Dear signatories of the UC boycott,
This is an important update regarding the status of our struggle.
After months of struggle, Carlos Cruz – the single remaining wildcat striker who faced employment discipline from the UC Santa Cruz wildcat strike – will no longer be suspended. Though Carlos remains on conduct probation for two years, this decision means he can both work and complete his PhD again. Though we continue to fight for his student discipline to be entirely rescinded, this represents a victory, the culmination of months of organized efforts to fully end the discipline against wildcat strikers. (Carlos’ letter to comrades and supporters is included in full below.)
As such, we have agreed that the UC boycott is officially over. We thank you for the continued pressure you have continued to exert upon the vast power of the UC.
Though the UC continues to refuse to make any public concessions to the COLA movement, over the past year striking student-workers forced many material gains across the system, winning wage increases and benefits on every campus that participated in labor actions. Many of these are charted here. We can only conclude that when we fight, we win.
The university’s disciplining of labor organization cannot go unchallenged; we have shown that it will be resisted to the end.
In solidarity,
UCSC Wildcat Strikers
Letter from Carlos
March 7, 2021
I want to start off this letter by thanking every ame for my head. A huge shout out to those of you who have supported me financially, emotionally, who have written and sent out letters, engaged administrators in meetings, signed petitions, testified on my behalf in front of a conduct board, and to those who woke up early in the morning to make some noise outside the administrator’s homes. A huge thank you from the bottom of my heart. Gracias!
Today, we received news that I will not be suspended for two-years, but will be on conduct probation for two-years. While this may still not be the ideal situation, this is a victory. I will be able to continue in my journey to obtain a Ph.D. for the time being, but we should keep in mind our struggle against the university is far from over.
We know the university is not a place meant for poor people. The University, a Western colonial project, was created with the intent to destroy indigenous communities on the continent of the Americas. In a 1997 Indigenous Forum, indigenous groups in Oaxaca declared that the university has been wielded as a tool that attempts to not only destroy their culture, but their people as well. They ultimately claimed that the Mexican educational system, like in many other places across the Americas, was meant to both extract and destroy the “indianity out of the indian” (unitierraoax.org/english/).
UCSC and the UC system are no different than those universities in Mexico that those folks in Oaxaca were referring to. UCSC engaged in (highly militarized) counterinsurgency tactics to break our movimiento and our spirits. Those of us who are interested in advancing the struggle of our communities saw up close and personal the many facets of counter insurgency that the university is willing to engage in in order to silence and crush our resistance. The university did not hesitate to call up the police from other universities and counties. It did not hesitate to borrow and use technologies meant to single us out and then consequently create a narrative that criminalized one person, held responsible for something hundreds if not thousands of people engaged in.
Like hundreds of my peers, I have had a visible and public role in bringing attention to workplace and living conditions uniquely faced by UCSC teaching assistants and graduate students. I remain concerned about the difficulties of Teaching Assistants, marginalized undergraduate students, adjunct faculty, and other precarious workers at UCSC. These groups are the backbone of the university.
I have been vilified, racialized, and criminalized as a militant protestor that is “out of control,” but this is not who I am. I have been unfairly singled out because of my race and gender. I remain concerned that this is a moment of criminalization that Chicanx scholars are far too familiar with as its persisted throughout history, and sadly, continues today; the racialization of people of Mexican descent as criminals, bandidos, thieves, cartel members, drug dealers, and “bad hombres”. The UC will label any affront to its authority as an act that has to be punished and, through student conduct processes and other forms of targeting and surveillance, will attempt to stop students from engaging in acts of resistance. We see the violence of the state reproduce itself in the neoliberal university as it labels, punishes, and pushes out people who are constructed as “threats” to its violent foundation and ideology. Unsurprisingly, men of color are least likely to make it out of higher ed institutions.
The violence of U-S imperial control has become so widespread that it becomes invisible, almost achieving normality, but when uprisings occur, we see the violence of the U-S war machine up close. We saw this one year ago here at UCSC in the terror inflicted on students by the militarized university and its assorted police forces at the picket. We see it daily in the harassment and intimidation police everywhere uphold. We learned that the university is not hesitant to resort to physical violence and brutality to subdue resistance. We saw many of our colleagues be brutalized by the police, and got an up-close example of how the university will easily spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on cops; funds they preferred to use on violence than to create conditions where students and workers can, at the very least, survive. The administrators will always use police to protect their own paychecks, meanwhile our comrades are still dealing with the physical and emotional effects of the university cops. Sabrina, we see you and hope you beat those bastards!!
As U-S imperialism and the globalization of the U-S war machine is reproduced within the university, we must think about the ways in which the ivory tower is complicit in reproducing war in different places across the Earth. We should take the events of the past year to be a constant reminder of the university’s complicity in creating, funding, and profiting from warfare and militarization.
On February 19th, 2020, Chief Nader Owens at UCSC PD asked for the California State Threat Assessment Center, which is partially funded by the Department of Homeland Security, to provide back up at the picket. As described on a Vice article on the matter, the California Threat Assessment Center is a “fusion center set up to monitor terrorism and other extremist activities.”
We understand that the university’s move to label those of us resisting U-S imperial violence as “terrorists” is nothing more than a projection because we know the University is in the business of terror. The U-S war machine brings terror to communities all across Mother Earth, it is a global manufacturer of terror. The university is complicit in the production of U-S terror as it produces the means and discourses through which the U-S can both exploit and profit from others suffering and justify their killing.
However, the student conduct process imploded and it exposed itself for what it really is. An impotent tool wielded to silence political dissent. This small victory should stand as an example of how our collective power and solidarity is crucially important in standing against the university. Because we know our struggle against the university will not end until it is abolished, it is important that we continue to build community, to stand up for and with each other, and let the admin know we won’t forget, we won’t be complicit, and we won’t submit.
Like comrades before us have said,
“See you at the barricades!” <3
Carlos H. Cruz