To meet Marcelina Pedraza, you have to go where no one ever goes. Going past the University of Chicago, crossing the deserted streets of the poor neighborhoods of the city, a little worried, and descending south for more than 30 kilometers. Then cross a weighbridge over the Calumet canal, which serves the industrial area. You can see a huge green hill: it is the mountain of rubbish accumulated by the city for decades. Finally, we arrive to attend this meeting where trade unionists and activists from the far south of Chicago meet. A first since the Covid-19 epidemic.
Marcelina Pedraza is one of them. At 47, she is part of this line of Mexicans who came to reinforce the industry during the First World War: “I am the fifth generation of unionized workers, from the railways to the steel industry”, said–she proudly. Her family lived through the harshness of the times: her grandfather had had several knuckles cut off, but she believed that “it was normal when you were a worker in the steel industry” ; her father died of a heart attack at 41, when she was only 9; she lived in poverty with her mother, a stone’s throw from the blast furnaces, and had never realized that Lake Michigan was so close, just behind the factory fence.
After starting her studies in California, Marcelina Pedraza interrupted them – “my mother couldn’t pay” — and trained with the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. She worked on construction sites, then in the factory, before joining Ford in 2016. In recent years, it has been above all societal struggles that have mobilized her, starting with the fight against a factory project for metal recycling conducted by General Iron. “They were polluting the northern neighborhoods and decided to move south. We told them it was environmental racism”accuses Marcelina Pedraza, who shows, hanging on the wall, the photos of the militants who led the fight. “We had to go on a hunger strike”, she recalls, so that the Biden administration ends up sending, in May 2021, the director of the environmental protection agency, the African-American Michael Regan. This prompted the mayor, Lori Lightfoot, to suspend the permits granted to General Iron.
The battles of yesteryear
The fights before were of a different stamp and the activist, who says she has read Marx, Lenin and Trotsky, confides her admiration for her predecessors in Chicago: “I am indebted to the revolutionaries who sacrificed their lives. » In the past, the city was nicknamed the “Paris of the Midwest” because of the bustle that reigned there. The Commune marked the spirits. After the great fire of 1871, the influx of workers drove wages down, rents up and exacerbated social and ethnic tensions. The most active workers were German anarchists who had fled the failed “People’s Spring” of 1848.
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