
By Maggie Astor and Caroline Gutman
Ten years ago, Janet Diaz and Tameko Patterson were not particularly engaged in politics. This week, they are rooming together in Chicago as delegates to the Democratic National Convention: some of the most powerful yet little-known people in the party.
Both started dipping their toes into the waters of local politics in Pennsylvania around 2015, about 100 miles from each other and far from the battlefields of national politics.
Patterson’s journey began with the closing of an elementary school in Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania, where she was raising her two children. District officials, she recalled, said the school didn’t have enough enrollment and transferred its students to the district’s other schools, increasing class sizes. A couple of years after that, local teachers went on strike.
“I said, ‘OK, enough is enough — I need to find out why they’re making these decisions.’ So I ran for school board,” Patterson said. She won, in 2017 becoming the first person of color elected to the Stroudsburg school board.
“Little did I know when I was complaining about a school being closed that I would end up in the position that I’m in now,” she said.
Right around the time that the school closing was pushing Patterson into politics, Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign was doing the same for Diaz. Excited by the prospect of electing the first woman as president, Diaz started making phone calls and knocking on doors for the campaign.
Then she joined the Latino caucus of the Pennsylvania Democratic Party, enrolled in a “boot camp” for prospective political candidates run by Emerge Pennsylvania — an affiliate of the national Emerge organization for Democratic women — and became the first Latino woman elected to the City Council in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

By the end of 2020, Patterson was the president of her school board, “which led me to even be more interested in politics, because COVID was so highly politicized,” she said. She founded a Black caucus within the Monroe County chapter of the Pennsylvania Democrats, and was elected as treasurer and then chair of the county party.
Diaz, by that point, was running for state Senate; she lost that race, but became the chair of the state party’s Latino Caucus. She served as a delegate to the 2020 Democratic National Convention, but the proceedings were virtual because of the pandemic, and it felt anticlimactic.
Then it was 2024, and the party was looking for delegates to an in-person convention. And soon they were delegates, each looking for a roommate to save money in Chicago.
They learned that they had been on parallel paths for the past decade, or perhaps even longer: They were both native New Yorkers who had moved to Pennsylvania.
Both have day jobs — Diaz as a medical data analyst and Patterson as a certified project manager — and said their husbands didn’t quite understand the amount of free time they devoted to politics. They said their identities as women of color helped drive them to devote that time.
“As a Black woman, we didn’t always have this right to vote, and I think it’s important that we all participate in this process,” Patterson said. “To be on the front lines is an amazing honor and privilege that I’m really looking forward to.”
Diaz said she was somewhat torn between excitement and anxiety. Especially after the assassination attempt against former President Donald Trump, she said, she is nervous about her and other delegates’ safety.
But she said she saw herself as playing an important role as a liaison between the Harris-Walz campaign and Latino communities, which she said political organizers tended to view inaccurately as monolithic.
“When you look like them, they feel more comfortable speaking to you,” she said. “I tried to even tell the party that you don’t understand the community, because we don’t come just from one place. I’m Puerto Rican. We come from everywhere, whether it’s Spain, Mexico, Dominican Republic. We have a different variety of Hispanics, Latinos that speak differently — even the dialect in Spanish — they eat differently, their cultures are different, and that’s something that unfortunately Anglos don’t understand.”
On Sunday, Diaz sat in a high-backed chair in a lounge off the lobby of the hotel where delegates from Pennsylvania and Florida were staying, waiting for Patterson to arrive from the airport. She looked around the vast room, commenting on the ornately painted ceiling and the clusters of police officers stationed in the doorways. Every so often, she spotted other Pennsylvania delegates whom she knew and greeted enthusiastically.
She said she was looking forward to attending panel events geared toward winning Latino votes, so she could explain the anger many of the neighbors she speaks to feel about their economic circumstances. And she said she wanted to “show the other Latinos in Pennsylvania that they also have a seat at the table.”
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