http://themilitant.com/2016/8008/800805.html
The Militant (logo)
Vol. 80/No. 8 February 29, 2016
(front page)
Support Eleanor García, SWP
candidate for US Senate in Calif.
In addition to running Alyson Kennedy for U.S. president and Osborne
Hart for vice president, the Socialist Workers Party is announcing
candidates across the country. In California, the party is running
aerospace worker Eleanor García for U.S. Senate and plans to put her on
the ballot. The Militant is reprinting her biography, released by the
SWP National Campaign Committee Feb. 16. Information on other candidates
will follow in coming issues.
Eleanor García for U.S. Senate from California
Eleanor García, 63, an aerospace worker at Triumph Vought Aerostructures
in Hawthorne, outside Los Angeles, was born in Phoenix. Her father was a
fireman and her mother, after she raised her children, a production-line
worker at Revlon and member of the United Auto Workers union. Her
grandfather, an underground copper miner in the Inspiration Consolidated
Copper mine in Miami, Arizona, was crushed by a mine car and killed at
work.
In high school García was inspired by the successful fight to overthrow
Jim Crow segregation in the South and by farmworkers fighting to win
representation by the United Farm Workers union. Public schools in
Arizona mining towns were segregated for Mexicans and Native Americans.
Cesar Chavez, leader of the UFW, held a 24-day fast in Phoenix in 1972
to protest an Arizona bill restricting the union and outlawing strikes
and boycotts. García was part of the security team to defend Chavez and
meetings organized to support the fight.
She became an organizer for the UFW and the Arizona Farm Workers Union
in the 1970s, helping workers win union contracts in vegetable fields
and citrus orchards.
García joined the SWP in 1977. In the 1980s she lived in Minneapolis and
joined protests by family farmers who faced foreclosure in a debt crisis
that swept the region and were being driven off their land. She
supported the fight of Native Americans for land and water treaty rights
on the White Earth Reservation in northern Minnesota.
García is a longtime supporter of women’s right to choose abortion and
has defended clinics against right-wing attacks. As SWP candidate for
governor of Utah she helped organize protests against the cops when a
teenage cousin of one of her co-workers at Kennecott Copper was shot.
Family, friends and supporters of the youth used García’s campaign
statement to build support for a march and rally in the copper-mining
town of Magna.
She helped organize activities to tell the truth about the Cuban
Revolution. She was part of the international movement that won freedom
for the Cuban Five, five revolutionaries unjustly imprisoned in the U.S.
for the “crime” of defending their country’s socialist revolution.
In addition to the Steelworkers, García has been a member of the United
Transportation Union, United Food and Commercial Workers and United Auto
Workers union. She has worked in rail, garment and in a smelter.
Related articles:
Socialist Workers Party: ‘Fight attacks by bosses!’
Working-class campaign challenges capitalist parties
Support the SWP 2016 campaign!
Scalia’s death prompts debate on Supreme Court, Bill of Rights
Join the Socialist Workers Party campaign in 2016
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