My name is Dan La Botz and I was born in Chicago, Illinois on August 9, 1945. My mother was of Irish ancestry and my father was the son of Dutch immigrants. At the time I was born, my parents were both working in the Co-op Grocery Store in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago, she as a grocery clerk and he as a produce man. We lived on the South Side of Chicago in neighborhoods that reflected the city’s long history of immigration, white families whose ancestors came from all over Europe and African Americans whose grandparents or parents had come up from the South.
My parents divorced when I was eleven years old, and my mother, with two children, myself and my sister Janet, moved to California to be near her mother who was living in the San Diego area. After a couple of years my mother remarried and a year later had another child, my half-brother Kenneth.
My mother continued to work as grocery clerk, a loyal member of the Retail Clerks Union whose union contract provided her with wages, health insurance and later a pension. She and my step-father Kenneth Hornke, alternately a house painter and a commercial fisherman, bought a house in Imperial Beach, a small working class town a couple of miles north of the U.S.-Mexico border and a few blocks from the Pacific Ocean. There I attended San Ysidro Junior High School and then Mar Vista High School, schools where many of the students were the sons and daughters of Navy enlisted personnel, mostly white southerners. Many others, however, were children of immigrants: Mexican Americans, Japanese and Filipinos. I ran the high hurdles on the track team and worked on the school newspaper.
Higher Education and Political Activism
When I graduated from High School, I went to Southwestern College in Chula Vista and two years later moved on to San Diego State College where I graduated in 1968. During this period I married and my wife and I had a son, Jakob La Botz. While in college I volunteered with the United Farm Workers union (UFW) and helped support farm worker strikes for higher wages and better conditions on the tomato ranches in southern San Diego County. The UFW was really part of an enormous Latino movement for civil rights and I learned a lot from it. Growing up on the border, studying and working with Latinos gave me a lifelong love of the Spanish language and Latin American culture.
I registered as a conscientious objector to war when I graduated from High School in 1963, though because I had a student deferment and later a child, I was never drafted. I became active in the anti-Vietnam War movement and joined in student protests and street demonstrations throughout that period. I learned that during such periods of crisis consciousness changes quickly, activists can help shape a movement as they both learn from it and help to lead it, and that people fighting for justice have enormous power.
In 1969 I became a member of a small socialist organization, a democratic socialist group opposed to both capitalism and Soviet-style Communism. The anti-war movement had been largely centered on college campuses, but we young socialists believed that we should take our socialist ideas off the campus and into society and particularly into the workplace and into the unions. So in 1970 I moved back to Chicago to look for a job. I worked as a librarian, a social worker, a steelworker and eventually became a truck driver.
I spent most of the 1970s as a truck driver in Chicago where I became involved in organizing a reform movement in the Teamsters union, then dominated by corrupt union officials linked to the Mafia. I learned an enormous amount from dockworkers, truck drivers, and food processing workers in the Teamsters union. I was a founding member of Teamsters for a Democratic Union and later wrote a book about the movement Rank and File Rebellion: Teamsters for a Democratic Union.
In 1980, after a series of injuries on the job, I left truck driving. I got a job as a reporter at the Chicago Daily Defender, an African American newspaper. When I joined with other reporters at the paper in organizing a local union with the Newspaper Guild, I was fired. By then my wife and I had divorced and as a single father raising my son Jake, I had to find another job quickly. I found one as a community organizer on the Northside of Chicago. There I worked with Latino immigrants to organize the Comité Latino, an organization of Spanish-speaking immigrants that dealt with housing issues, jobs, and immigrant rights. I also worked with the South Austin Community Council, an African American community group on the West Side of Chicago and helped them put out a community newspaper.
In 1984, the House Staff Association, the union of interns and residents at Cook County Hospital, hired me as organizer. When President Ronald Reagan cut back on Medicaid reimbursements, private hospitals then dumped patients on the public hospitals, overwhelming them. The doctors couldn’t do their jobs because of inadequate support staff. We waged a successful campaign that pressured the Cook County Board into hiring many more transporters, blood drawers and other ancillary workers.
The union’s president Sherry Baron and I fell in love, and married in 1986. Sherry and I spent a short time in Mexico City that year where she did a rotation in environmental health while I worked as a reporter for The Mexico City News writing on labor issues. When I returned to the United States I turned my research and journalism experience in Mexico into a book The Crisis of Mexican Labor.
In 1986 we returned to the United States and moved to Los Angeles where Sherry had a job at the UCLA School of Public Health. I worked for Jobs with Peace, a labor-community coalition working to make a transition in California from military to civilian production. We started a family in Los Angeles with the birth of our first son, Traven.
Sherry took a position in public health with the U.S. government and we moved to Cincinnati in 1988. Soon after, I enrolled in the History Department of the University of Cincinnati where I earned an M.A. and a Ph.D. Meanwhile amidst work and study we had a second son, Reed. I was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to conduct research in Mexico and at the same time Sherry was assigned by her agency to work in Mexico. We spent 1995-1997 living and working in Mexico City where our children learned to speak Spanish and to appreciate other countries and cultures.
On returning to Cincinnati I became a history teacher, teaching U.S. and Latin American History first as an instructor at Northern Kentucky University, then as a visiting professor at the University of Cincinnati, and for six years as a visiting professor at Miami University in nearby Oxford, Ohio. I also received grants from the Fund for Investigative Journalism to visit Indonesia and write a book about workers and unions in that country. Many of my Latin American Studies and U.S. History courses dealt in large measure with U.S. foreign policy. So I also took advantage of the opportunity to travel and learn more about countries from Brazil to Russia.
Throughout this period, spanning the late 1990’s until the present I have participated in many struggles for civil rights and worker rights: working with African Americans to stop police abuse in Cincinnati, working with Latino immigrants in fighting for their rights, and supporting workers in organizing drives and strikes. Sherry and I were proud to have our children grow up amidst such struggle for justice. I also worked with Labor Notes, the labor education center in Detroit. I wrote its bestselling book, the union activist’s manual The Troublemaker’s Handbook: How to Fight Back Where you Work and Win! I also began to work with the United Electrical Workers Union (UE) and the Mexican union the Authentic Labor Front (FAT) to produce Mexican Labor News and Analysis an electronic monthly newsletter in English on Mexican unions.
When my non-tenure job at Miami University ended, I found a new job, and a whole new experience teaching Spanish to children from first through eighth grade. I spend my day teaching small children songs and games in Spanish and teaching conversation and grammar to the older students. I enjoy my work and learn something from my colleagues and the kids every day.
Answering the Call For Political Change
The great recession beginning in 2008 added urgency to my commitment to become even more active in the fight for alternatives to the ongoing corporate domination and reckless squandering of our nation’s human assets and to the destruction of the livelihood of millions of working people at the hands of a privileged economic elite. Through struggles over the years I have come to know that none of the problems facing this country can be dealt with unless we end the domination of banks, insurance companies and multinational corporations over both major parties and over our political system.
The root of the problem is the capitalist economic system where small numbers of people control enormous wealth, where a group of a dozen men meeting in a board room can close a factory and destroy a town, or jeopardize the economic wellbeing of an entire state. The corporations do not hesitate to drive us into debt, to poison our atmosphere and our water, to lay us off for months or years or to close our plants. We need to change our economic system.
With both the Republicans and the Democrats failing to provide answers to the economic, environmental, health and foreign policy issues, the American people were becoming increasingly alienated from politics and government. Many turned to the Tea Party movement, a movement giving expression to their alienation and, in some cases base prejudices, but providing no answers. Neither the Democrats and Republicans nor the Tea Party movement are prepared to tackle the real problem which is corporate domination of the political system.
It is for these reasons and drawing on my background of lifelong involvement in struggles for social and economic justice, that I made the decision to be the Socialist Party candidate for the U. S. Senate from Ohio.
