I am a lifelong Detroiter. My grandparents came here from Mexico in 1920. My grandfather worked at Ford Motor Co. He was laid off in 1922. That should give you a little hint of how long this has been going on.
He later got hired at various other shops, and years later retired from Chrysler. My father also retired from Chrysler and my uncles retired from Ford. Almost everyone in Detroit of my generation (I am 52) worked in auto or our parents worked in auto. We came from the poorest people. We believed then and we know now that the U.A.W. was responsible for the good lives we had.
I am a grass roots activist. I spent years doing jail and prison advocacy after graduating from Wayne State University with a degree in criminal justice That work was motivated for me by the loss of a loved one to the drug trade. My boyfriend, Gilbert Gutierrez, was killed in a multiple execution murder in 1977. He was 26. Killings like this were rampant in the years of heroin here, and many lives were lost in the violence.
After the overwhelming sadness of identifying bodies, burials of victims and watching the sentencings, I found myself questioning the entire structure of society. One way I found to deal with my grief was to work with people who sought solutions to the root causes of poverty and injustice. And I continue that work today.
My theory about the Detroit gene pool is this: Everywhere in the country and in the world, people left their beloved homelands to try their luck in this cold, faraway place where all you had to do was be willing to work. Whether one came from the segregated South, post-revolutionary Mexico, Europe, Kentucky or the Virginia mines, everyone who came here was ready to work. And there was plenty of work to go around.
This was an amazing place, a Promised Land, where with nothing but hard work — not political connections, not silver-spoon wealth — one could buy a house, a car, even two, raise a family and take vacations. Anyone could earn an honest day’s pay. The union contract protected every worker from the tyranny of nepotism, favoritism, racism, sexism, and every other evil -ism that has ravaged society since the beginning of time. Of course it was not perfect, but it was a lot better than it would have been without the Battle of the Overpass, the Flint Sit Down, the Ford Hunger March, and countless other battles our parents and grandparents told us as bedtime stories.
We grew up walking every picket line in town, whether my parents worked there or not. We took food to strikers, talked Union at the dinner table, and to hear my family tell it, the working class would save the human race.
Many people who came to Detroit to work in the 20s and 30s were recruited from Mexico. My grandparents were among the 15,000 who arrived in Detroit during the early years of Ford recruitment. Some had made their way from Texas to Kansas, working in the fields and on the railroads until they arrived here for the promise of $5 per day.
When the Great Depression hit, there was a forced “repatriation” of thousands of Mexicans from Detroit and about one million around the country. My family was among the many who left and among the few who returned to Detroit. We still do not know how many people were affected by this tragedy. Shedding light on this important part of American history has become part of my own life’s work. It has also informed my own current work with immigrants arriving recently to Detroit.
I left my position as a local union president representing cafeteria workers in auto plants four years ago. After 9/11 the plants started cutting back on food services and our little local began to spiral into debt to the point that we were no longer sustainable. It was a very hard decision to leave a long standing solvent local, started by the dedicated trade unionists to insure that workers were protected on the job, that women who spent their lives in this service would receive pensions. All that is gone now. No longer is longevity rewarded; older workers are run out, replaced by employees who must work for less. Two tier contracts are the rule now, not the exception. Older workers in high wage industries under collective bargaining agreements are an endangered species. They will not reproduce. They are nearly extinct.
I left my local and started, with a dedicated group of activists, a center for immigrant workers. We hold legal clinics, English classes, some cultural events, and search for people picked up by I.C.E. (Immigration and Customs Enforcement), post bonds and accompany people to court.
Recently, a friend and I drove a young woman and her six-month old baby to a Southern state because there is no work here. She joined her husband, who had not yet seen their daughter. The couple will likely be picking tomatoes and then on to the next crop. The couple faces deportation, but they cannot leave the country because they have no way of feeding themselves and their families. I have never been so aware of the privileges of citizenship as I have since I started waiting in detentions, posting bonds, driving a car, all things many of my neighbors cannot do. We wait in hopeful anticipation of immigration reform for an end to this madness.
Still, thousands of U.S.-born children face the same fate as our families did in the 1930s — deportation. The big difference is this: We are here, and we will not stand by while innocent people are detained, incarcerated, hunted down and separated from their children, parents and loved ones. Children witness this every day. What are we to tell them? If I have learned anything as an oral historian, it is that small acts of cruelty and small acts of kindness are remembered as historical events. What we do will be remembered.
We are in a deep malaise here, but this is not new. It’s often said that in the private sector that Detroit is not the place to start a “service industry.” When you hear that the service is terrible in Detroit, imagine us raising our collective glass in cheer, because we did not come here to serve anyone.
