On May 1, 1886, the United States saw its first multi-city strike calling for the eight-hour workday.
Today, 140 years later, members of several University of Arizona organizations joined to continue the fight for a fair learning and working environment. Some even used the historic day to spark a new campaign: making the UA a sanctuary campus.
Mara Short is a graduate student and a member of UA Resist, a group that works to protect diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) efforts on campus. They said the sanctuary campus campaign seeks to make the UA free of immigration enforcement officers. It would also prohibit campus police from sharing information about students, staff and faculty with ICE or Customs and Border Protection.
After gathering community input, Short said “next steps are definitely going to be to kind of pressure the administration through various ways, but definitely approach the administration with those asks and demands and make it clear that the students want this and we won’t settle for anything less.”
“I think May Day is a great time because it speaks to the power of the people … Our labor keeps this university running. None of our research would go without grad students, without undergrads, without TAs,” they said, when asked why now is the right time to spread the campaign.
Marcos Esparza, a PhD student and the president of United Campus Workers at the UA, said the union is on board the sanctuary campus campaign as well. At the height of ICE activity this year across the country and locally, Esparza said the university failed to support students.
“The university was not doing a great job at that time as far as providing students with the information they needed to know if they were actually safe on campus,” he said.
Esparza said May Day has particular significance this year under Donald Trump’s presidency, which has threatened crackdowns on higher education curriculum, admissions and academic freedoms.
“We know we need to fight now to get those eventual wins in the future and we celebrate to remind folks of that,” he said.
Since Trump took office, the UA has rolled back several DEI-related protections on campus such as centralizing cultural resource centers; forcing groups to omit words like “trans,” “Black” and “Asian” from their names; and closing cultural dorm communities.
“Those actions broke a lot of trust with students, because the U of A brought us to this school promising, you know, a Hispanic Serving Institution, having all of these resources for students,” Short said.
Both Short and Esparza encouraged community members to get involved with their organizations if they have interest in building a more just learning and working environment.
