Tuesday marks the first U.S. election in which Gilsy Peña is eligible to vote.

She is originally from Santiago de Caballeros in the Dominican Republic and recently became an American citizen.

Peña said voting in the United States is very different, which is why she visited a Community Engagement Training Center workshop in Nashua last week to learn more about what she should do when she arrives at the polling station.

“As a Latino, you can get lost in some ways,” she said in Spanish. “I’ll be there, but I don’t know what I’ll face.”

The other participants agreed. Several new citizens visited the workshop and said finding a new voting system could be intimidating.
They also talked about the challenges of finding information about candidates, communicating with election officials and learning the ins and outs of voting.

Director Ángela Mercado said it was important to answer these kinds of questions, especially for naturalized voters.

She said it’s common to hear stories of confused voters who would rather leave a polling place than vote. To address these concerns, Mercado hosted a series of small group workshops in Spanish.

She answered common questions, talked about voter rights and distributed bilingual voting resources. Like all citizens, she stressed that Latinos have rights in elections, including the right to bring election materials, have an interpreter and register to vote.

She said she hoped participants would share what they learned with their networks and encouraged them to take away additional materials to share.

“If you have already read the booklet and got the information, you can give it to your neighbor,” she said in Spanish. “It’s never bad to have too much information.”