Vega, Eric
VEGA, ERIC (1951-2021). An active socialist and longtime leader in the Sacramento, California, Chicano movement, Vega emerged during the 1980s as an important figure in the Rainbow Coalition. He gained prominence as a community organizer, educator, and sometime Maoist. Later he was active in the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).
Born in 1951, Vega was the child of emigrants from Mexico fleeing the continuing unrest set loose by the Mexican Revolution. The family found work in the agricultural fields, in canneries, and on the railroad. Vega joined the US Air Force after leaving high school and quickly developed antiwar sentiments. Coming out of the air force in 1974, he imbibed the Chicano political and cultural flowering. He became an especially eager, influential activist in the Chicano circles of graphic arts, theater and poetry in the 1970s and 1980s. Later, he became a founder of the Arts and Culture Center, the Sacramento Sol Collective.
Like many others of his time, Vega entered the New Communist Movement that established vibrant organizing projects in Chicano communities and fell into disarray by 1980. He shifted ground tactically, becoming a state policy advocate in the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF), later Director of the Sacramento Human Rights Commission, chair and primary organizer of the Sacramento Civil Rights Network and chair of the California Civil Rights Conference from 1994 to 1996.
Vega’s activity with fellow socialists in the Jesse Jackson campaigns of 1984 and 1988, among other projects, prompted him to join DSA. He became a professor of Chicano/Ethnic studies at California State University-Sacramento, where he served as faculty sponsor and mentor to Movimento Estudiantil Chicanos de Atzlan. He also joined DSA's Latino Commission, where he played a key role immigrant rights, NAFTA and other issues.
In 1994, Vega chaired the Sacramento campaign to oppose the (successful) California Proposition 187, the well-known anti-immigration initiative. Mobilizations continued in 1996 with opposition to California Proposition 209, an anti-affirmative action initiative. Vega led efforts in the region to recruit and train organizers to get out the vote, particularly in barrios and Spanish-speaking neighborhoods. He applied a similar strategy to as series of other campaigns. These propositions were later repealed, as the state’s demography changed.
In 1995, Vega was elected to the National Political Committee of DSA, where he served for four years, representing an effective Latino voice and badly needed representation of West Coast Mexican-Americans and others within the socialist movement. With his energetic participation, and Dolores Delgado Campbell’s leadership of the DSA Latino Commission, Sacramento became a major site of Chicano activism within DSA. He personally strengthened and extended this effort by leading the ethnic studies programs at the university, providing an ongoing recruitment and training ground for bringing activists into the Latino Commission of DSA. In the twenty-first century, his key cultural work, the Sol Collective, continues as a vibrant effort to engage and involve young people in their own music, arts, and politics.