Council member Mazuera Arias’ goal: Represent ignored 

CITY OF CHARLOTTE

Juan Diego Mazuera Arias is the first Latino elected to Charlotte City Council.

When Juan Diego Mazuera Arias launched his Charlotte City Council campaign last year, his goal was to represent marginalized communities. 

Mazuera Arias, a Democrat who grew up in the east Charlotte district he represents, graduated Idlewild Elementary, Randolph Middle and East Mecklenburg High School. The city’s rapid development, he said, has largely excluded those neighborhoods and the objective of his first term is to pick up the pieces left from a transient storm sweeping the Carolinas’ largest city. 

“While all of Charlotte is growing at an incredible pace, east Charlotte has been neglected from that growth,” Mazuera Arias said. What I’m looking for is that east Charlotte is part of that growth, that we are growing without displacement, that we are growing without gentrification, that we’re progressing forward without pushing to the side the people that have lived here for generations and have been able to call this side of town home for years and decades.

“I’m not saying that we’re not welcoming to the new folks that are moving here each and every day, but … I feel like Charlotte is at a crossroads. We are growing for others that do not live here, and we are really forgetting about the people that have lived here for generations and call this area home.” 

Mazuera Arias, 27, is the first Generation Z council member and first person of Latino descent elected to the panel. He immigrated to the United States as an infant and plans to use his family’s experience to inform and protect others amid federal crackdowns.

“Immigrants are not solely Latino,” he said. “They are Latino, they’re Ethiopian, they’re Middle Eastern, they’re Nigerian, they’re Eastern European. I understand that from a personal level. And now I also understand it as someone who has gone through all the legal pathways to become a citizen, the endangerment that other citizens are now facing because this administration has no bounds, has no limits.

“They are now wanting to increase efforts to denaturalize folks. We saw it during the CBP Charlotte’s Web operation that they were detaining legally … permanent residents, as well as U.S. citizens. So, this attack … is not only an attack on immigrants, particularly undocumented immigrants, but an attack on every American regardless of legal status.”

Mazuera Arias, who worked for U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as a Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute Public Policy Fellow, is founder of the North Carolina Latino Political Caucus and chair of the Hispanic Democratic Caucus of Mecklenburg County. 

“I lived in Washington, D.C.,” Mazuera Arias said. “I saw what worked and didn’t work at the national level. I lived in New York City. I saw what worked and didn’t work in the (nation’s) largest city, right? The world’s most diverse city. And I took those lessons learned and those best practices back to Charlotte.

“What we’re dealing with now is an emboldened, a loud machine that is trying to distract us by throwing everything at the wall and be like, ‘we’re going to arrest immigrants here. We’re going to take transgender rights here. We’re going to gerrymander here so Black voters don’t vote.

“They’re throwing everything so they divide us. So, now our organizing and looking forward should be focused on how do we build coalitions, interracial coalitions, interethnic coalitions, intersexuality coalitions, interreligious coalitions, because now they're attacking all of us.”

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