#ctul

Veronica Mendez Moore, CTUL. Doing the Impossible, Teaching Imagination.

I grew up in Southeast Minneapolis, by the University of Minnesota. My dad was in college and then grad school. My parents, immigrants from Peru, came here about 40 years ago. I was the first in my family to be born here.

I lived in an international environment — subsidized student housing on Como Ave, full of immigrant families, aspiring to middle class — going to college. I had friends from all…

Gilberto Vasquez Valle. Mexican Chemist and Folk Musicologist Finds Poetic Justice in Minneapolis.

  All my education in Mexico was in public schools, and, since I was a teenager, I was conscious of the moral responsibility I had towards working people of my country, who paid for my education. But I have learned … the concept of nationality can be relative. There is another Mexico and another Latin America within the United States. One can be ideologically and morally congruent without having…

Racism and the Labor Movement. From $15Now to Philando Castile. Which Side Are We On? An historical view.

 On July 19, 2016, educators at the American Federation of Teachers’ national convention marched through downtown Minneapolisshouting “Black Lives matter”, “Justice for Philando,” and “We want justice, we want peace, in our schools and in the streets.” Leaders of the Minneapolis and St. Paul Federations sat in the street in their union colors as an act of civil disobedience aimed at local banks…

Minneapolis in the streets for $15 and dignity in the workplace.

    Joining 500 in the Working Families March of November 10, 2015 to support  retail janitors walking off their jobs in the Twin Cities, was the best kind of high. The march began at McDonalds in Northeast Mpls before the sun was up, — a show of solidarity with fast food workers across the country.  I met the moving brigade in front of the downtown Macys at 7:30AM in time to see students from…

Short-term memory and the fight for Working Families in Minneapolis

  I am old enough to have started my work life in Minneapolis at a time when sexual harassment on the job was not a phrase, just an everyday nothing-you-can-do-about-it reality. Gender discrimination in hiring and wages were just how people did business. Racial discrimination was rampant in both the the workplace and in unions. Race and gender discrimination was illegal, (I’m not that old!) but…

An older poem of mine about dignity, exploitation, and thinking critically about who benefits the most from our labor.