Andrew Gomez – Ph.D. student in UCLA’s History department with a specialization in United States working-class history.
SEIU-USWW Local 1877 Union Hall in Los Angeles
Two hours
Andrew Gomez and Victoria Marquez
This interview is part of a series documenting the Justice for Janitors movement in Los Angeles from the 1980s to the present day. Justice for Janitors is a labor organization of the Service Employees International Union 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. By including interviews with labor organizers, politicians, and rank-and-file members, the series aims to offer a comprehensive picture of the Justice for Janitors movement in Los Angeles. In addition to documenting Justice for Janitors, the series also explores many of the participants' experiences in Central America before immigrating to the U.S. and interviewees' involvement in other facets of the labor movement in the U.S. and Central America. The interview was conducted in Spanish. This project was generously supported by Arcadia funds.
Andrew Gomez prepared for the interview by reading Tom Waldman’s Not
Much Left: The Fate of Liberalism in America , David Halle’s New York & 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. Victoria Marquez did not review the transcript and therefore some proper names may remain unverified.
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. In some cases the audio recording may differ slightly from the transcript, because the transcriptionist did not accurately transcribe what was said.
Records relating to the interview are located in the office of the UCLA Library’s Center for Oral History Research