Meet your Sacramento Chapter Co-Presidents!

Alma Itzé Flores and Mya Dosch, your union chapter co-presidents, are the focus of this installment of Member Highlights. These two people have their own unique paths to union work, so let’s take a moment to hear about what made them want to be union members.

Meet Alma Itzé Flores!

From a young age, I have personally seen the impact of unions on my immigrant working-class family. I can still see my grandfather, Bolo, driving around his white pick up truck with his “union strong” bumper sticker. He was always a proud union worker. It’s for this reason why I quickly signed my union membership card when I started at Sac State fall of 2018. Yet, little did I know how much more of an impact CFA would have on my trajectory at Sac State. During my faculty orientation I found out I was pregnant with my son Xoaquín. While I was very excited, I also felt very unsure and nervous about how I would navigate this new chapter in my life- as a new faculty member and parent. As I prepared for the arrival of my son, I quickly realized how little support and benefits there are for parents in the CSU. Navigating the bureaucracy of the CSU made me feel so marginalized and dehumanized.

Frustrated, I turned to CFA. I connected with other parents across CSU and we began a campaign to improve the working conditions for parents in the CSU. At Sac State, I pushed our campus president to provide affordable and accessible childcare. At the time I started, the on-campus daycare had very little space for faculty since it primarily serves students. Shortly after this, Bright Path to Learning opened to provide more affordable and quality childcare for Sac State faculty. My daughter, Luna, now attends this center. In addition to childcare, we pushed for more lactation/nursing spaces on campus. Since I started at Sac, the number of these spaces have increased. During COVID, we also organized and pushed for release time so early career faculty could gain back so much of the time we had lost during the early phase of the pandemic. We did this particularly for mother scholars, because I knew we were carrying a disproportionate amount of invisible labor during this time and was concerned about the impact this would have on our careers and tenure. Our biggest win though, has been the increase in paid parental leave from 6 to 10 weeks, and I remain committed to winning us a full semester of paid leave. All of these changes would not have been possible without our union. 

I am starting my 7th year at Sac State and I am so proud to be a union member. I am especially excited to embrace a co-leadership model rooted in feminist values and social justice with Mya. Our move to a co-president model is intentional. We believe in inclusive and equitable leadership that is rooted in care and invites broader participation in union governance. I look forward to building and disrupting!

In community,

Alma

Meet Mya Dosch!

“I learned the value of a union young – my grandfather was a high school teacher and basketball coach in rural Wisconsin. He was fired from his teaching job. According to family lore, this firing was, in part, because the superintendent’s son was not getting enough playing time in basketball games, and my grandpa refused to take him off the bench. The union fought against his removal, and he got his job back. 

The union gave my grandparents, and therefore my mother, a stable life. It’s as simple as that.

At Sacramento State, I became a union member during 2018, my first year on campus, and got involved because I was interested in pushing CALPERS to divest our pensions from for-profit prisons and immigration detention centers. I saw the intense trauma that these detention centers caused for transgender asylum-seekers in our community. 

CFA leaders immediately supported this campaign. A team of CFA members on our campus collected hundreds of postcards to deliver to the CalPERS board (thanks if you signed!), and dozens of CFA members lined up to testify at the board meetings. I saw the power of this organizing when CalPERS agreed to divest in 2019.

And, I see the importance of union protections in my classroom every semester. I teach large GE art history classes, and College administrators frequently attempted to add 5-10 more students to already packed 70-student sections. When I mention that I want to speak about these additional students with a union rep present, they often back down. The power of our union is evident!

In this time of rising fascism and attacks on higher education, immigrants, and trans folks, we need solidarity more than ever before.I’m looking forward to continuing to build a powerful CFA chapter on our campus, with a great team! If you are interested in getting more involved, reach out to me at mdosch@calfac.org to join our College Advocates group.”