On Tuesday, May 17, 2022, John Fetterman coasted to a Democratic primary win in the race for U.S. Senator in Pennsylvania, but it wasn’t him who took the stage to give a rousing victory speech. Instead, it was his wife and Second Lady of Pennsylvania Gisele Barreto Fetterman.

“Now you may have noticed, I am not John Fetterman,” Gisele began, receiving a roar of applause and laughter.

Despite the warm welcome, it had not been an easy couple days for Gisele and the Fettermans. On the Friday — May 13 — before the Democratic primary for PA’s soon-to-be-vacant second U.S. Senate seat, John suffered a stroke that kept him in a Lancaster hospital through Primary Day.

When he got out of the hospital, John began on the long road to recovery from a stroke very much in public view. He was now a main candidate in what was one of the most-watched elections of the 2022 midterm cycle. In his place in the spotlight, especially in the early days of recovery, was Gisele.

In addition to her speech on the night of John’s primary win, Gisele was a constant promoter on social media, using her large following alongside her husband’s to push a nationally-recognized online Senate campaign.

She also took any interviews she could and was the face of the Fetterman campaign in its outreach to Latino communities across the Commonwealth. Gisele hit the ground in places like Reading, Hazleton, East Stroudsburg, and of course Philly.

It was also not John’s voice many Latino Pennsylvanians heard in the campaign’s first Spanish-language radio ads — the first of any campaign during the 2022 midterm cycle — but Gisele’s.

In them, she drove home the same points John did on the campaign trail about protecting abortion, voting rights, raising the minimum wage and more, while also sharing her own story, which strikes at the heart of many Latino experiences not just in Pennsylvania, but across the U.S.

It’s a story AL DÍA has had the privilege to tell on more than one occasion — how Gisele first came to the U.S. from Brazil with her mom at seven years old. She was undocumented for a time and that fact has become not a point of shame, but one of pride for the former Second Lady of PA. When she entered that prior role in Pennsylvania, that was one of the first things she tweeted about.

But that story itself is not why Gisele Fetterman is AL DÍA’s 2022 Person of the Year. Instead, it’s because of how much it’s grown in the years since. It’s now in Washington D.C. with potential to reach hundreds of millions of people not just in the U.S., but across the world.

And don’t think for a second it’s because of what John did to get himself there. It’s what both Gisele and John did together, and will continue to do together.

“I look like an ogre,” John once told Pittsburgh Magazine in a profile of Gisele. “People gravitate more to her than me, and not without good reason.… Kids love her. She radiates kindness and warmth.”

In a world of politics, that kindness and warmth is something dearly missed even though Gisele has said she’d never run for office and would not live in D.C. while John served.

We can still dream, especially after everything accomplished in the last calendar year.