Alex Sánchez

The 2026 legislative session left a bitter taste among those of us who spent 120 days with lawmakers under the gold dome advocating for policies to improve the lives of working folks. For Latino advocacy organizations like mine, Voces Unidas Action Fund, the session was largely defined by missed opportunities, watered-down protections and a profound failure of political courage at the highest levels of state leadership. Since 2021, Voces Unidas has graded the votes of all 100 state lawmakers...

Today will go down in history as the day Colorado lawmakers decided that farmworkers should work 56 hours before they earn overtime pay. It is a slap in the face to overworked and already underpaid immigrants who do the backbreaking work this country depends on, work most Americans no longer do. I do not have easy words to describe what many Latinos are feeling tonight. It is grief. It is anger. It is betrayal. People who have never had their community singled out by hostile policies may...

For many of us on Colorado’s Western Slope, the struggle for farmworker dignity is deeply personal. My father was a farmworker when he first moved to this country, working as an undocumented laborer in the orchards around Hotchkiss and Delta in the 1970s. He worked in the fields of California as well, where I was born, not very far from the birthplace of America’s farmworkers movement. So when I see Colorado’s state legislature advancing a bill that undermines the dignity of farmworkers by...