Quiet Insurrections! -May Day, Letter to the Editor and Grandmother's
tales
To all:
On the crest of the impending wave about to strike every city and town
this Monday, I offer the following musings: The first is a letter to
the editor, I sent to both the L.A. Times and the Pasadena Star News.
The second; My Grandmother's Knitting Needles, was first published in
LoudMouth Magazine, Cal State L.A.'s Feminist Newspaper in Issue 4:
Winter 2004. It is the story of my own grandmother and a reminder
that if we did deep enough, most of us will find that at least one
member of our family is an immigrant with dubious entry documents, or no
documents at all. While current immigrants hail mostly from Mexico,
Central America and Asia, immigration discrimination has been a national
plague dating back to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and since then,
reflected in one piece of repressive legislation after another;
directed mostly against peoples of Asia, the global South and Eastern
and Southern Europe. Poor working conditions, exploited labor,
insufficient educational programs have long plagued wave after wave of
immigrants. The exploitation of undocumented workers has been a
keystone of U.S. capital. The pejorative anti- Italian term WOP, simply
means, "without papers", used to refer to undocumented immigrants, by
greedy employers. The term was used universally, it simply stuck on the
Italians.
So, I hope to make my way down to the demonstrations on Monday, but
should my health limit my participation, I offer these quiet insurrections.
Peace with justice, from occupied Atzlan,
Emma Rosenthal
________________________________
Dear Editor:
Only workers in the United States and Great Britain have to declare a
boycott on May first, not to go to work on that day. In all the other
countries in the world, May Day is a holiday: International Workers'
Day, which grew out of the Haymarket Riots in Chicago, Ill. in 1886
when eleven people were killed during a demonstration, when a bomb went
off in the crowd, and police fired on strikers fighting for the eight
hour work day. Five activists, four (German) immigrants -anarchists,
were accused of throwing the bomb, and despite witness testimony to the
contrary, were hung, executed by the state. May Day grew into an
international holiday, but in the U.S. due to red baiting and
reactionary labor and governmental policies, an alternate Labor Day
became the official holiday. Cleverly timed for the first Monday in
September, before the school year begins, working class contributions
and consciousness are little recognized even for one day, in our
nation's schools.
Few workers in the U.S. know the words to Solidarity Forever, leave
alone the words to the Internationale, few know about the Haymarket
strike or the Uprising of the twenty thousand. Few know who Samuel
Gompers or Eugene Debs are. We are a people from many lands, torn up by
the roots, wandering aimlessly, unaware of our own past as immigrants or
as workers.
But this Monday brings a new breeze to the U.S. and labor landscape,
because we are about to witness, and many of us are about to participate
in the largest strike, perhaps the largest mass mobilization, in U.S.
history. It is no accident that we are brought back to our own history,
our own May Day by immigrant workers, reminding us of the international
holiday that actually began on U.S. soil. Oh the many contributions of
immigrants to our wide, deep and varied cultural mosaic.
These are exciting times indeed.
Emma Rosenthal
818-404-5784
__________________________________
My Grandmother's Knitting Needles
By Emma Rosenthal
"What the woman who labors wants is to live, not simply exist--the right
to life as the rich woman has it, the right to life, and the sun, and
music, and art. You have nothing that the humblest worker has not a
right to have also. The worker must have bread, but she must have roses
too." -Garment worker Rose Schneiderman, August 1912
Her hands moved like mercury. The click clack of the needles, back and
forth, the yarn spinning from the ball on the floor into the moving
swarm of hands and needles, emerging as form, as hats, gloves, scarves,
sweaters. "Watch and learn," she would tell me, and I tried but all I
saw was the miraculous transformation of a ball of yarn into cloth. She
had grandmother hands, bumpy where the veins stood out, loose soft skin.
"Before a girl could get married in my village she had to prove that she
was patient enough for the task," she told me. "They would give her a
bundle of tangled yarn," she would say, as we would struggle to untangle
wool, or rope or extension cords. She told the story as she wound yarn
into balls for knitting. "If she could not untangle the yarn, she could
not get married." I remember that story every time I have something to
untangle. I would never settle for a village marriage, but patience is a
skill applied to any task worthy of completion.
By the time she was five she had lost her entire immediate family. It is
not clear if they died of illness and starvation, or were killed in
pogroms, massacres committed by Polish or Russian authorities against
the Jewish peasants throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Either way, it was governmental policies towards the Jews that killed
them, living in the region that was Poland one day, Russia the next,
bombarded by Cossacks, government sanctioned thugs that rode in on
horseback killing and destroying everything in their sight, slashing
open the bellies of pregnant women, raping children, killing the
livestock, burning homes. She remembered being thrown into a root cellar
by her aunt when she was only six to hide from the Cossacks, hidden
among the carrots and parsnips, potatoes and rutabagas while death,
destruction, ravaged in the streets above her. At six, she landed on
Ellis Island in New York Harbor, with her aunt and nephews, on the false
passport of her dead cousin. They came to join her uncle in New York, in
America, where there is such abundance that they shovel gold in the
streets. What she found was the tenements of New York's Lower East Side.
Delancy Street, Hester Street. A three room, cold water walk up flat on
the fourth floor. There was no bath, the toilet was in the hallway,
shared by all the families on the floor. She slept in the kitchen.
She decided to go to work. At age nine she went to the factory by
day and school at night. Now she had three different identities, as
common to the immigrant experience as cheap labor and cloth dust. She
was of course, herself - Anna Kaufman - daughter of Aaron Moses Kaufman
and Choma Reingold. Her passport gave her the identity of her dead
cousin. And now she had a third set of documents, for work, identifying
her as a thirteen year old. She found employment in an umbrella factory,
making the tips of umbrellas.
She worked there for three years. By the time she was 12, she was
able to make every part of the umbrella and was now a shop forelady. It
was that year, 1909 that a strike broke out in the garment industry. The
strike, led mostly by Jewish and Italian immigrant teenagers, was named
the Uprising of the 20,000. Not a machine whirred, not a wheel turned.
The strike that began on November 22, 1909, lasted almost four months,
through the winter and ended on March 8, 1910. She wasn't a leader in
the strike, but she left her lofted position of middle management and
walked out with the other workers in one of American history's biggest
strikes. "I didn't want to be a scab," she told me.
Such a different world, where a 12 year old girl knows the sanctity
of a picket line and the importance of righteous bread.
"Watch and learn," she would tell me, her hands moving like silver
as yarn became cloth. "Watch and learn." She would tell me.
I still can't knit. I never have crossed a picket line.
___________________
© 2006 Emma Rosenthal All Rights Reserved - ---Permission to forward in
its entirety. To post to a web page or publication, please email
[EMAIL PROTECTED] for permission.
--
"I must fight with all my strength so that the little positive things that my
health allows me to do might be pointed toward helping the revolution. The only
real reason for living."
-Frida Kahlo
emma rosenthal is a disabled artist, writer, educator, activist and consultant,
living in southern california.
emma rosenthal
po box 1664
baldwin park, ca 91706
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
emma's web page:
http://home.earthlink.net/~emmarosenthal
emma's blog: In Bed With Frida Kahlo
http://inbedwithfridakahlo.blogsource.com/
The writing empowerment project http://home.earthlink.net/~theweproject
-educational and organizational consulting and dialogue.
cafe intifada http://home.earthlink.net/~cafeintifada
-art for social justice
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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