After a hot and busy summer, Union Summer intern Olivia Montesano is now back to pursuing a master’s degree in justice studies with a heavy focus on community organizing at Arizona State University. She’s back to reading about people around the world organizing their communities to make a difference.

This summer, between semesters, she decided to put classroom theory into real-life practice by participating in the AFL-CIO’s Union Summer two-month internship. In the sweltering heat of Phoenix, Ariz., Montesano helped spearhead the effort between Union Summer, who was working out of UNITEHERE’s office, and Citizens for a Better Arizona. The Adiós Arpaio campaign is a project between the Campaign for Arizona’s Future PAC and the Promise Arizona PAC.

“He’s corrupt in so many ways,” she says, echoing the perception many Arizonans have of Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s tenure in public office. “We’ve been seeing it for years."        

Six days each week, Montesano spent the mornings making phone calls to businesses and volunteers to ensure their support, attending trainings focusing on different aspects of the labor movement and, in the afternoons, heading out into the field. She spent hundreds of hours registering voters in front of restaurants, at Latino churches and outside houses in the cities of El Mirage and Surprise, both in Maricopa County.

Montesano has been up against Arpaio before. On Arpiao’s birthday, for instance, she and other members of Citizens for a Better Arizona went to deliver a cake to the sheriff, but he rudely declined the thoughtful gesture. Last September, while wearing Hawaiian shirts, the group visited his office to ask him for a taxpayer-funded vacation to Hawaii (a reference to the time Arpiao sent his deputy on a taxpayer-funded birther investigation to the Aloha State).

“We keep trying to talk to him but nobody comes out,” Montesano says of the three times she’s been to Arpaio’s office building.

We’ll keep trying. People in his office look really uncomfortable when we try to talk to him. They say that he’s in a meeting or something. And we’ll say we’ll wait and spend hours there waiting for him.          

Montesano occasionally met some resistance during Union Summer as well. She particularly remembers a 50-something Latino Tea Party supporter who would show up at “a lot” of their Citizens For A Better Arizona events and speak over them through a bullhorn, calling the Union Summer interns a “band of fools.”

She will no doubt continue to encounter similar resistance from Arizonans who support Arpaio’s hateful and divisive agenda, but at least she won’t be alone. On the last week of her Union Summer internship in early August, Citizens for a Better Arizona offered her a position as coordinator of a full-blown challenge to the Arpaio campaign whereby she’ll be overseeing a group of about 20 canvassers until Nov. 6, the day Arizonans will decide whether to re-elect Arpaio for a fifth time or vote someone else into the sheriff’s office. And although classes resumed for her recently, she’s fully committed to this new campaign, opting to take online classes this semester to have “complete flexibility” for her job, she says.

Inspired in part by her Union Summer experience, Montesano would like to organize workers or do nonprofit work after graduate school. Organizing is hard, challenging work with long and irregular hours, she recognizes. But she’s not one to spend all her work day in an office, either. For her, organizing surely beats the alternative.

“Many people are only looking out for themselves and after material things,” she says. “When that’s your only focus in life, there’s not very much good feeling in that. We should be looking after each other.”

And she adds:

People are apathetic. They don’t want to get out of their way to get involved in social justice issues. So we have to make the issues relevant to their lives. If you can talk to people and show them the facts, they’ll listen to you.

With people like Montesano, people like Arpaio stand no chance.