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Dismantling Racism Resource Book

Portland has seen periods of sustained activism, including civil rights lunch-counter sit-ins, anti-
war mobilizations and sometimes-militant campaigns for educational equity. Even so, Pérez has
been surprised to find that among many of the people Sisters meets on the doors, “there isn’t any
successful organizing effort about shifting power in this city that they view as part of their
history and see as an example of how you make change. In the South or in larger cities you have
that as a backdrop.” Still, she notes a difference in attitudes between many acknowledged
“community leaders” and community members: “The people we door-knock are more fearless.
They have less buy-in about not rocking the boat.”

Change is coming, if slowly. Pérez says that early on leaders warned Sisters that their organizing
might taint the girls and even hurt their ability to get decent jobs. Since the successful
transportation equity campaign, “we now have mothers bringing their daughters to us. We go to
the bank and the women-of-color tellers tell us, ‘You guys are the best.’ People are like, ‘You
brought Tri-Met down to their knees!’ They’re just so inspired by that.”

Still, engaging with the rest of the local social justice movement can be alienating. Says Pérez,
“We get requests all the time to attend local actions and rallies. We’re often the only people of
color organization at these events and sometimes feel that we become the exotic touch. At a
recent May Day march I almost lost it at how many white people were lining up to take pictures
of our members.

“The girls end up feeling like, ‘How come it’s only white people who do this work?’ That makes
it really hard for them to see themselves as part of this larger movement. Sisters has traveled to
the state capitol for events organized by Oregon’s farm worker union, and Pérez adds that she
has taken some members to the South, “just so that they can see black people organizing for
power.”

The Art of Uniting Forces

“Racism is real thick here,” says Ramón Ramírez, president of Pineros y Campesinos Unidos del
Noroeste (PCUN), Oregon’s farm worker union. Raised in the large Latin@ community of East
Los Angeles, Ramírez experienced serious culture shock upon arriving in the pale Northwest as a
teenager thirty years ago. As a student in Olympia, Washington, he sought out other people of
color and quickly formed an organization, “just to survive.”

Ramírez soon became active in the United Farm Workers’ grape boycott and, some years after
relocating to Oregon, helped to found PCUN. He remembers, “When I first arrived I lived about
two miles away from the headquarters of the Posse Comitatus for the state of Oregon. We’d go
into restaurants and find their literature.” He says that racism is not quite as blatant today as it
was 30 years ago, but that the semi-open racists of the past are now in positions of power.
“They’re in our police departments, city councils, legislature.”

Since its founding in 1985, PCUN has become one of the strongest people-of-color-led
organizing forces in the Northwest. In just the last five years, PCUN has had a series of major
victories—both defensive and offensive. They signed the first collective bargaining agreements

Dismantling Racism Project 86 Western States Center