moment she hit bottom.
It was March of 2012, and after a night of heavy drinking, Mendoza, who had been abusing alcohol to numb the trauma of a sexual assault she had experienced months earlier, drove into another car in a parking lot. She was charged with driving while intoxicated.
“That moment made me realize I needed healing,” Mendoza said in an emotional interview this week in which she recounted the previously undisclosed incident while sitting at a public library in Casa Grande, miles down the road from the desert town of Eloy where she grew up. “I couldn’t keep pushing this stuff down and hiding it.”
Today, Mendoza, 49, is sober and leaning heavily into her personal history in her campaign to unseat Republican Rep. Juan Ciscomani in Arizona’s toss-up 6th Congressional District, in a race that could be crucial to Democrats’ chances of winning the majority in November.
In such a competitive race for such a critical seat — Mendoza said Republican trackers often follow her, even filming private moments with her 10-year-old son — she said she expected the Ciscomani campaign to highlight the incident to attack her character.
She is betting instead that it will humanize her with voters who can relate to her lowest moments.
“I’m hoping that other people will see themselves in me,” she said. “And that despite all the things that have happened, it’s so important for me to do this now at this moment because of what’s at stake.”
It is one of the most important seats that Democrats are targeting, and Mendoza is a unique candidate. Working-class people remain a rarity in Congress. And her biography — she is a queer single mother who grew up in rural poverty and served in the Navy and as a Marine Corps drill instructor — checks so many boxes it almost feels out of a movie.
Growing up, Mendoza would wake at 4 o’clock on summer mornings and wait at a gas station with her parents for a bus to drive them to cotton fields where they would pick weeds with bare hands under the desert sun.
Her family never had a car. She remembers riding her pink bike to the grocery store with food stamps in her pocket and then home with plastic bags balanced on her handlebars.
“There was so much shame about it,” Mendoza said. “Everyone knew if you were using funny money, you didn’t have any.”
These days, things are pointing in the right direction for Mendoza’s campaign. She handily outraised Ciscomani, the two-term Republican incumbent, in the first quarter of the year, taking in $2.4 million to Ciscomani’s $1.1 million.
A recent Republican-commissioned poll showed Mendoza beating Ciscomani 47%-44%. Even some Republican operatives are questioning whether Ciscomani can still win in the current political environment, which is trending against the GOP.
Chuck Coughlin, a Republican political analyst, said on a recent podcast that the race was an uphill battle for Ciscomani, especially against a retired Marine with “a very compelling story.” It is also a populist moment when voters are angry at a government many believe has failed them at every turn.
Mendoza joined the Navy and then the Marine Corps after high school, the only path she saw available to her as she tried to escape rural poverty. But that version of the American dream was disrupted after a night of heavy drinking at a bar in 2000, when Mendoza, then a 23-year-old lance corporal, was sexually assaulted by a marine sergeant whose advances she had resisted in the past.
After a night out with friends, “I was drunk and blacked out,” she recalled of the incident as she held back tears. “As I was coming to, I realized what was happening to me.” The friends she shared a house with called the military police, and she was taken to the hospital for a full rape kit.
“I’ve done some work to be able to talk about this without breaking down, but it’s still an experience that, every time I talk about it, I relive it,” she said.
The man who assaulted Mendoza eventually received a court-martial and was sent to a military prison. Mendoza became a drill instructor, a decision driven by her determination to become tough enough to protect herself from something like the assault ever happening again.
“I didn’t want to be a victim,” she said.
Mendoza, who served tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, became one of two women in the Marine Corps to serve as a drill instructor’s instructor. “That’s the elite of the elite,” she said.
More than 10 years passed, and she thought she had moved past the hardest times in her life. And then she was assaulted again.
“The second was more of a date rape situation,” Mendoza said. “I went from preparing myself so that something like this could never happen again to it happening again. It was a peer, another gunnery sergeant.”
She added: “I felt angry, ashamed — somehow it was my fault. You’re supposed to trust the people you serve with.”
The DWI arrest occurred not long afterward. It was the moment that she realized she needed to set herself on a new path, which she pursued by leaning heavily on her Catholic faith.
When Ciscomani was first elected in 2021, he too ran as a different kind of candidate. He shared his personal story of immigrating from Mexico as a young child and washing cars to help his family make ends meet. Ciscomani, who became a citizen at 13, also pitched himself as an example of the American dream with a movie-worthy biography: a pro-business Mexican immigrant Republican and father of six.
On Tuesday morning, Mendoza attended a roundtable in her native Eloy at the Pinal Hispanic Council, where she pointed out her grandmother’s old home, the one with green trim, from the window.
“My heart is always in our rural communities,” she said. “Growing up poor, you feel a sense of despair and helplessness.”
She said it was only years later that she had come to realize that “it wasn’t my parents fault.”
“It was a failure of government,” she said, “a failure of our elected leaders.”
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