For six generations since emigrating from Mexico to America, Clarissa Renteria’s family never voted.

If any campaign mailers arrived during election season, Renteria’s parents — who both worked as warehouse workers in Woodlake, an agricultural town of 7,600 in California’s citrus belt — would throw them away. When their neighbor was elected mayor of Woodlake, Renteria’s father shrugged it off. “Look at him trying to fit in,” Renteria remembers her father saying.

“My family just didn’t feel included in the politics, didn’t feel seen,” Renteria, 25, said in an interview at a voter registration event in Tulare. “It was just like: ‘You guys obviously don’t care about me. I don’t care about you, and I’m not going to vote. I’m just going to work to live and that’s it.’”