Introduction: As a second Trump presidency looms, the treatment of immigrants, particularly from Latin America and the Caribbean, remains a central and contentious issue. Republican border policies have long framed immigrants as threats, using them as scapegoats for broader societal problems.
Yet much of the migration from Latin America is driven by the fallout from U.S. foreign interventions—anti-democratic coups, military dictatorships, and economic sanctions—that have fueled violence and poverty, forcing many to leave their homes. In turn, the struggle for Latino equality and the movements for immigrant rights, economic justice, and multiracial working-class solidarity have challenged these forces and have pushed for a future where borders no longer separate people or violate their rights.
One woman’s story offers a clear lens into past and present struggles of immigrant communities. Rossana Cambron, a lifelong activist in working-class movements, now serves as co-chair of the Communist Party of the USA (CPUSA).
Her life, shaped by the history of the U.S.-Mexico borderland and Latino political movements, highlights the enduring fight against right-wing hate and the broader systems that target working-class people under capitalism. Cambron’s story shows how resistance—rooted in solidarity, equality, and social justice—can push back against division and inspire a more humane, inclusive worldview.
Who crossed what border illegally?
Why did, Rossana Cambron, born in El Paso, Texas, live her early years in Juarez, Mexico?
When she was roughly seven years old, she left Juárez with her mother and siblings. Cambron’s mother was fleeing domestic violence, and with the help of her family was able to relocate to Los Angeles, where she encountered racial segregation.
“We lived in government housing,” Cambron recalled, “and the majority of the government housing where I was at was all Mexican, and there were a few poor whites, not too many, and a few Black residents,” she added.
Today, over one third of people living in Los Angeles County are immigrants. Further, over 4 in 5 L.A. County immigrants have been living in the U.S. for over a decade, including about 70 percent of undocumented Angelenos.
Despite the xenophobic myth that poor working-class Latinos and other immigrants are outsiders draining social services and getting a free ride without paying their fair share in taxes, Cambron’s personal story highlights a far more complex and totallydifferent reality about the Mexican American community, the largest immigrant group in the United States.
When Cambron’s family migrated to Los Angeles in 1963, they “were all American citizens. We were all born in the US, including my mother,” she explained. Cambron’s mother was the U.S.-born child of an immigrant family. Cambron’s grandfather had been working on the railroads in Lompoc, California.
“The reason why my mother was in Mexico is because in 1931, they began expatriating Mexicans, using Mexicans as an excuse for the recession, for the depression and the lack of food and money and jobs and all that, you know—they used Mexicans as a scapegoat,” Cambron said.
In the 1930s, under the guise of “repatriating” Mexicans, U.S. officials unconstitutionally deported American-born citizens of Mexican descent.
“That’s when my mother had to leave… she was only three at that time and was taken back to Mexico with her parents who were Mexican citizens,” she explained. “That’s why she was in Mexico, and why she was raised in Mexico.”
Incoming President Trump said he again wants to unconstitutionally end birthright citizenship.
Today, close to 60 percent of Mexican immigrants live in either California or Texas, former Mexican national territories which were acquired by the United States in wars of colonial conquest.
“The border crossed them”
The regular rightwing complaint is that Mexicans are illegally crossing the border into the U.S. when, in fact, it was the U.S. that illegally crossed the border into Mexico, grabbing away some of the best land in that country.
In the 1830s and 1840s, Euro-Americans aggressively seized much of northern Mexico, an area making up parts or all of 10 states in the United States today.. The first to be taken was Texas, which had become a destination for thousands of white settlers who brought with them enslaved people.
In 1829, President Vicente Guerrero prohibited slavery in most of Mexico but exempted Texas to appease Anglo slaveowners, who violently defended their alleged right to their human property. In 1837, after Texan colonists violently seceded from Mexico, slavery was officially abolished in Mexico a second time, this time without any exceptions.
American planters and pro-slavery interests saw the establishment of an independent Republic of Texas as an opportunity for annexation of the territory to the United States as a slave state.
Eventually, the Republic of Texas was annexed by and joined the United States, and one year later the United States began its military quest to take over Mexico’s land. At the end of the U.S. war with Mexico in 1848, Mexico lost nearly half of its territory, including all or parts of California, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, Wyoming, Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, and New Mexico. The United States acquired 525,000 square miles encompassing deserts, mountains, and canyons populated largely by autonomous indigenous communities.
Manifest Destiny—the ideological belief that settlers had to spread democratic institutions for those supposedly not capable of self-government through a series of conquests—not only justified continental expansion but also marked Native Americans and others of non-European origin as unfit for citizenship. Expansion in turn satisfied the U.S. need for more land for cotton production during slavery.
Everything changed for Mexican citizens in the contested borderlands after this mid-nineteenth century war of conquest. They went from living in Mexico to living in the United States seemingly overnight. As Rossana Cambron put it when reflecting on her ancestors’ experiences, “the border crossed them/” It was not the other way around.
The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which formalized the surrender of Mexican territory, legally classified Mexicans as “white” and extended eligibility for U.S. citizenship to Mexicans living in lands ceded to the U.S government. However, Mexico included indigenous peoples in their designation of citizenship while the U.S. did not.
The Mexican government ratified the treaty without seeking clarification on whether the treaty applied to all of its citizens or merely to all “white persons.” The United States denied the indigenous population citizenship, and many Mexican Americans with indigenous background were marked as culturally nonwhite.
For this reason, the label “white”—and with-it U.S. citizenship rights—was not universally granted to the treaty citizens despite the agreement and did not protect Mexican citizens living in these lands from being subject to violence and persecution. Many decided to flee the violence and move to Mexico.
Others chose to migrate from Mexico to the United States to reconnect with relatives. Thousands lost their lands. In addition, their new host society subjugated their culture, language, and religion as inferior to those of white Americans.
Many historians have documented the aftermath of this war and have argued that legal disenfranchisement, land dispossession, and extralegal vigilante violence transformed Mexicans into outsiders. By the 1890s, industries like mining and agriculture in the U.S. Southwest came to heavily rely on Mexican migrant laborers to work in what had once been their own land.
Migrating under neoliberalism
“My stance is that nobody leaves their home because they want to. They leave their home because they have to. And a lot of people don’t understand that,” Cambron said when asked why people migrate.
What “causes people to leave their home is, of course, the neoliberal policies, the exploitation of the country’s resources, which leaves nothing” behind for working people, Cambron declared, pointing to how U.S. foreign policy and transnational corporations work together to exploit immigrant and non-immigrant workers, prey on economic and other hardships, and divide the working class to increase profits. Sanctions, interventions, and so-called “free trade treaties,” impose conditions that prevent poorer countries from meeting their people’s needs and foist violence, economic stagnation, and political instability upon countless communities.
Cambron explained to People’s World how many members of her extended family in Mexico have migrated out of the country because of dispossession caused by big corporations, saying, “… they can no longer grow anything on their land, or they had to sell bits and pieces of it to survive.”
According to a recent report on transnational corporations and free trade in Mexico, over the last thirty years Mexico has become an industrial paradise and a laboratory for deregulation. Highlighting the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the EU-Mexico Free Trade Agreement, the report underscores how “Mexico’s territory has been subjected to the development of dense, interconnected industrial corridors, where high-risk industries, extensive agribusiness and extractive industries have proliferated.”
The report adds that “For the people affected, this process is also taking place against the background of violent land grabs, depriving them of their means of economic, social and cultural subsistence, destroying their health and the very fabric of their communities.”
Cambron said that many people wish for their migration to the U.S. to be temporary. Her goddaughter, for example, was able to afford a decent house in Mexico after having migrated to the U.S. for temporary work and returned to her local community once she had saved enough money. However, “not everybody goes back… My father-in-law wanted to go back. But it’s not easy. Once you settle here with family… it’s just not easy to go back.”
The situation that presents itself, then, is one in which capital is free to move across any border in efforts to maximize profits through the exploitation of both workers and the environment, yet people confront barriers, violence, racism, and removal for migrating in pursuit of peace, community, and employment.
Álvaro Rodriguez, an activist who attended and reported on a virtual Leaders Summit on Climate Change on April 22-23, 2021, said, “Mexico stood out… because of the uniqueness of its proposal…a plan that would simultaneously fix both the environment and the migration and immigration crises.” In addition to slowing down oil exports and halting oil drilling, the president of Mexico, López Obrador, promised his administration planned to continue to plant millions of trees to reduce carbon dioxide through a government program that “currently provides jobs for more than 400,000 Mexican farmers” and “lets people stay in their homeland.”
The new president of Mexico, Claudia Sheinbaum, pledged continuity of the transformative changes of the previous administration, promising “we are not going back to the neoliberal model.”
Until the profit-driven system that exploits people and natural resources is dismantled, borders will remain a tool to keep the working class divided, while the root causes of migration are ignored. After all, thrust under the microscope of historical scrutiny, strict adherence to political borders is often based on harmful nationalist myths about what is really our shared and interconnected past and future.
“Repatriation” was really “expatriation”
As the Great Depression plunged the nation and the world into economic turmoil, Mexican Americans in the U.S. suffered like many other working-class people. In California during the 1920s, Mexicans and Mexican Americans constituted up to two-thirds of the work force in many industries. Not only were they the bulwark of southwestern agriculture, but they also constituted 75 percent of the work force of the six major U.S. western railroads.
By 1930, many Mexican Americans worked in various sectors including manufacturing, transportation, communications, construction, food processing, textiles, automobile industries, steel production, utilities, and domestic and personal service.
By 1931, however, unemployment rates among Mexican Americans had soared to 60 percent, forcing many to turn to the government for aid. Yet, instead of receiving support, they were targeted. In Los Angeles, public officials cast Mexican Americans as the root cause of unemployment, food shortages, and widespread poverty. This politically charged campaign to promote anti-Mexican racism led to the unconstitutional deportation of many U.S. citizens of Mexican descent as well as Mexican nationals.
“Even though they had contributed during better times to the economic prosperity of the United States, now that is not recognized, they are ‘the other’,” said historian Francisco Balderrama in an interview.
Frank Shaw, a member of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors from 1928 to 1933, led the effort to launch the “largest organized repatriation campaign in U.S. history, targeting Mexican immigrants and their American-born children in a city that their ancestors had founded 150 years before,” writes historian George Sánchez.
By the end of 1934, over 13,000 Mexican residents and Mexican American citizens of Southern California had been removed from their homes and taken to Mexico. Los Angeles lost nearly one-third of its Mexican population during the first half of the 1930s.
Balderrama underscored how this mass expulsion “covered the entire United States. From Alabama and Mississippi, to Alaska, from Los Angeles to New York.” Researchers estimate that between 1-2 million individuals were uprooted and expatriated.
Sixty percent or more of those removed were American citizens of Mexican descent, and many of the Mexican nationals who were deported had lived in the U.S. for twenty or thirty years.
“Most of them were documented, most of them had papers… their children who were born in this country were U.S. citizens,” Balderrama asserted.
As Cambron reflected on the idea of “repatriation,” she concluded that Mexican Americans “were not repatriated, they were expatriated.” On the one hand, vast portions of the land from which they were removed once belonged to their ancestors and had been violently taken. On the other hand, the U.S.-born citizens who were removed were “going back” to a country in which many had never set foot. Lastly, Mexican Americans were not voluntarily leaving the country as the government wanted people to believe.
“Repatriation was a cover up word, because at that time… the cities and counties took upon themselves to say to their communities ‘there’s enough jobs for real Americans if we can get rid of these other people’ … so LA county and other counties throughout the nation then pressured Mexican families to leave even though Mexicans, from my research, never were a large percentage of those that were on welfare, but it played to the notion that Mexicans were on welfare,” Balderrama explained.
In Los Angeles County specifically, the officials in charge of the expulsion did begin to call their actions deportation until the legal counsel warned them that only the federal government could deport people. “That’s where the word repatriation was born so-to-speak, to be used in that context to cover it up to make it look clean, make it look like its voluntary,” Balderrama said.
In reality, Mexican Americans were victims of public raids and press-driven hysteria about unwanted aliens, all of which were extremely coercive in forcing working-class Latinos to either live in hiding or leave the country or suffer from starvation.
Latino equality and the fight against MAGA
President-elect Donald Trump has threatened mass deportations, detention camps and an expanded border wall. Moreover, Trump has threatened Mexico with harsh tariffs that would hurt working-class people in both countries. Leading Republicans have proposed authorizing the use of military force in Mexico to fight cartels like terrorist organizations. All signs point to the right’s eerie enthusiasm for a new Mexican American war.
Defense companies like Elbit Systems of America, Anduril and General Dynamics have built an estimated 500 surveillance towers across the southern border which create a funneling effect that corrals and drives migrants to some of the most remote and harsh desert landscapes, sometimes resulting in their deaths.
Meanwhile, U.S. pro-corporate, interventionist foreign policy spikes sharp increases in immigration from countries like Haiti, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, as well as Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua. In service of corporate interests, the U.S. sponsors coups, civil wars, and dictatorships, or imposes severe sanctions, provoking waves of violence, political repression, and poverty that ultimately drive people from their homes.
Put together, these forces are a recipe for a true catastrophe. U.S. imperialism in Latin America coupled with a hyper-nationalist, anti-immigrant, white supremacist ruling party at home do create a crisis at the border, but the victims are not the so-called “real Americans” of the far-right narrative, but rather the very people forced to flee desperate or violent conditions in their home countries and seek asylum or opportunity in the U.S. At the border, they are then met with further violence and severe violations of their basic human rights. Finally, in the U.S., they are subject to second-class citizenship status.
Not only this, but U.S. citizens who suffer from poverty, lack of healthcare, or even drug addiction to illegal fentanyl—the drug which anti-immigrant and xenophobic politicians use to stoke fears about the border—are left to deal with these issues on their own while the government invests resources into militarizing the border instead of meeting people’s needs.
In the UAW’s Election 2024 Live stream, the union’s president, Shawn Fain, raised the topic of immigration and the U.S.-Mexico border, stating that billionaires like Trump “talk about Haitians, they talk about the border… they talk about anything but corporate greed… about how the billionaire class continues to take and take while the rest of us are left further and further behind.”
Pointing to the immigrant scapegoating of the Trump campaign, Fain underscored that “Right now we have millions of people being told that the biggest threat to their livelihood is migrants coming over the border…You know in reality, all working-class people are on the same side.”
Cambron and her family’s personal history shows how the effort to sow division and hostility among the working class—a multiracial, multinational, multigender, multigenerational class—is rooted in generations of anti-Mexican hate. As Fain would later reveal in the speech, his own personal story is interconnected with Cambron’s, laying bare working people’s shared experiences as well as inequality based on different experiences of race, nationality, ethnicity, and citizenship.
“When I see destitute, desperate people crossing the border, I think of my grandparents crossing state lines to find a better life in the 1930s and 40s,” Fain shared with UAW members.
However, Fain recognized the disparate treatment of white workers when compared to migrant Mexican workers and pointed to a need for greater inclusion, saying “In the early days of the UAW, they didn’t tell my grandparents ‘you’re not welcome here, go back where you came from.’ They said, ‘if you’re ready to fight for a better life, then sign your union card and let’s get down to work.’”
Cambron noted that “the capitalist will find whatever works” to steer the focus off them and the real issues. “What’s worked is creating fear and hatred of another group, whether it’s black people, whether it’s Mexican Americans or trans people,” she said.
In contemplating how to build unity, especially in the age of a second Trump presidency, Cambron soberly and matter-of-factly stated that for immigrants from Latin America, or those of Latin American heritage, “Latino” can be “a unifying word” because “it gives us that tool to say, we are one people… wanting to preserve our culture, have our needs met, and live a peaceful life.” Ultimately, the empowerment of the whole working class means joining in on the struggle for Latino equality and immigrant rights, in hopes for a future in which “the border doesn’t mean anything.”
For now, immigrant rights defense will have to take the form of “rapid response” networks to mobilize people against government attempts to repress immigrant families. Moreover, enfranchising immigrants through support for the right to vote regardless of immigration status can go a long way toward empowering the Latino working-class. Lastly, progressive legislation that will regularize the status of currently undocumented immigrants and give them a clear path to citizenship must be supported while disastrous proposals such as the Laken Riley Act must be opposed forcefully.
As Cambron put it on November 17 at the CPUSA National Committee meeting after the election, “let’s go out and make the seemingly impossible possible. We can do it, comrades.”
Meaning of Trump return to Latinos
In the wake of the presidential election, news media has been plastered with analyses and interpretations of the so-called “Latino vote,” from conservatives crowing success to liberals blaming Latinos for the Harris loss.
Latinos in key swing states such as Nevada, Arizona, and others were a focal point of the 2024 election, sparking debates around immigration, the U.S.-Mexico border, and economic inequality. These issues highlight a critical question: What does a second Trump presidency potentially mean for Latinos and the broader working class?
The story of Rossana Cambron—interlinked with the history of Mexican American progressive politics in Los Angeles—reminds us of a powerful, often overlooked legacy. Cambron’s journey takes us through a long tradition of working-class Latino political activism, rooted in the fight for better working conditions and greater political representation, and serves as a testament to the enduring power of collective action in shaping both the city and the fight for justice.
Latinos, workers and voters
The 2024 CPUSA resolution on Latina/o equality asserted that “Latinas/os are a significant and growing sector of the U.S. working class counting in the millions” and specifically “Latinas are the most exploited group in the U.S. with the lowest wages.”
“Not just Mexican Americans, but Latinas, women from Central America and other Latin American countries, and the Caribbean,” Cambron clarified.
The number of Latina/o workers in the labor force has grown from 10.7 million in 1990 to 29.0 million in 2020 and is projected to reach 35.9 million in 2030. However, working-class Latinos face barriers to accessing good jobs and economic security. Their median earnings are lower than those of their Black, White, and Asian American counterparts. Also, along with Black workers, Latino workers are vulnerable to losing their jobs during periods of economic decline.
At the same time, the CPUSA resolution recognized the increasing political potential of the Latino vote, stating that the Latino community constitutes a “significant component of local and national elections, making a significant difference in current elections and even more potential difference in future elections due to the growth of our communities.”
Pew Research Center analysis shows that “Every year, about 1.4 million Hispanics in the U.S. become eligible to vote.” One quarter of all Latino eligible voters live in California as of 2022. The next biggest states by number of Latino eligible voters are Texas, Florida, New York, and Arizona.
What factors drive the exploitation of this increasingly important—and increasingly disaffected—voting group?
Insufficient bargaining power, gaps in legal protections, and discrimination all cluster Latino workers into jobs that pay low wages, offer little benefits, and rank high in labor law violations.
Despite discrimination and exploitation, or perhaps because of it, working class Latino communities have had a history of groundbreaking labor organizing and political activism.
Changing the narrative
In the early 1960s, civil rights activists and organizers Dolores Huerta and Cesar Chavez co-founded what is now the United Farm Workers (UFW).
Cambron remembers how in the late 1960s and early 1970s, “during the grape strike, the grape boycott with Cesar Chavez… My brother came home one day and said, ‘we’re not buying any more grapes.’”
Mexican and Filipino grape workers organized into the UFW and led one of the largest interracial farmworker strikes in California’s history. In the Coachella Valley, a small dessert near California’s U.S.-Mexico border, these immigrant farmworkers harvested the country’s earliest table grapes, which Cambron and many other Americans were fond of. Yet, farmworkers lived lives of pervasive, structural precarity in which hunger, child labor, lack of education, and constant migration from one substandard farm camp to another was the norm.
“We loved grapes, and we always had grapes in the house,” Cambron remembered. However, when her brother explained how farmworkers were standing up for fair treatment and justice, “we said, ‘okay, well, you know what, we’re not going to eat grapes.’”
After building a mass strike movement over the course of several years, the farmworkers mounted an unprecedented boycott in the United States and Europe. Moreover, they gained the endorsements of civil rights groups, labor councils, and politicians. In total, historians estimate that union activities caused $3-4 million in rancher losses, severely crippling the grape growers’ economic dominance over the farmworkers.
Cambron remembers this moment in the history and struggle of farmworkers as a catalyst for her own political consciousness and her eventual lifelong commitment to working-class justice. “You don’t really feel the bigger injustices until you get older, you know, that’s when I started feeling it a little bit more,” Cambron noted.
Reflecting on the groundbreaking labor organizing of the farmworkers, Cambron considered how “for the longest time, there was not much talk about the Filipino community being involved, but they were very much involved.”
Indeed, building multiracial, worker-led movements has been key to the political activism of Latinos and other working-class people in the United States, yet often the reach and significance of these struggles gets undercut by corporate media.
According to Cambron, “we have to be a part of changing that narrative.”
Beyond labor struggles, Mexican Americans in Southern California also organized for better living conditions, for social and political equality, access to better education, peace and an end to war, as well as voting rights.
Education and ethnic pride, not war
In the 1960s, Mexican Americans—a community that included descendants of native Californians, as well as three generations of immigrants from Mexico and the Southwest—were consistently cut out of fair access to housing, education, and good jobs, while facing police abuse and other forms of racial discrimination.
“You kind of feel the difference, and you feel not just the difference, but the poverty,” Cambron said. Growing up in Los Angeles, Cambron lived in public housing until her mother remarried and her family relocated to a community by the Azusa mountains.
“My dad, he wanted us to move out of the government housing so that, specifically, my older brother would have a better opportunity to get into a better college,” she remembered. “My dad was an educator in East Los Angeles, and he knew the ins and outs, and so he felt that in order for my brother to be accepted to a better college we needed to move out of the projects.”
When Cambron moved with her family in pursuit of improved educational opportunities, she noticed more starkly the racial divide that gripped Southern California during the 1960s and 1970s.
“First, I was in a community where it was all Mexicans, then I went into a community where it’s predominantly white, and there were small percentages of Mexican and black people. And there was tension,” she explained.
By 1970, a year after Cambron’s family moved out of the East LA projects, the Chicano Movement had gripped Southern California, as well as the nation. On August 29, 1970, the National Chicano Moratorium Against the Vietnam War took place in East Los Angeles. Tens of thousands of Chicanos and community supporters marched down Whittier Boulevard carrying banners and protest signs and chanting “Raza sí, guerra no.”
Rosalio Muñoz, UCLA student activist and longtime member of the Communist Party, spearheaded the 1970 Chicano Moratorium Committee as Co-Chair. He remembers “the festive atmosphere” of the nearly peaceful march. “It seemed typical of a weekend in the park in East L.A.,” Muñoz was cited saying in The Chicano Generation. The aim of the march was to bring attention to the disproportionate percentage of Chicanos being killed daily in the war and discrimination in the war draft.
The initially peaceful event turned violent when Los Angeles County Sheriff’s deputies confronted participants gathered in what was then called Laguna Park in East Los Angeles.
The Sheriff’s Department declared that the anti-war rally was an unlawful assembly and dispatched a large deployment of deputies who attacked the crowd. The police actions of the day left dozens injured and resulted in the tragic deaths of three people, including the highly respected Los Angeles Times reporter and KMEX-TV news director Ruben Salazar, who was killed under suspicious circumstances by a tear gas projectile.
Cambron and her brother both regretted having missed out on the historic protests of that late summer. “By then I was already a little conscious, and I remember both my brother and myself saying, ‘damn, we just moved out of there.’ You know, we wanted to be there.”
To Cambron, to be “Chicana/o” means “I am from both worlds. I am like a woke Mexican American so to speak, I am not asleep, I am fighting for my rights, I feel empowered…I am going to fight for my people.”
Inspired by the moratorium and a growing sense of political awareness, Cambron became involved in activism during high school. She joined the United Mexican Students Association and was part of a human rights organization that was developed because of the racial and political tensions at the local high school.
After high school, as a college student at Loyola Marymount University, Cambron joined the Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán (MEChA). During her time with MEChA, Cambron fought alongside other radical progressive students to maintain Chicano studies, because “they’re always attacking it.”
“We were a small group… But we were united enough to keep Chicano studies there at the university,” Cambron said. Amid efforts to limit access to higher education for marginalized groups, MEChA members organized statewide to ensure greater representation of Latino students in universities across the state.
Through her activism in MEChA, Cambron met her husband, Arturo, who had friendly connections to members of the Communist Party. While attending the Party’s Instituto del Pueblo in the late 1970s in East L.A., Cambron knew she had discovered a powerful tool that she would use for the rest of her life: Marxism.
“Up to that point, I was pretty much anti-communist, because, you know, I went by what my mom told us: They ate babies and they killed people with disabilities, all of the crazy stuff,” Cambron said.
When Cambron attended the Party’s national school, “it opened up, for lack of a better way of expressing it, the heavens. I mean, it really gave me that hope that I was looking for.”
“It was concrete: This is how society develops. This is how scientifically we look at things. So, it gave me that whole entire concrete analysis of the possibilities. I said, ‘I’m in.’”
Upon joining the party, Cambron became involved in working for Chicano representation in the city council, the county board of supervisors, the board of education, and other political institutions.
For many decades prior to the 1980s, Mexican Americans were denied any form of representation proportional to their population in local government in Los Angeles. In fact, the political situation for Latinos in L.A. during much of the WWII and post-WWII era resembled that of disenfranchised Black populations in Southern cities.
Progressive organizations led voter registration efforts and electoral struggles at the local level, contributing to the rise of Latino political representation. “From 1980s on, you begin to see that increase of Latino, or Mexican American, representation,” Cambron asserted.
“When I turned 18 in 1974, the very first thing, I remember this, the very, very first thing I did was register to vote… there was this movement of increasing the Latino vote … this movement to register to vote and increase political power.”
Latinos today
50 years later, the rapid growth of eligible Latino voters—contributing to nearly half of the total increase in eligible voters since the last presidential election—is generating a significant electoral force that will continue to shape the nation’s political landscape.
“I think, increasingly, we see that the Latino vote is even that much more important…Our task as Communists and as people of consciousness is to ask ‘How do we direct it? How do we educate?’ so that we guarantee that Latinos are voting for their best interest as opposed to voting for Trump.”
Latino organizations released key findings on Hispanic voter motivations and election choices, based on interviews with a representative sample of 3,750 actual Hispanic voters. In comparison, the national exit poll had 2,152 Latino respondents.
The fact of the matter is that a majority of Latino voters supported Harris — including men — and a supermajority reject mass deportations and abortion restrictions.
In many instances, however, policies associated with Democrats far outperformed candidates from that party. Moreover, “pocketbook concerns” dominated 4 of the top 5 priorities, with reproductive rights rounding up the top 5, nationally.
Clarissa Martínez de Castro, Vice President of the Latino Vote Initiative at UnidosUS, summarized the findings, saying, “The mainstream exit polls got Hispanic candidate support wrong, and that is a recurring sampling issue.”
She added that “The most potent driver in the election was economic discontent. If there is a mandate, it’s on that: raise wages and bring down food, housing and health care costs,” emphasizing how Latino demands align closely with the interests of the working class as a whole.
Vanessa Cárdenas, executive director of America’s Voice, concluded that “American voters, and Latino voters in particular, still strongly support legal status for long-settled immigrants” adding that “Trump does not have a mandate for mass deportations or sending in the military to round up our immigrant neighbors or family members.”
However, the over 25-point margin by which Harris won the Latino vote does represent a decrease from past cycles, which underscores how “it’s still a struggle” to “build that consciousness among Latinos about the importance of voting,” according to Cambron. Overall building political power has “been slow moving, you know, because we have this battle of ideas and all of these other challenges as people of color, as Latinos.”
Although the majority of Latinos in the U.S. are eligible to vote, Latinos are still considerably less likely than Americans overall to be eligible to vote. This is partly because the nation’s Latino population includes many people who are too young to vote or who are not yet U.S. citizens.
Cambron thinks it “really is important to build those relationships” with the Latino community and other working-class people for the anti-MAGA majority to stand a chance at defeating Trumpism.
“I like to stress the fact that you have to look and dig deeper. It goes back to this battle of ideas. They want you to believe that the Latino vote is going to the right, but I don’t think so,” Cambron noted. “I just don’t see how when, you know, this fool’s calling us rapists and drug addicts and all this BS,” she added.
“It could be temporary… but what’s propelling people to vote the way they’re voting is the fact that they haven’t seen any real change and they’re looking for change…And even back in 2008 when they voted for Obama, they didn’t really care whether he was a Black person or not. They wanted change and Obama was all about change,” Cambron said.
Indeed, that was the feeling expressed by Daniela Rosario, a middle-aged Dominican American woman who voted for Trump. In an interview with Mother Jones, she said “That’s what influenced me the most—that things might stay the same as they are now.” She added that “I think if Obama’s wife had been running, I would have voted Democrat.”
The working class must lead the way
The focus on economic issues for Latino voters tracks with recent years of upsurge of Latino workers organizing into trade unions. Moreover, “the trade unions have recognized the immigrant population” and the importance of including them as members and leaders. “The majority of the labor organizers here in the Los Angeles area are Latino… women and men. Not all of them, but the great majority of them are,” Cambron said.
“And some time ago, car wash workers unionized through the steel workers’ union… their main call was for having a place to take a break and, of course, livable wages,” she added.
Like in many industries with predominantly immigrant workforces, car wash employers skirt minimum wage laws. Often, they pay workers in tips only, or they have workers on stand-by without pay, or they pay workers per car or through daily rates.
In 2008, Los Angeles car wash workers formed a city-wide Car Wash Workers Organizing Committee (CWOC) to raise their standard of living, secure workplace protections, and address the environmental and safety hazards of the industry. In March of that year, CWOC joined with the United Steel Workers and became part of the CLEAN Carwash Campaign, a broad-based coalition fighting for the rights of car wash workers all over greater Los Angeles.
In 2011, the car wash workers announced a union contract with Bonus Car Wash in Santa Monica, becoming the first-ever Southern California car wash to unionize.
More recently still, the Los Angeles labor movement has demonstrated its commitment to the rights of the immigrant working class through fighting for sanctuary city laws.
SEIU Local 721—the largest public sector union in Southern California—was a leading force behind the Sanctuary City Rally on Nov. 9, 2024, organizing a quick response to Trump’s victory a few days prior.
On Nov. 19, 2024, Los Angeles city council voted 13-0 to approve the Sanctuary City Ordinance, which codifies protections for undocumented migrants and closes a gap in past policies by prohibiting the direct or indirect sharing of data with federal immigration authorities.
The passage of the Sanctuary City Ordinance in Los Angeles marks a significant victory for immigrant rights, highlighting the recent strength and relevance of the labor movement in advocating for vulnerable communities. Moreover, the progressive wing in city council includes two Latino council members of Mexican descent, Hugo Soto-Martínez and Eunisses Hernandez, and has recently been expanded to include Ysabel Jurado, the first person of Filipino descent elected to the LA City Council.
Indeed, the Sanctuary City Ordinance victory did not come out of nowhere. It is the culmination of years of organizing and advocacy of labor unions and community activists. Even more so, the decades-long generational fight for political representation, access to education, and immigrant rights has shaped the conditions that made such a law possible—and, perhaps more importantly, has put working-class people at the forefront of the struggle.
Finally, it points to a larger political evolution in Latino politics and the defense of immigrant rights. The timing of the law’s passage, amid the incoming Trump administration, shows how the legacy of past social movements for political change are the foundation of today’s resistance.
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