Michael Sedano
The world loves comeback stories like Brazil’s presidential election. The winner in 2022, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, in 2003-2010 was president of Brazil. Right-wingers dumped him in the next election and locked him up for two years. The political prisoner was freed by court decree. Lula organized his way back into relevance, ran against his jailers, and Lula wins again. Is there another shoe to drop? A ver.
A few years back, I was interviewing Esteban Torres to write his “as told to” autobiography. One of Torres’ favorite stories of his time as a United Auto Workers organizer in South America, is one where Torres butts heads with a firebrand laborer in Brazil.
Background: When Detroit’s Big Three started making cars in South America, the industry thought to leverage the region’s skilled, cheap, labor to rake in money hand over fist. A UAW-financed campaign sent the only Spanish-speaking organizer Walther Reuther knew, Esteban Torres, to organize the South American auto industry.
It’s an exciting story not only of labor versus management, but Torres and the UAW were in competition with other unions, the Soviets and the CIA get mixed up in the scene, and the State Department has to rescue Torres from repressive government threats.
Torres pulls it off to amazement and career-solidifying acclaim. Here’s Torres’ recollection, in 2020, of that time in Brazil.
“Pocho” is what Mexicans call a Chicano, I knew that already. Despite carrying a nopal en la frente, in Mexico, Chicanos were outsiders. In all Latin America, I am an outsider. Workers won’t give me a free pass into their group’s confidence just for being brown. Quite the opposite. Some thought I was a spy.
Overcoming suspicion often is a matter of how one treats others. In United States culture, Chicanos understand being outsiders or a “Stranger in One's Land,” as Ruben Salazar titled his historic 1968 report. Salazar laid the foundation for thinking critically about our cultura. I hope history remembers that.
We Chicanos don’t have to remain outsiders. My story is about one individual’s growth from outsider to insider, from insider to a top seat. Individuals, despite and in the face of exclusion, find the freedom to attain leadership and authority, to be the First, the Only, among the few.
Growing entire generations to have the same kinds of abilities and freedom as one individual, is our next step. Some people call that “assimilation,” or “accommodation,” but I think it’s adaptability. One individual’s “high tolerance for ambiguity” just means someone is good at being a chameleon. You fit in, you blend in, you disappear, but always remain yourself because no one can take that from you.
When the chameleon sees what it waited for in disguise, in a flash! the chameleon does what good chameleons do, take care of business.
For a Union organizer, every person in the plant presents a unique opportunity to bond, people-to-people, and as workers. The organizer comes into a meeting with a basic message and purpose, but the workers, the audience, determine a successful outcome. Ignite a spark among the worker community and local Organizers leverage that to enroll members and gain bargaining strength.
One of the best experiences of igniting sparks and making personal contact came in Brazil. The training plan scheduled a series of classroom meetings. Time and motion studies were a complicated technology and it didn’t help when one of the students heckled me. “This guy is a CIA plant,” he said. Some of the workers started to sway toward his persuasion. Being from the United States, CIA ties weren’t unlikely, in their experience.
I repeated what I’d always say stressing union to union and worker solidarity, not international movidas serving their own interests, not the worker’s.
The smart guy listened, that’s what good agitators do. My subject matter was immediately useful. Engineering, time and motion studies, produce hard numbers that prove arguments, like a need to slow down an assembly line. Labor shows Management how improving work conditions gains better productivity, a win-win bargaining stance. The agitator settled back and began to work with me in the classroom discussions.
When the final class came to a close, that heckler had become top student. He came to me and shook my hand and told me I’d won him over and that I was an all-right guy. I will always remember his young face and see it when I see the news about that worker, Lula da Silva, former President of Brazil.
No comments:
Post a Comment