MAY DAY: A LOCAL & NORTH AMERICAN HISTORY
- Gonzalo Santos
- 6 days ago
- 11 min read
Updated: 14 hours ago
First, a local history of May Day, from 2006 to 2026.
It is well known that going back to its earliest history, Bakersfield, California, had a well-earned reputation of being a bastion of conservatism and Big Agriculture/Big Oil power, where mass protests simply never happened. Such protests, such as did appear in the Southern San Joaquin Valley going back to the 1900s, 1920s &30s, 1940s & 50s, and especially in the 1960s, were mostly carried out by striking migrant farmworkers in agricultural towns like Delano and Arvin, and surrounding fields, but never in Bakerfield.
All that changed in 2006.
In early 2006, massive marches began to spread all over the United States to protest the draconian immigration bill (H.B. 4437) that had passed by the House of Representatives on Dec., 2005. A local immigrant rights coalition came into being in Bakersfield (I had a role in organizing it, as well as Dr. Jess Nieto) and by April 10 of that year, organized the first-ever march & rally in downtown Bakersfield.
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 did cover it well.
As the national immigrant rights movement grew, a new day of protest was soon agreed upon. May Day – a holiday most immigrants already knew was International Workers' Day - was chosen. Hundreds of cities and several millions of mostly 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 to 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 political history of Kern County has been that of a Republican Party political machine that maintains a rigid system of apartheid against the Latino majority. Though it has been repeatedly challenged, it remains entrenched. It is not surprising, then, that it is the county with the largest number of for-profit immigrant detention concentration camps in California, four of the eight in the entire state.
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 new protest atmosphere helped set the stage for henceforth holding many more grass-roots mobilizations: most prominently the Women’s March in 2016 and 2017, the Black Lives Matter protests of June 2020, and then in 2017 a new, more intersectional May Day celebration in Bakersfield. About a thousand folks marched & rallied in downtown Bakersfield on May Day that year, then assembled at Mill Creek Park. The multiple issues raised were truly impressive:
Paradoxically, the event was a success even though the local unions and many of the major community-advocacy organizations declined to participate, still reluctant of making May Day their own militant celebration, but many local activists responded favorably. A large picture and article of the march adorned the front page of The Bakersfield Californian the next day. One of the marchers featured by TBC holding a huge American flag was Dr. Randy Villegas, a student activist then, son of working class Mexican immigrants, who today is running for the CA Congressional District 22 on a progressive platform, endorsed by Bernie Sanders. Could it be that Bakersfield's era of Trumpian Republicans and Blue Dog Valleycrats is about to end?
MAY DAY 2025
Which brings us to May Day 2025. There was last year a more moderate May Day silent vigil outside the Federal Courthouse, brought back by the local community organizations after an eight-year hiatus. The moderation, though, was deceptive, as this action crowned a very active and intense period of mobilizations in early 2025:
The large Latino student walkouts and local protests over ICE raids in Kern County in January; the 50-50-1 "No Kings" rallies and marches against the relentless attacks by the Trump 2.0 administration on American democracy, civil liberties, civil rights, educational rights, and American’s health and social benefits; the very large UFW march for immigrant rights in Delano on March 31st.
Plus, we had just had, in April, two extraordinary grass-roots political events in Bakersfield: a boisterous "Benefits Over Billionaires" rally with Representative Ro Khanna, as well as the April 15 “Fight the Oligarchy” rally with Senator Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, with over 5 thousand folks in attendance!
Bakersfield had without doubt re-joined the growing national resistance movement to stop Trump’s fascist project threatening democracy and affecting all working class and immigrant communities. As the struggle continues across the country, Bakersfield and the Southern San Joaquin Valley are mobilized to say PRESENTE!
MAY DAY 2026
This year (2026), in a remarkable breakthrough and for the first time in memory, the California Federation of Labor Unions and the AFL-CIO have joined the statewide MAY DAY coalition which is calling to SHUT DOWN the system on May Day by taking the same three actions that characterized the May Day immigrant mobilizations of 2006: NO WORK! NO SCHOOL! NO SHOPPING!
This is, I repeat, a major breakthrough, which bodes well for the future of the U.S. labor movement, in such desperate need to reassert its autonomy, power, and militancy.
Remarkably, all the May Day coalitions for 2026 have expanded their main demands, such as the one adopted for Bakersfield:
Workers over Billionaires
Defending Democracy
Immigration Rights
Protecting Healthcare
Others have included abolishing ICE, stopping the war in Iran, ending the genocide in Gaza/Palestine and no further military aid to Israel, ending the embargo of and attacks on Cuba, saving the planet from climate change, abolishing the carceral/surveillance state, and many other progressive causes.
This concludes the first part of this essay, focused on the evolution of May Day in Bakersfield. The second part broadens the analysis to the origins and "bifurcated" evolution of May Day in the entire region of North America, as experienced personally since my childhood in Mexico and adulthood in the United States. In that sense, it is as semi-biographical as the first part.
--- O ---
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 radical 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 developed 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 workers of the world - other than, in their minds, it was associated with the world's biggest military parade held in… Red Square, Moscow! - at the heart of that dreaded rival superpower, the U.S.S.R. -; and that parade, to make matters even 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, May Day 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 a nationalist - not internationalist - working classes-State compact; and it had been re-framed so since the 1930s, when the single-party system of politics in post-revolutionary Mexico became consolidated.
But all that 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 state-staged occasion to openly insult and challenge the president - on live television! And so, May Day ceased to be a useful government-controlled propaganda spectacle. It got officially cancelled during Ernesto Zedillo’s presidency (1994-2000), something which, ironically, allowed May Day to return to its vibrant militant labor movement roots, fertilizing yearly its many gardens of resistance, where it remains vibrant today. And it coincided with the largest exodus of Mexican laborers to the United States, who brought that militant celebration with them, just as xenophobia reared its ugly head first in California (1994's Prop 187) then nationwide (the Clinton laws of 1996).
What about the other 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 founded by Friedrich Engels. 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 the 8-hour labor day in its 1917 Constitution, a great achievement of that revolution. In the U.S., despite fierce class struggle, there was a lengthy process of slow, piecemeal state-by-state adoption of the 8-hour day, which culminated finally in the 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 Deal administration to get it passed over the strenuous block opposition of the entire capitalist class. (Roosevelt war gearing for WWII; he also racially integrated the defense industries, despite strenuous opposition of the white labor movement).
After WWII, May Day began to be celebrated in every continent on the planet, most especially in the newly independent, 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 by Congress as a United States federal holiday in 1894.
After World War II, as the U.S. labor movement itself was purged of "radicals," granted new labor rights, and domesticated during the Cold War era (1945-1993), even that sanitized, September Labor Day was reduced to nothing more than a holiday marking of the end of the Summer, celebrated more with family picnics and shopping sales than with renewed calls for militant collective actions of any kind. The House of Labor became co-opted, complacent, and compliant as a willing instrument of U.S. global hegemony (See HERE the nefarious role it played in Latin America). Even the militant ethnic rebellions and civil rights movements of the 1960s/70s skipped and avoided May Day actions like the plague, afraid of being tainted as "Communists."
Enter the modern immigrant rights movement into the picture in the 2000s. May Day, as we already saw, initially became a day of collective mobilization for immigrant rights in the 1990s and 2000s, rights which were and are inextricably linked with labor rights, human rights, and social rights, and intrinsically imbued with a true sense of internationalist working-class solidarity. It sprung from the bottom up, not from the national advocacy organizations down, embraced and 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 the emergence of a rich, mutual solidarity.
Nine years have passed, but the holiday has returned, as we see. During the Covid pandemic years it was celebrated in some cities via "car caravans" - a brilliant new mode of collective action! In L.A., San Diego, and San Francisco, all sorts of workers' May Day events go on every year, including two marches in L.A. this year.
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 take root in this amazing country built by the labor of immigrants.
No more wars! No more imperialisms! No more genocides! No more billionaires! No more kings! Save the planet! Establish people's democracy! Enhance the social contract! Extend citizenship rights to North America! Abolish ICE & the Prison Industrial Complex! Education and Medicare for all! Affordable housing for all! Living wages for all!
Workers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains!
