America in Crisis: When the Supreme Court Refuses to See the Obvious We should be outraged! When U.S. Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett stated,...
People arriving to work in U.S. fields come from communities that speak languages that long predate European colonization, and their dances, food, music and culture have deep historic roots. As those farmworker communities today resist the immigration raids and anti-immigrant hysteria spread by the Trump administration, this culture has become a means for survival.
But Berkeley also has a working class history that is much less discussed. In the years after World War 2 it was an industrial city, with factories along the edge of the bay. After the wreckage of deindustrialization of the 1980s and 90s, the biggest one left was the huge Pacific Steel foundry on Second Street. As long as it was up and running, the workers there were militant strikers for better contracts, and supporters of the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa.
Since discovering in the 1980s the huge profits to be made in federal contracts, the company has become one of the two largest corporations running immigrant detention centers in the United States. Much of those profits are earned by keeping operating costs at a minimum; as a result Geo has been repeatedly charged with short staffing at the prisons it runs.
About the time I closed that life chapter, my mother had a stroke, which started a chain of events that led to her death two years later and, once again, I was the only close relative to shoulder the burdens that accompanied the end of her life.