People Still Have the Power
An essay from my forthcoming book "Riffs and Reflections, True Stories about Rock Music and Becoming." This essay traces my journey from political apathy to American citizenship—including the ordinary encounters that helped me understand the power of participation.
PEOPLE STILL HAVE THE POWER
Patti Smith, Dream of Life (1988)
On September 1st, 1982 when I was 14 years old, while my dad and I were washing his car in the street in front of our house, Radio Fórmula was crackling through the car radio. Mexico’s president José López Portillo was delivering his last State of the Union. As water ran the sides of the car and my hands dripped soap, my dad scrubbed the windshield listening closely. Suddenly, Portillo’s voice changed. It sounded hesitant, then pushed forward: “¡He decidido nacionalizar la banca!” — “I have decided to nationalize the banks,” he declared.
My dad froze. He turned toward the radio and raised the volume, sponge in hand. Then, for a long moment, he just stared at nothing, listening…quiet. Then he set the sponge down and wiped his face with the back of his hand, leaving a streak of soap across his cheek and muttering, “oh God…” I didn’t know what it all meant, but I could sense what he felt: something like frustration, disbelief, fear, betrayal…
Then, without saying anything else, my dad dried his hands, paced twice, and went back to scrubbing the hood.
That’s how PRI politics worked. A regime that trained generations to expect the unexpected, distrust the spectacle, and brace for consequences handed down from above. “El PRI,” the Institutional Revolutionary Party, Mexico’s ruling party for most of the 20th century, was a political machine that governed through patronage, propaganda, and fear. To me, elections felt like theater; power seemed inherited, negotiated, or bought.
In the years that followed this announcement, money was tight for our family. We didn’t travel, and rarely bought new clothes — we felt it.
So I grew up believing democracy was more choreography than choice. I inherited the apathy. As a young adult, voting in Mexico felt pointless to me. The result seemed predetermined: The PRI would win. That apathy started to change when I moved to the United States.
I came to the US in 1999 to do my master’s in business administration, and upon graduation, I found a full-time job at Whirlpool Corporation in Benton Harbor, Michigan.
While studying, I had a student visa, then when I found a job, a working visa, and five years later became a permanent resident. I could only observe. I watched democracy from the sidewalk. I listened to neighbors debate politics outside coffee shops, saw lawn signs appear before elections, and realized that regular people cared enough to argue about their country; they participated in meetings; they used their voices. It felt very different from what I had grown up with, where politics seemed opaque and the outcome already decided for us.
Then, one summer day in 2008, I started to gain insights into how democracy worked.
One of the things I loved about working at Whirlpool was going out for lunch during the summer. Stepping out of the office into downtown St. Joseph, Michigan, felt like a mini-vacation. Tourists from Chicago and the surrounding areas walked around in shorts, kids ran past in swimsuits, and teenagers traveled in herds toward the beach. On one otherwise ordinary Wednesday, I was meeting my wife, Marilú, and our kids for lunch.
I was standing in line to buy Chicago-style hot dogs from a street cart for everyone at the corner of Elm and State while Marilú and the kids walked up from the beach to meet me. Then I heard Patti Smith coming from somewhere down the street.
“People Have the Power.”
I assumed there was a band covering it. That wouldn’t have been unusual; during the summer, different acts would come and play at a small stage. But as we walked toward the music, hot dogs in hand, we found something unexpected: a circle of people gathered around a tall, thin woman with a portable speaker.
She was registering voters, with Patti Smith blasting from the speaker beside her.
The powerful voice of Patti’s song rattled the pavement while she shouted over it, “Your vote counts! Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise!” People listened and signed clipboards. Barack Obama was running for president, and she was trying to get people involved. Cars honked in solidarity. The woman seemed archetypal; almost mythic in her power to summon people to action. And the whole scene felt loud and alive—civil electricity!
Then, I recognized that woman all of a sudden; it was our good friend Amy. I stood there listening and eating my hot dog, caught somewhere between surprise and awe. Our kids found hers—they were like cousins—and they ran to the playground. When the song stopped and the crowd thinned, we talked. I told her how different all of this felt from what I had grown up with in Mexico. She talked about why participation mattered, then asked me a simple question.
“Are you going to vote?”
I told her I had a green card but no citizenship. I couldn’t.
“Then get it,” she said. “If you’re part of the country, you should be part of the power.” It always struck me how open, loving, and supportive she was with Marilú and me—we were still finding our place in the country, and she always treated us like family.
Patti Smith had made a career out of questioning things. A poet before she became a rock star, she emerged from the New York underground in the early seventies and became one of the central figures in the scene growing around CBGB, alongside bands like Television, the Ramones, Blondie, and Talking Heads. Her 1975 debut, Horses, fused poetry with the rawness of rock and helped lay the groundwork for what became punk.
Which makes the story behind “People Have the Power” even more interesting to me.
By the time she recorded Dream of Life in 1988, Patti had largely stepped away from the New York rock-star life. She was living near Detroit, raising a family with her husband, Fred “Sonic” Smith, formerly of the MC5. They wrote the song together, and the story goes that it began at home while Patti was doing the dinner dishes.
A song with such an enormous message about ordinary people having power emerged in the middle of an ordinary day, not unlike the Wednesday when I found Amy playing it on a sidewalk in St. Joseph.
The way Amy framed citizenship was the first time someone had framed it to me as agency—not simply as a piece of paper, but as an opportunity to participate in democracy.
That conversation lit something in me. I started reading, learning, and asking questions. I paid attention to primaries, debates, and court decisions.
One Saturday night, a few months later, we had dinner with the family of one of Marilu’s friends. Her husband had grown up in rural Michigan and was roughly at the same stage in life I was —young kids, busy job, and the vague memory of something called free time. Besides that, we didn’t have common.
Talking about some of the cultural differences I had experienced since moving to the United States, I mentioned that Americans are usually amazed and sometimes uncomfortable with the help most middle-class families have in Mexico, which extends beyond the house to driving, childcare, everything. This is perfectly captured in the film Roma. This extends even to golf. “For example,” I said, “if you play golf in Mexico, they’ll do everything for you. Park your car, carry your clubs, clean your shoes, carry your drink, find your balls.”
“But I hate it,” I continued. “I like playing here. You just show up, pay, head to the tee, and play. Nobody knows who you are, nobody cares who you are, and nobody is waiting to do things for you. I like that.”
At the mention of golf, Marilu’s friend suggested that her husband and I should play. “Honey, you deserve to relax a little. Why don’t you and Moises go hit some balls tomorrow morning? Marilú and I will take care of the kids.” His face lit up. Within minutes, he had secured a 6:30 a.m. tee time, which raised questions about his definition of relaxation.
The next morning, somewhere between bad drives and lost balls, our dinner conversation continued. He seemed genuinely curious about why I moved from Mexico and why I had come to the United States. He wanted to know how Whirlpool had hired me, what opportunities had brought me here, and what I was finding in Corporate America. He asked about my health insurance, how I paid taxes as a non-citizen, whether I had a 401(k), even what kind of visa I had. As a social worker, he seemed particularly intrigued by my corporate job; to him, it sounded almost “elite.” I also sensed that, from where he stood, he felt I had a very comfortable life for someone who had been in the country such a short time. It certainly didn’t feel that way to me. We were raising young kids and, despite the corporate job and the benefits that came with it, still felt like we were living month to month—paying mortgage, car loan, and saving a little for our kids colleges.
Once we had warmed up, as we teed up in hole seven, I told him I didn’t understand much about American politics. I mentioned Amy, the woman I had seen registering voters in downtown St. Joe, and told him she was supporting Obama.
He chuckled a little. Then he missed an easy putt badly.
Then I asked him, with complete sincerity, if he could explain something very basic to me that I truly didn’t understand. “So what’s the difference between the Democratic and Republican parties?”
He became considerably more careful with his words.
He started with immigration. As he explained it, Democrats were generally more open to immigration and more willing to provide government support to immigrants. Republicans, he said, tend to be more restrictive and more concerned about who entered the country and whether Americans should have first access to jobs and government resources.
Then I asked how someone like me fit into that.
There was a longer pause than usual.
He stepped up to the tee and hit the ball way out of bounds.
“Well...” he said.
I waited.
He explained that Republicans wanted to be more selective about who could immigrate and under what circumstances. Then he quickly added that someone like me was different. I was educated. I had come legally. I had a good job and paid taxes. Of course, he didn’t have a problem with people like me.
He didn’t sound entirely convinced. Neither was I.
I stepped up to the tee, put my ball down, and hit what may still be the best drive of my life. Straight down the middle of the fairway, at least 250 yards, maybe more.
We started walking toward our balls. Mine, miraculously, was exactly where it was supposed to be. His had disappeared into the woods.
I watched him wander through the rough, pushing aside branches and staring at the ground until he stepped into a patch of mud and nearly went down with it. That seemed to settle the search. He pulled another ball from his bag, dropped it beside the fairway, and shook the mud from his shoes and white pants, now considerably less white.
Neither of us said much.
I continued to walk toward my ball, sitting beautifully in the middle of the fairway, and thought about Amy.
I think I’m beginning to understand why I might want the right to vote.
A few years later, on March 20, 2013, Marilú and I raised our hands in a government office in Grand Rapids and became U.S. citizens. And on November 8, 2016, we dropped the kids at school and went to the library to cast our first votes together. Then we went on with our day.
Something that had once seemed enormous had become wonderfully ordinary.
Patti Smith wrote “People Have the Power” while doing the dishes. I learned about the power of voting while buying hot dogs and playing bad golf.
Maybe that’s how democracy is supposed to work. Not as something we watch from the sidewalk, but something ordinary people can and should do in the middle of ordinary lives.
About the Book
“Riffs & Reflections, True Stories about Rock Music and Becoming” pairs iconic albums with personal stories of identity, belonging, and reinvention. It follows my journey from a childhood in Mexico City to a life and career in the United States, with rock and roll as a constant companion. This essay traces my journey from political apathy to American citizenship—including the ordinary encounters that helped me understand the power of participation.
Author’s Note
This essay is part of a manuscript in progress. Conversations and scenes have been reconstructed from memory and, in places, condensed for narrative purposes. You are welcome to share this complete essay with attribution to Moisés Norena (Don Moi), from the forthcoming book Riffs & Reflections. For publication or adaptation, please contact me first.
© 2026 Moisés Norena.
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