Dimitri Rodriguez In her head, she envisioned a big, festive event. Celebratory. Perhaps in a park, or on a brownstone-lined street, the sun streaming through the trees. People of all races, religions, and backgrounds—the people she seeks to represent—would flood together in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, the neighborhood where she grew up, and she, Dianne Morales, a girl who was poor and didn’t know it, now a woman rich in the perspective that comes from a life spent proving people wrong, would stand on a platform and declare that she was a candidate for mayor of New York City—a city brimming with possibility, but one that has yet to live up to its potential as the greatest in the world.