May Day was celebrated in San Antonio with complementary cries for justice bookending the day. It opened at at the memorial for the 53 immigrants who died while locked inside a tractor trailer on the city’s south side in the summer of 2022. Organizers gathered at the memorial kicking off a May Day Caravan event decried structural injustices they described as intrinsic to a capitalist system.
Araceli Herrera Castillo, founder and director of Domesticas Unidas, called on those present to celebrate the day with pride and courage—and dedicate their efforts to the men, women, and children who died at this site. They were victims, she said, of an exploitative system that requires migrants to come to the United States to enrich billionaires who then subsequently criminalize and seek to punish those same workers.
“They were workers; they came to work,” Herrera said. “Why did they come to work? Because this fucking government, this fucking system is going to steal our countries, steal our lives, our blood, our work, our lives, our families, and forces us to migrate to this fucking country, to continue exploiting us, sucking our blood, sucking our lives and not allowing us to be happy.”
Public Citizen’s DeeDee Belmares called for better protections for workers who are forced to endure increasingly brutal summer temperatures in Texas being driven by climate change linked to fossil fuels.
“I think about them in the heat, in the summer time, when it’s over 100 degrees, and they’re around all these cars…breathing in that exhaust,” Belmares told the group of a couple dozen attendees. “They deserve protections. They deserve a livable wage. They deserve breaks. … And the only way they are going to get that is if all of us here continue to fight for them. Because the climate crisis is getting worse and worse.”
The Republican-led Texas Legislature has undermined efforts to establish protections for workers in the state.
Brian Lopez from the Southern Workers Assembly, a growing network of unions and worker-empowerment efforts across the U.S. South, offered a broader sweep of the history of economic exploitation of workers that sought to connect the dots with militarism and other forms of oppression.
“We must stand united,” Lopez urged. “When they threaten our livelihoods, we must stand united. When they send bombs to Palestine, we must stand united. When they strip our social safety nets to keep us poor and sick, we must stand united.”
Later that day, between 200 and 300 area residents converged on a downtown federal building adjacent to the storied Alamo (described both as a “Shrine to Texas Liberty” and a “Shrine to White Supremacy“) as part of an ongoing international protests decrying the abuses of the Trump administration and its attacks on federal workers, social service programs, and human rights.
The evening May Day Rally, “People Over Billionaires,” drew on the strength of the nascent 50501 movement, the local AFL-CIO chapter, and established political efforts, such as Indivisible, including other union chapters and organizations.
“The pimps say, ‘If you get their mind, their ass will follow.’ That’s what they’re doing,” said Don Edge, of the American Federation of Government Employees, Local 3511. “MAGA is following their leader. Some of them are following in ignorance; the rest of them, they’re showing who they are.”
‘People Over Billionaires’
The migrant memorial on Quintana Road on San Antonio’s south side has been vandalized twice, the first time by what appeared to be a woman in the throes of a mental health crisis. Deceleration interviewed volunteer caretaker Angelita Olvero in 2022.
