In December, the national Women’s March announced that it had chosen Las Vegas, not Washington, D.C., as the site of its first-anniversary rally—a voter-registration event that the organizers were calling Power to the Polls. To those who know the city as the home of the original Rat Pack, the erstwhile fiefdom of the Mafia, and the setting for “The Hangover,” it seemed like an unlikely choice. Some speculated that the march needed a city with lots of hotel rooms. In an early press release, the organizers clarified that they had a specific rationale. Las Vegas is experiencing the country’s pains in an especially acute way. The city was the site of the worst mass shooting in modern history, when, in October, Stephen Paddock opened fire from the thirty-second floor of the Mandalay Bay, killing fifty-eight people and injuring nearly five hundred others. Last month, after being accused of sexual misconduct by two women, Congressman Ruben Kihuen, a Democrat, said that he would not seek reëlection. Nevada, a swing state, will also be a battleground state in the 2018 midterms, with a gubernatorial election, four House races, and a chance to oust the state’s Republican senator, Dean Heller.
Over time, though, and perhaps in response to local pique at the negative P.R., the line shifted: Nevada had been selected as the site of the Women’s March for its record of putting women in office. Three of Nevada’s largest cities (Las Vegas, Reno, and Henderson) have female mayors, the state legislature is nearly forty per cent women (one of the highest percentages in the country, second only to Vermont), and half of the state’s congressional delegation are women. Yvanna Cancela, the first Latina to serve in the Nevada State Senate—her parents immigrated from Cuba—was, until her appointment in December, the political director of the Culinary Workers Union, the largest union in the state, with fifty-seven thousand members, many of them hotel and casino workers. In this role, Cancela was instrumental in turning Nevada—which is, as she put it, “really a purple state”—blue in 2016. During the third Presidential debate, Cancela organized a “wall” of taco trucks that parked in front of the Trump International Hotel in protest. Her union outreach helped turn out a record number of Hispanic voters—about seventeen per cent of the state’s electorate.
On Sunday, the day of the march, which was more like a series of inspirational speakers, Cancela, who is twenty-nine, was standing in a cordoned-off area behind the stage that had been erected at Sam Boyd Stadium; she was dressed in jeans, blue Nike sneakers, and a black sweatshirt unzipped to reveal a black T-shirt that read “The Future Is Latina.” A pink pussyhat was tucked into her back pocket. The speakers, and their family members and guests, huddled near heat lamps and piled paper plates with pasta and seven-layer dip. In the late morning, Cancela was called onstage with sixteen other Nevada legislators, many of them women of color, to greet the crowd of roughly fifteen thousand people. “It’s emotional, being up there,” she said, as she walked offstage to pose for a photo. “I got really choked up.”
Cancela took her seat in the audience. A short time later, Caitlyn Caruso, a youth activist, appeared onstage with three fellow-speakers, looking less than moved. “It’s the allotting of three minutes for four young folk,” she said, speaking out against the organizers, who had apparently given less time to lesser-known speakers, “and threatening to cut a black trans activist from the program if they talk over. We need to start listening to youth voices,” she told the crowd. “After all, your liberation is tied to ours, and you need to start acting like it!”
State Representative Paulette Jordan of Idaho, an indigenous woman running for governor in that state, was dressed in a red leather blazer; addressing the crowd, she strenuously urged other women to run: “The government will fill with women, and immigrants, and L.G.B.T. people, people with disabilities, and people of color,” she said. The civil-rights advocate and race scholar Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, who codified the term “intersectionality,” was met with quiet awe. The event’s emphasis on inclusivity was surely in part a response to criticism of last year’s Women’s March in D.C. as overwhelmingly white and middle class—which was particularly embarrassing given that fifty-three per cent of white women had voted for Donald Trump. But it was also a reflection of the crowd; Nevada is one of the most racially and ethnically diverse states in the country.
If the day had an overarching message, it was that white women needed to get their shit together. “Don’t come to this rally today and sit here with your pink hat on saying that you’re with us, and you’re nowhere to be found when black people ask you to show up in the streets to defend our lives,” Tamika Mallory, one of the co-chairs of the Women’s March, hollered into the crowd, which was speckled with pink hats. “Stand up for me, white women!” she went on. “You say you want to be my friend? I don’t want to hear it from your mouth. I want to see it when you go to the polls at the midterm elections.”
The former MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry took to the stage and paid homage to her paternal grandmother, a seamstress who made thirty-five dollars a week. “Saying thank you to black women is not a damn hashtag!” she said, referring to the online outpouring of gratitude for black women who voted against the Senate candidate Roy Moore, in Alabama, in December. The sign-language interpreter, a bald white man, animatedly signed.
Later, a group of about thirty sex workers came onstage. (Nevada has twenty-one legal brothels.) Many of them held red umbrellas, to signify solidarity with other sex workers; others brandished posters in primary colors (“Sex Worker Rights Are Human Rights” and “Melania, Ho to Ho, Kill That John in His Sleep”). “I am a sex worker. I have the right to be here,” Cris Sardina, the director of the Desiree Alliance, said—an oblique reference to the fact that, last year, the organizers of the Women’s March had professed to “stand in solidary with all those exploited for sex and labor.” (The position was eventually updated to include sex workers.)
Cancela was scheduled to speak at 1:45 P.M. A little after noon, she slipped away to write her speech. “I find that if you can get the first line and the last line, you’re set,” she said, looking anxious. When I found her again, just before two, she was holding a page full of remarks that she had written out on the back of a flyer, and was shifting from foot to foot. The schedule was running behind; Faith Evans had got the crowd dancing. Cher, who came after and gave her speech in her puffy jacket, was typically blunt. “This is one of the worst times in our history,” she said.
Cancela, who is also the executive director of the Citizenship Project, a nonprofit that helps people apply for naturalization, was slated to address the audience with two other women: Ericka, an immigrant from El Salvador with temporary protected status, and Argelia, a twenty-five-year-old DACA recipient from Mexico who works with children who have autism. Onstage, Ericka, who is a Culinary Union member, talked about being a single mom with four children. “I can’t go back,” she said of her country. “I afraid. I afraid right now.” As she spoke of her fears of deportation, Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” started to play in the background, loudly—an awards-show-style signal that she had to wrap up the speech. Within moments, Lauper’s warble had drowned her out entirely.