When a group of organizers in San Luis Obispo decided to hold a march in solidarity with large demonstrations scheduled to take place in Washington, D.C., and other major American cities, they expected a small turnout of about 200.
On Jan. 21, the day of the National Women’s March, the size of the crowd that gathered at Mitchell Park braving the cold, wind, and rain numbered between 7,000 and 10,000. The throng flooded the streets of downtown SLO. Men, women, and children chanted and held up colorful signs with slogans like, “keep your tiny hands off my rights,” “love makes America great,” and, “I will not go quietly back to the 1950s.”
Held the day after the presidential inauguration of reality television personality Donald Trump, the national women’s march movement was an outpouring of concern, a show of solidarity, and a beacon of hope for women, people of color, immigrants, and others who felt vulnerable and targeted by the incoming administration. On that day, the SLO marchers joined more than 4.9 million others worldwide, participating in one of the largest protests to ever occur in the United States.
There was an inauguration day protest in Santa Maria at the corner of Main and Broadway, but a Santa Maria-based women’s march didn’t materialize. There were several groups involved in the inauguration day protest, including the Central Coast Alliance United for a Sustainable Economy (CAUSE), Central Coast Future Leaders, and the Fund for Santa Barbara, which all collaborated and pooled funds to charter a bus from Santa Maria to SLO and back on Jan. 21 for the women’s march.
There were plenty of Santa Marians who were going to be there anyway, explained CAUSE community organizer Hazel Davalos, so booking a bus was just one effort to support that.
“I think it was a really inspiring day across the nation, and I think that people really wanted to be a part of that,” Davalos said. “It’s really important to us that Santa Maria be represented there and as part of this larger national movement.”
The bus was open to protesters who weren’t members of any of those groups as well, like local actor and activist Gale McNeeley, who rode the bus up with organizers and members of CAUSE and Central Coast Future Leaders.
McNeeley began demonstrating during the Vietnam War, and has protested in Santa Maria for at least 20 years. He’s never seen a rally the size of the Women’s March on the Central Coast, McNeeley told the Sun, and the recent protests in Santa Maria—on inauguration day and a travel ban protest on Feb. 3—had larger crowds than is usual for the city.
McNeeley was at all of those events, and saw firsthand the swell of young and ordinary people getting involved in activism and demonstration.
“The [protests] after Trump’s inauguration are really promising because people are energizing,” he said. “People are standing up and saying, ‘We don’t have to take this anymore.’ I think it is true, that this election is a gift to the United States because it has woken us up.”
Organizing in North County
When it came to making the series of Santa Maria protests a reality, the process happened “very quickly,” according to Central Coast Future Leaders Executive Director Patricia Solorio.
Social media was a big boon to the mobilization, but so was the urge locals had to get out and assemble, she said.
“With all the protests we’ve had in Santa Maria—and I don’t even like to call them protests, they’re more like rallies, an opportunity to come together and have kind of like a visual—that here in Santa Maria there’s folks who want to come together and work on these issues,” Solorio said. “Not in Santa Barbara, not in San Luis Obispo, not that there’s anything wrong with that, but right here in Santa Maria, we can create our own movement.”
Groups like the Central Coast Future Leaders and CAUSE already have some infrastructure for organizing and mobilizing locals. The North County Coalition is an amalgam of community, faith, and labor organizations that have advocated for common goals, explained CAUSE’s Davalos, like supporting ballot measures, proposing legislation, holding rallies, organizing citizenship fairs, and overall support and representation for the native community in Santa Maria. They hold rallies every year on Cesar Chavez Day, Black History Month, and May Day.
CAUSE acts as a kind of facilitator for the North County Coalition, Davalos explained, which includes the Santa Barbara County Action Network, the Guadalupe Catholic Worker, the Democratic Club of Santa Maria Valley, a local chapter of the United Domestic Workers, the NAACP, and several others.
But the recent protests have also led to novel connections in the community. The Santa Maria Arab-Muslim Association reached out to CAUSE for help with the travel ban rally on Feb. 3, Davalos said, and received immediate support in both organizational advice and numbers at the event. CAUSE and the North County Coalition offer classes and workshops on protesting or rallying, including how to organize, stay within the law, and further positive change beyond demonstrations.
“The most exciting part of this is that so many new folks and new organizations are coming out of the woodwork,” she said. “What is really inspiring was the immigrant solidarity. Latino immigrants really feel solidarity with our Muslim brothers and sisters; they share a common struggle.”
Santa Maria has had a small but vocal population of liberal activists for decades now, McNeeley explained. He has protested at Main and Broadway for many reasons over the years, from the war in Iraq to marriage equality.
But McNeeley was spurred to start a new group following inauguration day, the Progressistas, or the North County Progressives. He took down names and contacts on the bus ride to the Women’s March, he said, inspired by all the young people he saw getting politically active.
“A majority of the group is young Latino men and women, and some of us old liberals in the community,” McNeeley said. “We hope that these young people will stay involved. I’ve just assembled the group because someone had to organize it, but I’m hoping that these young people are going to be our leaders and lead us to a community where everybody is represented and everybody is heard.”
Past protests
While the Women’s March and subsequent local protests continue to make headlines, it isn’t the first time the Central Coast has been caught up in a wave of political activism.
As McNeely explained, the corner of Main and Broadway has been a common location for demonstrations, protests, and rallies, from anti-war protesters to the Tea Party, or rallies for marriage equality to prolife marches.
McNeeley remembers specifically a protest that happened in 2008, just before state voters passed Proposition 8—the ballot proposition to ban same-sex marriages in the state, which was legal in California at the time.
“I cried that day,” he said, “because I never thought I would see, in Santa Maria, all these people—black, white, Latino—whether they were gay or not, standing up against that measure.”
Another local with a long history of protest is Dennis Apel, who has demonstrated at Vandenberg Air Force Base for more than two decades.
Apel has been arrested several times for trespassing on Vandenberg, which he called acts of “civil disobedience.” He is against one particular mission at the base, Apel told the Sun—the testing of intercontinental ballistic missiles, the carriers of nuclear warheads.
“I have nothing but respect for the people who work at Vandenberg,” Apel said. “But it’s the mission they have, what they’re asked to do, that I disagree with specifically.”
Apel is also involved with the Guadalupe Catholic Worker, so his mission is humanitarian first. He said that the recent demonstrations across the Central Coast, which included attendance from others involved with the Catholic Worker, are a good sign that people are compelled to get active.
“It’s what they do with their bodies in public that makes a difference,” he said. “If you and I sit on a sofa and talk about our ideologies, it doesn’t do anything. But if we get outside with our bodies and do something publicly, that makes an impact.
“It’s like when the Tea Party started after Obama was elected,” he added. “I was grateful for that, even though I didn’t agree with them, they were getting off their sofas and making their opinion known.”
Jorge Manly-Gil is also involved with the Catholic Worker in Guadalupe and was at the inauguration day and travel ban protests in Santa Maria.
Manly-Gil said that “rabble rousing runs in my veins,” and that taking to the streets is about representing “regular folk, common folk.” It’s a way for native and indigenous people to feel supported by others in the community, he explained, when groups like CAUSE, Central Coast Future Leaders, and the Catholic Worker can rally people and come together in solidarity.
“This is one of the ways that we exercise our rights and practice democracy in the public arena,” he said. “I’ve always had this notion of trying to speak up and speak out for justice or causes I believe are just.”
That’s what compelled Manly-Gil and others with the Catholic Worker to take their support and expertise out to the Standing Rock Indian Reservation in North Dakota last year, to help the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe take a stand against the Dakota Access Pipeline.
The protest at Standing Rock and the current wave of activism nationwide makes sense, Manly-Gil said, given the current state of affairs in national politics.
“I’m Latino, I’m native, I’m a person of color, so for me, injustice has always been there, racial bias has always been there, so just now, it’s apparent to more people,” he said. “For me, in reality, nothing has changed that much. But now, more people, the liberal establishment, are more aware of it.”
New to the fold
If you are looking for an example of the next generation of activists moved to action by the election, look no further than 18-year-old SLO High grad Bella Stenvall.
After spending the summer abroad and volunteering in a Syrian refugee camp in Greece, Stenvall is now living in Washington, D.C., where she works as an intern for 24th District U.S. Rep. Salud Carbajal (D-Santa Barbara). Stenvall was one of an estimated 500,000 people who participated in the Women’s March at the nation’s capital. She said the sheer size of the crowd that turned out was inspiring, especially in light of the fear and anxiety many women, minorities, immigrants, and other marginalized groups were feeling after the inauguration of President Trump the day before.
“[At the Women’s March], I finally felt hope,” she said. “I finally felt like I could go to bed at night and feel confident that people were trying to do something.”
She didn’t stop there. Since the march, Stenvall said she’s continued to attended protests and rallies, connecting with other passionate activists both in person and online. On Feb. 4, Stenvall spoke in front of the White House to a crowd of hundreds of protesters gathered to oppose the recently signed travel ban against individuals and refugees from seven predominantly Muslim countries. On Jan. 23, she participated in a rally to encourage more women to run for office. Taking direct actions, large or small, has become part of her everyday life.
“It’s a gut reaction when you wake up every morning and you look at the news and you feel like they are targeting the people you care about,” she said. “It becomes a priority.”
Similar to SLO and Santa Maria, Stenvall said that D.C. has seen a renewed interest in activism and protests. There are many, many others like her.
“The saying that’s been going around in D.C.,” Stenvall joked, “is that protest is the new brunch.”
On the Central Coast, groups like the Women’s March SLO, the SLO Progressives, the North County Coalition, and others are trying to welcome energized newcomers into the fold. In part, they hope to show them that large marches aren’t the only way to contribute to the cause. Small and measurable actions that work toward a larger goal are often the stepping stones that make a one-time marcher into an everyday activist. Women’s March SLO encourages members to participate in a national strategy asking members to take on small goals, such as sending letters or making phone calls to their representatives opposing the president’s cabinet nominees and executive orders. The march’s members are also forming “huddles,” which will set short- and long-term goals on specific policy issues.
The SLO Progressives—a rapidly growing club formed by former supporters of populist presidential primary candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-Vt.)—have a similar approach. Its website features an “action center” that provides information on how to call senators and other representatives or write letters to the editor to area newspapers. In addition to getting members out to the SLO County Board of Supervisors meetings, the group also got members to write and mail 500 postcards to state representatives for the Democratic National Committee in support of naming Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) as the Democratic National Committee’s national chairman.
“We are trying to make activism accessible to people,” said Heather Gray, a mother of two and member of the SLO Progressives. “We want to make it so that whatever time you have, however you are coming to the table, we can give you information on how to incorporate activism into your everyday life and make it a habit.”
Courtney Haile, co-founder of the nonprofit activism group R.A.C.E. Matters SLO County, echoed that sentiment.
“There’s been all kinds of calls to action, and I feel that different people have been called to different causes under the progressive umbrella,” Haile said. “If you have money, donate. If you have time, volunteer. We are all called to different things, and that’s OK.”
Increasingly, those different causes appear to be banding together in SLO and Santa Maria. The Women’s March SLO, SLO Progressives, the North County Coalition, and the other individuals and organizations under that “progressive umbrella” have been networking more often since the election, creating a broader coalition of support.
“We’ve been out beating the pavement,” said Women’s March SLO organizer Dawn Addis. “Finding out who are the people in the community doing human rights works, women’s rights work, LGBTQIA rights work, climate rights works, and immigration work. We’ve all been getting out and personally meeting [them]. We are looking for organizations we can build a collaborative relationship with.”
Moving forward
As burgeoning activists continue trying to make progress on the Central Coast and across the United States, the question remains about just how much of an impact they can make, and how sustainable their efforts are.
So far, there are some promising signs for their movement. After mass protests at airports across the country, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals issued a stay on the controversial travel and refugee ban. After a tidal wave of phone calls, letters, and emails, Senate Democrats fought Republicans to a draw and nearly stopped the confirmation of Education Secretary Betsey DeVos. Soon after, Trump secretary of labor nominee Andrew Puzder pulled his name from the Senate confirmation process.
Haile of R.A.C.E. Matters SLO County said she was cautiously optimistic about the early successes, but noted that the work of achieving long-term goals means continuing the momentum of large public outpourings like the Women’s March over the coming weeks, months, and possibly years.
“Seeing a tangible result is definitely hopeful,” Haile said. “But at the same time there’s always the caution not to celebrate too much, because there’s a long marathon ahead and you never know what’s going to be next.”
The Guadalupe Catholic Worker’s Manly-Gil agreed, and said that continued progress will come from the nitty-gritty and less glamorous organizing work along with the marches and protests.
“I’ve done the other stuff, lobbying or letter writing, but the street politics is about representing the common folks,” he said. “That’s why I go to the streets, because that’s where the common purpose of expression is. The common person’s congress is on the streets.”
That “tedious” work—the phone calls, the letters—has an impact, according to activist and congressional intern Stenvall, who said the recent wave of collective action is being heard in Washington, D.C.
“People need to know that their officials do see those organized protests. … It sends a powerful message to those officials,” Stenvall said. “No matter how frustrating and slow the process can seem or how government works, it is how we can create the change.”
Her boss, Rep. Carbajal, agrees.
“This is an unprecedented time that calls for unprecedented engagement of our constituents to be heard and to create a critical mass of concern in the face of policies that we disagree with,” he said.
Those who seek to maintain that critical mass still have a long and uncertain road ahead of them. The success of their efforts, and the result of their work and organizing and activism, remains to be seen. Manly-Gil knows better than most that that road is not always easy, nor is victory always guaranteed. Still, he insists that the fight is worth it.
“I see a lot of people come together for a common cause, a cause I happen to think is just and fair, and it gives me hope,” he said. “It’s a cautious hope, but I see hope as a sign of resistance.”
Chris McGuinness is a Staff Writer at the Sun’s sister paper to the north, New Times. Managing Editor Joe Payne can be reached at jpayne@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Mar 9-16, 2017.