On Tuesday night, 25-year-old Maxwell Alejandro Frost made history as the first member of Gen Z—and the first Afro-Cuban—elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. The next day, the Democratic congressman-elect from Orlando was already on a flight to Washington, D.C. for Congressional Progressive Caucus orientation, “just kind of looking out the window, playing sad music, and thinking about my grandma, to be honest,” Frost tells Vogue by phone.
By then, the former March for Our Lives and A.C.L.U. organizer had exploded into an overnight political star—a personification of the hope that the kids are alright. He inspired a burst of unabashedly excited national media headlines and a Daily Show joke about how he’d be the first congressman to vote “mid” (the TikTok equivalent of “mediocre”) on a bill. He’d also fielded a congratulatory call from President Joe Biden, who name-checked him in a post-midterms speech from the White House on Wednesday. “I have no doubt he’s off to an incredible start in what, I’m sure, will be a long, distinguished career,” Biden said of Frost.
On the plane, however, Frost was in his feelings. Listening to “Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story” from Hamilton—a show that he saw for the first time only recently (“Don’t judge me!”), when its national tour stopped in Orlando—his thoughts turned to his own family lore. How his biological mother, his aunt, and his grandmother Zenaida Argibay—“Yeya” to Frost—left Fidel Castro’s Cuba during the Freedom Flights of the 1960s and ’70s “with only a suitcase and no money,” as Frost wrote on his campaign website. Frost and I are both the children of Cuban immigrants, which, we agree, can make striving feel like part of your DNA. He describes the inherited family ethos: “You have to have that grind to get the life that you want and be in a place where you can succeed, because the cards are completely stacked against you.”
Argibay went straight to work in Hialeah, near Miami, “for like a buck an hour, just so my mom and my aunt would have a better life,” Frost tells me. Her skin became permanently stained from the labor at a lamp factory. In Latino immigrant culture, that struggle is often worn “as a badge of honor, like, ‘Wow, our family came here with nothing, and now look at us.’ You work at Vogue. I’m running for Congress,” he says—still evidently getting used to the idea that his run actually turned into a win. “But it’s also incredibly sad. I think about where she would’ve been if she had the same opportunity that I had, or she was represented by a union, or she had healthcare as a human right, or she had a thrive-able wage,” he adds of his grandma. “She deserved so much better.”
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