Radical Labor
Beyond labor unions, radical groups that organized women and immigrant workers often dismissed as “unorganizable” were also invited to or participated in the Festival.
Launched in the early ‘70s, “Wages for Housework” became a global network, with chapters in major U.S. cities including New York, Los Angeles, New Orleans, and Chicago. At a time when women had few economic rights and were dependent on fathers and husbands to access bank accounts and credit cards, this “internationalist, anti-capitalist, and feminist” movement focused on women’s unpaid labor at home (Jaffee, "The Factory in the Family"). A campaign that embraced those most economically vulnerable, including Black women and lesbians, its Chicago chapter organized a conference in 1977.
Asociación Pro Derechos Obrero (APO) appears on the invitation list. Formed in the late 1960s by Mexican and Puerto Rican worker activists and with a building in Pilsen, APO staged sit-ins and bus takeovers and boycotts in this neighborhood to push the Chicago Transit Authority to hire Latinos in 1972 (Ramírez etal., Chicanas of 18th Street, xxiii.). Above, published in their Spanish language bulletin of Sept. 1979, we see an article and photograph of an APO demonstration at Chicago's St. Luke's hospital charging them with denying Latino job applicants. According to the article, the peaceful demonstration was met with brutality and arrests by the Chicago Police Department.
Also invited was the Chicago branch of the national group Centro de Acción Autónomo (CASA). Based on their understanding of U.S. capitalism’s imperialist roots, global reach, and reliance on immigrant labor, CASA developed the concept of “Sin Fronteras” and organized with and for undocumented workers, a group then marginalized by labor unions and leftist organizations (García, “Towards a Left”). Above, in a 1980 cover of the CASA Chicago newletter Sin Fronteras, we see a stirring drawing by Pilsen artist and muralist Aurelio Díaz that unites historic Mexican, Latin American, and Chicano justice struggles.
To learn more about CASA Chicago, check out this dissertation: Garcia, Myrna. Sin Fronteras: Activism, Immigration, and the Politics of Belonging in Mexican Chicago, 1968–1986. PhD diss., University of California, San Diego, 2013.
SOURCES
García, Arnoldo. “Toward a Left without Borders: The Story of the Center for Autonomous Social Action-General Brotherhood of Workers.” Monthly Review 54, no. 3 (July-August 2002): 69-78
Jaffee, Sarah. “The Factory in the Family: The Radical Vision of Wages for Housework.” The Nation, April 19, 2018. https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/wages-for-houseworks-radical-vision/.
Ramírez, Leonard, with Yenelli Flores, Maria Gamboa, Isaura González, Victoria Pérez, Magda Ramirez-Castañeda, and Cristina Vital. Chicanas of 18th Street: Narratives of a Movement from Latino Chicago. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2011.