Miller is a local author, professor at San Diego City College, and a vice president for the American Federation of Teachers, Local 1931. He lives in Golden Hill.
As we approach the holiday season, many of us look forward to having a few days off from work to celebrate with our family and friends. It might be something simple, like going out to dinner, having a drink with friends or sharing a small feast with family at home. Those of us with the good fortune to know these moments probably take them for granted, but the fact is that for a large number of San Diegans, these luxuries are beyond their reach.
The truth is that beneath the veneer of the sunny tourist postcard image that San Diego promotes to the rest of the world lies much suffering.
Recently, I was at a small rally on the corner of Front Street and Broadway by the Edward J. Schwartz Federal Office Building organized by Justice Overcoming Boundaries and the San Diego Dream Team to call for a pathway to citizenship for millions of undocumented immigrants in the United States. While the chances of such a policy being ed as part of a reconciliation package in Congress are increasingly slim, these activists — including students, religious leaders, union , essential workers and community allies — were there to make their voices heard nonetheless, hoping against hope for justice.
As cars and buses rushed loudly by and the occasional pedestrian shouted hostile insults, a series of speakers gave testimonials in Spanish and English about the struggles of undocumented workers in our community. One by one, they took the bullhorn and spoke of fathers and mothers doing everything they could to put food on the table, working tirelessly, enduring long hours and experiencing wage theft, racism and 1,000 other cuts to hold a household together.
At one point, I observed a trail of ersby carrying bags of take-out food making their way through the crowd on the sidewalk, coldly staring at one of the essential workers from San Diego, Maribel Solache on the bullhorn as she asked the assembled, “Who is working in the restaurants? Who is working in the kitchens? Who is feeding people? They want us to do our jobs, but they don’t want to give us citizenship. That is not human.”
Another woman, a college student, choked back tears as she told the story of her family’s struggle and her fight to stay in school. People clapped and urged her on as she paused to regain her composure. It was a moment of grace under pressure that few people saw, but one that embodies the dignity of the struggle of those at the bottom of our region’s economy.
More people went by laughing, ignoring the words as they echoed against the concrete wall in the beautiful, indifferent twilight of our fair city.
As a long-time activist, I have been to hundreds of rallies and have probably heard thousands of speeches, but that night, as I leaned back against the cold wall, I was moved. In part, this was because that young woman’s story was like that of countless students I have taught, tried to mentor and encouraged during more than 20 years of teaching at San Diego City College. In that time, their tales of personal, economic and cultural struggle have woven together into a vivid tapestry of love, pain, and, at times, transcendence.
But the fact that things never seem to improve for those at the margins of our economic life is simply, for lack of a better word, obscene.
One of the last speakers, Julio Villa, a student and member of the San Diego Dream Team, one of the two groups who sponsored the rally, said that undocumented workers didn’t have the luxury of staying home during the pandemic, and rather than being seen as essential, their labor was largely invisible to us.
“I want you to look at us,” he said. “We put our loved ones at risk. Is that essential enough? We feed America. Is that essential enough?”
There was blame at the rally for Republicans, for demonizing all immigrants under former President Donald Trump, and for Democrats, for being full of empty promises now. And both are to blame. The truth is that people in San Diego and the United States of America at large are, in fact, happy to eat food and consume a multitude of goods that are the product of the labor of undocumented workers like those at the rally and in the restaurants, hotels and office buildings that surrounded it. This is happening, still, years after an infamous piece of agitprop art by Elizabeth Sisco, Louis Hock and David Avalos coined the phrase in 1988, “America’s Finest Tourist Plantation.”
It’s long past time that this changes, and, against all odds, that we finally craft a humane immigration policy that recognizes the dignity of the workers we depend on — all of them.
