Eleanor García joined the Socialist Worker’s Party in her twenties. She had been working with the United Farm Workers in Phoenix, Arizona, where she is from, on a boycott of Gallo wine, iceberg lettuce and table grapes.
The UFW, founded in 1962 under a different name by Dolores Huerta, César Chávez, Larry Itliong and other organizers, is the largest farm workers union in the United States.
She felt it was too intertwined with the Democratic Party, which did not align with her beliefs. Over time, she knew she wasn’t a Democrat.
“There were farm workers that were pulled off the picket lines and they were sent to go campaign for Jerry Brown in Arizona,” she said of the California governor who was a presidential candidate at the time. “They went and leafleted some places for the Democratic candidate. I just saw something that I didn’t like.”
In the decades since, García, 69, has traveled the country for the Socialist Workers Party, helping unions and workers across industries strike. She’s worked widely herself — on railroads and in the garment industry, and most recently assembling airplane parts in a Los Angeles-area factory.
The Socialist Workers Party traces its roots back to the Communist League of America. The party as it is now known was founded in 1937 by supporters of Leon Trotsky, who founded the Marxist variant of Trotskyism.
The Socialist Workers Party champions the Cuban Revolution and work of Fidel Castro. García praised the Cuban system of mostly government-owned land where farmers work and takes cuts of their produce. The workers do not pay for their land costs.
She said a similar system should be established here to prevent farmers from being evicted or struggling with production and living costs.
García will be listed as “no party preference” on the ballot. The Socialist Workers Party is not one of the six parties currently qualified to participate in California elections: Republican, Democratic, American Independent, Green, Libertarian and Peace and Freedom parties.
García is one of 23 candidates seeking the Senate seat currently held by Sen. Alex Padilla, a Democrat.
Padilla was appointed to fill the remainder of Vice President Kamala Harris’ term. He was California’s secretary of state.
California’s first Latino U.S. senator, he will be one of eight on the ballot twice in June: once to finish the unexpired term and another time for a full six years starting in January 2023. Padilla, who ran unsuccessfully for U.S. Senate in 2016, is heavily favored to win both.
While Garcia is a longtime advocate of a third party in Congress, she said it is needed now more than ever as fractures between moderate and left-leaning liberals and Trump and anti-Trump conservatives leave discussions about helping the working class out.
“Right now, those two parties are in crisis. They’re ready to split,” she said.
“The reason we’re running is because we want to get this perspective out to working people and have a discussion that there’s a crisis right now, a huge capitalist crisis,” Garcia said, citing the disproportionate impact of inflation, gas and house prices on workers. She said the upper class makes conditions for the working class worse in efforts to lower prices by extending workdays, not paying overtime or preventing unionization.
Farm, factory and grocery-store workers, who were among those deemed essential, could not work remotely during the pandemic.
Workers at meatpacking plants were considered to be some of the hardest hit by the coronavirus, with about 59,000 people at five major companies contracting COVID-19 and 269 dying from complications during an eleven-month period starting in March 2020, according to a congressional report.
On Thursday, the same congressional committee released another report detailing how meatpacking industry leaders leaned on the Trump administration to continue operating during the height of the pandemic at the expense of workers’ health. This included Foster Farms’ plant in Livingston where almost 400 people contracted the virus and at least nine died before the health department forced the plant to suspend operations for six days in September 2020.
García noted that many factory and farm workers died on the job before the pandemic.
Among other congressional priorities, García said that members of the Socialist Workers Party want Russian troops to withdraw from Ukraine. The party opposes sanctions on Russia, saying they hurt working people. It also wants “U.S. forces and nuclear weapons out of all of Europe,” she said.
An advocate for access to abortion, García said that she and the party prioritize family planning and women’s rights. She noted that many young people are struggling to start their lives due to a combination of the pandemic, debts and housing prices.
In addition to workers’ rights, García said she would prioritize funding an infrastructure program and keeping an open door.
“My office would always be open to working people who want to organize, to women who want to fight for their rights and farmers too,” she said.
