Greetings from Oaxaca to Minneapolis Workers Assembly
In January and February 2026, supporters of Class Struggle Education Workers from New York City traveled to Minnesota, to join in mass protests against the murderous rampaging by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Border Patrol agents. In February, CSEW supporters attended a Workers Assembly of several hundred activists who had participated in the mass resistance to the feds’ brutal “surge” in the Twin Cities, Minneapolis and Saint Paul.
During their visit, the NYC educators met with a number of Minneapolis teachers, where the experiences of the combative teachers movement in Oaxaca, Mexico were cited. Building on these contacts, in March CSEW supporters in the UFT and members of the Education Working Group of the Labor Committee to Defend Immigrants in NYC organized a Zoom meeting of education workers from New York, Minneapolis and Mexico where they heard from teachers who had participated in a number of struggles of the National Coordinating Committee of Education Workers (CNTE) in Mexico. Keherly Cruz spoke about the massive 2016 teachers strike together with the indigenous population that shut down the state of Oaxaca for months.
The joint Minneapolis-New York-Mexico meeting served to build international ties of solidarity between education workers in the face of anti-immigrant repression in both countries, as well as drawing lessons for mobilization against future ICE surges in other U.S. cities. As a result of that meeting, Cruz was asked to give greetings to a subsequent Minneapolis Workers Assembly held on April 4, in which she related the experiences of Oaxaca teachers. Keherly is a delegate in Section 22 of the CNTE in Oaxaca and a supporter of the Grupo Internacionalista, the Mexican section of the League for the Fourth International. The transcript of her greetings, which were a featured presentation, is printed below. A video can be seen here.
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Saludos, compañeras y compañeros.
I am Keherly Cruz, a teacher with Section 22 of the National Coordinating Committee of Education Workers, called la CNTE in Spanish, here in the state of Oaxaca in southern of Mexico (CNTE). I am the Foreign Relations Delegate for my subsection of the union.
I am sending these greetings to the Workers Assembly in Minneapolis because several days ago I had the opportunity to participate in a teleconference with teachers from Oaxaca and Mexico City and from New York and Minneapolis. The meeting was motivated by the desire to share international solidarity and teachers' experiences of struggle in these different parts of the world, working alongside the communities where we work. The backdrop to our meeting was the very important struggle that has recently taken place in Minneapolis in defense of immigrant workers. That day, we in Mexico were in the midst of a work stoppage, fighting for real pensions against the current model of "individual savings accounts" controlled by banks that use our resources to gamble on the stock market.
Comrade Treasure has sent me a question about the basic forms of organization that made the recent work stoppage (called a paro in Spanish) possible and also asked about how we as teachers have built relations with other unions and political groups.
I think that to answer this we need to describe a little of the development of the teachers movement in Oaxaca and in Mexico generally. The recent paro (which was a three-day strike) comes from the long history of teacher organizing here in Oaxaca, the Mexican state, along with Chiapas, with the highest proportion of indigenous people in the whole country.
During our recent Zoom meeting with Treasure and other teachers in Minneapolis and New York, our comrade Patricia talked about her experiences going back to the 1970s with teaching and organizing in mainly indigenous towns and villages that suffer extreme poverty together with racism and repression against indigenous people. She talked about working with the little boys and girls who are brought up by their grandmothers and live many years waiting for their mothers and fathers to come home. Why? Because Mexico is the birthplace of many of the migrants who are now under attack in the United States. They go there to work and are treated like criminals, but as our Internationalist slogan goes, “Ni ilegales, ni criminales, somos obreros internacionales” – We are not “illegals” or “criminals,” we are international workers.
So news about immigration enforcement persecution there in the United States is followed here with great interest. This isn't just a general interest: in many cases, it's about the fate of many members of families in our communities here. This is one of the reasons why the work of unionists and revolutionaries in the United States to defend immigrants is very important to us here.
I think it is important to emphasize that the schools in Oaxaca have been organizing centers for defense of basic rights – which I understand is the case in Minneapolis too, while in New York teachers from Class Struggle Education Workers and others are working to have that occur in New York too. In Oaxaca the schools became centers to organize in defense of indigenous education and public education generally, against repression by the capitalist state, and against the capitalist programs for privatization of education. Of course, those programs are "Made in U.S.A." and imposed by U.S. imperialism.
In the recent Zoom meeting our comrade Patricia talked about her experiences with the militant teachers strikes of the 1970s, which were essentially illegal at that time, and how the poor people of the villages came out massively to support us teachers and how we come out to support them.
In 2006 there was a huge teachers strike, and the capitalist government sent the militarized capitalist police to the capital city of Oaxaca to very violently repress us, and so, given the history of our struggles, it was very natural that we teachers could establish close relations with indigenous rights and community organizations. To advance this struggle we revolutionaries who are part of the Grupo Internacionalista here had to insist on the complete political independence of the workers against all the different capitalist parties. In Mexico this is especially important because of the whole history of corporatist subordination of the unions to the capitalist state, which goes back many decades. This means fighting for a clear break from not only from the old government party, the PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party), but from the populist bourgeois parties that arose out of the PRI such as the PRD and the current government party that is called Morena. Against this, we call for a revolutionary workers party to organize leadership of the whole working class and all the oppressed.
My comrade Patricia commented during the recent Zoom conference that when she heard the stories of teachers in New York and Minneapolis about their arduous work defending immigrants, she could feel how it is the same struggle beyond borders.
The attack against immigrants in the U.S. has been the spearhead of an attack against the rights of all workers. For us, it is also about defending migrants from Central America, the Caribbean, and from as far away as Africa and Asia, who cross through Mexico to try to reach the United States. The education workers of Section 22 are spread throughout the southern state of Oaxaca, the immediate neighbor of Chiapas, through which tens of thousands of immigrants enter Mexico.
In the communities where we are present, we defend immigrants as they pass through, not only against Mexican immigration authorities, but also against the racism and xenophobia incited by capitalist rulers against migrant workers. And we demand full citizenship rights for all immigrants here and in the United States too. In many places in Chiapas, Oaxaca and Mexico City, teachers are actively organizing to bring migrant children to their schools, so they can not only receive the stipend that every school child in Mexico is entitled to, but also have a safe haven from the hardships of a journey that has forced them to leave their countries of origin.
For Patricia and me, as well as for other Mexican teachers at the meeting, it was extremely important to learn more about the efforts of workers and union members in Minneapolis who have been fighting as workers alongside their communities. We hear the discussions about a general strike and we hope there will be real general strikes in the fight to drive out the racist immigration Gestapo. It is very clear to us that we must strengthen the ties between education workers in Mexico and the United States. We feel a very strong connection with the struggles you are waging in New York, Minneapolis, and elsewhere. We want you to know that on this side of the border, we are also involved in the same struggle as you; we are simply on different fronts of the workers' struggles in defense of immigrant workers, in particular, and of the international workers in general. As another slogan we often chant at demonstrations in Mexico says, “¡La lucha obrera no tiene fronteras”, “The workers' struggle has no borders!”
The connections between us are many, and we must always point them out. Many indigenous people from Oaxaca are migrants in the United States, especially in California. In Minneapolis, the racist campaign against African migrants is something that resonates deeply with me as an Afro-Mexican woman.
Because of their position, teachers can help bring together different sectors of workers in struggle. In Mexico, for example, we the teachers are the link that unites impoverished rural and urban workers. We are also a link to workers from many especially oppressed sectors, such as indigenous communities. Therefore, when there is a capitalist attack against a sector of the oppressed, those at the bottom, they turn to Section 22 for support and defense. At the same time, this means that communities defend teachers when they are under attack.
At the Zoom meeting, we also discussed the repression against rural teachers' colleges that culminated in the “disappearing” of 43 students from Ayotzinapa in the state of Guerrero on September 26, 2014. Our comrades were kidnapped and “disappeared” by the municipal and state police and the Mexican Army. Almost 12 years have passed since then, and their whereabouts remain unknown. What was their “crime”? Studying to become teachers in rural, predominantly indigenous communities. And fighting against the closure of teacher training colleges for peasant and indigenous people.
Based on our own experience of struggle and the experiences you shared with us, we see the need to organize powerful and genuine strikes and mass actions by the working class and to liberate the working class from the control of bourgeois politicians of all capitalist parties. Education, the struggle in defense of immigrants, both and the fight for workers' rights form a unity that demands a socialist revolution encompassing Mexico and the rest of Latin America, as well as the United States. As a labor unionist and a communist I want to participate in this struggle towards its victory, and send you greetings of solidarity in the struggle.
Class Struggle Education Workers is an organization, fraternally linked to the Internationalist Group, of union and non-unionized activists in all aspects of education fighting for a revitalization and transformation of the labor movement into an instrument for the emancipation of the working class and the oppressed. See the CSEW program here. The struggle for students’ and educators’ rights, and mobilization against the genocidal war on the Palestinians continues. If you are interested in joining these efforts, contact the CSEW at cs_edworkers@hotmail.com. ■