Guest Column – Standing for Justice and Memory: Why I Am Backing Phil Weiser for Governor

The opinions, beliefs, and points of view expressed by our guest columnists do not reflect the opinions, beliefs, and points of view of this publication.

Irene Vilar, Author & Justice Worker

I learned what environmental injustice was before I had words for it as a child growing up in Barceloneta, Puerto Rico, where pharmaceutical companies came for a colony’s tax breaks and left behind poisoned aquifers and Superfund sites. The mothers, teachers, and nurses in my town noticed it first. My mother led the Puerto Rican Independence Party of my town and also the protests demanding the government’s accountability for the poison in our water, soil, and air, as well as the release of Puerto Rican political prisoners in U.S. federal prisons; my grandmother Lolita Lebrón was one of them, serving twenty-five years for her activism.

Every Tuesday evening in 1975 and 1976, I got to hear the sweet cadence of her voice speak to dozens of fellow women and watched the heartwarming ways of solidarity grow out from ties of mutual concern. That is the school I come from and why I am voting for Phil Weiser for Governor of Colorado.

I have spent twenty years in Colorado connecting communities to clean air, trees, forests, books, and each other. In the last two years, I have watched federal grants vanish simply for using the words “equity,” “DEI,” or “climate change,” and I have watched mothers skip essential health care visits because ICE was waiting on the corner.

I have witnessed families stop attending cultural events they held dear out of pure terror of government actions. Fear functions as a serious public-health exposure, and it spreads just like particulate matter.

A Proven Record of Defending Our Communities

Through all this adversity, one statewide office, led by Phil Weiser, held the line. His record demonstrates why I cast my vote for him. Phil uncovered a pattern of racially biased policing in Aurora and negotiated a landmark consent decree with an independent monitor and clear milestones, establishing one of the first such state-led accountability mechanisms in the nation.

When a sheriff’s deputy handed a 19-year-old nursing student over to federal agents, Phil took him to court, declaring unequivocally that Colorado law enforcement exists to enforce local law, not federal immigration policy. When the Trump Department of Justice sued Colorado and Denver to force cooperation with ICE, Phil’s office fought back, and the judge dismissed the lawsuit entirely.

His commitment to our shared environment and economic security has been just as unyielding. During his very first days in office, Phil pulled Colorado out of the lawsuit against the Clean Power Plan, consistently resisted every federal rollback of clean-air protections since, and ultimately took the EPA to court to defend Colorado’s independently crafted pollution-reduction strategy.

In total, he sued the Trump administration more than fifty times to overturn federal funding freezes targeting nonprofits, block penalties on state equity programs, and safeguard critical safety-net funds meant for Colorado’s most vulnerable families. Furthermore, he crafted an opioid settlement framework that directs every single dollar toward solving the public health crisis on the ground, channeling resources directly to communities, Spanish-speaking households, and frontline rural healthcare providers.

This election matters more than any I can remember. Colorado needs an executive leader who understands every agency from within because he has already stood up to defend them, creating a sanctuary where anyone can report a crime, see a physician, send a child to class, and breathe clean air without fearing persecution.

Vision, Accountability, and Culture as Health Infrastructure

As governor, there are vital commitments to which we must hold him accountable. First and foremost, clean air must become an urgent priority for children’s health, anchored by the full enforcement of the Environmental Justice Act. Immigrant families must be explicitly shielded by law across every single county.

Data center development requires enforceable community regulations covering site placement, emergency backup generators, water consumption, and energy costs, ensuring these critical decisions are made alongside local neighborhoods rather than imposed upon them. On technology, Colorado must establish firm boundaries for artificial intelligence; having drafted the country’s first comprehensive state AI law and charged his office with enforcing it, Phil must finish this work as governor by funding the bilingual educators needed to demystify these platforms for the residents they directly impact.

Crucially, arts, culture, and literature must be recognized as vital public-health infrastructure. Through the Outdoor Recreation Industry Office—where I was privileged to serve as a board member under Governor Hickenlooper alongside Luis Benítez—Colorado formally recognized nature as critical to public health. Our state is now ready to apply that same standard to arts and culture.

While Colorado Creative Industries performs valuable work, it remains housed within an economic development agency and relies primarily on federal arts funding that faces mounting political attacks. I urge Governor Weiser to elevate this agency into a dedicated state office for arts and culture backed by an explicit public-health mission and independent state appropriations, following models long established in Germany, France, and Mexico that treat culture as a fundamental social determinant of health.

Within that office, Colorado should establish a community grants program modeled after the environmental justice grants at the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment (CDPHE), where I serve as an appointee under Governor Jared Polis. This initiative should reach small, bilingual, rural, and grassroots institutions that traditional funding pipelines routinely overlook, centering its mission around an active state publishing initiative.

The printed book remains the most durable, cost-effective, and resilient technology human beings have for transmitting testimony through time, yet it faces unprecedented danger today. Generative artificial intelligence trains on previously recorded words while flooding commercial channels with synthetic text detached from authentic human experience.

In such a climate, safeguarding cultural memory demands an uninterrupted stream of original literature written by actual witnesses, expressed in their native languages, and published under their own names. That continuous literary stream serves as an indispensable democratic safeguard.

While robust European democracies translate and publish significant portions of their literary catalogs—exceeding 30% in smaller nations—the United States translates less than two percent overall and under one percent of its literature. Consequently, in a society where people of color make up more than forty percent of the population and multilingualism is at its peak, reading habits remain dominated by English-language titles produced by an industry lacking broad demographic representation.

This widening gap acts as a slow-burning fuse under an increasingly diverse democracy, because any society whose public stories systematically exclude its people will eventually fail to recognize them as its own. No state has tackled this crisis directly, but Colorado could lead the country by establishing a focused, state-supported publishing initiative inside an arts-and-culture agency.

Such a program would commission, translate, and circulate the genuine voices of our communities across English, Spanish, and the intersections between them. Having spent more than three decades in publishing—working alongside university presses, founding multicultural series, and directing a nonprofit imprint centered on conservation and diversity—I have seen firsthand the severe obstacles presented by corporate media consolidation, algorithmic selection, and the sudden rise of artificial intelligence narrowing our collective narrative right when democracy demands memory and plurality.

I have proudly supported Governor Polis for many years. Today, the realities of our time demand that I support Phil Weiser with even greater urgency, conviction, and faith.