By: Profe Gonzalo Santos ~ May 1, 2020
About a thousand folks marched & rallied in downtown Bakersfield on May Day in 2017 – the first (and so far, the only) time folks in this town proudly celebrated International Workers Day, that I know of. I’m proud to say I was involved in convening folks in early 2017 to organize this event, hoping it would become a yearly tradition.
Most local unions and community-advocacy organizations declined to participate; but a highly-motivated, varied group of activists responded favorably. And so, it was on! The event as it happened that glorious May Day was a great success – hundreds marched around downtown Bakersfield, held a wonderful festivity in Mill Creek park, and got great media coverage. A huge picture of the front of the march adorned the front page of the Bakersfield Californian the next day.
The points of unity agreed upon by the organizers – see below – reflected a welcome intersectionality in the group. In other towns, the demands were focused for immigrant rights, something that became a tradition after the historic immigrant marches of 2006, which culminated with the May Day National Boycott for Immigrant Rights, which in Bakersfield attracted the largest-ever, all-day rally at Beach Park – about 35,000 people!
But folks, May Day is as American as apple pie. It originated back in 1890 as a day to honor the memory of the world-famous “Chicago Martyrs,” the American workers who in 1886 rallied 80,000-strong at Haymarket Square to demand an 8-hour day – a labor demand that had started in the US back in the mid-19 century, in the UK even earlier -, only to be brutally attacked by the police, its labor leaders subsequently framed and executed.
Oddly, I knew all that growing up in the Mexican port and major oil town of Tampico, in the Gulf of Mexico. Every May Day, as a little boy, I would watch from my grandmother’s balcony, stunned, how thousands of workers – peasant farmers (ejidatarios), oil workers (petroleros), dock workers (alijadores), and many others – would suddenly appear out of nowhere, pour into downtown, and pass by my balcony marching in boisterous, but disciplined, interminable contingents, chanting and carrying huge banners extolling their unions – and unfailingly, the “Chicago Martyrs” and “international workers’ solidarity” (“¡Que vivan los mártires de Chicago!” “¡Que viva la solidaridad internacional de los trabajadores!”).
Wow! Who, my boyhood mind wondered, were those “Chicago Martyrs,” and whywere they been so prominently honoredby these throngs of proud and militant Mexican workers? This was even more intriguing to me, having grown up in a hyper-nationalist culture that glorified mostly Mexican heroes and had such a deep anti-imperialist political tradition. The only other foreigners ever honored so publicly were the “San Patricios”– the Irish American brigade that switched to the Mexican side in the U.S.-Mexico war.
As a little boy growing up in the 1950s, with a very welcoming and loving Mexican grandmother, an expatriate, gruff, Irish-American grandfather (who thought FDR was “a Communist”!), and a beautiful and talented ballerina godmother (madrina), who lived with them and frequently hosted her leftist artist friends for lunch, I quickly learned – from their very heated debates at the table – of the hotly contested significance of this worldwide holiday somehow “born in the U.S.A.”
Many years later, when as a young man I came to the U.S. in the 1970s, I was stunned and surprised to discover practically no one knew about May Day, the “Chicago Martyrs,” or anything else related with that truly American gift to the world – other than, in their minds it was associated with the world’s biggest military parade, held in Red Square, Moscow, the capital of the dreaded U.S.S.R. – and that parade usually displayed the latest nuclear intercontinental missiles, built to compete with the Americans in their mutually destructive, insane, nuclear arms race. That is, in the American minds I encountered, it was a threatening “Commie celebration” – nothing more anti-American than that -, a view held in the Labor movement as well as the various movements I encountered, like the Chicano, Black, and anti-war movements, all of whom made sure to stay away from it.
Meanwhile, back in Mexico, the main plaza in Mexico City – the Zócalo– would continue to swell up with hundreds of thousands of marching workers on May Day (no military parade, that was Cinco de Mayo, which, weirdly, WAS adopted by the Chicano movement), waved on by the all-powerful Mexican president in turn, safely perched at his high balcony in the National Palace, in an apotheosis of nationalist class-state solidarity. In the 1990s, though, as the ruling party PRI became delegitimized after it abandoned its national developmentalist project and embraced the U.S.-imported neoliberal globalization project, the badly impacted Mexican workers used the occasion to openly insult and challenge the president. And so, May Day ceased to be a useful government-controlled propaganda spectacle. It got officially cancelled, something which allowed May Day to return to its militant labor movement roots, fertilizing its many gardens of resistance, where it remains today.
What about the peculiar story of May Day in the U.S., its prolonged avoidance, and its incipient return in this new century, carried on the shoulders of Mexican, Salvadoran, Guatemalan, and other combative migrants?
Picking up the story just after the Haymarket Affair: May Day was first adopted as a yearly labor celebration in 1890 by the Second International (1889–1916), a Paris-based organization of socialist and labor parties. It soon spread as a labor holiday to most countries in the world. Its main demand was the 8-hour work day, today an international labor norm frequently violated. Mexico enshrined it in its 1917 Constitution, a great achievement of the Mexican Revolution. In the U.S., there was a lengthy process of piecemeal adoption of the 8-hour day, which culminated in a New Deal federal law passed in 1937. It took the combative class militancy of American workers during the Great Depression and a sympathetic Roosevelt administration to get it passed, over the strenuous opposition of the capitalist class.
But back in the 1890s, as the US labor movement gained strength, US President Grover Cleveland was one of those concerned that a labor holiday on May 1 would strengthen socialist and anarchist movements at the heart of the militant US labor movement. He advocated for a *September* Labor Day holiday instead, as a less inflammatory alternative. That September date was formally adopted as a United States federal holiday in 1894. After World War II, as the labor movement itself was tamed and domesticated during the Cold War era (1945-1993), even that Labor Day was reduced to nothing more than a marking of the end of the Summer, celebrated more with family picnics and shopping sales than with militant collective actions of any kind.
Enter the modern immigrant rights movement into the picture in the 2000s. May Day became a day of collective mobilization for immigrant rights, which were and are inextricably linked with labor rights, human rights, and social rights, inextricably imbued with a sense of internationalist working-class solidarity. It sprung from the bottom up, insisted upon by the immigrant workers themselves, resurrected even without much support from Big Labor.
All of this was well reflected in the organizing I was involved in for the 2017 May Day march & rally in downtown Bakersfield. It was a grass-roots event, organized by activist from various movements, without the formal support of any of the big, formal unions in the county – or even most of the community organizations (though a few, to their credit, did). But that did not keep hundreds of folks from marching that day – even in conservative Bakersfield. Their banners and posters reflected our rich, mutual solidarity.
Three years have passed. In the intermediate years, the Women’s March in January has become a similar type of intersectional movement festivity. But it is held always on a weekend, following a minimal march route, with very pro-establishment, moderate voices in command (even rightwing Republican ones, all in the name of sisterhood!), and overall lacking the militancy of May Day. Perhaps that’s how it should be, but given the extreme challenges we face today on all fronts, including women issues, I doubt it.
Today, May Day is being celebrated all over the United States – mostly virtually on internet, and via “car caravans” – the brilliant new mode of collective action in these times of coronavirus. In L.A., all sorts of workers’ solidarity events are going on today, especially in defense of grocery workers and the other front line, essential but unprotected workers helping us through the crisis, many of whom are immigrants.
The pandemic has not stopped us from celebrating May Day in the United States, so much as it has refocused it to protect our workers now, and demand structural, radical change after the pandemic is over. About time!
I believe May Day is here to stay in the United States, primarily and thus far through the agency of immigrant workers, who have taught and are teaching their American brother and sister workers the meaning of international worker solidarity as it was always meant to be, and as it should certainly be in this country built by immigrants.
——————
MAY DAY MARCH & RALLY IN BAKERSFIELD, 2017
Principles of Unity
May Day Resistance Committee
• Guarantee Health Care for All
• Protect Labor’s Right to Organize & a Living Wage
• Stop Criminalizing Immigrants, Refugees, Muslims & People of Color & Protect DACA
• Embrace Full Equality & Rights for Women & LGBTQ People
• Respect & Protect Mother Earth
• Promote Quality Education for All & Guarantee Debt-Free College Education
• Stop Criminalizing Homelessness & Mental Illness
• Invest in Education – Not Incarceration
• Preserve the Free Press
• Embrace Religious Diversity
• Prevent Hate Crimes
• End Racial Profiling & Police Brutality
* DON’T GO TO WORK * WALK OUT OF SCHOOL
* DON’T SHOP * CLOSE YOUR BUSINESS
Source: Profe Gonzalo Santos ~ May 1, 2020
