When Edgar deJesus
was growing up in
East Harlem in the
late 1960s, he was surrounded
by the sights and sounds of a
generation awakening to its
own power. The Young Lords,
a group of young Puerto
Ricans committed to seizing
the day on behalf of a commu-
nity, commandeered a local
church as the site for
a children’s breakfast
program. It was the
beginning of a com- munity offensive that
demanded respect
and better services for the residents of the neighbor-
hood known as El Barrio. “The offensive was happen-
ing in front of our faces,” deJesus recalls. “It focussed
everyone on poverty.”
Seared into his memory are the discussions that
erupted over the dinner table or on the street about the
causes of poverty. “It’s illogical to have poverty in the
richest country in the world,” he remembers thinking.
“It was the simple concept of why is there a division of
rich and poor.” DeJesus also recalls his father, a hotel
waiter and shop steward, arguing vigorously in defense
of the trade union movement as crucial to the econom-
ic stability of Latino families like his own.
DeJesus, now 40, is the assistant manager and direc-
tor of organizing for the NY/NJ Regional Joint Board
of the Union of Needle-
trades, Industrial and Textile
Employees (UNITE). The
350,000-member union was
formed in July 1995 by a
merger of the International
Ladies’ Garment Workers’
Union (ILGWU) and the
Amalgamated Clothing and
Textile Workers Union
(ACTWU). It is not only in
his official UNITE
capacity that deJesus
is influencing the labor
movement; he is also a
member of the New
York City Hispanic
Labor Committee in East Harlem and the AFL-CIO
Labor Council on Latin American Advancement.
Through his participation in these advisory bodies,
deJesus has helped articulate a northeast Latino per-
spective on NAFTA and issues of trade that provided an
important counterpoint to the pro-NAFTA drumbeat of
the Clinton Administration and Latino business leaders.
“Eddie managed to build a very solid roundtable of
Latino unionism, including Puerto Ricans, Cubans and
Dominicans,” says Hector Figueroa, an analyst with
Service Employees International Union (SEIU). “He
has made unions more sensitive to the needs of Latinos,
especially in the Northeast, which tend to be over-
looked.”
Figueroa also credits deJesus with helping to recon-
nect the labor and civil rights movement, an alliance
that has unravelled in the 33 years since Martin Luther
King Jr. marched on Washington D.C. with black and
VOL XXX, No 3 Nov/DEC 1996
dqar deJesu!
Linda Ocasio is a freelance writer and a former member of the New York Newsday editorial board.
27REPORT ON LATINO LABOR
66 My father was my first teacher of tra
unionism. He made it clear that if it
weren’t for the union, we wouldn’t hav
anything.99
white union leaders at his side. “Eddie makes a contri-
bution on a national agenda. He moves the labor move-
ment, not just the Latino issues within the labor move-
ment,” says Figueroa. DeJesus also has ties with the
Puerto Rican movement: he is a board member of the
Institute for Puerto Rican Policy and a former vice pres-
ident of the National Congress of Puerto Rican Rights.
For deJesus, his stint as a teenage Puerto Rican
activist lit the fire for a lifelong commitment to social
justice. “I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for that experi-
ence,” he says. His experience is significant for the U.S.
labor movement, as it seeks to re-energize itself, in part
by addressing the issues of minority communities that
it had ignored in the past.
By the time Eddie joined with the Young Lords in
1973-1974, the group had splintered and evolved into
the Puerto Rican Revolutionary Workers Organization,
a Marxist-Leninist group. That group eventually crum-
bled, fueled by paranoia and mistrust, which deJesus
and others now attribute to deliberate government sub-
version-a fate common to radical left political groups
in the 1970s. “From 1975 to 1976 was the most demor-
alized period in my life,” deJesus says. After dropping
out of Brooklyn College, he took refuge in family, mar-
rying his high school sweetheart, Yolanda. Together
they went to work in a bookbinding factory on 10th Ave.
in Manhattan.
In addition to what he observed on the streets of East
Harlem, deJesus had another influence shaping his
political and organizing principles: his father. “My
father was my first teacher of trade unionism,” deJesus
says. “My father made it clear, that if it weren’t for the
union, we wouldn’t have anything.” The evidence was
all around him: Puerto Rican families who had a least
one parent in a union stayed together and were finan-
cially stable, whether they lived in East Harlem, the
Bronx or the Lower East Side.
However, deJesus’ first experience with a union was
not what he expected at all. At the bookbinding factory
he joined with coworkers to decertify a Teamsters local
that was not representing the Latino workers. “They
were disgruntled with the union and the union reps,” he
recalls. The experience gave him a chance to put into
practice his beliefs about what a union should do for its
members. “I was seeing in reality what I had the-
orized about,” he says. Later, he and his wife
de moved on to a metal factory; she did clerical
work for a jewelry workers union and he became
a metal spinner.
re By 1980, much of the fury that had splintered
the Puerto Rican movement began to fade for
deJesus, and he started contacting activists that
he had lost touch with in Chicago and Canada.
He reconnected to the Puerto Rican movement
through the National Congress of Puerto Rican
Rights, where he established a labor task force.
Through the task force, he published for two years a
newspaper called El Obrero Boricua (The Puerto Rican
Worker). “We became the more activist Latino voice of
the labor movement,” he says. At that time he was also
working with the Workers Education Center in
Manhattan, which melded radical politics with labor-
rights awareness. In 1985 he completed a study of
Puerto Rican workers in New York City.
DeJesus began to draw the attention of older Latino
labor leaders, including Edward Gonzalez, a onetime
organizer for the ILGWU who taught at Cornell
University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations.
“He looked at my work with the task force and put me
into labor law courses at Cornell,” deJesus recalls.
Gonzalez also did something more. He introduced
deJesus to trade union veterans. “They were not radi-
cals, just basic trade unionists who spent all their lives
building unions,” deJesus recalls. “That was probably
the beginning of my left politics merging with my trade
unionism in practice.” After two years at Cornell,
deJesus headed the school’s Puerto Rican Latino Studies
program for trade unionists.
From there, he worked as an organizer, business
agent and eventually administrator for the Capmakers
Union Local 2 of ACTWU. Today he oversees organiz-
ing for the New York/New Jersey region of UNITE
from his office in Union City, NJ. And the Latino com-
munities he works with are not just Puerto Ricans,
Cubans and Dominicans. In the textile mills of Passaic
and Paterson, Colombian and Peruvian workers pre-
dominate, and with them comes a more militant legacy
of activism, deJesus observes: “They’re used to the
state negotiating with unions and general strikes. There,
negotiations are done region or statewide. Here, it’s
done factory by factory.”
In addition to reaching out to the Latino community in
all of its diversity, DeJesus says strengthening the link
between labor and the civil rights movement is a con-
tinuing effort. Recalling the 1963 March on
Washington, he has a tone of wistfulness as he lists some
of the unions that linked arms with Rev. King: the UAW,
AFSCME and the Steelworkers. “I’m waiting for that to
happen with the Latino labor movement,” he says.
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