Andrew Gomez, is a doctoral candidate in United States History at UCLA’s Department of History with a specialization in working-class history.
The home of Rosa Beltran in South Los Angeles, California
2 hours
Rosa Beltran and Andrew Gomez
This interview is part of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) series and was recorded in Spanish. It focuses primarily on the Justice for Janitors movement in Los Angeles from the 1980s to the present day. Justice for Janitors is a labor organization of the SEIU that has historically sought to improve the working conditions and bargaining power of workers in the janitorial services industry. The movement has taken various forms in different cities with Los Angeles serving as the largest center of activity. Interviewing labor organizers, politicians, and rank and file members, the series aims to depict a comprehensive picture of the Justice for Janitors movement in Los Angeles. Themes addressed in this series include the Central American Diaspora, labor activism, and Los Angeles history.
Rosa Beltran was selected for this interview because of her long term involvement in the Justice for Janitors movement. She joined the janitorial service industry in the 1980s and has been an active member of the Justice for Janitors movement from the late 1980s until the present day.
Andre Gomez prepared for the interviews by reading Tom Waldman’s Not Much Left: The Fate of Liberalism in America, David Halle’s New York and Los Angeles: Politics, Society, and Culture: A Comparative View, Raphael Sonenshein’s Politics in Black and White: Race and Power in Los Angeles, Ruth Milkman’s L.A. story: Immigrant Workers and the Future of the U.S. Labor Movement, Lydia Savage’s Justice for Janitors in Los Angeles and various archival articles from the Los Angeles Times.
The interviewer compiled the table of contents and interview history and supplied the spellings of proper nouns and the complete names entered in brackets in the text.
The transcript of this interview is a verbatim transcript of the audio recording. It was transcribed by a professional transcribing agency using a list of proper names and specialized terminology supplied by the interviewer. The interviewee was then given the opportunity to review the transcript in order to supply the missing or misspelled names and to verify the accuracy of the contents. However Rosa Beltran chose not review the transcript and therefore some proper names may remain unverified.
In some cases the audio recording may differ slightly from the transcript, either because the transcriptionist did not accurately transcribe what was said or because of the changes the interviewee made at the time of their review.
Records relating to the interview are located in the office of the UCLA Library’s Center for Oral History Research.