Sometimes we write history when millions of us are in motion. At other times we leave our footprints in the actions of a small collective, always part of the enormous masses and always the product of the masses.
Sometimes we communists, perhaps not wanting to be arrogant, are the first to underestimate or ignore this historic role. The saying goes that a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. But it's easy to forget that we got where we are because of that first step. Today we remember the steps that Norma took as part of a revolutionary communist collective. In her thirty-seven years as a communist, Norma helped achieve four historic milestones that continue to mark the communist road that our class will take to its final liberation.

Rooting the Party in the Working Class
Norma joined the Party in Los Angeles in 1976, when almost all its members were students and professionals, mostly white. A communist party like that cannot survive for long. Many undocumented immigrants with a lot of revolutionary fervor joined and played a key role in transforming the Party into one in which most members were men and women industrial workers. Norma helped a lot in this. When we met her, she had already spent seven of her twenty-one years as an industrial worker in maquilas in El Salvador. She gave important leadership to Party clubs in the LA garment industry. Comrade garment workers struggled almost daily against some of the most exploitative and racist bosses in the US, leading strikes and work stoppages and demonstrations, leafleting, organizing study groups, and recruiting more workers to the Party. Thanks to this collective effort, we took a step that was seemingly small, but was really a giant step. Communist parties that are incapable of making this transition, and those that lose their working-class composition, tend to disappear. This happened to some of our party organizations in the US and our fraternal parties in Canada and Puerto Rico. Thanks to Norma and her collective, our Party in Los Angeles remained firm, continues firm, and is advancing.

Fighting Those Who Betray Revolutionary Ideals
Also during the 1970s and 1980s, Norma played another important role: again, as part of a communist collective and again, something that seemed of little importance. However, we must now appreciate its true historic impact. In that period, our Party was in a life-anddeath political struggle against the old international communist movement.
Even though it had betrayed its revolutionary ideals, that organization still had much influence among the oppressed masses, leading millions in reform struggles, electoral struggles for socialism and armed struggles for national liberation.
While combatting the bosses' huge anti-communist campaign, we had to struggle against the ideology in the mass movements led by these traitors in Vietnam, Chile, Cuba, El Salvador, Nicaragua, South Africa, and elsewhere. The former communists claimed to be the solution but only led our class to be slaughtered while trading one capitalist- imperialist yoke for another.
Against all odds, men and women workers like Norma helped keep the red flag of proletarian revolution flying high. Our enemies branded us utopian, ultra-leftists, even as CIA agents. But history has proven that we were correct. None of those countries—including Russia and China— today inspires the masses in motion. The leaders of the armed movements in Central America are today part of the bourgeoisie or their henchmen attacking the working class.
Our Party survived and has grown internationally in Mexico, El Salvador, Honduras and Spain, thanks to the efforts of Norma and other comrades in Southern California who stood firm against the onslaught of our enemies, recruiting more workers and renewing our commitment and confidence in the working class.

Fighting Directly for Communism
Another historic milestone was our decision to change our political line from fighting for socialism to fighting directly for communism. Some abandoned the Party because this was contrary to the teachings of Marx. Norma, as part of the collective, defended fighting directly for communism and we continue to defend this position.
The science of the working class—not limited by what Marx wrote—is nurtured and advanced by the experience of the struggle of the masses. It is called "dialectical and historic materialism" and it irrefutably proves us correct. Norma attended workshops on dialectical materialism in Delano, California, and led dialectics discussions in Party garment workers' clubs in Los Angeles.

Mobilizing the Masses for Communism
We have reached the decade of the 2010's. All these advances steeled us for the fourth giant, historic step of organizing a communist party of a new type: the International Communist Workers' Party.
Norma was one of those who saw clearly that the old party had become reformist. When the decisive moment came, she boldly supported the split necessary to form the new Party.
"Traveler, there is no road. You make the road by walking," quoted a friend at Norma's memorial.
"Our victory will be glorious when one day we break the chains and all the diseases and capitalist evils will be smashed forever."
Norma's life inspires us to continue and deepen the heroic struggle to mobilize the masses for communism, the cause to which she and others dedicated their lives. Her example lights up the path she helped to build, the path to victory for the workers of the world.

For Norma!
And well here you are now…in the place where it is always day,
Where the ugly are always beautiful and eternally young!
The place where we are all one and we are many more than two.
The place where the powerful do not abuse the weak.
And it will not be in a cemetery because your memory is in another place
It is multiplied in the memory of so many people whom you
touched and all the workers whom you organized.
Norma, daughter of a strong and courageous woman!
Norma, mother of dreams of struggle and of change!
Norma, wife of ideals struggled for shoulder to shoulder!
Norma, friend of those nourished by your love for the working class!
But more than anything Norma, LEADER: of workers who believed in your creed
And thus through the revolution and change they followed you!
And now in the middle of the inner changes, your skull full of a new ife instead of thoughts
Will give flowers!
There end the earthly ties, and the wise and the idiot join in the region of equals!
But there! Where the spirit becomes exhausted and the machine appears right there. The being that dies is another being that springs forth!
THAT AT THE END OF THIS TRANSITORY EXISTENCE TO WHICH IN OUR ZEAL WE TRY TO CLING
MATTER, IMMORTAL LIKE ETERNITY
CHANGES FORM BUT NEVER DIES!