a working-class history of fighting deportations

A WORKING-CLASS HISTORY OF FIGHTING DEPORTATIONS By David Bacon Jacobin, 12/15/24 https://jacobin.com/2024/12/deportations-unions-immigrants-organizing-trump https://davidbaconrealitycheck.blogspot.com/2024/12/a-working-class-history-of-fighting.html The history of working-class organizing in the United States is full of examples of immigrant resistance to mass deportation, sweeps, and other tactics. Time and again, immigrant worker activity has changed the course of society. It has produced unions of workers ranging from copper miners to janitors. It turned the politics of Los Angeles head. And it is this tradition of worker resistance that is the real target of immigration enforcement waves, both current and threatened by the incoming administration. Organizers of the past fought deportation threats just as we do today, and their experiences offer valuable insights for our present situation. Not only did they show tremendous perseverance in the face of direct threats to migrants, but these organizers also envisioned a future of greater equality, working-class rights, and social solidarity - and proposed ways to get there. Increased immigration repression has a way of making the bones of the system easier to see and the reasons for changing it abundantly clear. These organizations and coalitions defending immigrant workers, their families, and their communities have often been building blocks for movements for deeper social change. The rich tradition of worker organizing against immigrant repression is a story of courageous struggle and a reservoir of strategic thinking that can help immigrant workers and communities confront the promised MAGA wave of repression. It involves far too many organizations and fights to list here. This article aims to show what people faced, how they fought, and what kind of future they fought for. RICHMOND, CA - People of faith and immigrant families celebrate Passover and hold a vigil outside the Richmond Detention Center, where immigrants were incarcerated before being deported. An immigrant woman came with her two children to ask for help in getting her husband released.  He was imprisoned in the detention center. The Old Threat of Mass Deportation In the outpouring of fear and outrage over Donald Trump's threat to deport millions of undocumented immigrants, many have drawn parallels to the mass deportations of 1932-33. At the height of the Great Depression, with hunger haunting the homes of millions of working-class people, relief authorities denied food to Mexican and Mexican American families. Racist bureaucrats appealed to the government to deport them, claiming that forcing them to leave would save money and open up jobs for citizens. These age-old lies have been recycled over the last century, repeated most recently by the MAGA campaign. Hunger was the most powerful weapon used to force people to leave. Thousands were swept up in street raids, and many more fled because of the terror these raids produced. Voluntarily or not, people were loaded into boxcars and dumped at the border gates. The euphemism of the '30s was "repatriation." Today's immigration enforcers call it "self-deportation." The idea remains the same, and Trump and J. D. Vance are only the latest proponents of this inhumane policy. People resisted deportation through the radical organizations of the era, from the Congreso de Pueblos de Habla Española to the unions formed in bloody strikes in mines and fields. The largest farm labor strike in US history, the Pixley cotton strike, erupted in 1933 across the barrios of California's San Joaquin Valley during that peak deportation year. Radical activists were singled out for deportation and defended by communist and socialist defense organizations, including later the Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born. The Mexican government of the time, only a decade after the revolution, also protested and tried to help deportees. This history of resistance is as important to remember as the history of the deportations themselves. The organizations created by resistance, and the larger working-class movement of which they were a part, survived the deportation wave. While many groups were put on the attorney general's list of subversive organizations during the Cold War, others emerged during the civil rights era. When the immigrant rights movement peaked again in recent decades, it inherited this legacy. RICHMOND, CA - People of faith and immigrants at the last vigil in front of the West County Detention Center, where immigrants were incarcerated before being deported. After seven years of vigils, the Contra Costa Sheriff cancelied the contract with Federal authorities under which the jail has housed immigration detainees.  Of the 178 detainees, supporters raised enough money to pay for 21 to be released to their families.  Victor Aguilar and Hugo Aguilar are recently released detainees, in front of the detention center. Workers Win Over Their Unions One crucial battle was fought by a small group of workers in wealthy Palm Springs, California. Twenty-three years ago, Maria Sanchez, working at the luxurious Palm Canyon resort for $4.75 an hour, marched into the office of Hotel Employees & Restaurant Employees (HERE) Local 309. There she and her coworkers joined the union. The hotel hired security guards - dressed in uniforms mimicking those of the Border Patrol - and began firing workers. The immigrant housekeepers organized a silent march in the street outside, prayed in the parking lot, and refused to go back to work. With the support of Local 309, Sanchez and her coworkers stayed out on strike for four months. She lost her house and car, selling personal belongings to survive. The manager swore they'd never work there again. Despite his threat, the Palm Canyon was finally forced to agree to reinstate the workers with back pay. But when the hotel said only workers with legal immigration status could go back, everyone stayed on strike another month, documented and undocumented together. "I didn't care who had papers and who didn't," Sanchez told me then. "We decided that no one would go back until we all went back. The union didn't back down, and we won." What makes the Palm Canyon experience important today is not just the inspiring courage of the workers but the strategic ideas that guided them. They organized over the concrete conditions of their lives. Faced with legal repression and firings, they defied efforts to make them suffer. Knowing they couldn't fight alone, they looked for help, and the union supported them. Most importantly, they stuck together. "This is exactly what's leading unions to change their attitude towards immigration," explained John Wilhelm, then the national union's president. It was no accident that as the strike unfolded, the AFL-CIO highlighted the organizing of immigrant workers at its Los Angeles convention. Rejecting its history of support for anti-immigrant legislation, the union federation adopted a resolution calling for immigration amnesty for the country's then six million undocumented people and the repeal of employer sanctions - the 1986 law that made it illegal for them to work. Palm Canyon strikers were among the many witnesses at the subsequent union hearings organized around the country to expose the violation of immigrant workers' rights.

 

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David Bacon @photos4justice on the daily lives and ongoing struggles (both personal and political) of farmworkers - interview on Against the Grain with C.S. Soong https://x.com/radioagainst/status/1848820503898710137 Pushing Forward: Organizing in a Post Trump Reelection US November 22, 2024 by A Public Affair https://www.wortfm.org/pushing-forward-organizing-in-a-post-trump-reelection-us/ On today’s two part show, Esty Dinur speaks with photojournalist David Bacon who has a long history of documenting and fighting for immigrant rights.   BOOKS - LIBROS More Than a Wall / Mas que un muro El Colegio de la Frontera Norte https://david-bacon-photography.square.site/product/more-than-a-wall-mas-que-un-muro/1?cp=true&sa=true&sbp=false&q=false   In the Fields of the North / En los campos del norte University of California Press / Colegio de la Frontera Norte ucpress.edu/9780520296077 En Mexico:  https://www.colef.mx The Right to Stay Home:  How US Policy Drives Mexican Migration  (Beacon Press, 2013) http://www.beacon.org/productdetails.cfm?PC=2328 El Derecho a Quedarse en Casa  (Critica - Planeta de Libros) http://www.planetadelibros.com.mx/el-derecho-a-quedarse-en-casa-libro-205607.html Illegal People -- How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants  (Beacon Press, 2008) Recipient: C.L.R. James Award, best book of 2007-2008 http://www.beacon.org/Illegal-People-P780.aspx Communities Without Borders (Cornell University/ILR Press, 2006) https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9780801473074/communities-without-borders/#bookTabs=1 The Children of NAFTA, Labor Wars on the U.S./Mexico Border (University of California, 2004) https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520244726/the-children-of-nafta Hijos de Libre Comercio (El Viejo Topo) http://www.tienda.elviejotopo.com/prestashop/capitalismo/1080-hijos-del-libre-comercio-deslocalizaciones-y-precariedad-9788496356368.html WORK AND SOCIAL JUSTICE: The David Bacon Archive exhibition at Stanford Libraries https://exhibits.stanford.edu/bacon/browse For a catalog: (https://web.stanford.edu/dept/spec_coll/NonVendorPubOrderform2017.pdf)   THE REALITY CHECK - David Bacon blog http://davidbaconrealitycheck.blogspot.com For more articles and images, see  http://dbacon.igc.org and https://www.flickr.com/photos/56646659@N05/albums     BROOKE ANDERSON PODCAST #8 That's How the Light Gets In  LISTEN: https://linktr.ee/thatshowthelightgetsinpodcast (or anywhere you get your podcasts)   MAS QUE UN MURO Cinco Entrivistas sobre la exposicion en el Museo Nacional de las Culturas del Mundo, CDMX: Part 1:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6eix0HEStpc Part 2:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FO4IIBPs06U Part 3:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VHtY-fgtsjs Part 4:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xm_MNrEX2Mw Part 5:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MpwSuBbgAQs   Pacific Media Workers Guild, CWA Local 39521, adopted a resolution supporting the Labor Call for a Ceasefire in Gaza:  https://mediaworkers.org/guild-joins-calls-for-immediate-ceasefire-in-gaza/ WHEN WE SPOKE OUT AGAINST WAR Unearthing the history of protest against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan Photographs © by David Bacon https://www.flickr.com/photos/56646659@N05/52759801492/in/album-72177720306862427/

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