Carlos Montes-Ponce

Community Organizer
Carlos@SacACT.org

916-272-5119

Favorite quote or scripture related to justice: 

But the poor person does not exist as an inescapable fact of destiny. His or her existence is not politically neutral, and it is not ethically innocent. The poor are a by-product of the system in which we live and for which we are responsible. They are marginalized by our social and cultural world. They are the oppressed, exploited proletariat, robbed of the fruit of their labor and despoiled of their humanity. Hence the poverty of the poor is not a call to generous relief action, but a demand that we go and build a different social order.

Gustavo Gutierrez

 

I have often reflected upon the new vistas that reading opened to me. I knew right there in prison that reading had changed forever the course of my life. As I see it today, the ability to read awoke inside me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive.

Malcolm X, El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz

 

Tsuas muaj tus ntses lawv tus dej

Tsis muaj tus dej lawv tus ntses.

There are only fish that follow the river;

There are no rivers that follow the fish.

Hmong proverb

What called you to ACT?

The belief that individuals acting in guidance of love for justice and change when coming together can create change, but also coming to be conscious that the apple does not fall when it is ripe, but rather you have to make it fall.

Favorite Book: 

Autobiography of Malcolm X by Alex Hailey

Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life by Jon Lee Anderson

They Called Me King Tiger: My Struggle for the Land and Our Rights

The Souls of Black Folk by W. E. B. Du Bois

Up From Slavery by Booker T. Washington

The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures by Anne Fadiman

Favorite thing about Sacramento: 

The diversity of its people. Discovering we are much more alike than we are different.