Dylan Baca

By Josh Kazali

Illustration by Phoebe Wagoner

On Nov. 5, 2024, Dylan Baca, CC ’25, was driving through Northern Arizona. It had been a long Election Day for the nation, but particularly so for Dylan, who at just 22, was serving as a Regional Political Director for the Kamala Harris campaign in Arizona. After making furious phone calls to keep polling stations open across Apache County, handing out blankets and hot beverages to keep nearly 2,000 voters in line, and attending a party at the President of the Navajo Nation’s office, Dylan O. Baca (known by some of his coworkers on the campaign trail as “Barack O-Baca”) was listening to NPR on the way to Flagstaff when it became clear that the night was not looking in his favor. “I’m a little concerned about how things are going,” he recalls, wincing. As battleground states turned redder and redder, Dylan received a call that Fox was calling the election for Donald Trump. So he pulled into a gas station outside of Winslow and assembled “the craziest fucking shopping cart of things”: a trifecta of energy drinks, Nerds Gummy Clusters, and a tin of ZYNs—“I don’t even do ZYNs,” he adds hastily, “But I do now.”

Dylan is a busy guy: He’s a citizen of the Navajo Nation and the White Mountain Apache Tribe, hailing from Pinetop, Arizona; he’s the Chairman of the Indigenous Peoples Initiative, an organization he founded in 2019 as a senior in high school; he’s a frequenter of classy cocktail bars in Manhattan; and for a brief, glorious period between the fall of 2021 and the spring of 2022, he was my roommate in a spacious double on the 15th floor of John Jay Hall.

Since freshman year, our paths have diverged, to say the least: While I joined The Blue and White Magazine as a staff writer, Dylan was elected a delegate for the Arizona DNC. But now, as seniors, we’ve rekindled the strange and wonderful spark that only randomly assigned roommates can have at Nobody Told Me on 107th and Amsterdam, where Dylan is a known quantity. Over a round of Old Fashioneds (his drink of choice), I was regaled with war stories from the campaign trail, reflections on a disastrous electoral outcome, and a glimpse into a profoundly unusual undergraduate perspective. 

When I met Dylan on move-in day, his political star was already ascending. He had worked energetically with the Indigenous Peoples Initiative on advocacy and legislation supporting Native Americans across the country, most notably the celebration of Indigenous Peoples’ Day. On Oct. 8, 2021, when myself and most other college first-years were mired in hangovers and homesickness, President Biden signed a proclamation declaring the federal recognition of Indigenous Peoples’ Day. Dylan takes a lot of phone calls, but the one he received that day was a long time in the making: It came from the White House, and as he spoke to President Biden and received compliments for his work on the initiative, Dylan was positively glowing with giddy excitement and pride. I know because I was the one watching incredulously from my bed on the other side of the room, and the one who treated Dylan to a celebratory jumbo slice at Koronet that afternoon.

An Old Fashioned is an apt drink for Dylan. If you meet him, you’ll find that behind the boyish face and jolly countenance lies the humor and taste of a much older man. Our room in the John Jay days looked more like the bachelor pad of a distinguished gentleman on the Upper East Side than a college dorm, with a crystal decanter of whiskey, a roster of Tom Ford colognes and suits, and a selection of fine cigars for special occasions. My hipster friends would wander to his side of the room with a mix of anthropological fascination and total bewilderment, studying a leather briefcase like an artifact from an alien planet.

Dylan loves telling stories, which he delivers with the roaring laughter and wistfulness of an old codger looking back on his glory days. He has stories about meeting astronaut Mark Kelly on the campaign trail and welcoming Kamala Harris to Arizona. “I just hear her laughing,” he says fondly of the candidate whose campaign he championed, “You know, her traditional cackle that everyone knows her by. I’m like, Oh, she’s here.” When discussing the current Democratic leadership, he mentioned Illinois governor JB Pritzker, noting casually, “He’s a character. I did a shot of Malört with him and the governor of Massachusetts.” Dylan delivers these anecdotes with an infectious hilarity that embraces their own absurdity, as if he can’t quite believe it either. He has a certain swagger, but he also doesn’t fear laughing at himself. When I ask about his relationship with the Democratic Party after the election loss, he says with a sheepish grin, “I must like abusive relationships—I’ll probably run another candidate!”

When the conversation turns to the Trump administration, Dylan shifts to a somber and stately tenor. “I literally broke down,” Dylan says, recalling election night. “Everything had grown into that moment.” Losing Arizona to the Republicans was a crushing blow, and one that poses a challenge for Dylan’s immediate future. “Every step forward we took feels like four steps back,” he tells me. “I think a lot of people will be hurt in the process of whatever ‘making America great again’ looks like.” For Dylan, the matter is personal to the Indigenous community he has long fought to defend, whose lives are subject to change under a far less sympathetic White House. After four years of Biden-signed proclamations recognizing Dylan’s advocacy, the future of Indigenous Peoples’ Day is threatened under the new administration. I asked him if there was any hope for the initiative for the next four years, to which he responded simply, “Nonexistent.”

Yet in spite of the losses, Dylan has emerged from the fray of the election more committed to the future of the Democratic Party than ever. The election was not simply a defeat, but a wake-up call: “What the fuck are we messing up?” He describes the post-mortem discussions after the election as an urgent realization of the need for reform. “The party needs to fundamentally change how it views issues,” he tells me, describing the need for policy “built toward common-day issues”—a party which reflects and amplifies the voices of the people. 

In a period where political disillusionment and apathy is unavoidable, Dylan’s earnest commitment to the American project is refreshing. I left the Millennial haze of Nobody Told Me feeling slightly more at ease about our future politicians—a rarity when talking to a political science major at Columbia. “It’s about earning your keep,” Dylan says, describing the need to “think beyond yourself” in the pursuit of public service. For Dylan, it’s the work that matters above all—and with another election cycle fast approaching, the work is only just beginning. “It’s invigorating in a way,” he tells me. “It’s like, oh yeah, we can’t let this shit happen. So how do we gear up for the midterms?”