Gallego helping build voter awareness at UTB-TSC

Twenty-seven-year-old Luisa Gallego has a love for her country.

She developed that love at a young age after she and her family migrated from Colombia to the United States.

She didn’t know the language. She wasn’t familiar with the customs. But once she learned both she knew this was the place she and her family were meant to be.

Because she wasn’t a U.S. citizen — she was a legal resident and didn’t have the right to vote — Gallego did the next best thing to show her loyalty to America. She joined the U.S. Navy from 1999 to 2002.

What surprised Gallego during her time in the military was the voter apathy among her fellow troops who were registered voters. She didn’t understand why they weren’t making time to exercise a privilege that many like her would have loved to have.

“I would get so mad because I would see all these things happening around and I wanted be involved in it,” she said. “Once I became a citizen I said nobody is going to hold me back.”

After serving in the Navy, Gallego returned to Brownsville and enrolled at the University of Texas at Brownsville and Texas Southmost College, majoring in communications. She graduated in May 2007. In her spare time, she also helped out at the Cameron County Elections Office during elections, helping in any way that she could.

“I would do anything from moving boxes to whatever I could do” to help, Gallego said. Once again, she was startled by the voter apathy, not only among county residents, but UTB-TSC students as well.

“They just weren’t coming out” to vote, she said. “They said it (my vote) doesn’t matter. Nobody is going to listen to us anyway.”

Gallego took action.

She helped form the campus’ League of Student Voters, an offshoot of UTB-TSC’s Communication’s Council, in fall 2005. Its goal was to increase voter awareness among students.

The organization wasn’t then and isn’t now about endorsing any political candidate or party. It’s about getting students interested in the electoral process and the importance of their votes in elections.

“Now you walk around campus and you hear the political debates between students and that is so refreshing because you are actually hearing” discussion among the students, Gallego said. “I think it’s going to be different this time and people are actually going to go out and vote.”

The importance of the student vote has escalated in the presidential race, in which Texas will play a key role in choosing the Democratic Party’s nominee.

The League of Student Voters played a big role in bringing presidential candidate Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton to the UTB-TSC campus last week, as well as in bringing Sen. John Kerry to campus.

“Obviously we did something to get her (Clinton’s) attention ... to get her to say your campus” is a place to visit, said Gallego, who is working on her masters degree.

Gallego had the privilege of meeting the presidential candidate and she hopes this visit and possible visits by other presidential candidates or dignitaries will get the community voting.

“To have an effect on the students is great, but to have an effect on the community is excellent. If we can get our voting numbers up by 10 percent or 20 percent, we are going to start making a difference and people are going to start taking us seriously,” she said.