It was during her time attending the tiny Baltimore County liberal arts school, where she served as Goucher College’s Student Government president for three years, that Ramos was introduced to the city and its politics. Her activism continued through high school, at one point including a protest of the Persian Gulf War that nearly got her arrested.Īfter high school, Ramos chose to attend Goucher College. You can actually make change,’ and so I’ve been very interested ,” Ramos says. “I testified before the City Council to say, ‘Hey, you need recycling,’ and they passed the bill that night, and I was like, ‘Wow, this is really cool. Inspired by a teacher’s activism, Ramos, as a seventh grader, lobbied city government to create a recycling program. She traces her interest in public policy back to the early 1980s. Ramos’ inclination to political activism, apparently inherited from her great-grandmother, emerged at a young age. “And my dad, you know, says I look like her. What’s interesting is there hasn’t been anybody else in our whole family who’s run for public office since then,” Ramos continues with a smile. So my dad talks a lot about and the work she did. “And then shortly after, she ran for governor of Puerto Rico. “My great-grandmother, in Spanish she’s called bisabuela, she was very active in the suffrage movement,” Ramos says. In a way, it even reaches back generations and across the ocean to Puerto Rico, where her great-grandmother, Ricarda López de Ramos Casellas, helped lead the island’s women’s suffrage movement, and then did something incredibly unusual for a woman in 1936. Her journey stretches back roughly 1,900 miles west, and more than 5,000 feet above the sea-level Inner Harbor to Albuquerque, New Mexico, where Ramos grew up. Over the past two decades, Ramos has led community groups, volunteered with local campaigns, built connections through her nonprofit work, served on the Democratic Central Committee, and even suffered a loss at the ballot box before winning this race. While Ramos’ election marks a milestone for Baltimore and the city’s ever-burgeoning Latinx community, it also marks a culmination of years of hard work by the 48-year-old longtime activist, who has worked her way up to the City Council the old-fashioned way.
“I think we can make more transformative change, and I think I can do it from this seat.” Why are you doing this now?’” Ramos says. “People ask me, ‘Why ? You’ve done all this stuff. But they also share an understanding that politics is about a lot more than smiles and glad-handing, and requires an understanding of where the pressure points are on a given issue, in case they need a squeeze. Like Clarke, Ramos is friendly and approachable, as well as a dogged worker. It was Clarke, in fact, who gave Ramos her first, albeit volunteer, campaign job in Baltimore. It’s no small coincidence that Ramos is filling the shoes of Clarke, a historic figure in Baltimore politics in her own right as the first woman president of the City Council. Indeed, the early returns are so lopsided-with 91 percent of ballots cast going to Ramos-it’s immediately clear voters in North Baltimore overwhelmingly voted to make history and elect the first person of Latinx heritage to serve on the Baltimore City Council. The first count released online by the Baltimore’s Board of Elections shows Ramos dominating her race against Republican Charles Long and likely to succeed retiring City Councilwoman Mary Pat Clarke in District 14. The results from her contest provide some lift, however, as supporters process the drip, drip, drip of the initially disappointing national news (for Democrats). That anxiety mounts as Donald Trump unexpectedly surges to a big lead in Florida, dampening the mood among Ramos’ backers. The attempt to create a festive vibe, however, only exacerbates the tension surrounding the presidential election.
Across the street, another neighbor blasts disco from a sound system. A neighbor lugs a big-screen television onto their lawn so folks gathered outside can watch cable news coverage of the presidential election. With her bright orange, rectangle-framed glasses pushed atop her head, she sets pizza and wine out on a table in front of the Victorian cottage she shares with her daughter and husband. Ramos, a Democrat who is on ballot, is wearing a purple blazer with black trim and a black face mask with white lace, a nod to the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. A few neighbors occasionally pull down their masks to sip beer, despite the election night chill, as they await the first vote counts. Standing on the sidewalk outside of Odette Ramos’ home in Abell, a smattering of residents perform the awkward dance of trying to interact socially while simultaneously remaining socially distant.
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