THE FUTURE IN THE PAST In 2013, Barack Obama traveled to Las Vegas—the most heavily unionized city in the United States—to make a signature speech on the need for comprehensive immigration reform. To understand why Obama traveled to Vegas at that moment reveals the distance that African American and Latinx workers have traveled in the United States. Las Vegas is home to one of the most powerful unions in the Americas, Culinary Workers Union Local 226, an organization built and led largely by working-class women of color who are maids, custodians, and food service workers on the Las Vegas Strip and beyond.110 Local 226 was one of the first major unions in the West to endorse Obama during the presidential primary season of 2008.111 During the election campaign, then Senator Obama openly endorsed two of the union’s strikes, saying, “I have been on the picket line for years with workers in Illinois, and if workers in Nevada are forced to strike I will be standing on their side as well.”112 The sixty thousand members of the Culinary Workers Union Local 226 hail from eighty-four different nations, and the local has been led by working-class women since the union’s six-year Frontier Strike in the 1990s. Without their endorsement, it is quite likely that Obama would not have been elected to the White House. Herein lies the symbolic power of his speech on immigration as well as the transformations in American life that it reveals. In the 1990s, the Culinary Workers grew to prominence led by the African American unionist Hattie Canty, who migrated from rural Alabama in the late 1950s. In contrast to George Meany, the head of the AFL-CIO from 1955 to 1979, who bragged that he had never been on a picket line, Canty led a strike where not a single one of the hundreds of strikers crossed the picket line. “Coming from Alabama, [to me],” Canty observed, “this seemed like the civil rights struggle. . . . The labor movement and the civil rights movement, you cannot separate the two of them.”113 Whether they hail from Alabama, Thailand, Central America, or someplace else, the members of Local 226 represent the potential future promise of the Americas. At the end of the Frontier Strike, the bosses hired back all of the original strikers, and the owner of the chain “said he was happy to have the strikers back since they showed nerve and moxie throughout the 6½ year strike.”114
