MAY DAY: A LOCAL & NORTH AMERICAN HISTORY
- Gonzalo Santos
- Apr 29
- 9 min read
Updated: Apr 30
First, a local history. Going back to its earliest history, Bakersfield, California, had a well-earned reputation of being a bastion of conservatism where mass protests simply never happened. Such protests – mostly by migrant farmworkers - had happened in agricultural towns like Delano and Arvin, and surrounding fields, but never in Bakerfield. That changed in 2006.
In early 2006, massive marches began to spread all over the country to protest the draconian immigration bill (H.B. 4437) passed by the House of Representatives. A local immigrant rights coalition came into being in Bakersfield (I had a role in it, as well as Dr. Jess Nieto) and organized the first-ever march & rally in downtown Bakersfield, on April 10.
Given how unaccustomed and reluctant the local police and park departments were to authorize anything other than “parades” and “picnics,” they initially flat-out denied all permits. It took the personal intervention of city councilmember Irma Carson to obtain the permits. The day of the march and rally, cops with high-power rifles were posted along the route’s roof tops, as families and their kids on strollers peacefully marched! Fifteen thousand, mostly Latino, immigrant families first assembled in Jastro Park, marched down to the Liberty Bell outside the Kern County Superior Courthouse, and then marched back. Led by a few Latino elected and community leaders, two representatives from the Sikh community joined in the front of the march. The local print media mostly ignored it – but the local TV channels covered it.
A new day of protest was soon agreed upon. May Day – a holiday most immigrants already knew was International Workers' Day - was chosen, joining a national day of pro-immigrant protests. Hundreds of cities and millions of immigrants participated. In Bakersfield, the coalition held the largest-ever mass protest in the city’s history to date, with about 35 thousand mostly Latino immigrant families participating throughout the day, rallying at Beach Park, then marching to Yokuts Park, and ending at the district office of then-representative Bill Thomas, the powerful chair of the House Ways & Means Committee.
Of course, Thomas did not deign even respond - a dismissive, cynical trait he bequeathed his then-assistant, the future (now disgraced) House Speaker Kevin McCarthy - which, it must be said, he passed on to his assistant, the now equally dismissive and unconditional Trumpy congressional representative, Vince Fong.
The May Day 2006 protest called for the Bakersfield/Kern communities to demonstrate their solidarity with the millions of undocumented immigrants by honoring four slogans that day: “Don’t go to work; Walk out of school; Don’t shop; and Close your business.” The Latino communities – and businesses - all over Kern County enthusiastically responded. The message went out loud and clear: Bakersfield/Kern had joined the nation in demanding justice for immigrants from our elected representatives, even if the latter did not want to listen.
Despite how well the event went, the local newspaper - The Bakersfield Californian (TBC) – was openly hostile to immigrant protestors, minimizing the event and blowing out of all proportion a minor incident involving a humble paletero vendor being denied sales to smear the whole event. But the TV news again covered the May Day mobilization very well, showing thousands of exemplary immigrant folks peacefully standing with their signs along Oak & Rosedale avenues.
By 2013-14, when pro-immigrant marches and protests recommenced, this time to target then-House majority whip Kevin McCarthy to support comprehensive immigration reform (which of course he and speaker John Boehner stonewalled and sabotaged), the front-page newspaper coverage became much better!
This receptive atmosphere helped set the stage for henceforth holding many more grass-roots mobilizations ever since: the Women’s March in 2016 and 2017, the Black Lives Matter protests of June 2020, and then a new, more intersectional May Day celebration in Bakerfield in 2017. About a thousand folks marched & rallied in downtown Bakersfield on May Day that year, assembled at Mill Creek Park. The multiple issues raised were truly impressive:
Paradoxically, the event was a success though the local unions and many of the major community-advocacy organizations declined to participate, but many local activists responded favorably. A large picture and article of the march adorned the front page of TBC the next day. One of the marchers featured holding a huge American flag was Dr. Randy Villegas, a student activist then who today is running for the CA Congressional District 22.
Which brings us to May Day 2025. This afternoon, at 5PM, there will be a more moderate May Day silent vigil outside the Federal Courthouse. The moderation is deceptive, as this last-minute action follows the student walkouts and local protests over the past few months that began with ICE detentions in Kern County in January and were continued by the 50-50-1 movement against the relentless attacks on democracy, civil liberties, civil rights, educational rights, and American’s health and social benefits under the Trump 2.0 administration. Plus we just had a boisterous rally with Representative Ro Khanna as well as the “Fight the Oligarchy” rally with 5 thousand folks in attendance with Senator Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez. Bakersfield is squarely involved in the unfolding national resistance movement to stop Trump’s fascist project. The struggle continues across the country and in Bakersfield.
Now a brief history of the peculiar, bifurcated history of May Day in North America.
May Day, as most everyone knows outside the United States, is as American as apple pie in its origins. It originated back in 1890 as a day to honor the memory of the world-famous "Chicago Martyrs," the American workers who in 1886 rallied 80,000-strong at Haymarket Square to demand an 8-hour day. This labor demand went back to the mid-19 century - in the UK even earlier. But on this occasion, the rally was brutally attacked by the police, its labor leaders subsequently framed and executed.
Oddly, I knew all that growing up in the major Mexican port of Tampico, in the Gulf of Mexico. Every May Day, as a little boy, I would watch from my grandmother's balcony, stunned how many thousands of workers - peasant farmers (ejidatarios), oil workers (petroleros), dock workers (alijadores), and many others - would suddenly appear out of nowhere and pour into downtown passing by my balcony, marching in boisterous, but disciplined, interminable contingents, chanting and carrying huge banners extolling their unions - and unfailingly, the "Chicago Martyrs" and the slogan "International Workers' Solidarity" ("¡Que vivan los mártires de Chicago!" "¡Que viva la solidaridad internacional de los trabajadores!").
Wow! Who, my boyhood mind wondered, were those "Chicago Martyrs," and why were they so prominently honored by these throngs of proud, militant Mexican workers? This was even more intriguing to me having grown up in a hyper-nationalist culture that glorified mostly Mexican heroes and had a deep anti-imperialist culture. The only other foreigners ever honored so publicly were the "San Patricios" - the Irish American brigade that switched to the Mexican side in the U.S.-Mexico war of 1846-48.
As a boy growing up in the 1950s, with a very welcoming and loving Mexican grandmother, and an expatriate, gruff, Irish-American grandfather who thought FDR was "a Communist,” and a beautiful, talented ballerina godmother (madrina) who lived with them and frequently hosted her leftist artist friends for lunch, I quickly learned - from their very heated debates at the table - of the hotly contested significance of this worldwide holiday somehow "born in the U.S.A."
Many years later when I came to the U.S. in 1970, I was stunned and surprised to discover practically no one knew anything about May Day, the "Chicago Martyrs," or anything else related with that American-origin gift to the world - other than, in their minds it was associated with the world's biggest military parade held in… Red Square, Moscow, the capital of the dreaded rival superpower, the U.S.S.R. -; and that parade, to make matters more taboo, habitually displayed the latest nuclear intercontinental missiles built to compete with the Americans in their mutually destructive, insane, nuclear arms race.
That is, in the minds of Americans, it was a menacing "Commie celebration" - nothing more anti-American than that! -, a view held in the labor movement as well as all the various movements I encountered, from the Chicano & Black movements to the anti-war movement, all of which made sure to stay as far away from it as possible.
Meanwhile, back in Mexico, the main plaza in Mexico City - the Zócalo - would continue to swell up with hundreds of thousands of marching workers on May Day (no military parade, that was Cinco de Mayo, which, weirdly, was adopted by the Chicano movement as its own). The throngs of passing workers were waved on by whomever was the all-powerful Mexican president in turn, safely perched atop his high balcony in the National Palace. The whole celebration became a yearly reaffirmation and apotheosis of nationalist class-state solidarity ever since the 1930s. But that also ended.
In the 1990s, as the ruling party PRI became wholly delegitimized for having abandoned its national developmentalist project and embraced the U.S.-imported neoliberal globalization project that badly impacted Mexican workers, the workers began to use the staged occasion to openly insult and challenge the president. And so, May Day ceased to be a useful government-controlled propaganda spectacle. It got officially cancelled during Ernesto Zedillo’s presidency, something which, ironically, allowed May Day to return to its militant labor movement roots, fertilizing its many gardens of resistance, where it remains vibrant today.
What about the peculiar story of May Day in the U.S., its prolonged avoidance, and its incipient return in this new century, carried on the shoulders and strollers of Mexican, Salvadoran, Guatemalan, and other Latin American marching migrants?
Picking up the story just after the Haymarket Affair: May Day was first adopted as a yearly labor celebration in 1890 by the Second International (1889–1916), a Paris-based organization of socialist and labor parties. It soon spread as a labor holiday to most countries in the world. Its main demand was the 8-hour work day, today an international labor norm frequently violated. Mexico, which held its first May Day parade in 1913 in the middle of the Mexican Revolution, enshrined it in its 1917 Constitution, a great achievement of that revolution. In the U.S., there was a lengthy process of slow, piecemeal adoption of the 8-hour day, which culminated in a New Deal federal law passed in 1937, in the midst of the Great Depression. It took the combative class militancy of American workers and the sympathetic Roosevelt New administration to get it passed over the strenuous opposition of the entire capitalist class.
After WWII, May Day began to be celebrated in every continent on the planet, especially in the post-colonial Third World.
But back in the 1890s, as the US labor movement gained strength, US President Grover Cleveland was one of those concerned that a labor holiday on May 1st would strengthen the socialist and anarchist movements at the heart of the militant US labor movement. He therefore advocated for a September Labor Day holiday instead, as a less “inflammatory” alternative. That September date was formally adopted as a United States federal holiday in 1894.
After World War II, as the U.S. labor movement itself was tamed and domesticated during the Cold War era (1945-1993), even that sanitized Labor Day was reduced to nothing more than a marking of the end of the Summer, celebrated more with family picnics and shopping sales than with any sort of militant collective actions of any kind.
Enter the modern immigrant rights movement into the picture in the 2000s. May Day, as we saw already, became a day of collective mobilization for immigrant rights, which were and are inextricably linked with labor rights, human rights, and social rights, and imbued with a true sense of internationalist working-class solidarity. It sprung from the bottom up, insisted upon by the immigrant workers themselves, resurrected even without much support from U.S. Big Labor.
All of this was well reflected in the organizing I was involved in for the 2017 May Day march & rally in downtown Bakersfield. It was a grass-roots event, organized by activist from various movements, without the formal support of any of the big, formal unions in the county - or even most of the community organizations (though a few, to their credit, did). But that did not keep hundreds of folks from marching that day - even in conservative Bakersfield. Their banners and posters reflected our rich, mutual solidarity.
Eight years have passed, but the holiday is here to stay. During the Covid pandemic years it was celebrated in some cities via "car caravans" - the brilliant new mode of collective action! In L.A., all sorts of workers' solidarity events keep going on every year, including two marches this year and a massive SEIU strike.
I believe May Day is here to stay in the United States, so far through the agency of immigrant workers, who are teaching their American brother and sister workers the meaning of international worker solidarity as it was always meant to be, and as it should certainly in this amazing country built by the labor of immigrants.
