May Day in the Mission

The small, enthusiastic crowd assembling at 24th Street to march to join the main festivities at Civic Center reminded me how much I love my neighborhood.

San Francisco's quite powerful established unions -- teachers, nurses, city employees, longshoremen -- were elsewhere. And more power to 'em. This crowd was made up of the sort of workers who for many years organized labor ignored: domestic workers, childcare workers, health aides, restaurant workers, undocumented casual laborers -- the service economy working class. 

Most were immigrants. Quite likely, they brought a broad vision of May Day with them from elsewhere: a May Day that takes up all the ills of their lives and propounds the general welfare as the duty of the state. The predominant language seemed to be Spanish, though the young man above was standing up for a Filipino political party.

 

The Mission has no truck with the immigration authorities.

 

They assume a decent society would provide health care accessible to all. 

 

Students want respect -- and debt cancellation. Isn't the job of a decent society educate its members?

There were even a few Zapatistas.

 

I was surprised by how nearly universal mask-wearing seemed to be in this crowd. I generally don't wear one outside, but pretty much everyone here did. So I did too. Perhaps these are people accustomed to having to wear masks at work or school? We have demanded this from "essential workers" for two long years.

I suspect this young drummer is going to remember marching on May Day fondly. 

A sprinkling of ideological leftists wandered the edges of the crowd, trying and failing to engage people with their newspapers. What would the Mission be without the last living Trotskyists?