Norma Chavez

It can be a slow process walking with Norma Chavez down Imperial Avenue, a main thoroughfare in one of the older Mexican-American neighborhoods south of downtown San Diego. It’s not the August heat that slows her down but the fact that she seems to know almost everyone, and she stops to chat with every person she passes. At 32, Chavez is not only one of San Diego’s most prominent political organizers, having been a key figure in the city’s record-setting April 9 pro-immigrant march. She is also the kind of person that people like to be around.

“We’re a country of change,” she has said. But can she spark change in a city known more for its good weather and large military bases than for political activism? Given that San Diego is just 20 minutes’ drive from the Mexican border, you might expect it to be a haven for pro-immigrant activism. But San Diego organizers face plenty of challenges. In their 2003 book, Under the Perfect Sun: The San Diego Tourists Never See, a handful of irreverent scholars including Mike Davis (City of Quartz, Planet of Slums) describe a city hampered by municipal corruption, political repression, and virulent anti-unionism. There is “a repeated pattern of disproportionate police response to political activism in San Diego,” local organizer Michael Cardenas told the San Diego CityBeat. This year’s April rally—with between 50,000 and 100,000 people—was much smaller than those in Los Angeles and Chicago, where there were upwards of 500,000 in attendance. Still, it was the largest in San Diego’s history. 

In September, the mayor of National City, just south of San Diego, announced that his city would be a “sanctuary” for illegal immigrants, with no local funds going toward enforcement of state or federal immigration laws. In response, National City’s police union said its members would continue to comply with state and federal immigration laws. At a rally in late September, National City police showed up in riot gear, some armed with rubber-bullet rifles and some on horseback.

Chavez called the scene “ridiculous.” “San Diego lacks infrastructure,” she says. “It’s not that strong. And it’s not enough, obviously, because look at the politics. We have to work smarter and work together.” She knows making the city an effective part of the national pro-immigrant movement will require a more practical commitment from San Diegans who are in it for the long haul. But this spring’s rallies were a start. And she’s been pushing ahead with ambitious organizing efforts ever since.

Tools for Empowerment

At a street festival this summer, she was milling about among an estimated 50,000 people at the two-day Fiesta Del Sol, a major fundraiser for her group Justice Overcoming Boundaries (JOB), a San Diego County coalition formed just two years ago. JOB is a branch of the Chicago-based Gamaliel Foundation, a national faith-based social justice group established in the late 1960s. Gamaliel was formed to support African-American homeowners in Chicago who had been discriminated against by banks. It now backs a variety of causes, including comprehensive immigration law reform, which would expand family and worker visa programs and increase immigrant labor protections.

Within view of the rising curve of the San Diego-Coronado Bridge, miles north of the U.S.-Mexico border, the Fiesta Del Sol may have looked like an ordinary street party. Imperial Avenue was lined with vendor tables laden with soft taco accoutrements, plastic barrels of hot sauce, gleaming low-rider cars, and piñatas. Children painted peace-sign murals and made tempera-paint handprints on paper plates. But the event’s main, unstated purpose was to help Chicanos empower themselves. In between the taco stands and ring-toss tables were booths offering heavier fare. Posters read: “Conozca tus derechos,” “!Si se puede!” and “Tome accion!” (“Know your rights,” “Yes, we can!” and “Take action!”). People could register to vote, open a bank account, enroll their children in preschool, and get information on naturalization, citizenship, civil rights, education, day care, housing, and health care.

Chavez is fierce about involving Chicanos in the American political process. She believes voting is the way for Chicanos to effect massive change in state, local, and federal policies, and one of her group’s slogans is, “Today we march, tomorrow we vote.” But there are plenty of obstacles to that goal: Mexico has a history of less-than-legitimate elections, and many Mexican-Americans lack basic knowledge of the American political system. 

This can lead to practical predicaments. This spring, when the Senate Judiciary Committee was considering a bill that would expand rights for undocumented immigrants, Chavez and other activists tried to orchestrate a phone-calling campaign to influence California Senator (and committee member) Diane Feinstein’s vote. But the activists realized community members had no idea what to say on the phone. So Chavez asked a priest friend in north San Diego County, Father Andres Rivero, to show them how by making a mock phone call during mass. He did this seven times in one weekend, asking congregation members to stand up afterwards to signify their intention to call Feinstein. Over the weekend, around 1,000 people stood up to indicate they would make the phone call, according to Chavez. So did they? “Well, they promised during mass,” she says, laughing. “I hope they did!”

A Powerful Moment

Weeks before the Fiesta Del Sol, Chavez had set up camp at the coffee shop Chicano Perk in National City to hammer out details. Wearing little makeup, jeans, a deep red blazer, and fan-shaped chandelier earrings, she took a seat by the window. Behind her were paper streamers punched out to illuminate the face of Che Guevara, along with the words “Hasta La Victoria Siempre” and a flag for the Zapatista Army of National Liberation. One of her two daughters, Monica, 12, (the other is ten-year-old Tehya) sat a few tables away, working on a laptop computer. Chavez, eager to talk about the march’s success, didn’t touch her yogurt breakfast.

“I think we’re in a historic and powerful moment in terms of social justice,” she said. “In San Francisco, you expect it. In Los Angeles, you expect that. Not San Diego. It had never been done. It had never happened, and we made it happen in two weeks.”

Chavez recalls hearing the approaching marchers before they arrived to the stage where her husband, Tommy Peterson, was setting up. “You could literally hear this echoing roar of people,” she says. “There was such a spirit that was present…such a spirit of community that I think I have never felt before.”

She takes the long view when she considers the progress of the movement. The 1960s Chicano movement created institutions like community clinics, schools, community centers, and parks. Now the question is whether Chavez and others can use the momentum from this spring to march forward with a clearly articulated agenda. “I think this is all of our hope,” says Shannon Hueper, a member of JOB’s board of directors. “With this community coalescing, the politics and policy decisions made in San Diego County, in the state, and the country will be more fair and equitable because their group will have a say and a voice. They will feel more inclined to say, ‘No, this is not the way it is going to be,’ or ‘Yes, we can say that you do need to have an immigration policy that is more fundamentally humane.’”

For Chavez, the movement is deeply personal. She grew up in the state of Michoacan, Mexico, in a rural community village of fifty homes, a church, an elementary school, and two stores. Her father left their family to seek work in the United States, crossing to the “Otro Lado” (other side) to pick avocados in California. Not long after, her mother decided that she was tired of bartering beans and corn for necessities. To improve her family’s quality of life, she decided that she too should cross. Pregnant and without documentation, she entered the United States with her two oldest children, leaving three behind with Chavez’s grandmother. She moved to Santa Barbara, California, where her other children would join her a few years later. Santa Barbara’s high rent meant the family started out living in a house where eight people sometimes shared one room.

Chavez launched her political career early, establishing a MEChA (Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán or Chicano Student Movement of Aztlán) branch at her middle school and serving as president of that movement in high school. The student organization, with about 400 affiliates, promotes awareness and pride about Chicano history and culture, with the goal of educating Chicanos toward political action. While protesting Operation Gatekeeper and Light Up the Border—initiatives started in the 1990s to stop border crossings—she says she was exposed to older, more sophisticated activists who served as mentors. “That is where I became politicized,” she says.

Politicized maybe, but Chavez shies away from descriptions of herself as ferocious or radical. “I may be radically grounded, but you have to begin with where people are at,” she says. This pretty well sums up one of her strongest assets as an activist: her ability to connect with people. When she answers the phone, it sounds as though yours was the phone call she had been waiting for all day. When she speaks to volunteers, she uses small words intentionally, knowing she won’t make allies with fancy talk, and knowing that she herself was intimidated by the large vocabularies of Gamaliel’s organizing elite at her first leadership workshops in Chicago.

That said, Chavez is no softie. It can be a tad disconcerting to watch her switch gears between the friendly, neighborly character who strolls down Imperial Avenue giving people hugs, to the impassioned organizer who drops her voice a notch, speaks quickly, and makes everyone sit up straight in their chairs.

“You Can’t Clock Out”

Chavez married her high school sweetheart at age eighteen, had her first child at twenty, and divorced not long after. She remarried two years ago to Peterson, an African-American musician. “It’s all a balance, this type of work,” she says, explaining how she juggles the demands of activism and family life. “It is definitely not an eight-to-five—you can’t clock out. It is so embedded in who you are.” The family makes a rule to eat together twice a week. They also pitch in during periods of intense work. One example: during Fiesta del Sol, Chavez and her husband stayed up all night with several other volunteers, guarding the fair’s expensive sound equipment. They snagged a few minutes’ sleep in another volunteer’s car.

Chavez says she sees Martin Luther King as a role model, but feels particularly inspired by a New Mexican activist named Dolores Huerta. The mother of eleven children, Huerta was cofounder of the United Farm Workers and right-hand woman and sister-in-law to Cesar Chavez (no relation to Norma, though she likes to joke that the great organizer was her uncle). Huerta made a lifelong commitment to combating poverty among farm workers and successfully lobbied Congress to pass the Agricultural Labor Relations Act, the first law of its kind, which lets farmers organize and bargain for better wages and working conditions.

In the long run, like Huerta, Chavez is pushing for massive, dramatic policy changes. But in the short run, she’s pushing for at least a local attitude change. “People are conservative, people are apathetic, people aren’t used to massive mobilizations,” she says. “People in San Diego County think the weather is nice and they can stay inside . . . It is not a community that fosters involvement and caring about people in your community. We need to start a public discourse on something other than ‘everything is just peachy in San Diego.’”

Emily Vizzo is a history teacher in San Diego. Her work has appeared in the San Diego Union-Tribune and the Los Angeles Times.