Moreau on the impact the killing of Michoacán-born Gonzola Gonzales on Latin New York. Within days during the summer of 1930 two Communist activists, Alfred Levy and Gonzalo Gonzales, were murdered by New York police during demonstrations. Levy, a young Black worker, was killed at an anti-lynching protest in Harlem, while Gonzales was murdered while leading a group of Latin American workers to pay their respects to Levy as he laid in state at the Communist Party’s Lenox Avenue offices. Tens of thousands would attend Gonzalez’s funeral.

‘Latin-American Workers and Murder of Gonzales’ by Alberto Moreau from The Daily Worker. Vol. 7 No. 167. July 12, 1930.

THE brutal murder of Comrade Gonzalo Gonzales has aroused the class indignation of the Latin American workers of Harlem and the working class of New York. The series of murders perpetrated by the police was a definite expression of intensified oppression of the Negroes and Latin American workers, as exemplified by the murder of Alfred Levy only a short time before the killing of Gonzales.

The effects of the racial discrimination now running high in Harlem have conclusively proven to the oppressed colonials of New York, as well as of the United States, that the American imperialist class is fighting its death battle in the United States and in its colonies.

It is significant that while Gonzales was killed by policeman O’Brien in the most brutal manner on June 30, when he and a group of Latin American workers were marching to a mass protest meeting held under the auspices of the Anti-Imperialist League and its affiliated Latin American organizations, that the American organizations, that the American imperialists were massacring 20 Mexican workers in Matamorros at a demonstration held there under the leadership of the Communist Party of Mexico. The bloody hand of Wall Street that killed Comrade Gonzales reached all the way to Matamorros.

The lesson learned by the Latin Americans in the United States, especially the Mexican workers, who suffer most from American imperialist exploitation and oppression, is that they no longer can pin their hopes for their emancipation on the leadership of the nationalist traitors in their home country and in the United States. For they are nothing but the executive agents of the bosses.

Fought in Mexico Against Imperialism.

The story of the life of Comrade Gonzales as narrated by his wife, Dolores Gonzales, who has just joined the Party, is a vivid example of a proletarian family of Mexico suffering for years under the yoke of foreign domination. Gonzales and his wife took part in the bourgeois-democratic revolution led by Calles and the other henchmen of American imperialism now at the head of the Mexican government. Seven years ago, at the age of sixteen, Dolores Gonzales met her husband in the streets of Michaocan, fighting for the liberation of Mexico from the claws of foreign imperialism. Much blood was shed then by the workers and peasants but they were led by the bourgeoisie, by its betrayal, into victory for American imperialism.

Gonzales, a baker, found no improvement in the lot of the workers after the battle was over. Misery and starvation followed this triumph of Calles. The Gonzales family, poverty-stricken and at the point of starvation, decided to cross the frontier into the land of “prosperity” in “Yankeeland.” But they found that added to the poverty in this country was the racial discrimination to which all Latin American workers are subjected.

Mother, 70, Worked In Imperial Valley.

Gonzales’ mother, a woman of 70 years, was also driven away from Mexico into the misery of the Imperial Valley. The intrepid young Gonzales, barely 30, struggling in the bakery shops of New York for miserable wages, part of which were sent to feed his aged mother. The crisis of American capitalism, increasing unemployment, reached the poor Gonzales home. He lost his job and was unemployed for the last seven months. Dolores Gonzales was compelled to increase her hours of work from ten to fourteen hours a day in order to feed her husband.

From the fields of Michaocan, Dolores found her way into a restaurant of New York. For 14 hours a day her body was exposed to the intense heat of the kitchen and to the freezing icebox. The left-over food she was forced to eat swiftly undermined her health. Soon Dolores Gonzales was suffering from pulmonary congestion. Could she think for a moment of leaving her job to take care of her broken health? No—Gonzales was unemployed and her $75.00 per month wages had to take care of both of them. Gonzales began to see clearly into the situation. His passive attitude gave way to an active struggle against unemployment and he soon found his way into the Communist Party.

He knew when he entered the ranks of the Party that he would have to help carry on a struggle against the imperialist class that keeps seven million workers in the United States unemployed. Gonzales was a class-conscious fighter and he died like one. The death of Comrade Gonzales did not leave the Latin American workers of New York indifferent. Two hundred and fifty of them have already joined the Communist Party. Many more will follow this vanguard of the workers. Police brutality, murder and assassination cannot and will not stop the Latin American workers from continuing the fight against American imperialism, under the leadership of the Communist Party.

The demonstration at the funeral of Comrade Gonzales has proven that hundreds of Latin American workers, by joining the march, intend to continue the struggle that Gonzales was faced to leave so heroically.

The Daily Worker began in 1924 and was published in New York City by the Communist Party US and its predecessor organizations. Among the most long-lasting and important left publications in US history, it had a circulation of 35,000 at its peak. The Daily Worker came from The Ohio Socialist, published by the Left Wing-dominated Socialist Party of Ohio in Cleveland from 1917 to November 1919, when it became became The Toiler, paper of the Communist Labor Party. In December 1921 the above-ground Workers Party of America merged the Toiler with the paper Workers Council to found The Worker, which became The Daily Worker beginning January 13, 1924.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/dailyworker/1930/v07-n167-NY-jul-12-1930-DW-LOC.pdf