Rickie’s Story

Rickie Allen Gonzales is a native New Mexican and a lifelong Valencia County resident. He grew up here and went to school here — Raymond Gabaldon Elementary, Daniel Fernandez Intermediate, and Los Lunas Middle School. He spent his teen years in Alaska before coming home. He came back on purpose — to make a life here, where much of his family had settled, on the intersection of The Camino Real and Route 66.

He studied in Albuquerque and earned a degree in Graphic Design and Advertising Art — the start of a working career that now runs more than twenty years in the trade.

His first job out of school was five years at the Valencia County News-Bulletin. It turned out to be an education of its own. Covering county commission, city council, and village meetings, elections, crime, and development, Rickie spent those years watching how decisions get made in Valencia County — and noticing who was in the room and who wasn’t.

He spent the rest of his career in the corporate world: design and marketing, technical writing, layout, and publications for two New Mexico casinos, and packaging and branding for sports medicine products. Two decades of highly skilled work, and no job security at any point in it. New Mexico is an at-will state, which means an employer can end your livelihood without ever telling you why. Rickie has lived that, and it shaped how he thinks about workers and worker’s rights.

He comes by it honestly. Rickie is kitchen table union trained — raised in a household of union and pro-labor workers, where organizing wasn’t a theory, it was dinner conversation. He worked under collective bargaining early in his career — as an air ramper for UPS in Alaska, in the grocery industry, and doing stage-hand work — and then spent years in corporate jobs where no organizing was allowed to exist, seeing exactly what workers lose without it.

Rickie’s roots in Valencia County run through both sides of his family. His maternal grandfather, Ezekiel Mares, worked for the New Mexico Department of Transportation and organized for AFSCME in the early 1970s — he raised his family in Albuquerque, loved Bosque Farms, and retired to Peralta. His grandmother Mercedes Chavez, his mother, his sister, his aunts and his cousins all found their heart in Valencia County. His father married into the Aragon family here, and his paternal grandmother — his favorite person — came from Arizona to be near them. Between siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins, nieces and nephews, Rickie is running for a district his family actually lives in.

Today, Rickie has stepped away from the corporate world. He’s helping to build a small business with a friend — still designing, still printing, still doing the work he’s good at, but building it for himself and for people here instead of for a company that could let him go any Tuesday. It’s harder in some ways. Nobody guarantees the fifteenth of the month. But he’d rather build something than keep running the rat race, and getting out of it gave him back his health and some clarity. It’s also what made running for this seat possible.

Rickie became involved in local politics through the Democratic Party of Valencia County and has served as a voter registrar. That work showed him how fragile voting rights can be—and how much protecting them depends on ordinary people showing up. As he puts it: “Your most fundamental right is not the right to vote, but the right to register to vote.”

Why he’s Running

Rickie saw himself in politics as a child, and he always meant to run one day. What finally decided it for him was a ballot.

Two years ago, he looked at the ballot for his own district and found there was nobody to vote for. No Democrat. No choice. No contest. A man who had spent years signing people up to vote had nothing to offer them on the ballot. Then this past February, the Democratic Party of New Mexico met and Rickie by chance happened to be there when it was announced the seat still had no candidate. Rickie spent ten days weighing it. Nothing in the math said yes. He said yes anyway.

He’s running because the families in this district who are struggling deserve a voice in Santa Fe — and because a district with no choice on the ballot isn’t a district being represented.

House District 7 is a rural district inside a growing county — and the growth keeps happening somewhere else. The business base is small. The east side of the district has been ignored by lawmakers for years. Big Ag has its mark. Families here deal with the congestion of city life and the access problems of country life and get the benefits of neither. And the rural people… the farmers, they are caught in the middle, fighting to hold on to their heritage!

Rickie’s approach is pragmatic and he says so plainly: bring constituents and experts to the same table, find what actually works, and fund projects in an order that makes sense — feasibility through construction — instead of paying consulting firms for endless studies while nothing gets built for decades and decisions are made without public input. That’s just wrong. We must do better. He wants to be a voice for the people who come to the table with very little, or having things taken away: workers and their families, seniors and retirees, veterans, people living with illness and disability, people without homes, immigrant families, and the kids who’ll inherit whatever we build or fail to build.

“The status quo is not progressing in a way that will benefit the future of this county. HD7 is a very important seat for New Mexico moving forward.”

                                                                                                ~ Rickie A. Gonzales