On Friday morning at the CFT convention, President Jeff Freitas introduced Lorena Gonzalez, the first woman and first person of color to serve as Chief Officer of the California Federation of Labor Unions, AFL-CIO. Freitas talked about some of the historic legislation Gonzalez passed when she was in the California State Assembly: paid sick leave for every Californian, overtime pay for farmworkers after eight hours of work, protecting janitorial workers against sexual assault, and ensuring employers can be criminally prosecuted for intentional wage theft. 

Gonzalez began her speech by encouraging everyone to breathe and said although she was an eternal optimist, it was hard to keep her “everything is going to be OK” attitude with the current administration. 

“Every time we turn on the TV or, God forbid, Twitter, everything is overwhelming, and it’s meant to be,” she said. “Everything we fight for is under attack. Organized labor is the last line of defense of taking away free speech. We’ve always been that last beacon of hope. This is not the first time, and it won’t be the last time.”

Another guest speaker that morning, Marielena Hincapié, told the delegates that even trees through their roots migrate.

The distinguished Immigration Fellow and Visiting Scholar at Cornell University’s Immigration Law and Policy Program, talked about how her parents came from Colombia, but her extended family came from around the globe. She said her father was a union worker who moved his family to Rhode Island to work in the textile mills, so that his 10 children could have a better life. 

Refugees will never stop looking for that, Hincapié said. 

“Migration is a natural phenomenon. All species, birds, butterfly, whales, migrate,” she said. “The movement of people will continue, and so we need a different way forward, and that requires moral character, and imagination, which lies here in this room.”

Hincapié said her family would not be able to immigrate now due to the current situation in the U.S.  She told the delegates that she had been excited to come speak at the convention, but with the administration ramping up attacks, she started to get scared, worried that someone would record something she said and that she would become a target for having her citizenship revoked. Then, she says, she decided that fear is what authoritarians count on. 

“The fear that immigrant families are experiencing, that trans families are experiencing, that people with disabilities have, all of us are experiencing some level of this fear,” she said. “And then I knew I had to move forward. I had to be in that discomfort and that fear.”

Like many leaders over the weekend, Hincapié reminded people there was power in unity. 

“We are never alone. We have our ancestors, we have our coworkers,” she said. “We have CFT, and we have future generations to be fighting for.”