Few other people are as prepared for night-to-morning notoriety as Kristin Urquiza.
On Monday, the woman in San Francisco rose to fame in a three-minute television segment of the Democratic National Convention.
In his national debut, Urquiza issued a harsh sentence to President Trump, blaming him for the coronavirus that killed his father more than six weeks earlier in Arizona.
“My father was 65 and in good health,” he said on the show. “His only pre-existing condition was to accept as true with Donald Trump, and that’s why he paid off with his life.”
Urquiza’s conference adventure began after her father’s death and she wrote a letter to the Arizona Republic, her father’s hometown newspaper. The 39-year-old social justice defender sought out her hometown and her people to know that her father didn’t have to die. She believes he would still be alive if Trump and Arizona Governor Doug Ducey had not minimized the severity of the coronavirus, had not complied with the regulations of the shelters at the scene, and warned the disease of a hoax.
Their father believed them.
“He’s dead,” he said Thursday afternoon, sitting on a park bench in Golden Gate Park, across the street from the apartment he shares with his wife and now communications manager, Christine Keeves.
Until he won an unforeseen call from convention organizers, Urquiza said he did not have the ambition to face a national audience serving Joe Biden’s presidential bid. But when his time came, he prepared for it, and also for the inevitable consequences.
Trump supporters told him they were happy for his father to die. But he also praised for sharing his family’s heartbreaking story.
“It’s a harsh expression of how COVID personally destroys others,” said Rob Stutzman, a Sacramento-based Republican political representative and Trump’s critic.
While Stutzman doubts that Urquiza’s story will move many electorates alongside Biden, his “far-reaching personal testimony,” he said, which probably resonated with millions of Americans.
Urquiza grew up in Maryvale, an outdoor network in Phoenix populated almost entirely by Mexican and Latino immigrants. His parents, born in the United States, were the children of migrant farmworkers. His father, Mark Anthony Urquiza, worked in the field as a teenager and young man.
She was an only child, and her parents raised her, she says, so she wouldn’t be afraid to use her voice. A notable student, she earned a place at Yale University and in August 1999 bought a one-way ticket to New Haven, Connecticut, on a Greyhound bus.
“I have an idea of how much other people were given there,” he said.
She’s wrong. The world that welcomed her to the elite, the establishment of the Ivy League more strange and intimidating than anything she could have imagined.
“It’s not like I’ve trained for softball and ended up betting football,” he said. “It’s like I’ve trained for softball and ended up in some other galaxy where nothing made sense, and I was the only one who didn’t perceive it.
He discovered that compatibility between devices was complicated and, for the first time in his life, largely kept his mouth shut and listened. But he gradually made friends and connections through the university’s children’s theater, a program for marginalized communities and New Haven citizens.
It was at Yale that he first realized what he described in his speech as two other worlds: universes that occupy the same space, but operate in parallel.
There one in which other people knew how to operate the systems around them with power, influence, effective and social relations. And then there’s the other one, full of other people like her, who were denied or didn’t have access to change, manage, or influence those systems.
Since graduating in 2003, he has championed social and environmental justice, building a career around mobilizing others to assume and replace inequality, from its adoption in San Francisco to the Amazon.
During the winter, he said, he had campaigned actively to conserve tropical forests, highlighting the risks posed by deforestation to human health, releasing and spreading new diseases.
“The timing is strange,” he said, because that’s when the first reports of coronavirus began to arrive from China.
“I’m terrified, ” he said. And he made sure to warn his parents when the disease began to spread.
However, in early June he contracted the disease, shortly after visiting a karaoke bar with friends after Arizona lifted the order to stay at home. He died after five days with a fan, alone.
Overwhelmed by grief and enraged by what she saw as reckless and incorrect information through political leaders, Urquiza wrote her father’s obituary to publish on her funeral day. She invited the governor to attend, along with representatives of the Arizona Star Republic. None of them, he said, answered.
But a boy saw his obituary and posted it on Twitter. The next day, Urquiza’s phone “exploded,” he said. It had a lot of voicemails, emails and social media tags, adding requests for CNN appearances and the “Today” screen.
A sensible activist, she identified the national platform given to her and to use it: she and her partner, Keeves, a communications specialist, introduced an organization, marquéethroughcovid.com, to constitute and protect those hit by COVID-19. These come with survivors, abandoned and an essential staff, such as teachers, who are at risk of getting it.
They already began a crusade in Iowa, in which teachers wrote their own obituaries and sent them to local newspapers, in anticipation of the disease.
“This is a developing demographic,” Urquiza said. As governments put policies and aid systems in place in the months and years to come, they “will have to have a position at the table.”
“This disease is gone,” Urquiza added. “He’s here to stay.”