Latinos at the Golden Gate: Creating Community and Identity in San Francisco

Introduction. How Do I Get to San Francisco?: Latin Americans and the Golden Gate

1 i n t r o d u c t i o n How Do I Get to San Francisco? Latin Americans and the Golden Gate “This doesn’t just affect Mexicans or Central Americans, documented or undocumented,” explained one San Francisco day laborer in the spring of 2006. “We are all affected.” Addressing other local jornaleros at a meeting of the San Francisco Day Labor Program, the undocumented man was referring to the Sensenbrenner Bill then working its way through Congress . The legislation, an effort to further criminalize undocumented immigrants , politically mobilized millions nationwide.1 The fifty or so members of the day labor group had met to discuss the controversy at La Raza Centro Legal, a grassroots organization dedicated to providing accessible legal services to the Latino community. Centro Legal brought together a broad coalition of Bay Area organizations and residents already organized in opposition to the draconian congressional attempts at “border security.” The jornalero’s passionate plea for unity was repeated throughout the city’s network of progressive advocacy organizations, articulating that spring’s political struggle in a much larger context. As he worded it, “This is against us—this is against Latinos.”2 The same refrain of mutuality had echoed in the city decades before, in December 1985, when San Francisco became another in a growing list of municipalities around the nation declaring themselves “cities of sanctuary ” for Guatemalan and Salvadoran immigrants.3 Members of the Latin American community were joined by a diverse group of San Franciscans in this successful movement, a multifaceted effort to pressure the city’s Board of Supervisors into taking “a moral position” on the humanity of refugees. The formal resolution forbade local law, health, education, and social service agencies from assisting Immigration and Naturalization Service (ins) agents in the fulfillment of their duties with respect to Central Americans, 2 / introduction while condemning the Reagan administration’s policies in those countries . The board’s affirmative vote made the city one of the national epicenters of a growing grassroots effort to end U.S. military involvement in the hemisphere. For San Francisco, already home to tens of thousands of immigrants from El Salvador and Guatemala, the measure also had particular local appeal: supporters hoped the symbolism of the stance would translate into tangible changes in how “illegal” immigrants were policed within the city’s borders. Opponents waged an equally passionate effort, complicating the city’s reputation as a bastion of unrivaled leftists. One city supervisor called the measure “inappropriate,” the mayor said it would require her to “violate her oath to uphold the law,” and an editorial in the San Francisco Chronicle characterized it as a “plan for anarchy.”4 The measure passed nonetheless, an assertion of solidarity between the city and the struggle of Central American refugees. One local activist proclaimed that it “signifie[d] the city of San Francisco and the people from El Salvador and Guatemala are in this together.”5 These multiple expressions of identity, solidarity, and interconnectedness are the heart of Latinos at the Golden Gate. In its simplest form, this is a story detailing the social and political experiences of multiple generations of ethnic Latin Americans in San Francisco and their efforts to forge lives of dignity and meaning.6 It pays special attention to those moments in the past when a diverse population of mostly Spanish-speaking migrants coalesced to express panethnic solidarity and identity rooted to the geography of the city. Though fluid and contingent, these expressions of pan-Latin community could cut across lines of difference, such as those marked by nationality and immigration status. Ultimately, they helped integrate Latinos into the cosmopolitan imaginary of the city itself. When activist and advocacy networks in the city respond to modern attacks on immigrants, they also draw on a rich history of Latin Americans’ forging substantive connections to each other and to the city by uniting in common cause. And so central to this study is an examination of this emerging and evolving pan–Latin Americanism as an experience lived through institutions, organizations, and movements. Empire and the Golden Gate For generations, San Francisco has promoted itself as a cosmopolitan city, tolerant of difference and welcoming of a diverse stream of migrants from all over the world. The city enjoys an image as an exception to traditional urban race relations in the United States, “an oasis of equal treatment for introduction / 3 restless...