In The Arena

For most of her life Danielle Cendejas (’04) has been deeply involved in politics.

Her passion spans high school and college experiences campaigning for candidates, working internships and launching student clubs at Gonzaga. She did community organizing for former President Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign, and eventually started working full-time at Los Angeles-based communications firm The Strategy Group.

“We help candidates shape their narratives and shape their stories,” Cendejas says of her company’s work. “They come to running for office with a why, as in, why they want to do what is an incredibly challenging thing to do. It’s a very vulnerable place to be, and everything gets scrutinized on every level, no matter whether they’re running for city council or school board or Congress.

Cendejas credits her experiences as a Gonzaga undergraduate with helping her learn how to work with people from across the political spectrum, even as her arrival in Spokane from suburban Los Angeles was a classic “fish out of water” situation.

“Most of my friends growing up were either Latino or Asian because I lived in a very diverse part of L.A. County,” says Cendejas, who serves as president of the Gonzaga Alumni Los Angeles Chapter as well as on the GU Board of Regents and on the leadership team of the Zags of Color alumni affinity group. “Going to Gonzaga, I learned a lot from people who grew up with 500 people in their entire town, in a small town in Idaho or Montana or Washington state. You can learn about the reasons why somebody who grew up in a rural area might feel like their opportunities were disappearing before they entered a learning environment that is bigger than anything they’ve ever experienced.”

Learning about her classmates’ backgrounds made Cendejas even more passionate to pursue social justice in her life, even if many of those classmates came from a different political background. And in her job now, she taps into those memories when she’s working in a place she’s unfamiliar with, asking questions about the economy and jobs, where people like to congregate, what they like to do on a Friday night. All of that in service of being better able to communicate with them and find common ground even if she’s working for a candidate who might not seem a natural fit for the area.

Then and Now

When Cendejas was at Gonzaga, campus and the country were suffering from serious political divisions.

The 2000 presidential election was contested well past Election Day all the way to the Supreme Court, and the candidate who won the popular vote did not win the Electoral College vote (and hence, the election) for the first time since 1888. Then the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the U.S. occurred, leading to a brief period of national unity before divisions again arose related to how the country should react and recover. And on campus, from Cendejas’ perspective, “you had people who were very much protecting a very conservative ideology, and then you had people who were part of an emerging social-justice movement” around women’s rights, LGBTQ+ rights and clubs tied to different cultural backgrounds.

There are certainly parallels to what current students are experiencing in 2024. Political discourse is arguably even more divided between Republicans and Democrats. Hamas’ attack on Israel and that country’s response in Gaza has campuses across the country divided. And while cultural clubs and social justice groups have blossomed across Gonzaga’s campus, there remains passionate debate on issues like abortion and controversial guest speakers invited to campus.

The main difference is social media, says Cendejas, an “elder Millennial” at 42, comparing today’s students to her era. Facebook wasn’t around yet when she was in college, let alone TikTok. Students barely had cell phones. The speed in which students get information is totally different. “[In the early ’00s] you still had a lof of traditional media,” she says, “and you still had a lot of people influenced by what their parents and grandparents thought about politics.”

“A lot of people were agnostic, politically speaking,” Cendejas says. “Like, ‘This doesn’t impact me. This doesn’t affect me.’ This generation sees it just the opposite. I think they know politics affects them, and they know the decisions being made impact them.”

Today’s students also have events from halfway around the world thrust in their face instantly via Snapchat or TikTok. Students when she was an undergraduate had to seek out information, Cendejas says, and now they get news so quickly – and often unvetted for accuracy – that political divisiveness is accelerated along with it. Overcoming such divisions is something that takes work.

Asked for advice for current Zags for navigating the choppy political waters ahead, Cendejas mentions the importance of voting, as well as doing what she did on campus 20 years ago – get to know fellow Zags who aren’t just like you.

“You know the things you want changed. You know the conversations worth having. If you don’t participate [by voting], it’s not just that you don’t get a say, it’s that somebody else is making those decisions for you,” Cendejas says. “There is a whole group of people who are showing up, and if you’re not one of them, you are ceding your opportunity to make a statement.

“And be curious, not judgmental. Have that hard conversation with somebody and understand their why. They might make you upset, and that’s okay. It's okey to be upset by somebody who may be a little closed-minded. But you have the opportunity to share your perspective with them.”