Portrait of an Organizer: Edgar deJesus
Ocasio, Linda
When Edgar deJesus was growing up in East Harlem in the late 1960s, he was surrounded by the sights and sounds of a generation awakening to its own power. The Young Lords, a group of young...
...He made it clear that if it weren't for the union, we wouldn't hav anything.99 white union leaders at his side...
...He reconnected to the Puerto Rican movement through the National Congress of Puerto Rican Rights, where he established a labor task force...
...Today he oversees organizing for the New York/New Jersey region of UNITE from his office in Union City, NJ...
...From there, he worked as an organizer, business agent and eventually administrator for the Capmakers Union Local 2 of ACTWU...
...labor movement, as it seeks to re-energize itself, in part by addressing the issues of minority communities that it had ignored in the past...
...DeJesus also recalls his father, a hotel waiter and shop steward, arguing vigorously in defense of the trade union movement as crucial to the economic stability of Latino families like his own...
...His experience is significant for the U.S...
...At that time he was also working with the Workers Education Center in Manhattan, which melded radical politics with laborrights awareness...
...However, deJesus' first experience with a union was not what he expected at all...
...In the textile mills of Passaic and Paterson, Colombian and Peruvian workers predominate, and with them comes a more militant legacy of activism, deJesus observes: "They're used to the state negotiating with unions and general strikes...
...The experience gave him a chance to put into practice his beliefs about what a union should do for its members...
...It was the simple concept of why is there a division of rich and poor...
...Eddie managed to build a very solid roundtable of Latino unionism, including Puerto Ricans, Cubans and Dominicans," says Hector Figueroa, an analyst with Service Employees International Union (SEIU...
...The evidence was all around him: Puerto Rican families who had a least one parent in a union stayed together and were financially stable, whether they lived in East Harlem, the Bronx or the Lower East Side...
...He looked at my work with the task force and put me into labor law courses at Cornell," deJesus recalls...
...Here, it's done factory by factory...
...From 1975 to 1976 was the most demoralized period in my life," deJesus says...
...Linda Ocasio is a freelance writer and a former member of the New York Newsday editorial board...
...It is not only in his official UNITE capacity that deJesus is influencing the labor movement...
...Through the task force, he published for two years a newspaper called El Obrero Boricua (The Puerto Rican Worker...
...After dropping out of Brooklyn College, he took refuge in family, marrying his high school sweetheart, Yolanda...
...Gonzalez also did something more...
...That group eventually crumbled, fueled by paranoia and mistrust, which deJesus and others now attribute to deliberate government subversion-a fate common to radical left political groups in the 1970s...
...They were not radicals, just basic trade unionists who spent all their lives building unions," deJesus recalls...
...he is also a member of the New York City Hispanic Labor Committee in East Harlem and the AFL-CIO Labor Council on Latin American Advancement...
...I was seeing in reality what I had theorized about," he says...
...By the time Eddie joined with the Young Lords in 1973-1974, the group had splintered and evolved into the Puerto Rican Revolutionary Workers Organization, a Marxist-Leninist group...
...The offensive was happening in front of our faces," deJesus recalls...
...Eddie makes a contribution on a national agenda...
...He introduced deJesus to trade union veterans...
...Later, he and his wife de moved on to a metal factory...
...My father made it clear, that if it weren't for the union, we wouldn't have anything...
...Through his participation in these advisory bodies, deJesus has helped articulate a northeast Latino perspective on NAFTA and issues of trade that provided an important counterpoint to the pro-NAFTA drumbeat of the Clinton Administration and Latino business leaders...
...re By 1980, much of the fury that had splintered the Puerto Rican movement began to fade for deJesus, and he started contacting activists that he had lost touch with in Chicago and Canada...
...For deJesus, his stint as a teenage Puerto Rican activist lit the fire for a lifelong commitment to social justice...
...DeJesus, now 40, is the assistant manager and director of organizing for the NY/NJ Regional Joint Board of the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees (UNITE...
...with black and VOL XXX, No 3 Nov/DEC 1996 dqar deJesu...
...It focussed everyone on poverty...
...In addition to reaching out to the Latino community in all of its diversity, DeJesus says strengthening the link between labor and the civil rights movement is a continuing effort...
...Together they went to work in a bookbinding factory on 10th Ave...
...In 1985 he completed a study of Puerto Rican workers in New York City...
...My father was my first teacher of trade unionism," deJesus says...
...DeJesus began to draw the attention of older Latino labor leaders, including Edward Gonzalez, a onetime organizer for the ILGWU who taught at Cornell University's School of Industrial and Labor Relations...
...Figueroa also credits deJesus with helping to reconnect the labor and civil rights movement, an alliance that has unravelled in the 33 years since Martin Luther King Jr...
...DeJesus also has ties with the Puerto Rican movement: he is a board member of the Institute for Puerto Rican Policy and a former vice president of the National Congress of Puerto Rican Rights...
...They were disgruntled with the union and the union reps," he recalls...
...in Manhattan...
...The Young Lords, a group of young Puerto Ricans committed to seizing the day on behalf of a community, commandeered a local church as the site for a children's breakfast program...
...I wouldn't be here if it weren't for that experience," he says...
...It was the beginning of a com- munity offensive that demanded respect and better services for the residents of the neighborhood known as El Barrio...
...He moves the labor movement, not just the Latino issues within the labor movement," says Figueroa...
...Seared into his memory are the discussions that erupted over the dinner table or on the street about the causes of poverty...
...He has made unions more sensitive to the needs of Latinos, especially in the Northeast, which tend to be overlooked...
...marched on Washington D.C...
...27REPORT ON LATINO LABOR 66 My father was my first teacher of tra unionism...
...After two years at Cornell, deJesus headed the school's Puerto Rican Latino Studies program for trade unionists...
...King: the UAW, AFSCME and the Steelworkers...
...There, negotiations are done region or statewide...
...The 350,000-member union was formed in July 1995 by a merger of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU) and the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union (ACTWU...
...At the bookbinding factory he joined with coworkers to decertify a Teamsters local that was not representing the Latino workers...
...And the Latino communities he works with are not just Puerto Ricans, Cubans and Dominicans...
...I'm waiting for that to happen with the Latino labor movement," he says...
...she did clerical work for a jewelry workers union and he became a metal spinner...
...It's illogical to have poverty in the richest country in the world," he remembers thinking...
...In addition to what he observed on the streets of East Harlem, deJesus had another influence shaping his political and organizing principles: his father...
...We became the more activist Latino voice of the labor movement," he says...
...Recalling the 1963 March on Washington, he has a tone of wistfulness as he lists some of the unions that linked arms with Rev...
...That was probably the beginning of my left politics merging with my trade unionism in practice...
Vol. 30 • November 1996 • No. 3
