ICE CAN'T ERASE WHAT LELO JUAREZ BUILT

ICE CAN'T ERASE WHAT LELO JUAREZ BUILT
Photoessay by David Bacon
Labornotes, 4/24/25
https://labornotes.org/2025/04/ice-cant-erase-what-lelo-juarez-built

Lelo with his partner and niece in the May Day march next to the sign that says "With No Fear."

In 2022 I went to Washington State for May Day, and the following year as well.  Just south of Canada, in Bellingham and Mount Vernon, Community2Community and Familias Unidas por la Justicia  celebrate the workers holiday in the tradition followed by the rest of the world.  They march.  For me, a child of the Cold War, when May Day was the forbidden Communist holiday, it's a time to appreciate how the world has changed,  Brightly-painted hand-made signs and banners call out - "Another World is Possible!"  - a May Day sentiment if there ever was one.  Some demonstrations can be formal exercises.  Theirs are filled with farmworkers and children chatting in Mixteco or Triqui, with students and earnest young men in religoius collars, and of course with activists from a dozen unions.  

Both years I came a few days early.  I wanted to see the tulip harvest, or at least the end of it, since it's almost over by May.  Thousands of tourists come to see the flowers.  Fields of solid red and yellow blooms stretch for miles, from Mount Vernon halfway to the ocean.  Shiny BMWs and Acuras crawl bumper-to-bumper down tiny country roads, creating an urban-sized traffic jam.

Both years I got up early, before the madness, and drove those same roads, as yet still empty.  I wasn't looking for the flowers, though. Instead, I was keeping an eye out for beat-up Fords and Toyotas parked by the side of the fields, or dusty school busses transformed to transport labor.  I was seeking the workers.  I hoped I'd find the ones who stopped the harvest in the first year of the pandemic, using the power they'd discovered when they organized their independent union at the Sakuma blueberry farm a decade earlier.  (See Trouble in the Tulips, https://labornotes.org/2022/03/trouble-tulips-organized-farmworkers-win-basic-demands-quick-strike and Why These Farmworkers Went on Strike, https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/why-these-farm-workers-went-on-strike-and-why-it-matters/)

Today one of those worker-organizers rots in a cell, in the infamous Tacoma Detention Center.  Lelo (Alfredo Juarez - as his mother named him) was a teenager when Triqui and Mixtec indigenous workers rose up in the Sakuma fields and labor camps.  As they fought for their union, Sakuma strikers put Lelo to work while he was still a boy.  Because he'd gone to school in Washington he could translate easily back and forth from classroom English to the Spanish of the streets and the indigenous language of his family.  

It took four years to win a contract for berry pickers at Sakuma Farms.  Indigenous Mexican migrants learned to use short walkouts to push up piece rates and protect each others' jobs.  Some left the fields for days or weeks, traveling from campus to campus, from Seattle to San Diego, asking students to picket and boycott Driscoll berries, the giant company that bought the fruit they picked.  In the end they won, and with that contract in hand, Familias Unidas por la Justicia became the voice for farmworkers across northwest Washington.

As I drove through the early morning, I saw a small group of workers hoeing weeds among the giant leaves of overgrown cabbages,.  As usual, I stopped to talk, then take some photographs. It didn't take long before I asked them if they'd ever worked at Sakuma.  The leader of the little crew proudly announced she and her workmates all belonged to Familias Unidas.  That morning they were not laboring at a union job, but they had thr union in their hearts.

Then I caught up with a larger crew cleaning the remaining flowers in a tulip field, and the experience was repeated.  I'd just walked into the rows with my camera when someone called out my name.  There was Benito Lopez, wearing his Familias Unidas sweatshirt, marking him as a member of the union committee.  Benito stayed in my Bay Area house on one of those boycott journeys a few years before.  He plays in a band and plays for FUJ and community fiestas, and his mirror sunglasses gave him away as a musician or a rocker as he worked down the row of flowers.

When the field was nothing but bare tulip stalks, and the petals from the last discarded blooms were trampled into the mud between the rows, the foreperson came to Benito to ask if the crew wanted to move to another field.  It was late in the day by then, and perhaps they might want to go home.  But the crew held an impromptu committee meeting in the dirt road, and decided they wanted to get a couple more hours in before quitting.  There's no written contract with Washington Bulb in the tulips, but it was clear that the supervisor knew he had to get their agreement.  That is the power that Lelo and Benito and the rest of the workers built.

The next morning I saw a huge machine, motionless in the middle of what had been a tulip field the day before.  I parked and walked down the dusty road from the highway, and found a crew eating breakfast.  Some were men in blue coveralls, and the others were women in regular work clothes.  They offered me their tacos.  Eating has social meaning in a field, so we ate together and talked.  

The men were H-2A workers, who come from Mexico to do this work every year on temporary work visas.  They clearly needed the work to support families back home.  But I wondered if the regular tulip workers in the picking crews were ever trained to work on the huge rig.  Those jobs probably pay better than cutting tulips and daffodils.  

The workers in Familias Unidas por la Justicia have tried to find a way to fight for the interests of both groups - H-2A workers and local residents.  During their organizing saga at Sakuma Farms, they had to defeat an effort to replace hundreds of strikers with H-2A workers.  Their success in doing that ensured they could keep their jobs win the strike.  Yet every year their marches carry banners honoring Honesto Silva, an H-2A worker who died from the conditions in a Washington field.  When his coworkers stopped work after he died, Familias Unidas helped organize their protest before the company cancelled their visas and fired them.  A worker is a worker, and everyone needs to be organized, the union says.

Breakfast over, the machine coughed to life and again began its ponderous travel down the now-bare field.  As it clanked along it dug up the tulip bulbs, separated them from the dirt, and spat a stream of them into a gondola alongside.  Behind it a small group of women gathered up any bulbs the machine missed.  Tulip bulbs must be worth a lot, I thought.

Now, looking at the images from those two years, I see the kind of hard labor Lelo gave the company as a worker in those flower fields.  Then I thought of the work he gave the union, when he decided that the most important thing was to change the lives of the people who work in them.  That was not an easy decision.  His actions, and those of his workmates, have made some powerful people very angry.  They are using his immigration status to remove him and throw him in a hole.  By extension they threaten anyone else who dreams of doing what Lelo did.  I can see the family Lelo has just started is out there on the May Day march, now facing such terrible danger.

These photographs are just a few of the many I've taken since that first strike at Sakuma Farms in 2013.  To me they show the hard reality of these workers' lives, and their determination over years to change it.  Getting Lelo out of detention will bring justice for him.  And it will move that struggle a little further down the road.  

Pablo Ramirez works in a crew of farmworkers weeding a field growing organic cabbage plants for seed at Morrison Farm.  Because it is an organic field, the grower doesn't use herbicide, and instead hires a small crew to weed the field before harvesting the seeds.  

Farmworkers clean a tulip field belonging to Washington Bulb.  The workers are members of Familias Unidas por la Justicia.  Benito Lopez is a leader of the union.

Juana Sanchez is a worker in the crew cleaning a tulip field.

Benito Lopez cutting the tops of tulip flowers.

Natalia Feliciano is a worker in the crew.

Natalia Feliciano walks in the mud and tulip petals.

The tulip cleaning crew leaves the field.

Benito Lopz, Juana Sanchez and other members of Familias Unidas hold a meeting to decide if they will continue working in another field.

The family of Benito Lopez at the Tierra y Libertad cooperative farm, started by the union.

Benito Lopez and his fellow musicians at a party after the May Day march, celebrating the successful strike a month earlier by workers in the tulip harvest.

Lelo speaks to a May Day march of migrant farmworkers and their supporters, calling for unions and human rights.

On the May Day march workers remind the growers that with no workers there will be no tulip harvest.

A march protesting federal regulations making it more difficult to protect the rights of H-2A and resident farmworkers the H2-A guestworker program, on the anniversary of the death of Honesto Silva.  The march stopped in front of the Ferndale Detention Center, where Lelo was later taken.

Foreman Jose Partida and other workers eat lunch in a tulip field belonging to Washington Bulb.

Helene Mancillas, Heidi Garcia and Ismael Lopez eat lunch on a break from their work collecting tulip bulbs.

Maria Ramirez, Victoriana Galvan, Helene Mancillas and Heidi Garcia walk down the rows collecting tulip bulbs.

Maria Ramirez works in the tulip field.

Maria Ramirez, Victoriana Galvan and Heidi Garcia collect bulbs missed by the big machine.

Working behind the machine.

 A worker supervises the tulip machine as it makes it way down the field.

Two farmworkers pick bulbs out of the dirt on the tulip machine.

Two farmworkers on the machine.

As they cross the river into Mount Vernon during the tulip harvest, May Day marchers carry a banner remembering Honesto Silva, an H-2A worker who died in the fields.  Another sign says Without Workers There Are No Tulips.

Two young women on the May Day calling for unions and human rights for farmworkers. 

"Another World is Possible"

HOW TO FIGHT TRUMP'S ATTACK ON FARMWORKERS

HOW TO FIGHT TRUMP'S ATTACK ON FARMWORKERS
By David Bacon
The Nation, 4/11/25
https://www.thenation.com/article/society/migrant-farmworkers-trump-2025/

On March 25, Alfredo Juarez was driving his compañera to work in the flower fields of Washington Bulb, the largest tulip grower in Washington State. His family, including two uncles, all work there, and until two years ago, he did too. That's when Lelo (as he is known) started working full-time for the union, Familias Unidas por la Justicia (FUJ).

That morning, however, was anything but normal. In the predawn darkness he saw flashing lights in his rearview mirror and pulled over. As a Border Patrol agent approached the car, Lelo rolled his window down partway. He asked why he was being stopped and if the agent had a warrant. When he reached into his pocket for his ID, however, the Border Patrol cop broke the window. The agent dragged him out of the car as his partner began shouting, demanding to know why he was being brutalized, before the agent took him away.

The Border Patrol first brought Lelo to the nearby Ferndale Detention Center, and then to the giant migrant prison in Tacoma run by GEO Group. Within days, he was lined up to board a deportation flight to Sonora, Mexico. But, without a clear reason, he was called out of line and returned to detention while the others were flown off. There he remains, at least as of the publication of this article.

Meanwhile, workers at Washington Bulb report that ICE agents picked up two more people from the company warehouse.


 

Lelo speaks to migrant farmworkers and their supporters on a May Day march to call for unions and human rights for farmworkers. (David Bacon)


Was Lelo A Target?

The recognition Lelo earned for his years of organizing farmworkers created the pressure that kept him off the deportation flight, according to Rosalinda Guillen, director of Community2Community, the farmworker rights organization of northwest Washington. He joined FUJ when it won a contract at Sakuma Farms in 2017, after a watershed four-year strike and boycott of the giant Driscoll's berry company, buyer of the fruit Sakuma workers picked. After the union stabilized, its members began organizing in the tulip and daffodil fields in the same valley, trying to win better wages there as well.

As a leader of the flower workers' union committee, Lelo and his workmates tried to get an agreement from the company about their pay and rights as the harvest started. At the same time, crowds of tourists began to fill the valley's back roads, gawking at the fields of brilliant blooms, and the workers laboring in them. The union's efforts to fight for workers extended beyond the fields. The week before he was picked up, Lelo spent several days in the state capital, Olympia, trying to ensure that the Keep Washington Working Act would stay in force. The law, won five years ago, prohibits state agencies from cooperating in federal immigration raids. In the Trump era, it is predictably under attack.

Teresa Romero is the president of the United Farm Workers.(David Bacon)


Lelo spoke so many times to so many members of the legislature that politicians know him well. Within hours of his arrest they were already discussing his detention. US Senator Patty Murphy said she was tracking his case. "I don't care what Trump promised on the campaign trail," her statement said. Other expressions of concern came from US Representative Rick Larson and Governor Bob Ferguson.

Unions and immigrant rights groups began demanding Lelo's release. Teresa Romero, president of the United Farm Workers, called for it during a recent march in Delano, California, celebrating Cesar Chavez's birthday. Local groups have mounted continuous demonstrations in front of the Tacoma center.

While this broad coalition tries to free him, immigrant rights activists report that ICE is picking people up on warrants for detention across the country. ICE Director Tom Homan calls all undocumented immigrants criminals, and therefore credible targets for deportation, no matter how many years they've lived in the United States. "Sometimes they have a list," reports Fernando Martinez, organizer for the Mixteco Immigrant Community Organizing Project in Santa Maria, California. "But when they can't find a person, they go for any family member they can find."

Yet Lelo's arrest wasn't just one of many. "ICE claims it had a warrant from 2018," Guillen says. "But it's clear they'd been surveilling him, because they knew when he was leaving for work and what route he'd take. He was targeted because he's been such a visible activist. That's why there's been this massive support for him."  

Guillen believes thousands of people are in ICE's database of immigrants who weren't notified of an immigration court date or somehow were flagged by the system, providing the pretext for warrants. But why was Lelo singled out, Guillen asks, and by whom?

Lelo's supporters believe his detention is another example of immigration enforcement targeting social movement activists, from working-class leaders to students protesting the genocide in Gaza. But his case raises particular questions, Guillen believes, about the use of immigration enforcement against farmworkers.

California Attorney General Rob Bonta marches with Lorena Gonzalez, executive secretary of the California Labor Federation and Yvonne Wheeler, President of the Los Angeles Labor Federation.(David Bacon)


When Lelo spoke in the legislature the Friday before his arrest, he denounced the abuse of farmworkers brought to the United States in the H-2A guest worker program, and the use of that program to displace local farmworkers-almost all of whom are immigrants. His union, Familias Unidas por la Justicia, has a long record of opposing the H-2A program because of its exploitation of both guest workers and resident farmworkers. And over the past decade, the union has built a reputation for helping guest workers themselves when they protest abuse or strike against it. That makes FUJ, and Lelo himself, a target in this new era, in which the Trump administration uses detentions and deportations to terrorize workers, while encouraging growers to bring in guest workers to replace them.

Attacks Against Farmworkers

Trump's immigration enforcement strategy is not new. Some of it expands measures already initiated by Republican-held state legislatures. In the last few years, states like Georgia and North Carolina have passed laws mandating that employers use the E-Verify database to identify undocumented employees, and then fire them. Last year Florida passed a law, SB 1718, not only mandating E-Verify but making it a crime to give a person without papers a ride to work, and requiring hospitals to check the immigration status of patients.

During the 2024 election campaign, Democrats and Republicans vied to claim each was more committed to enforcement than the other. After Trump's election, the Border Patrol office in southern California didn't wait for his inauguration. For three days, starting the day after the January 6 certification of Trump's win, agents stopped farmworker vehicles on their way to the fields, and detained workers at day labor sites in front of Home Depot and gas stations.

In the orange and grapefruit groves that supply the winter's few field jobs, the normal cacophony of ladders and voices grew silent, as workers stayed home. "I didn't go to work for two days," Emma, an orange picker, told me. "I have a 5-year-old, and that's the fear, that I won't be able to come home to him. But on Wednesday I went back to work. The fear is great, but the need is greater." Some of her coworkers, however, decided to leave for other areas, or even to go back to Mexico, she said.

Biden officials claimed that the raid was a "rogue operation," but self-deportation-the predictable impact of the raid and the arrests-is also not new. In one four-month period in 1954, at the height of "Operation Wetback," Fay Bennett, executive secretary of the National Sharecroppers Fund reported, "300,000 Mexicans were arrested and deported, or frightened back across the border." As raids drove undocumented workers back to Mexico, the government then relaxed federal requirements on housing, wages, and food for braceros, the guest workers of the Cold War era. In one year, 1954, over a million workers were deported, and two years later, the number of braceros brought to the United States by growers reached 450,000.


 

Guillermina Castellanos and members of Nueva Sol, the new San Francisco organization of day laborers and domestic workers, march behind their banner.(David Bacon)


The parallel wasn't lost on Marc Grossman, who spent a lifetime as communications director for the United Farm Workers. In a Sacramento Bee op-ed in early March, he wrote that the growers' agenda "is replacing the domestic farm labor work force-now comprising both documented and undocumented farm workers-with many more H-2A guest workers."

Grossman highlights the vulnerability of H-2A workers, who can only work less than a year in the United States before returning home and are tethered to the growers who recruit them. "If undocumented workers are mistreated," he wrote, "at least they have the option to leave and work elsewhere. More vulnerable H-2A workers, however, are at the total mercy of employers who control their livelihoods through the visas they obtain for their employees. If H-2A workers complain about abuse, they are immediately shipped home. The H-2A program is practically serfdom."

Trump's Immigration Priorities

Combining deportation and expansion of the H-2A program has been an explicit Trump goal since his first administration. At a Michigan rally in February 2018, he told farmers, "We're going to have strong borders, but we have to have your workers come in." In 2020 then-Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue emphasized the government's support for more H-2A workers. "That's what agriculture needs, and that's what we want," he said. In her nomination hearing, Trump's current secretary of agriculture, Brooke Rollins, told Congress that she'd modernize the H-2A program "to do everything we can to make sure that none of these farms or dairy producers are put out of business [by immigration enforcement]."

The growth of the H-2A visa program, however, has been a bipartisan project. Twenty years ago, the Department of Labor issued 48,336 certifications to growers for workers brought to the United States with H-2A work visas. Eight years later, that number had almost doubled, to 85,248. In Trump's first year in office growers received 200,049 certifications, and in Biden's last year they received 384,900. The total number of farmworkers in the United States is about 2 million, so almost a fifth are now H-2A workers.

In Florida, with its draconian anti-immigrant and anti-farmworker laws, growers' 47,416 H-2A certifications last year covered over half of the 80,821 people employed on its farms. Georgia's 43,436 certifications were for over three-quarters of its 55,990 farm laborers. Of New York's 51,330 farmworkers, 10,294 come on H-2A visas.

 

Narcisco Martinez, an artist whose work is based on the lives of farmworkers, marches with Veronica Wilson of the UCLA Labor Center.(David Bacon)


When Lelo denounced the impact of H-2A certifications in Washington, one big target was the Washington Farm Labor Association (now simply WAFLA), the state's biggest labor contractor. Both WAFLA and the website Save Family Farms-which has a long history of fighting environmentalists and FUJ-lobby hard for growers, who last year received certifications for 35,884 H-2A visas, among the state's 90,166 farmworkers. Save Family Farms calls itself the voice of Washington farmers, and takes credit for defeating overtime pay for farmworkers.

During Trump's first administration, at WAFLA's instigation, Washington State's Employment Security Department and the US Department of Labor agreed to remove the guaranteed piece-rate wage for H-2A workers picking apples, the state's largest harvest. That effectively lowered the wage by as much as a third.

In his last term, in addition to lowering H-2A wages, Trump allowed growers to access federal funds earmarked for farmworker housing, and even use federal labor camps, to house H-2A workers. This December, before Trump took office, Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr (who is currently running for governor) asked him to discard the federal rule setting the minimum wage for H-2A workers in the state.

Armando Elenes, UFW secretary treasurer, says bitterly, "On one side of their mouth they're saying they're worried about their workforce, but on the other they're trying to strip away workers' rights from the guest worker program. They don't want to pay the workers what the law requires or provide the housing that the workers need. They don't want to pay for the transportation of the workers. They want to make it as cheap as possible."


 

Lelo and his family.(David Bacon)


What Can Be Done?

The sharp increase in detentions and deportations raises big questions: Will unions be able to organize in this political environment? And can they protest the raids and displacement of immigrant workers who are already residents (including their own members), and at the same time organize and defend the rights of H-2A workers brought by growers to replace them?

Over the last several years, UFW has organized H-2A workers in New York State, where Elenes has headed the UFW effort to use the new state labor law for farmworkers. As a result, the union has won votes on six farms, and has invoked arbitration to force contract negotiations on four of them. California's new law gives farmworkers an easier way to organize. Growers have to bargain if a majority of workers sign union cards; if they don't, the state can impose a contract. The union has won five campaigns covering about 3,000 workers, and has signed two collective bargaining agreements.

 

"Esta es nuestra tierra" -demanding recognition that the land of California's corporate agriculture is unceded land of native people.(David Bacon)


The UFW currently represents H-2A workers under contract in California as well, as a result of organizing drives where resident workers were a majority of the workforce. At D'Arrigo California, for instance, the union contract gives H-2A workers workplace rights while guaranteeing that resident workers can't be replaced.

Other unions also represent H-2A workers, particularly the Farm Labor Organizing Committee, which has a bargaining agreement with the North Carolina Growers Association covering over 6,000 workers.

Roman Pinal, UFW's organizing director, says it will take a lot of work to build unity between immigrant workers residing in the country and the H-2A workers being brought here. "I've heard workers living here say their shifts are being cut from five, six days to two, three days a week, as growers use more H-2A workers. At the same time, H-2A workers have a lot of issues of their own. Growers threaten one group with being replaced, and the other with being sent back to Mexico. We have to help them stick together. And we have to stick together with unions like FUJ as well."

Andres Cruz, a Triqui farmworker and irrigator for D'Arrigo Brothers Produce, came to the march from Greenfield in the Salinas Valley.(David Bacon)


While fear induced by grower threats or immigration raids can be paralyzing, workers aren't always fearful. Guillen says the committee at Washington Bulb was angry at Lelo's detention and plans to organize their own march to protest. "Before the march in Delano," Pinal says, "many farmworkers asked me, 'Is it safe to do this?' Seven thousand answered yes and came." More marches are planned in other parts of the state.

In the end, a strong counterweight to fear of deportation or job loss is the anger many workers feel over the lack of recognition of the importance of their work, and the heavy demands it makes on them. Emma described to me the toll farm work takes on her. "In the oranges I have to climb ladders with a 40 or 50 pound bag on my shoulders," she said. "When I'm bunching carrots, I'm on my knees all day. Every season my body has to learn to adjust to the way my hands and back hurt. It can take an hour and a half to get to the field, and for all that the most I make is $700 a week. And last year 70 percent of the time I only got four hours of work a day because the company hired so many other people."

She resents growers and the government for threatening deportation instead of recognizing the value of her labor. "The company takes advantage of the fear [of deportation by paying] low wages, and sends us to meetings to tell us that the union is bad. We work in the heat and cold to put food on the table [in] this country, but they call us criminals. We need to lift up our voice."

photos from the edge 11 - FAYE OLLISON, PRESENTE!

photos from the edge 11 - FAYE OLLISON, PRESENTE!

Faye Ollison was 92 when she died last week.

It wasn't an easy death because not having money puts you at the mercy of a healthcare system where money is everything.  As her son Terance said over and over, "It's all just about the money."

Faye had health insurance, but it was United Healthcare, a plan she'd kept up from her time working at the UC Berkeley Rad Lab.  When she couldn't get out of bed at home, Terance took her to the hospital.  The nurses were great, but from the beginning the hospital wanted the bed back.  So first they put her on a list for hospice care.  When her doctor pointed out that they hadn't been feeding her, and she began to bounce back after eating a little, United Healthcare said she'd have to be moved to a skilled nursing facility.  The hospital was too expensive.  "But we know all about United Healthcare," her hospital caseworker told us.

The nursing facility was full of patients.  Terance had already had bad experiences with two other ones, from a crisis a year earlier.  "They're all understaffed," he said bitterly, "because money is the only thing that counts to the people that own them."  To United Healthcare too.  

Faye was holding on.  She'd recognize us and try to talk a little.  But eating was a problem.  Her hands, calloused from a lifetime at the lab and then cleaning houses, were too frozen to hold a fork.  A nurse's aide would help her, or Terance would bring a protein shake she could drink with a straw.  But then United said they were cutting off money for the nursing home, to force her into hospice care at home.
 
Terance and I cleaned a space for the bed in her cluttered apartment.  The patient transport van unloaded Faye on a gurney, and brought her in.  The hospice nurse was great, giving her the attention she didn't get in the weeks before.  But sleep had overtaken her.  The next morning Terance called:  "She's gone."  He was crying into the phone.  Another hospice nurse came out, changed her clothes and even got her agency to pay for the coffin.

Faye, who never had much love for funerals or memorials, told Terance she wanted to be buried without any ceremony, in a pine box.  And so she will be.

Faye Ollison was born in the countryside, outside of Gonzalez, Texas, a small town that used to be part of Mexico.   She grew up learning to cook Southern style, with a love of chile that never left her.  When we wanted her to eat in the nursing home, we brought her sausage covered in chile flakes, usually her favorite. 

Gonzalez was a slave county in a slave state, where 384 slaveholders owned 3,168 human beings in the year the Civil War started.  That history was still alive when Faye was growing up - her grandfather remembered his enslaved life.  In the 30s and 40s she went to segregated schools, which weren't desegregated until the mid-60s.  By then she'd long since left for California, a single mother with her son.  Over the years while Faye worked at the lab and cleaning jobs, Terance found work in the Pile Drivers Union, from which he retired.

My mother and Faye were good friends from the time I was a teenager.  When she was trying to get alcohol out of her life, my mom depended on that love and support Faye gave her.  Faye knew everyone in my family, and sent us all cards on every occasion, slipping into the envelope a cartoon from The Better Half, and always a 2-dollar bill.

It was hard the way Faye left this world.  It should have been kinder and more gentle.  Our country has so little respect for the old people who got us all here.  Now we're run by gangsters that Faye, always a radical and a real red in her heart, would call out by name. She knew who they all were, from first to last.

I'm sorry we didn't change the world in time for you to leave it, Faye.  But you would always say goodbye to us by calling out, "We just have to keep on going."

Faye Ollison, presente!

These photographs were taken with Faye's permission, and with the cooperation of her son Terance Reeves, who wants people to know about his mom and her last days.  The last two photos are one from a family album of Faye and Terance as a child, and the other taken on the occasion of Faye's retirement at the Rad Lab.