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.
 
 
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