Few people are as prepared for notoriety overnight as Kristin Urquiza.
On Monday, the San Francisco woman rose to prominence during a three-minute television segment of the Democratic National Convention.
In her debut on the national stage, Urquiza issued a disgraceful condemnation of President Trump, accusing him of spreading the coronavirus that killed her father more than six weeks earlier in Arizona.
“My father was a healthy 65-year-old,” she said on the broadcast. “His only existing existence was to trust Donald Trump, and for that he paid with his life.”
Urquiza’s path to the convention began after her father died and she painted a letter to the Republic of Arizona, her father’s newspaper of her father. The 39-year-old social justice lawyer wanted her natural community and city to know her father should not die. She thinks he would still be alive if Trump and Gov. of Arizona. Doug Ducey had not downplayed the severity of the coronavirus, relaxed rules in place and suggested the disease was a hoax.
Her father had believed her.
“He should not have died,” she said Thursday afternoon, sitting on a park bench in Golden Gate Park, across the street from the apartment she shares with her partner and now communications manager, Christine Keeves.
Until she received an unexpected call from conventional organizers, Urquiza said she had no ambitions to address a national audience in service of Joe Biden’s presidential bid. But when her moment came, she was ready for it – and also the inevitable fallout.
Trump supporters have told her they are happy her father died. But she is also praised for sharing her harrowing story of her family.
“It was a powerful expression of how COVID personally pulls people apart,” said Rob Stutzman, a Sacramento-based GOP policy adviser and Trump critic.
Although Stutzman doubts Urquiza’s story that many swinging voters will move to Biden’s side, her ‘personal will’ had a large scope, he said, which probably resonated with millions of Americans.
Urquiza grew up in Maryvale, a community outside of Phoenix populated almost entirely by Mexican and Latin American immigrants. Her parents, both born in the US, were the children of migrant agricultural workers. Her father, Mark Anthony Urquiza, worked in the fields as a teen and young man.
Kristin Urquiza, standing at Golden Gate Park, wrote an obituary about her father who broke fire on Twitter. Then came the national media and organizers of the Democratic National Convention.
(Susanne Rust / Los Angeles Times)
She was an only child, and her parents raised her, she said, to believe in herself and not be afraid to use her voice. An exceptional student, she earned a place at Yale University, and in August 1999, she purchased a $ 69 one-way ticket to New Haven, Conn., On a Greyhound bus.
“I think that’s how most people are there,” she said.
She was wrong. The world that greeted her at the elite, the Ivy League setting was stranger and intimidating than anything she could have imagined.
“It was not like I had trained for softball and ended up playing football,” she said. “It was like I had trained for softball and ended up in another galaxy where nothing made sense, and I was the only one who did not.”
She found the adjustment difficult, and for the first time in her life, she kept her mouth shut and listened for the most part. But she gradually made friends and connections through the university’s children’s theater – a program for the inferior communities and people of New Haven.
It was at Yale that she first became acutely aware of what she described in her speech as two different worlds – universes occupying the same space but operating in parallel.
There was one in which people knew how to operate the systems around them with power, influence, money and social connections. And then there was the other, full of people like them, who were denied or had no access to change, manage or influence these systems.
Since graduating in 2003, she has been a proponent of social and environmental justice – building a career to mobilize others to tackle and change inequality, from her adopted San Francisco to the Amazon.
In the winter, she said, she had actively campaigned to preserve rainforests, emphasizing the dangers posed by deforestation to human health – releasing and spreading new diseases.
“The timing was strange,” she said, as it was at this point that the first reports of the coronavirus from China began to trickle down.
“I was scared,” she said. And she made sure to warn her parents when the disease began to spread.
Kristin Urquiza’s father, Mark, is shown during a video call she had with him in June while he was in a hospital in Phoenix fighting the coronavirus. “He should not have died,” she says.
(Kristin Urquiza)
In early June, however, he contracted the disease, shortly after visiting a karaoke bar with friends after lifting the order to stay home. He died after five days on a ventilator, alone.
Overwhelmed by grief and perplexed by what she saw as reckless misinformation from political leaders, Urquiza picked up on her father’s objections to celebrating the day of his funeral. She invited the governor to attend, as well as representatives of the Star Republic of Arizona. Not one of them, she said, responded.
But one man saw her abuse and posted it on Twitter. The next day, Urphone’s phone was ‘inflated’, she said. She had hundreds of voicemails, emails and tags on social media – including requests for appearances by CNN and the show “Today”.
A serious activist, she recognized the national platform they had been given and decided to use it: She and her partner, Keeves – a communications specialist – started an organization, markedbycovid.com, to represent and advocate for people affected by COVID-19. These include the survivors, those left behind and essential workers – such as teachers – who are at risk of getting it.
They have already started a campaign in Iowa, in which schoolmasters have written their own obituaries and sent them to local newspapers – in anticipation of the disease.
“This is a growing demographic,” Urquiza said. While governments will be implementing policy and relief packages in the coming months and years, “they need to have a seat at the table.”
“This disease does not go away,” Urquiza added. “It’s here to stay.”
