Gloria La Riva Interview

Interviewed by Madison Verner

 

Madison Verner: I would love to start the interview with how you started your journey. Can you describe how you began your interest in politics and when you learned about the workers movement within the U.S.? 

 

Gloria La Riva: I probably should talk about my background growing up because that shaped a lot of what I am today. I am from Albuquerque, New Mexico. My mother is from Mexico. She came into the U.S. as a young adult, and my dad is from Southern New Mexico. He is, you know, Mexican American, I guess you could say, but his grandmother is Mescalero Apache. Basically, we're Mexican. Growing up in Albuquerque, it was before the time of the big Chicano pride movement, Black pride and the Black liberation movement, before everything was kicking off in the 1960s, but I grew up in the 60s. I was very shaped by the social struggle that was going on. There wasn't a lot in my neighborhood or my circle, but certainly the media, and I think children and young people were much more aware of the news than we are now, even with all the channels and social media, a lot of primary news doesn't get to people. Yet, of course, the media is the mainstream media that shapes our understanding of where we live. I grew up believing in capitalism, even though we were poor, even though we got evicted a few times from our homes, and even being Mexican and experiencing a lot of racism in school and our neighborhood. Those were all the things that I saw. I believed in the system because unless youare a child of political people with other views, like leftist views, you pretty much adopt what your school system, school system, government, everything says around you. I was always politically interested. I wasn't naive about things, or apolitical, but I didn't understand things. I heard Nixon say he was for peace, it was a complete lie, but that's what people believed.

I'd like to offer something in terms of education of what it was like then. 

If you watch the movie, it's a Hollywood movie, Born on the 4th of July, which actually stars Tom Cruise. It's a perfect depiction of what life was for teenage boys in the early 60s until the anti-Vietnam war movement grew. We were told it was communism that we were fighting in Vietnam. The tragedy of U.S. foreign policy and dragging hundreds of thousands to war, to kill millions in Vietnam, to be killed by the tens of thousands. That was the kind of thing that wasgoing on in our country. If you watch Born on the 4th of July, it's actually the true story of a great anti-war activist, Ron Kovic, who joined the Marines, believing the lie, became paralyzed by being shot, and how he came around to be anti-war for the rest of his life. He's still alive. But that's important for young people to know today, how we were shaped then. I was always a really good student, got good grades, loved school, you know, didn't like the weekends because I wanted to get back into school. And yet, I got accepted to universities. I was accepted to George Washington University, to UNM in New Mexico, but we had no money. I thought, well, how am I going to pay? Now, school was a lot cheaper then, but still, how was I going to pay? My parents didn't have money to give us, and I didn't know about loans yet. One day in the spring of my senior year, a young, Chicano woman came into our school in Zonohai. A few of us people of color were called into the counselor's office, and she said, “apply to Brandeis University.” There were scholarships and money there, so I applied and got accepted with a 92% grant coverage of an expensive school and privileged kind of school. I was just amazed. I thought, well, my grades did it. This is great. I made it. I go to school. Right away, the young, political activist, leftist kids said, “we read your application. You’re a goody two shoes, and we're going to show you how you got into school.” I learned right away from them that students in 1968 and ‘69 in Brandeis University, Black students, later joined by Latino students and others as well, actually took over one of the buildings and held it and basically wonaffirmative action for those of us who came in later, and something called transitional year program for high school dropouts and for kids who just needed a leg up. It was a chance to be in a school setting with tutoring, room, and board, so you didn't have to worry about the outside environment and was very successful. But then I realized then I didn't make this on my own. It was students who fought for me. From that moment, I became a great advocate of affirmative action, which I do to this day. It's under terrible attack, but it's been chipped away for years, since the 1970s. 

Anyway, that was part of it. I got involved in the Latino group, Grito, and other things too as well. By the end of the year, I decided I have to become a socialist. It wasn't just my personal life. I always wanted to make the world better. Most young people want to change the world; they want to do something. I thought from our aptitude tests in high schoolthat I’d become a translator at the United Nations because I love languages. That's how I'll change the world, not knowing it takes a lot more than that. It takes a lot more to change the world. Anyway, that year was a great education for me. My first action was May Day.

 

Madison Verner: What's May Day?

 

Gloria La Riva: May Day International Workers Day.

 

Madison Verner: Oh, yes.

 

Gloria La Riva: It's been an international holiday where workers around the world, it's actually honored in most countries as a holiday, national holiday for Mexico, many countries, but except for the United States, where it was born. That's where International Workers Day was born. That 1886 Haymarket Square event. It was where some anarchists were accused of setting off a bomb that killed a few people, I think, including police. And it was a labor action, it was a labor rally that took place. Anarchist men were accused, we believe falsely, and most of them were executed. In the late 1800s, there was already a socialist movement starting to grow, and the Communist Manifesto had been published in 1846. The world movement of workers honored those people who sacrificed in Chicago, just in Chicago, Haymarket. It became an international workers' day, May Day. In the U.S., to keep us away from our own history, it's celebrated on Labor Day in September. Labor Day is the first Monday of September, but that was a conscious decision of the U.S. to change our history of creating Labor Day, the workers' struggle for unions, into one very far away in date.

 

Madison Verner: That's interesting. Thank you so much for telling me the beginning. I guess we can move on to the next question if you want. Could you tell me about your experience running for San Francisco mayor, California state governor, vice president, and president as part of the Workers' World Party?

 

Gloria La Riva: That was 1983. I was in Workers' World Party, and I was originally chosen by leaders in my party locally here in San Francisco because I moved here in ‘81. A couple of us moved here in 1981 to help establish a presence of our party. I was asked to run for Congress, but we found out I was too young to run for Congress. You have to be 30 years old.Then, the opportunity came to run for mayor, and I was 29 when I ran. It was 1983. It was a field of about eight people, and in the vote outcome, I was third, which is really pretty good. It was very, very good because we had almost no money. We're just this new group here, and we had no money. I worked full-time, and in the working-class districts, I was second.The one who won the mayorship was Dianne Feinstein because she was appointed as mayor after the assassination, the terrible assassination of Harvey Milk, the first openly gay politician to win as supervisor in the city. The mayor, Moscone, George Moscone was also assassinated. She became mayor, and when you're nominated, it gives you a real leg up. Plus, she was a capitalist and funded by big finance and corporations. Our program was very interesting because what we did was a lot of people were very excited about our campaign,but we did it strictly through flyers. We had maybe one or two local TV interviews. I worked for the San Francisco Chronicle from 81 all the way until I retired in 2017. I was a union activist in the Chronicle. I wasn't a reporter. I was a typesetter. There was one article about me in the campaign, but you didn't get this constant, constant advertising that those who have money run. Yet, our demand was for, the main demand was, roll back the rents. Roll back the rents. To give you an idea, my husband and I moved into an apartment in 1983, the same year. We still live here. It's a one-bedroom. It's very small. It's in the working-class community of the Mission District. We were paying $375 a month, which was reasonable.It wasn't cheap. It was reasonable because it was about a week's wages, you can imagine, at the time. Today, we pay $900.Next door, the young woman who lives next door in our building, it's a little bit smaller than ours. It's one bedroom. She pays $2,500 a month.

 

Madison Verner: Wow.

 

Gloria La Riva: In those days, there's an issue that was really huge. Only five states in the country allowed rent control.In the other states, rent control is banned. It's banned. There's rent control in New York. There might be in Massachusetts.There is definitely in California. But even that's super limited because it's only for buildings that were built before 1979.Okay. Otherwise, there's no rent control. Rents have gone sky high everywhere in the country, especially after COVID.This is one of the big crises. Yet, at that time, it was also a big problem. We would go around in this little car with some sound, you know, little sound system, and we'd say, roll back the rents. We got to roll back the rents because we still don't have vacancy control. That is, that when you leave an apartment, to this very day, if you leave the apartment, even if we have rent control here, $900, we leave our apartment, he can rent it for $2,500 to $3,000, which is such a blow to people.There's a lot of young people here who pay at least half their income, if not a lot more. This is one of the big crises for people in our country, you know. How many hundreds of thousands, if not millions, are homeless and suffering, including families with kids? Anyway, with that demand, we really tapped into people's feelings about it. We said, cut back on parking meter fines. Something we're still fighting. This is why, to this very day, when you talk about the real issues that people get to vote on, which is very rare, they only vote for politicians, capital politicians, who may talk about, oh, cutting taxes, when they really mean cutting taxes for the rich and raising our taxes. That's the trend. For example, starting with the overturning of Roe versus Wade, the defeat, this great women's gain from the fight of the 50s, 60s, and 70s. Finally, in 1973, the Supreme Court ruled, yes, women have a right to our body autonomy, to our privacy, and to our own healthcare, what we determine with our lives.Well, that was overturned. When? What, two years ago? Mm-hmm. By the Supreme Court, this new Supreme Court. In the next election year of 2024, it was six states, I think, six states where it was put on the ballot by the working-class people, especially women's groups, gathered hundreds of thousands, in every state to make it, do you agree that it should be a constitutional right? We won in six states, which is remarkable, even in the state of Kansas, which is a conservative state. We've gone through these gains. We've gone through social gains for decades, including women's rights, including LGBTQ rights, including the right for social security, unemployment, assistance for people, Medicaid, Medicare, food stamps, which right now are all under attack. This is what we're facing, and why history is so important, why women's history and all people's history is important. We're in February right now, Black History Month. Black history should be taught every month. Because from that, everyone's boats has risen. You know, in the 60s, with the height of the Black struggle, lesbian, gay, rights came about. You'd see the flag for liberation. That came from the Black struggle and also inspired by the Vietnamese struggle. There was a lot of solidarity at that time with each other, so history is very important.

I got to look at the date that the first six states guaranteed women's right to abortion, California, Kansas, I forget where else. It passed the right of women to determine our own lives with respect to reproductive rights. It would have been more, but in Florida, the state sneakily made it a requirement for referenda to have to pass by 60% plus one. It passed by 55%, a solid majority, but we have more work to do there. In Nebraska, where I actually, I do political organizing there with young people who wanted to join the party I belong to now, the party for socialism and liberation.There was a very deliberate confusion in the ballot by right-wing anti-abortion organizations that placed an almost twin referendum, but actually that denied women's rights. That one passed, and I was in the street, you know, doing political organizing, and there would be young people passing around that right-wing proposition thinking, actually, that they were supporting abortion. They were getting paid probably two, three dollars a ballot signature, but it was only by deliberate confusion that it lost. Otherwise, if the people were allowed today to say, regardless of who's president, do you vote to stop funding the war in Ukraine against Russia? Do you vote to stop the genocide in Palestine? Do you vote to stop sending the bombs that Israel is using to, to carry out the genocide in Palestine? The majority of people would vote to end it. Instead, it's passed over smoothly from Biden, who's responsible for the, probably almost 100,000 people who've died, handed it over to Trump, because now we read that 5,000 bombs of 2,000 pound size are being sent to Israel. When Trump says he's going to move the Palestinians out, he really means that he's giving the green light, the continued green light to Netanyahu to continue massacring people with massive bombing, not just Palestine, not just Gaza, but killing people on the West Bank, allowing more settlements, bombing Lebanon, killing hundreds, and threatening other countries in the Middle East, threatening Iran. I believe that we're facing an extremely dangerous time, not just with what was developing under Biden and before him, the previous presidents, including Obama, including Bush, but now with Trump, he is trying to wipe out all the gains, all the rights of the people in this country. Executive orders, which are illegal, claiming he'll deport 11 million undocumented and who knows what else he'll do. He's using divide and conquer. Our theme and what I truly believe in is, we all have the same needs, and we must have the same rights, including the right to legalization for people who have come to the U.S. to work and to live.

I got 5.4% in the mayoral election. I got 5.4% vote, which is very high for someone with no funding, virtually, as an open socialist, as a woman, and 20% in the mission. Very high rate in the Castro, in the Bayview, in the Black community, in the Fillmore. It was quite a remarkable campaign, but it showed what people wanted and what they still want.

 

Madison Verner: You also ran for California state governor. Can you tell me about that as well?

 

Gloria La Riva: Well, I ran twice, and in 1994 was the first time. I was very happy to be chosen. I was a candidate for the Peace and Freedom Party. Peace and Freedom is a statewide party that achieved ballot status in 1969. It was a combination of anti-war, anti-Vietnam War activists, and the Black Panther Party, who worked together to gather enough signatures to qualify, and Peace and Freedom is the only consistently ballot-access socialist party in the United States. Even though I'm one of the founding members of the Party for Socialism and Liberation, we are part of Peace and Freedom, along with other groups, and all our members in California register as Peace and Freedom Party, because we believe very much in it. It's a socialist, feminist party. That's how it's labeled. 

I ran in ‘94. It was a really key moment, again, in the fight for immigrant rights, because the governor was extremely right-wing. At that time, there was a proposition numbered 187. It would have banned children who were undocumented from access to public education. This would deny an education in public school and health care. It was an extremely dangerous thing. We were flooded. The people of the state were flooded with constant ads in favor of Prop 187 that was showing Latinos running across the freeway from San Diego into the United States. Constant, constant. It was like, we're being invaded. We're being invaded. It was that kind of hysteria, the way that we're facing right now. This is nothing new, and it passed. Before it passed, this state saw a remarkable uprising of youth, junior high and high school kids. The remarkable thing was there was walkouts by tens of thousands of high school and junior high kids. I was running for governor. One of our biggest platforms was full rights for all undocumented and amnesty, meaning let them have legalization. The big problem is there's not been legalization for many, many, many years in the country. They keep saying, yeah, yeah, you work. Yeah, you work. Yeah, you work in the fields. Yeah, you pick the food. Yeah, we eat because of you. But you're illegal. You're illegal, and that's this horrible label that's been placed on people. I'm Latina, and I consider myself part of the community always.

My mother came without papers, but without Latino and all the other immigrant labor, this country's economy would collapse. There would be no food for people within a few days. If we all, like we did in 2006 with the mass, mass marches, if we all stop working, including people who are citizens or permanent residents, we have the power. That's what we have to understand. The people have the power. We're just not exercising it. In 1994, it was overthrown. It was overturned. Proposition 187 was overturned by the Supreme Court of California. The interesting thing is, if they were able to vote, and if the undocumented were able to become legalized, it would be a completely different situation. Because we would be voting for our rights, because the immigrants understand their value as people and their rights as humans. The struggle of 1994, when I ran for governor, the struggle of 1994 was really what influenced the Supreme Court of California to overturn Prop 187. It was this big uprising of people in California against Proposition 187. The people who were affected, the undocumented, the permanent residents, they had no voice because they can't vote. I wrote an article about this at the time.

There was another proposition, Proposition 216 in California, that would have banned bilingual education in the state. It passed, but it was, again, knocked out by the court. I wrote about in Santa Ana, which is a Southern California city, where over 90% of the kids get bilingual education because they're mostly immigrant children in the public school system. That voting population voted to ban bilingual education because the voters are mostly white. The working class without the papers has no say in anything in how their lives are affected.

 

Madison Verner: Would you tell me about running for vice president and president with the Work Congress Party before you joined PSL?

 

Gloria La Riva: Yeah, there were some highlights. I was vice presidential candidate for Workers' World Party in 1996.Clinton had been president for four years. He was running again. This was when I was running for vice president. Monica Moorhead was my presidential candidate.

Clinton signed what is known as the Helms-Burton Law. Helms and Burton were senators, and they signed a law which is having a very terrible effect on Cuba. The Helms-Burton Law took away the presidential power. Clinton actually abandoned the presidential power of the president to lift the U.S. blockade against Cuba. From 1962, under President Kennedy, who signed the first blockade law, from ‘62 until 1996, the presidents each had the power to end the U.S. economic financial blockade of Cuba, which has created trillions of dollars in damages to the Cuban people and has isolated them economically. Clinton in the Helms-Burton Law said, “now it's no longer the presidential prerogative. It is now up to Congress to lift the blockade.” Do you think when Congress can't even pass an Equal Rights Amendment for women that Congress is going to agree to lift the blockade when you have such a huge Republican blockade and many Democrats who also vote for the blockade? That was really outrageous. The Helms-Burton Law also allowed for lawsuits against any corporation in the world that invests in property that used to be owned by the United States before the Revolution or owned by a Cuban capitalist who later became a U.S. citizen. In other words, that affects about 85 percent of Cuban territory and property. The law said any company that wants to come into Cuba and invest in a factory or anything like that to help the economy can be sued by the former U.S. owner. It's outrageous. This is what's called internationalizing the blockade. The Title III, the right to sue those companies, was held in abeyance. Clinton put a suspension on that, but Trump lifted that in his presidency, and Biden kept it going. It still exists today. That ability of what has become thousands of U.S. corporations to sue other foreign corporations, Mexican, Panamanian, European companies, Canadian, to sue them for damages, for daring to invest in Cuban economy. This is the height of arrogance of the U.S. against the Cuban people. Now, what does it have to do with me? Clinton also, in 1995, passed what was popularly called the Contract for America, but it was really an attack. We called it the Contract on America. It basically wiped out welfare. More than a million women, the poorest of society, with children, were knocked off of welfare. It greatly weakened very many social programs and required people who received social benefits to have to work for some of those benefits. In other words, it was a problem mainly for the poorest of women. Women are really targeted by these attacks on welfare and general assistance. It's always been that way. For part of my childhood, my parents became divorced. My parents were poor. The divorce made our income even lower, even though my mother worked in sweatshops, as a seamstress, cleaning houses, in hotel rooms. When I was growing up, you couldn't have a car because it was like, that was wealth. The welfare people could come into our house and make sure that a man wasn't living in the house. They would look at my mother's closet and her bedroom. There was nobody but her and her kids. It's a humiliating process. And so Clinton didn't even allow women to have that. There are many, many stories of that time. Of women having to leave their kids without child care. Because child care is not provided.

But you're supposed to work for part of the food stamps you get or little of the measly money you get.

So how are you supposed to get out of that poverty? If you're kept poor on that assistance.

Instead of using it to help women get education with child care so you can move up and move out. So, but anyway, even that wasn't allowed by his, um, contract on America, contract on America. So, as a vice presidential candidate, it was October 20, 1996, I was in Teaneck, New Jersey, on the campaign trail. And one of my comrades called and said, there's a benefit for, uh, Robert Torricelli, another, another Cuban American who's totally dedicated to trying to destroy the Cuban revolution to continue the blockade. Robert Torricelli was moving from Congress to Senate. But later he spawned, oh no, earlier in 1992, he sponsored the Torricelli law, which was another tightening of the U.S. blockade on Cuba. Another, you know, super right-winger. But that day, Clinton candidate, President Clinton, was hosting or main speaker at a fundraiser for Robert Torricelli. And so one of my comrades said, do you want to go to it? I said, sure do. So we entered, I won't say how we got in, but it was a $1,500 plate fundraiser. Today it's $25,000. And we got in, fantastic food spread. And the stage was all set. There was tons of media because it was almost election time. Tons of media. And I had a couple of signs, paper signs hidden in my jacket or whatever. And there was a velvet rope, a velvet, you know, rope to keep the crowd, the pro Clinton and pro Torricelli crowd a little distance. It was probably about maybe 10 feet distance from the stage. And Torricelli speaks. And then Clinton got up to speak. And as soon as he got up to speak, I started shouting, Clinton, like you should be in jail for throwing a million women off welfare. You should be indicted, I said, for killing a million people in Iraq because he was the main enforcer of the U.S. blockade, the total blockade of Cuba. I mean, not Cuba, of Iraq. See, I went to Iraq three times. I made an award-winning film on the sanctions and how they killed a million and a half people, blocking the island, the country completely from food, medicine, even pipe to fix the water supply. It was genocide. I made a film and won second prize in the International Film Festival called Genocide by Sanctions, the Case of Iraq.

Madison Verner: Oh, wow.

Gloria La Riva: Yeah, I made that. I made that in 1998. But anyway, I was one of the activists in the anti-sanctions movement. I was one of the leaders of the movement against the U.S. war on Iraq of 1991 and the years of the sanctions, fighting the sanctions. And so I shouted at him, saying he should be in jail for throwing women off welfare, for blockading Iraq and causing genocide, and for blockading Cuba. And all the media was on me. And these people were kicking me, you women like yanking my hair, because I had long hair at the time, and trying to tear my sign. It's on video. Oh, my God. It was on TV. The next day, I was in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, where I was working. Everywhere, it was international news. It reached everywhere in the world, literally, because it was big news. In fact, the Times or the Washington Post, I can find it for you, it said, well, there hasn't been a debate in this election, because it was kind of a boring election campaign. And they said, but last night was a debate, only this time it was, you know, Gloria La Riva and Bill Clinton.

So I found that to be the highlight of my campaign as vice presidential candidate, because we expose issues that so many people in the world were aware of, and many people in the U.S. Yeah, but that's, you know, it shows you the, the locked up game that the U.S. political scene is. The electoral system is locked up for two main political parties. Even someone like a billionaire who was, who was that man? 

 

Madison Verner: Oh, I think I know who you're talking about. 

 

Gloria La Riva: Paul. Dick? Who was the billionaire who ran for president? Who was the rich guy? The billionaire who ran for president? 

Madison Verner: Ross Perot. 

 

Gloria La Riva: Yeah, Ross Perot. You know, it's not just wealth, although wealth, although you have to have a billion dollars minimum to become president. It shows you, it's not people's little dollars. It's corporations. It's the Supreme Court case of citizen, that citizen case. Oh, citizen case of citizen case of citizen case of citizen case of citizen, that allows millionaires to, like, you know, pack their coffers. And it's the reason it's a locked up game is because it's the elections for the capitalist system. They can't have challenges. They can't have working class challenges. You know, someone like the, I think she was, was she the first woman, Shirley Chisholm? I mean, what a, look at her videos. Look at her messages. She was a radical. She was a powerful, courageous woman who was saying things that needed to be said in a very difficult time. But the movement was buoying her, buoying her. She was a reflection of the movement, but she was also someone who was pushing the movement forward. Shirley Chisholm was a fascinating woman. And, you know, a lot of people were cheering her on at that time. So, but just back to that thing, funny thing was I was working on a case to help free five Cuban nationals who were fighting U.S.-sponsored terrorism against the island. They were in prison from 13 to 16 years, but three of them were facing life. And I was a leader of the campaign in the U.S. for their freedom from 19, no, from 2001 until 2014. No, 2000, yeah, 2014. They were in prison from 2000, they were in prison from 1998 to 2014. But the campaign began in 2001 to 2014. I was a leader of that campaign. It's a little diversion. But I was in Arkansas petitioning to get us on the ballot in 2008. They were in prison. And I went to the Bill Clinton Library in Arkansas to take advantage of the time being there to do research on their imprisonment from the presidential papers. And there were two women, young women, they were like interns. And they were the ones who'd come up and say, well, what papers would you like to look at? What files do you want to see? What dates? You know, it's like a library. And I said, you know, I want these dates and these dates. And I said, oh, by the way, you know, I made the news, October 20, 1996, when I interrupted Bill Clinton. And they're like, they didn't know what to make of that. I said, it's in the news. I said, it's probably even in the library here. Well, they brought me the papers I wanted. And then later in the afternoon, they brought a card out with the news coverage and the papers from the library of the communications. Of when I interrupted.
 

The funny thing was, is that the Secret Service was there on stage, you know, like, you know, they were there on stage and they were there in front of the platform. And they never moved. And I interrupted him for like eight minutes. It was a long time. And I was shouting at him and he wouldn't say anything. He turned red. And at one point he said, I want to ask the hosts here. Are you going to let her speak or let me speak? He was very annoyed because they weren't dislodging me. And the secrets, I was wondering, why isn't the Secret Service dragging me out of here? You know, which I expected. They were waiting for the Teaneck, New Jersey, local police to come get me. Finally entered and... You know, pulling me out. I wasn't being dragged. I walked out with him. And as I was leaving the place, Clinton says, I'm going to answer that young lady. He said, Saddam Hussein is responsible for those people dying. No, you were. But you couldn't face it. You couldn't answer me. You couldn't have a debate with me. And you couldn't face why it was that you were blockading Cuba and you threw women off welfare.

But I was very proud of that moment because it let the world know that people are fighting here in the U.S.

 

You know, I've traveled to many countries. And when you tell people there's strikes and unions and the struggle here for justice, people are like, really? Because they don't see that. The news doesn't reach them. And I think that one of the biggest tools and vehicles that we have for justice is protest. Protest, petitioning, action, rallies, information. What the students have done since the uprising in Palestine is very, very fundamental to the world. When the students took up the cause more actively than they had been with the protests and they started doing it on campus, students around the world started doing the same thing. But I've always, as someone who risked my education, but got into school because of the youth who fought for me years before.

And for those who are, especially in these elitist schools, where like billions in all the money that these universities have, these big, big, big billion-dollar bank accounts that they have. For the students to take a stand on campus because they have the right to. It's their school. Their parents are paying for that. And the university is just worried about losing their billions. So they had to crack down on the students. And when the students risk their education, that their parents, you know, put a lot into it. And that the students themselves are risking. They're risking their future, their employment, because it'll mark them. I salute them. I think they're great. I think they're heroes. Yeah, sure. I guess while we're talking about protest, I have here something that you led the farm workers relief campaign in the 1990s. Do you want to talk about how that happened?