Women’s March coming to Petaluma

An offshoot of the national movement will take place in Petaluma on Saturday.|

Petaluma is preparing to hold its first-ever Women’s March, a global rally that began two years ago as a rebuke of Donald Trump’s election, continuing a trend of community activism that has regularly taken to the streets since he became president.

An all-female planning committee, made up of a diverse group of local social advocates, have been meeting for the past month to piece together the city’s inaugural event, which is scheduled for 11 a.m. on Jan. 19 at Walnut Park.

The organizers are working diligently to put on a cohesive experience, they said, filled with speeches from elected officials and human rights proponents, designed to energize the community and inspire grassroots activism. The Petaluma event comes as the Women’s March movement faces a schism on the national level.

“We see this moment as an opportunity to really engage people in Petaluma,” said co-coordinator Amber Szoboszlai. “To do more than just come together and march together, but actually push for the change that we want to see happening in our schools and our local government.”

For co-coordinator Zahyra Garcia, co-chair of Indivisible Petaluma, which is hosting the rally, the ultimate goal is empowerment.

“It defines me - I’m a queer woman of color, an immigrant, a former DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) recipient,” she said. “Ever since Trump was elected, it’s attack after attack. I’m literally fighting for my life. But it’s also about empowering those who are marginalized like myself … and turning those marchers into voters.”

Having a chance to hold a march in Petaluma is the product of an active community that organizers said have mobilized repeatedly throughout Trump’s term to voice opposition to policies and decisions that undermine their ideals.

Last summer, Petaluma hosted a Families Belong Together rally to protest the administration’s immigration policies that resulted in thousands of children being separated from their parents at the U.S-Mexico border.

In March 2018, nearly 2,000 local students walked out of class to promote gun control and pay tribute to the 17 victims of a mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla.

Almost 300 supporters walked the streets of downtown Petaluma in September 2017 to show solidarity with the so-called “Dreamers” after Trump took the first steps to phase-out DACA.

Candlelight vigils have also been held after the violent clashes between white supremacists and protesters in Charlottesville, Va., and most recently after an anti-Semitic gunman killed 11 Jewish congregants at a Pittsburgh synagogue. Many have associated the president’s rhetoric to the rise in right-wing extremism.

“We’ve had a lot of things go down in Petaluma this (past) year that the community spoke up about,” Szoboszlai said. “The will of this community is strong, and it’s amazing to watch in action.”

Supported by more than 20 community sponsors and area businesses, the Petaluma Women’s March committee has assembled over a dozen speakers and performers across a spectrum of religions, ethnicities and sexual orientations.

Cotati resident Marjorie Crump-Shears, a former educator and one of the first members on the Commission on Human Rights, is emceeing the rally.

Mayor Teresa Barrett, Councilwoman D’Lynda Fischer and newly-elected Petaluma City School Board Trustees Mady Cloud, Joanna Paun and Caitlin Quinn are among the list of local leaders scheduled to speak.

Having diversity between the orators is important, the organizers say. The founding members of the national committee have recently been roiled by allegations of anti-Semitism, resulting in a fractured event in 2019 with two separate rallies in New York City.

Even along the North Coast, organizational issues led to a cancellations in Eureka where concerns over a lack of diversity became all too real, and organizers called off the Jan. 19 rally because the planning committee was supposedly “too white.”

“Our speakers are basically the vision that we wanted, which is creating a platform for those that need to be represented – LGBTQ, people of color – and speak to that,” Garcia said of the Petaluma march. “I thought that was important because we give so many white leaders and allies so much time, so I wanted to go the opposite way.”

In a broader context, this year’s march comes after a midterm election many political pundits dubbed as the second “Year of the Woman.” A record 102 women were sworn into the U.S. House of Representatives last week.

The staying power of the #MeToo movement, and the turmoil created by the controversial Supreme Court appointment of Brett Kavanaugh, who was confirmed amid allegations of sexual assault, have kept the momentum going for women’s rights movement.

“I think when the march started, it was this reaction to emerging change in the government,” Szoboszlai said. “But it was so much more. People were reacting because they had been living this way for so long and it all came to a head. Now, we’re beyond that initial reaction and we realize we have so much to do.”

Added Garcia, “It’s like (turning) defense to offense.”

(Contact News Editor Yousef Baig at yousef.baig@arguscourier.com or 776-8461, and on Twitter @YousefBaig.)

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