Lizzie Suarez grew up in Miami and watched the city morph into what it is today: a billionaire’s playground. She works with Miami Workers Center, ‘as a place where people are finding community and finding answers to the questions of their lives.’ She’s also a cultural organizer grappling to answer the question, what exactly is a cultural organizer? The following is from our conversation on March 6th, 2026. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. ~ Mark Chavez What was life like growing up in Miami? Lizzie Suarez I had a great experience growing up in Miami. I was fortunate enough to be involved in extracurricular activities, like sports, got into the arts outside of school and I had an experience of both being in public school and private school in Miami. As I got older, a lot of my experience I can see through a more political lens: the experiences I had with, you know, peers growing up. I was a teenager when Trayvon Martin was murdered and experiencing that as a kid and trying to make sense of the story. And then as I got older, witnessing uprisings and resistance across the United States, just following the news and being online. And so I would say it’s been a really eye-opening experience and a very unique experience. Miami is such a unique place compared to many parts of the United States, but I would also say I was like most kids when you get lost in childhood classmate drama and all that. MC What has changed about Miami over your lifetime? LS A lot has changed. Miami is a place that has always, since its founding, as the city of Miami proper and the region, a place that was created by Indigenous and Black people of the Caribbean for outsiders and for wealthy northerners. And so in that sense, not much has changed about Miami, but because the people who govern Miami have such a commitment to novelty, to newness, to the new next best shiny thing our city really changes, I would say, every five years almost. Every five years there’s a new influx of people, whether it be from New York or California, especially post pandemic. Now, most recently in the past few months, there’s been like six billionaires who have announced that they’re moving to Miami, one of them being Peter Thiel, moving Palantir here. And so, in the past six or seven years, a lot of my friends, people that I’ve known, have had to leave Miami due to rising cost of living. A lot of people in my circle that I’ve organized with or been in community with, many of them are not from here, but nonetheless, they have chosen to call this place home and chosen to help make it better. All that to say, although there’s new people, migration is just part of life. And so there’s all sorts of different people here, different nationalities, different states, but I think more and more, there’s just more concentration of wealth into fewer and fewer hands and working class people are feeling it the most. MC Can you share how that ties into your work? How is Miami Workers Center borne out of, related to, responding to that increased disparity of wealth in the city. LS I was actually just reading some notes and reflections from members from a convening that we had this past weekend. And the prompt was, who are we? When you think about us as an organization, who are we? One of our members put, ‘we are those who have been forgotten about, the disabled, working class people, people who can work, people who can’t work, people who are single parents with young kids, people who are navigating our complex immigration legal system.’ And so I think about the organization, Miami Workers Center, as a place where people are finding community and finding answers to the questions of their lives. Can I afford to live here? Is this a safe place to live? Can I build roots here? How can I afford to live here? How can I find the resources I need to live a life of dignity? And yeah… I think the organization is like a quest to answer the question, who was Miami for? We know, like I just shared, it has been a place for the rich, but it doesn’t have to be that way. Just as it was made, it can be unmade and made again. MC That’s so beautiful. You all were involved in launching the first worker-owned cleaning business in Miami. Can you share, what is that? And in responding to that, also share a little bit about what is a cooperative and why are they so important? LS The Miami Cleaning Cooperative is a new business, a new worker cooperative founded by members of the Miami Workers Center in collaboration with, and supported by, Neighborhood Housing Services of South Florida and Catalyst Miami. For the past about two to three years now, members of that cooperative have been part of an incubation process. So they first started with learning what a cooperative is. It’s a different kind of way of doing business, as opposed to standard business practices where there’s a CEO at the top and everyone under them doesn’t get to make the decisions that impact their lives, whether it be economically or just the way that the business is governed. They are making the same amount of money, and they have learned about cooperatives being a more collaborative, generative kind of economics where the work is shared, there’s equal say, or the workers who make the business run get to set up the structures that they feel are fair and also supportive of their business. The worker-owners are involved in making decisions about where the profit of the business is going towards, how much of it is put back into the business versus how much of it turns into salary or pay that workers get to take home. We’re so proud that they’re now in business and working and taking on clients. And this is especially important for this group of women. One being a multiracial group of women, Miami is a place that is very segregated still by class and therefore by race, especially along national lines. So you often don’t see images or representations of people who are Spanish speaking from Peru or Nicaragua working in collaboration with Haitian women. And that is what we’re seeing in this cooperative. It’s not only an example of how people from different places can work together when there’s a shared vision and shared respect for one another, but also as domestic workers in an industry that is very precarious, where workers are often working in private homes: there’s little to no regulations for these workers. They’re often mistreated and taken advantage of, both economically, but also personally, it’s horrible the levels of disrespect and violence that women often experience on the job. Being part of a worker cooperative, an organization that has their back in these situations, that they don’t have to deal with these challenges alone, is really important. And then another part of it also is the environmental impact. So part of their commitment as a cooperative is educating other workers, other domestic workers on what are the kind of products that workers should be using on the job that doesn’t harm their health. MC This is an aside but I remember when I was younger talking to my dad and being like, ‘Dad, I saw this thing that said ‘vinegar is really good for cleaning stuff. It that true?’’ And his response was, ‘Yeah, if you like the smell of vinegar.’ LS (laughs) MC It was the most dad response you could get. I saw something else about an eviction diversion program at Miami Workers Center. Can you share what that is and how that works? LS In 2022, about four years ago, we advocated at the county that a budget for this program be created. We wanted to see a codified right to counsel for tenants who are facing eviction to have the right to free legal representation so that they have a better chance of staying housed, as a strategy to slow the rate of evictions in Miami-Dade County and have that impact the rate in which prices were going up. It’s kind of like a slow the bleed strategy. And we realized there would be many challenges to enforcing having a codified right to counsel without funding for pro bono lawyers who are willing to represent these tenants, even if tenants had those rights on paper. So we successfully got this program started, which wouldn’t have been possible without our legal partners in this work. It’s in the second or third year now where MWC has a canvassing team dedicated to canvassing tenants who are facing eviction. Many times, our team is how families are finding out that they have five days to file a response to the court or they default on their eviction. That’s part of the work that we’re doing. We are also putting on monthly know your rights and legal clinics in each district in the county. Part of the challenge is continuing funding for this every single year. We have to go to the county and fight at this point. It’s not even, what we want to see is increased funding, but what we’re seeing is a fight just to keep it as it is, where it can’t even, the program can’t even expand. That’s part of the challenge where we’re at now. Last year, the Eviction Diversion Project reached over 11,000 families with information about their rights, and connected over 1,700 to the representation that they needed. Many people were able to file responses and stay in their homes. Some of our most committed members are those who have that lived experience of facing an eviction and fighting it. Some win and some don’t, but throughout the process they are seeing how MWC stands in solidarity with them and has their back, and they want to ensure that that doesn’t happen to anybody else, that evictions don’t happen to any of their other neighbors. MC What you’ve shared about Miami Workers Center makes me think about this idea of the third space. I think it’s so interesting because we’re in this moment where companies and corporations and brands are working so hard to figure out how they can get people offline and to real life experiences, and moments and events and things to build their excitement and engagement and buy into their brand. I keep thinking about how that is what our communities do inherently, like what organizing is, is about creating that offline interaction and engagement for community. I think we are just in this moment, especially in this post-pandemic era where people are just craving a place to be and to be engaged in something bigger than themselves. It’s really beautiful to see groups all around the country and the world that are doing that kind of stuff. LS Yeah, it’s our biggest strength: being human beings in a world that desperately wants to be everything but a human being. MC So you work at Miami Workers Center, and you’re also an artist, and this other thing that people call themselves, a cultural organizer. What is a cultural organizer? LS I actually was just thinking about this the other day, ‘cause I’m like, what is that? What is it that I do exactly?’ I would say it’s being part of efforts that are bigger, that are like, what is that phrase, greater than the sum of its parts. Where you understand that it’s not about the work that you do alone, but it’s about making connections. And so for me, what that looks like is being open to connecting with new people, people who I see are doing similar kinds of work or trying to, or doing work in an effort of making [it] progressive. I have cultural worker friends who are in cumbia bands and doing local shows. I have friends who are sculpture artists who do poetry, and who are more in the academic field who are archivists and researchers. So it’s about getting to know all these different kinds of people and what they care about, and then being part of the organizing and using that as a vehicle in which these can come together in some way or another, even if it’s not part of a formal project. Cultural organizing can look like an assembly that was produced in collaboration with a grassroots organization, with a campaign, a clear call to action, and had theater and song and dance and art. It can also look like the long-term work of building relationships with people locally and trying to align on some shared vision. MC It feels like there’s some similarity to when I was on the fundraising team at CJA for a while, and during that time we were grappling with the idea of calling ourselves resource mobilizers. It was a way to say that this is different from the mainstream approach to fundraising. It was kind of this reclamation, or just creating something of our own. LS Yeah. And, where I would fear that the term cultural organizing doesn’t go is just seeing culture alone as a vehicle for change. When the reality is that you need culture and organizational structure and shifting of labor conditions, you know, to make systemic change. I think the smartest cultural organizing happens before we can get to the place where tenants are willing to form an organizing team and organize their neighbors. Food is the best way to get people to know each other. You gotta start with the barbecues, the cookouts, the movie nights, like that is cultural organizing at its best when it’s infused with the organizing strategy and not seen as an afterthought. MC Speaking of food, you created a really beautiful food sovereignty poster a while ago. What was your process to actually make that poster? LS My process began before the Creative Wildfire fellowship came about. I had been part of working with an organization, another local worker center called WeCount!, who organizes with day laborers, agricultural workers, domestic workers, construction workers. For many years I had been making campaign posters with them, doing graphics with them. And so through that experience, I got to know more about the struggle of agricultural workers who are trying to organize to change the industry. When I got the opportunity to collaborate with CJA and the Farm Workers Association of Florida on this and got to hear the stories that they shared, I wanted to paint the picture of both visualizing a transition with snapshots of what we are seeing in the world. You’ll see, I think it was in the bottom left, kind of like a toxic environment where the soil is very toxic and not only toxic to the land, but also to the workers who are tending to the crops, the food, and then in the bottom right, it’s almost like a comic, starting from the bottom left to the right, and then kind of moving its way up through transformation. The intention was that you could read it as a comic in that way or just as a process, but then looking at it wholly there’s always something bad and something good happening at the same time. It doesn’t show that everything is all great and we’re gonna arrive at liberation and things are just gonna be amazing. There’s always going to be struggle ‘cause that’s just part of life. And so the intention was centered around food which is why you have the fish and the animals that are from the Everglades, which is most near to where I’m based out of. But you see people in it as well. I really wanted to just kind of pay respects to the workers who tend to the lands to make our food possible. Also recognizing that there’s a lot of work to be done to make it better. MC What is some art that has really moved you recently? LS There’s an organization in North Carolina called Down Home. They just started a video storytelling series and I’m really excited to see it. It’s called the Front Porch. They have a substack and they just put out a teaser video. It seems like they’re going to show stories and profiles of different people in rural North Carolina. Storytelling projects like that are exciting to me right now. It reminds you that the people in the stories are human, real people, showing their lives. MC Thank you, Lizzie, for taking some time. It was really nice to chat and hear a little more about what you’re doing. 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