Want to Organize the Working Class? Join Those Who Already Are.
- Shreya Dharavath
- 5 hours ago
- 3 min read
America has always suffered from main-character syndrome, but it is fascinating, and rather humbling, to witness how ego has seeped into even the most electorally sidelined of political ideologies: the left. Levi Vonk recently wrote an article for Jacobin, “Want to Organize the Working Class? Learn Spanish,” proposing that if socialists in our country cannot speak the second most widely spoken language in the United States, then they cannot organize its speakers, who make up the nation’s second-largest ethnic group. Vonk repeatedly refers, specifically, to undocumented people as “perfectly primed workers ready to reject the status quo,” with “huge political potential, not just for how we can organize them but how their struggle can organize our own,” and as the “most essential proletariat.” Yet their potential is “just sitting there, largely untapped.”
To his credit, Vonk does not pretend that immigrant-led organizing is a new phenomenon. He points to the 2006 A Day Without Immigrants march and the Justice for Janitors campaign as proof of the Latino working class’s organizing power. He even emphasizes the retaliatory measures undocumented workers face that learning a language alone will not solve. But he treats this history as a precedent for what the English-speaking, monoglot left must build toward. Proposing years of Spanish and English classes tied to some future 2028 strike really just ignores the infrastructure that already exists, right now, for the left to simply join.
Spanish speakers have long organized themselves. It is “us” who are late to the people’s party. In Vonk’s article, and often throughout leftist history, the monoglot left is positioned as the “vanguard class” responsible for fetching the “proletariat,” despite the established existence of bilingual infrastructure for the working class. Although many of these organizations are not explicitly leftist or founded with a mission to organize the working class, they remain for and by the people. They continue, as Mission Action has stated, “breaking isolation, stabilizing people in crisis, and building collective power among Latinx/Indigenous, low-income and immigrant people in San Francisco’s Mission District.”
For these marginalized groups, resource security is political power. Under the incessant pressure of mass deportation and plainclothes ICE arrests, people are constantly pushed beneath one of the most corrosive threats of all: the loss of wage security. Lost wages can drastically deteriorate one’s access to food, housing, and health, especially for a population whose belonging, to reiterate Vonk’s point, relies on labor productivity. According to a 2025 Baker Institute analysis, undocumented individuals live in 6.3 million households in America, and mass deportations could result in “an average income loss of 62.7% or $51,200 per year in mixed-status households.”
It is one thing to ask immigrant network organizations to contribute to this chopped version of language justice that Vonk attempts to introduce as a radical idea. It is another to ask people in these underserved communities to spend their time teaching primarily English speakers Spanish for free. It once again reduces a person to their labor, but now that labor goes into teaching their language. Vonk is right to argue that we have to learn from Spanish speakers, and it is admirable to want Spanish and English language classes to be taught without compensation, but at what cost? What will make up for the time lost that could have earned money?
Marina Roberts, development director at the Texas-based Workers Defense Project, put it simply: “There are PLENTY of organizers who are Spanish speakers; they are just overwhelmingly never compensated for their work as organizers and never encounter an opportunity to be hired as organizers.” She goes on to explain that the issue is not a shortage of bilingual organizers, but rather the well-documented funding disparity Latine organizations face compared with their counterparts, as well as the need for a better pipeline through which organizers can be compensated. What we need to do is recognize the agency Latino organizations already have, and then we need to join them and empower their platforms. We are part of the bigger picture, not the painter.
To find a Spanish-speaking, immigrant-led organizing group near you, start with the National Day Laborer Organizing Network. Its 69 member organizations across the United States serve day laborer communities.
