From Sleeping on Floors to History-Making Senator: How Ruben Gallego Fought Back When Childhood Took a Turn (Exclusive)

Mar. 15, 2025

Senate candidate Ruben Gallego speaks at a campaign event in Tempe, Ariz., on Nov. 4, 2024.Photo:Mario Tama/Getty

Mario Tama/Getty

AsRuben Gallegoprepares for the biggest moment of his career on Jan. 3, his swearing-in as Arizona’s first Latino U.S. senator, he acknowledges that it’s a once-improbable fulfillment of the American dream — one that he unknowingly set the stage for in his childhood.

While growing up in Chicago, Gallego’s middle class life took a drastic and unexpected downturn when his father, who had a fairly successful contracting business, abandoned the family for a life of drug dealing.

“Even before my father left, he was a horrible man,” the senator-elect, now 44, tells PEOPLE. “He was very emotionally abusive, physically abusive to me and my mother.”

This upheaval led to Gallego’s mom, a secretary, moving her son, then in seventh grade, and his three younger sisters into an apartment where he slept on the floor because a bed was unaffordable. “It sucked, there’s really no other way to describe it,” he says, adding: “And when you’re poor, it hurts.”

“I was angry and also a little frustrated at that point just because I felt that things had gone very wrong very fast in my family,” he continues, “in a very short period of time.”

Ruben Gallego (left) helped take care of his younger sisters Liza, Alejandra and Laura (pictured with him on the right).Courtesy of Ruben Gallego

Courtesy of Ruben Gallego

However, Gallego was determined to make things right, for himself and his family.

“I’m like, okay, I need to figure out what I’m going to do. Either just focus on how to get out of it, or you just kind of languish in it,” he recalls.

Gallego set his mind on working as hard as he could to change his circumstances — both for outstanding grades and at jobs to support the family, juggling algebra and history homework after school with shifts at a pizza parlor, a meat plant, flipping burgers, and as a bouncer.

At night, exhausted, he’d sometimes cry, overwhelmed with his desire to succeed and help his family. “I was definitely hoping, but also literally praying,” he says, “that this was all going to be worth it in the end.” It was.

Ruben Gallego poses outside the White House in Washington, D.C., long before holding public office.Courtesy of Ruben Gallego

Gallego began feeling his hard work pay off during his senior year of high school, when a large envelope from Harvard University arrived at his apartment mailbox, containing an acceptance letter and scholarship offer.

“You have these little envelope slots and I just saw it stuck in there, it was massive,” he recalls. “I’m like, ‘Holy s—, I made it!’ ”

At Harvard, though, Gallego struggled to adapt to college life alongside his much wealthier classmates. “I worked throughout college cleaning toilets, toilets in the dorms of students that I had to see in class the next day,” he recalls — and he floundered academically.

When officials suggested he take a leave, Gallego joined the United States Marine Corps Reserve before returning to Harvard and graduating in 2004.

A young Ruben Gallego pictured in uniform. On the right, he stands beside his mother.Courtesy of Ruben Gallego

The next year, his unit deployed to Iraq, where his Lima Company, at first called “Lucky Lima” because it suffered no combat casualties, ended up with 48 men losing their lives — the most casualties for a Marine unit since the Beirut bombing of a Marine barracks in 1983. (Gallego later recounted his time with the unit in the 2021 bookThey Called Us ‘Lucky’.)

The lack of support Gallego found from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs would later spur him to run for public office.

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Gallego eventually moved to Arizona to be with Harvard classmate Kate Widland, whom he later married. The now-divorced couple share a 7-year-old son. His ex-wife, who still carries Gallego’s last name, is currently serving as the mayor of Phoenix. “I’m very lucky,” Gallego says, “to have a good co-parent to work with.”

In 2014, after a stint as the assistant minority leader in the Arizona House of Representatives, Gallego was elected to federal office as a Democratic congressman.

Hespent the past two yearsvying for independent Arizona Sen.Kyrsten Sinema’s seat in the Senate, ultimately defeating Republican nomineeKari Lakein November during an election year when Arizona otherwise swung conservative.

Arizona Senate candidate Ruben Gallego meets with concrete workers at sunrise.Courtesy of Ruben Gallego

A key to Gallego’s most recent victory? He believes his openness in sharing his personal struggles while growing up resonated with Latino voters,particularly Latino men, who felt financial strain — many of whom backedDonald Trumpfor president.

“A lot of them decided to vote for me because they saw that I understood them,” he says. “I understand how hard it is working hard and then not making it… I’m the guy that was a dishwasher, the guy who flipped burgers, the guy who did everything you can think of to make money for my family. I was able to get them to understand I was going to be fighting for them.”

Gallego made an effort to accommodate his constituents’ schedules and meet voters where they were, in one case joining concrete workers at the break of dawn before they clocked in for the day.

Ruben Gallego and his wife, Sydney Barron Gallego, and two kids.Courtesy of Ruben Gallego

And while he grows his family and looks ahead to the next chapter in the Senate, he notes that the women in his family who once faced the same difficult circumstances are now doing well for themselves, too. “We all have middle class lifestyles, we all have college degrees,” he says.

His mother, who is about to retire from a nonprofit, moved to Phoenix to be closer to him. One of his sisters is a businesswoman, one is a primary school teacher and one is a blood cancer research doctor at Northwestern’s medical school.

“We studied hard, worked hard, we did whatever we had to do,” says Gallego. “The sacrifice that my mom and my three sisters did to succeed, to really live the American dream, has definitely worked.”

source: people.com