May Day Los Angeles, 2003

Black and white image taken at a May Day march. Two garment workers are carrying a large banner from the Garment Workers Center, the only word fully visible is "Trabajador." other people in the image are carrying picket signs, one that says "immigrant bashing" that is crossed over. and another is shaped like a dove and reads "no war"

The Multi-Ethnic Immigrant Workers Organizing Network (MIWON) formed in the year 2000 to support immigrant and undocumented immigrant labor rights across Los Angeles. The coalition brought together the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights (CHIRLA), Instituto de Educación Popular del Sur de California (Institute for Popular Education of Southern California, IDEPSCA), Koreatown Immigrant Workers Alliance (KIWA), the Pilipino Worker Center (PWC), and later the Garment Worker Center (GWC), among other organizations. Throughout its ten years, these groups committed themselves “to the struggle for dignity, justice, and the human rights of immigrant workers and all peoples,” through sharing strategies and information, fostering interethnic and interracial solidarity, and promoting political consciousness and civic engagement among low-wage workers in Los Angeles.

MIWON campaigned for the passage of the “Immigrant Workers Bill of Human Rights” at the Los Angeles City Council in 2001, and to expand undocumented immigrants’ access to drivers’ licenses and government-issued identification. But perhaps their most enduring tactic was their annual commemoration of May Day (International Workers Day), marches that promoted solidarity among multiethnic and immigrant workers in Los Angeles and beyond.

Pictured here: a scene from MIWON’s May Day march in 2003, where protestors connected “immigrant bashing” in Los Angeles and the United States government’s invasion of Iraq weeks earlier.

View more images from the 2003 May Day march here.

July 10, 2025July 10, 2025

Day of Conscience Against Sweatshops

An older woman in a UNITE! t-shirt holds a big sign that reads: "This is a bill for your DIRTY LAUNDRY from: Workers and Community Cleaning up the Garment Industry -- to: Made in the Shade hardstyle International, 110 E. 9th St., L.A. - Wage and hour Violations - by: Department of Labor." In her hand is a soda can sealed with duck tape, likely a home made noise maker.

A garment worker carries a “Bill For Your Dirty Laundry” at a “Day of Conscience to End Sweatshops” rally and march in Los Angeles’ garment district on October 4, 1997. Organized by UNITE and its allies as part of their campaign against Guess? Jeans, the event was part of a national day of action that aimed to pressure the Presidential Task Force on Apparel Manufacturing to enforce a strong accord that would protect garment workers’ rights in Los Angeles and around the world.

Photograph by Linda A. Lotz, CLUE records (LSC.2441), UCLA Library Special Collections Collection Information: https://oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/c8g167r7/

View more of Lotz’ photos from the CLUE collection here.

July 10, 2025July 10, 2025

Boycott Forever 21

Image from a demonstration on the Santa Monica 3rd street promenade. Two protestors hold a larger banner reading "Boycott" with Christmas holiday symbols. Behind them looms a large, handmade puppet being held up by other protestors. On the right side of the march, a woman directing the protestors wears an orange safety vest.

In 2001, the coalition of organizations that had come together to support the Thai Workers in El Monte pooled their funds to establish the Garment Worker Center (GWC), as a legal clinic to support workers in filing wage claims under the new procedures established by AB633. They hired three young Asian American women to run the GWC, including Kimi Lee as director, a lawyer who had previously worked on wage theft cases at the ACLU. But soon after they opened, the GWC’s small organizing staff began to notice that many of the workers seeking their support were coming from the same shops. And some additional research revealed that those shops were producing garments for the same company: fast fashion retailer Forever 21.

The GWC launched its multi-pronged campaign against Forever 21 in 2001. With support from the Asian Pacific American Legal Center, they filed a lawsuit on behalf of thirty-three workers alleging wage theft and dangerous working conditions. They organized picket lines at Forever 21’s subcontractors across the city and at its various retail stores, and even demonstrations outside the homes of the company’s owners. And they organized a nationwide boycott campaign calling on their fellow workers and allies to join through loud and colorful public demonstrations like this one. Pictured here: María Pineda, one of the thirty-three workers who filed the lawsuit, and GWC Director Kimi Lee (in the orange vest).

Check out more photos from the GWC’s campaign against Forever 21 here.

Watch the 2007 documentary about the Forever 21 campaign, Made in L.A. at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=juvhOO2RdgA

January 1, 2000February 27, 2022

They were willing to break with tradition

Maria Elena Durazo recalls her first organizing job

On a trip to Mexico I met Cristina Vázquez and others from the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union (ILGWU or ILG, now Workers United-SEIU). And when we came back, Cristina referred me to the union for a job. I was already familiar with the work of the ILG at that point. It was the only union that was openly, aggressively organizing immigrants. They were doing things like challenging the INS for raiding the factories without arrest warrants. In conjunction with its aggressive program of organizing workers in the shops, the ILG also had a legal program that backed it up to push the INS out of the shops. Because ultimately, as long as they continued with those raids, it was gonna be pretty much impossible to organize. So I just loved the fact that they were so bold and they were out there on the front lines in a vanguard position.

The ILG was “willing to break with the traditional way of looking at immigrant workers.”

Once I got to know Cristina I saw the way that the ILG approached organizing. It was very experimental in the sense that the organizers were given the freedom to organize anyway they liked. “Figure it out, do whatever you can. Be creative!” They were almost, in a sense, given carte blanche, instead of, “This is the way, and this is the only way.” All those elements made the ILG even more appealing to me.

January 1, 2000March 6, 2023

We were the union they’d call

Cristina Vázquez on the lessons of organizing immigrant workers in the 1970s

In 1976, when I started working for the ILGWU, we had several thousand members, but for ten years they had hardly organized a shop. The union had not paid much attention to the situation in L.A. … but then the ILGWU decided to bring an organizing director from back east, Phil Russo. He was an organizer himself and he had a vision. He thought there was a lot of potential here, and he said he was going to find and hire the best organizers. He started going to the universities and recruiting people who were active in political groups. He put a team together, and among them was my husband, Mario F. Vázquez, who had just graduated from UCLA law school after emigrating from Mexico at age 15. He saw this ad, “Organizers Needed at ILGWU.” At the time he was doing some volunteer work for CASA (Centro de Acción Social Autónomo), the Chicano pro-immigrant organization, writing and translating for its newspaper, Sin Fronteras [Without Borders], and doing all this political work.

Workers celebrate a union victory outside of a garment factory in Los Angeles, 1980. They stand waving and smiling while holding a sign that indicates that 149 workers voted for the union and 10 against it.

“This union was in front of the fight against employer abuses in the immigrant community”

–Cristina Vázquez