Rain of Gold

"This has been a favourite of mine for a while, but it’s definitely off the radar of most people so I also want to highlight it for people who don’t know about it. I think it’s a great book. It’s kind of a semi-autobiographical novel but it’s basically about the migration of Mexican families to the US, families that get to California. It’s the life of Victor Villaseñor’s family starting back at the time of the Mexican Revolution as the family migrates and comes to the States. They work as miners, they work as farm workers, they do basically everything to survive and so it’s kind of a classic immigrant story. For me, it had a personal connection because I spent a number of years as a union organiser. Probably the best campaign I was ever involved with was in Los Angeles. It was a Justice for Janitors campaign, where we were organising immigrant janitors who were from Latin America primarily and had the same kind of resilience that you read about in this book – despite all odds, just continuing on. That was really my experience too, in that organising campaign. These are folks who had risked everything to come to the United States and then were willing to risk everything again to organise a union for janitors. I think we have an enormous responsibility to get the immigration issue right in this country and there’s so much work to do so. It’s probably right up there with the most important issues that we have to deal with as progressives and I think we have not done a good job. I think this book just gives you a good taste of the immigrant experience. It also, beyond showing the incredible courage and vitality and leadership that immigrants demonstrate to get here, does a beautiful job of illustrating the contribution that the immigrant community has made to culture and arts. Look at Los Angeles and California and the influence of Mexican immigrants. Without them it wouldn’t be the same city, it wouldn’t be the same state, it wouldn’t be the same country, so I love it in that way as well. I think it does an excellent job of talking about that part of the immigrant experience. They’re both about resilience. You think about Cedric and you think about Villaseñor’s families – these are people who just keep going on. They face unbelievable odds and they just keep going on."