The Arts: A Platform Statement

Summary Statement

The arts are not a luxury; they are the language we reach for when policy alone cannot

capture what a community has lived through. I have seen what happens when people are

given a way to express their history, their grief, and their hope instead of just their

grievances. Long before I ran for office, I built Miami's first full-time Creole-language radio station because I believed our community deserved to hear its own voice, its own music, its own stories, reflected back to it. That belief has not changed. At a time when our national conversation has become a shouting match conducted through screens, and when more of daily life is being shaped by artificial intelligence rather than human hands, the arts are one of the last places left where people actually sit across from each other and make something together. That is not nostalgia. That is infrastructure for a healthy democracy, and I will fight to protect it as such.

The Full Case

1. Creativity is a civic skill, not a luxury.

As more of our economy and daily life becomes automated or AI-generated, the ability to

originate something new, to sit with ambiguity, and to make meaning by hand becomes

more valuable, not less. A community that invests in its creative capacity is investing in

the one thing no algorithm can replace: the human ability to imagine what comes next. I

will support policies and funding that treat creative education and creative industry as

economic development, not extracurricular enrichment.

2. The arts are where we practice disagreement without destruction.

We are more divided, and more mediated, than at any point in recent memory. The arts

remain one of the few spaces where people encounter difference without needing to

declare a side first. Research on arts participation consistently finds it strengthens social

cohesion and community well-being, particularly in a moment when isolation and

division are public health concerns in their own right. I want South Florida's stages,

murals, and studios to keep doing what our politics increasingly cannot: bringing people

from different backgrounds into the same room.

3. The arts are a serious economic engine, and Florida is proof.

This is not an abstract argument. Florida's arts and cultural sector added $51 billion to our state's economy and employed more than 307,000 workers earning $24 billion in wages and benefits. Here in Miami-Dade alone, the arts and culture sector generates $2.1 billion in local economic activity and supports over 31,500 jobs. Nationally, the nonprofit arts and culture industry generates $151.7 billion in economic activity and $29.1 billion in tax revenue every year. When we fund the arts, we are not spending, we are investing in one of the most productive sectors of our economy.

4. Protecting the freedom to express is protecting the point of democracy itself.

What does our democracy exist to protect, if not the freedom to speak, to create, and to be heard? The arts are that freedom in its fullest form. This is not a partisan idea, it is one of the few things nearly all of us agree on, whatever else divides us. Public support for the arts also happens to be one of the smartest investments government makes: public arts dollars consistently draw in private and philanthropic giving at a multiple far exceeding their cost, meaning a modest public commitment unlocks a much larger wave of private support. I will fight in Congress to protect that commitment, including through the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities,

because protecting the freedom to create is not a lower priority than any of the urgent

fights in front of us. It is part of why we are fighting at all.

5. Arts education builds the students our future needs.

Students with strong arts education post higher grades, higher test scores, and higher rates of graduation and college enrollment, and the effect is largest for students from low-income families, the students our public schools most need to reach. That is not a

coincidence. Arts education builds the same skills, critical thinking, discipline, empathy,

collaboration, that prepare young people for every field, not just creative ones. I will fight

to protect arts education funding in our public schools, especially in the communities that stand to benefit the most and that too often see it cut first.

6. The arts carry our heritage forward. FL-24 is home to one of the largest Haitian-American and Caribbean communities in the country. I know firsthand what it means to have your language, your music, and your story reflected in the culture around you, and what is lost when it isn't. Supporting the arts in this district means supporting Creole storytelling, Caribbean music and dance, and the cultural institutions that keep our history alive for the next generation. This is not a side issue for our community. It is central to who we are.