Rights at Stake: Participants at Palm Springs’ International Women’s Day Rally Pledge to Fight Against Threats to Their Freedoms

Clarissa Cervantes was in elementary school when she began learning about the Civil Rights Movement. Her grandparents told her about Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta, and how they led a protest march for farmworkers past the family’s ranch in Coachella in the ’60s.

Her mother was a teacher who insisted Cervantes and her three sisters study the people who fought for the privileges and rights they took for granted. Summer days were often spent in the library.

“Over time, there were 10 to 15 civil rights leaders who I got to really learn about, and I dove in deep,” Cervantes said.

At 8 years old, she was inspired by the words of Martin Luther King Jr., and decided to recite his “I Have a Dream” speech from memory for a school project. That was in the late ’90s. Today, Cervantes holds a seat on the Riverside City Council and works as a political strategist.

She spoke at the International Women’s Day rally in downtown Palm Springs on March 8, telling the crowd that studying those historic protests inevitably fueled her passion for today’s movement. After the rally, the Independent spoke to Cervantes and other women about the current state of women’s rights, here and abroad.

Joy Silver currently chairs the Riverside County Democratic Party. She is a Palm Springs resident, with a 30-year career in health care, housing advocacy, senior living and executive management. Silver helped organize the rally with fellow members of Courageous Resistance/Indivisible of the Desert, which she helped co-found. Silver said close to 1,000 participants showed up to the event March 8 to express their anger at the threat of personal freedoms being taken away.

“Freedom is something that always needs to move forward and be protected. It’s something we have to always fight for,” Silver said. “These white, privileged oligarch men are so scared of the progress that has been made. They are not going to limit their privilege and their power without a big fight. This only means that we were moving and progressing, and that the world was actually having the opportunity to become equal and have equity and inclusion. The issue here is that they’re not going to let go of this power. And so what does this tell me? To never give up.”

Kimberly Skeete has worked in health care in Palm Springs, since 2017. She chairs the Association of Nurses in AIDS Care (ANAC). Her work in gender-affirming care led to the creation of DAP Health’s first gender-affirming care team. Skeete currently works in private research at BIOS Clinical Research, where she advocates for equitable access to clinical studies for transgender and gender non-conforming individuals, as well as other marginalized communities.

Speaking at the rally, Skeete introduced herself as a Black trans woman. She talked about the power of solidarity and asked rally participants to “lean into empathy.”

Skeete later told the Independent, “I’ve had the privilege of working at all three of the big health-care organizations in the desert. I’ve done a lot of advocacy; I’ve done a lot of research surrounding infectious disease and prevention. As you know, women, specifically Black women, are some of the most vulnerable to being susceptible to HIV.

“I think now more than ever, we have to realize that we are stronger united. We’re stronger together. Your walk of life might be different from my walk of life, you know. I’ll never be able to walk in your shoes. But I can at least walk beside you while you walk in those shoes. I can be empathetic to your journey, as it might look different from mine. We can paint the same picture with different brushes.”

Alexis Moore has been in the United States since the ’60s. She lives in Desert Hot Springs and maintains dual Canadian/American citizenship. Moore said it was important for her to be at the protest, “to be with like-minded people (who are) resisting what’s happening in the entire country.”

Moore said she’s considered returning to Canada if things get much worse under the current administration—and she is willing to help others expatriate. “I can sponsor up to 15 people if they’d like to come,” she said.

She said she knows of folks who have already returned to Canada.

“We live in a community where there are quite a few Canadian snowbirds—a few that (left) and haven’t come back,” Moore said. “And my sister-in-law, she’s Canadian. She married an American, and the last time Trump took office, she left and did not come back.”

Maddison Eberts is a doula and student midwife. She said she knew at a young age that birth-work was a calling. She recently moved back to the valley and got into community organizing about a year ago.

“I’ve always been a very politically active person, but I actually got involved locally in the past year, and then became an organizer and a leader in the last few months,” Eberts said. “I volunteered with the Harris/Waltz campaign, and then Californians for Choice as well. Now I volunteer with Planned Parenthood. I helped plan the People’s March this year in January. I’m also an organizer with Code Pink Coachella Valley. I’m very passionate about human rights in general, but specifically reproductive rights,” Ebert said.

Ebert told the Independent that while the work of a doula is very personal, the act of giving women the freedom to choose can be extremely political. “Primarily, my work is localized; it’s face to face with my clients, ensuring that doulas are accessible.

“I think that it’s very important to realize that birth work is political, and will always be political. It’s very tied up in women’s rights and autonomy, and unfortunately, I think we’re seeing a large regression in those areas.”

Eberts said she hopes advocating for reproductive rights and access to health care at the local level can make a difference on a global scale. “America is seen as the blueprint for a lot of countries, and we have tremendous global impact and influence. Women are not sitting back and letting things happen with the current administration; we are raising our voices and getting in the streets and pushing back on fascism.”

Former Palm Springs City Councilmember Lisa Middleton told the Independent that local organizing is essential, especially in the current political climate.

“I think it is critically important to build institutions both from the bottom up and from the top down,” Middleton said. “When you have the kind of pressure coming from the federal government that has been unleashed by this administration, those institutions that we have built up locally become absolutely essential.”

Susannah Delano isn’t a local; she lives in Northern California, but as the head of Close the Gap, a nonprofit consulting firm that recruits progressive women to run for the Legislature, Delano is pushing for gender parity in the state. Close the Gap has contributed to the increase of women in the California Legislature, with 25 Close the Gap candidates serving currently. Eighteen of them are women of color. Overall, women hold 59 of the Legislature’s 120 seats—one short of 50 percent.

Delano said getting women elected makes good economic sense.

“We’ve never really had the chance as a nation or a state or a region to see women sitting around the decision-making table in equal numbers,” Delano said. “There is a lot of research and experience to suggest that women take a fundamentally different approach to governing. It’s really relevant right now, because the hallmarks of women’s leadership really are a comprehensive approach, looking at the full circle of people impacted by a given issue. It’s very economic; it’s about day-to-day: How do you pay the bills? How does everyone get taken care of? There’s definitely an orientation toward caregiving, but particularly with an economic point of view.”

Delano said events like International Women’s Day can build connections between people around the world and help increase solidarity.

“People on the ground all over the world are struggling right now, economically, in terms of more repressive governments. And to connect the struggles that we have been having, (that) seem to be intensified in the U.S., to similar issues all around the world, is powerful,” Delano said.

Raising awareness is key, she said. “Visibility and showing up are always important. Any progress we’ve ever made anywhere in the world as women, there’s been some sort of a movement behind it. So showing up and showing out, particularly when freedoms and safety are under attack, is really critical—and it can be a jumping-off point for more direct pathways to change. Like, after the Women’s March in 2017, there was a pivot toward elections and getting more people registered to vote, running new candidates, and getting new donors activated around issues that fundamentally tie back to women, at every single level … and we saw some big change. I think you could make the argument that we wouldn’t have had the outcomes we had in the 2020 election without these small periods of reinvigoration, commitment and activity.”

For Cervantes, this moment in time is sobering. She knows she is carrying the mantle of leaders she has read about in history books.

“It not only angers me to see where we are now, but this is exactly what I learned about,” Cervantes said. “Now, being older, an elected official, a mother, and having my whole career rooted in serving the community (and) fulfilling what my grandparents and parents raised me to do … I know we have that power when we come together.

“People have always been at the core of moving and changing history, as I shared with the group. … But you know that saying: History will repeat itself if we do not, essentially, intervene to change the course of history.”