El Comité: Advocating for Older Latinos

When Colorado state lawmakers took up a bill this year to exempt some medications from price review by the state’s prescription drug affordability board, two AARP volunteers—Irene Martinez Jordan and Magdalena Aguayo—jumped into action.

Martinez Jordan, 78, contacted 20 legislators and drafted talking points against the bill for other AARP volunteers to use. She and Aguayo, 82, both of Denver, also activated the Latina Calling Tree—a network of AARP volunteers who use their collective power to press lawmakers on key issues. In this case, they flooded lawmakers with phone calls and emails encouraging a “no” vote on the drug bill.

The calling tree is just one function of El Comité, a group of about 10 volunteers whom AARP Colorado turns to when it needs help advocating for or assisting the state’s older Latino residents.

The committee was formed in 2005, and its members, based in the Denver area, serve as AARP’s eyes and ears for Colorado’s Latino community. They help sharpen AARP’s focus on pressing issues and undertake projects that affect Latino residents, who made up 22.5 percent of the state’s population in 2022.

“[El Comité] has been a fierce boots-on-the-ground outreach committee historically,” says Marissa Volpe, AARP Colorado’s associate state director for livable communities. She wants to expand the committee beyond Denver and increase members’ visibility, possibly tapping them to serve as AARP ambassadors on city or statewide commissions or with civic groups. That would increase their clout in arenas “where aging and race and ethnicity intersect,” she says.

Plugged in, charged up

As of press time, the drug bill that Martinez Jordan and Aguayo advocated against had stalled. After a previous campaign on a different issue, one lawmaker acknowledged El Comité’s sway—telling an AARP staffer they could “call off the dogs now,” according to Martinez Jordan. The comment made her proud.

“[Society] doesn’t respect how knowledgeable [older] people are.… We have things to say, and we can help,” says Martinez Jordan, who also testifies at legislative committee hearings.

Chart by Nicolas Rapp

In addition to advocacy, El Comité members work on voter education and engagement—whether it’s at a local library or a naturalization ceremony. El Comité member Ruth Sanchez, 73, of Denver, is leading such efforts for the 2024 general election.

“We don’t push any candidate,” she says, noting that AARP is nonpartisan. She and others are encouraging people to register to vote, and AARP Colorado is making sure they’re up to speed on key issues, such as the future of Social Security.

El Comité members are active in many other organizations, which helps them stay plugged in to the Latino community’s most pressing issues. For instance, Martinez Jordan, a former principal of Denver’s West High School, co-runs the West Campus Food Bank; Sanchez served as chair of the Denver Commission on Aging and also is active with the American GI Forum; and Aguayo, a literacy advocate, volunteers with Denver Public Schools.

Sanchez, Aguayo and other members of El Comité served on a community advisory committee that helped create “El Movimiento: The Chicano Movement in Colorado,” an exhibit at the nonprofit History Colorado Center documenting one of the state’s most important social movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Sanchez says it took about a year of planning to develop the exhibit.

“We said we need to tell people about our history because they’re not teaching it in schools,” she says.

To learn more about El Comité or to get involved, contact Marissa Volpe, mvolpe@aarp.org

Cynthia Pasquale is a freelance writer and former editor at The Denver Post. She has written for the Bulletin since 2011.

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