Why the stories working people tell ourselves about ourselves matter

Over the 2026 Labor Day weekend, I had the honor of speaking at the Reuther-Pollack Labor History Symposium in Wheeling, West Virginia, organized by the Wheeling Academy of Law & Science (WALS) Foundation. The symposium takes place in Wheeling every year and adopts a different theme each year; this year, the theme was “The Art of Labor.” I got to represent TRNN and speak alongside a truly incredible lineup of artists and working-class warriors, including: Tabitha Arnold, the great textile artist and tapestry maker; Erik Ruin, printmaker and shadow puppeteer; and Shaun Slifer, a multidisciplinary artist and the Creative Director for the West Virginia Mine Wars Museum.

The text below is a transcript of the talk I gave at this year’s Symposium, which has been lightly edited for clarity and readability. You can also listen to the audio recording of my speech on The Real News Network podcast feed.

https://www.spreaker.com/show/2952221/episodes/feed

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Thank you. It is genuinely an honor to be here on these hallowed grounds with all of you in Wheeling, West Virginia. It really, really means a lot to me to be here with all of you.

I also have to say: I really appreciate it when Vince or anyone else tells me that that first-ever Working People interview I recorded with my dad, Jesus Alvarez, meant something to them—because it meant everything to me. It started everything.

I didn’t start out to become a labor journalist or to do the kinds of interviews I do with working people. I didn’t set out to make a life reporting on working-class struggles from working-class areas around the country, on the front lines of a class war that is hitting all of us in similar and different ways. I didn’t start out to be or do any of that. I started because I didn’t want my dad, the greatest man I know, to go to his grave feeling like a failure after we had lost everything during the Recession, including the house I grew up in, just like millions of other families. And we have continued to struggle, just like millions and millions and billions of us around the world have continued to struggle. And so, to be here standing in front of all of you—having started the show back then as a ruse to get my dad to talk about something he was so deeply depressed about and wouldn’t talk about—it means a whole lot for me and my family.

I really do want to thank all of you for being here. And of course, I want to thank Seán P. Duffy, Vincent DeGeorge, and everyone at the WALS Foundation for bringing us all together here on this hallowed ground.

I came here today from Baltimore to talk with you all about why stories matter to me, and why I believe they matter to us, or should matter more.

I wouldn’t be here without the stories that made me. And the same is true for all of us and every one of us.

And when I say “I wouldn’t be here,” to start, I mean it literally. I quite literally and very quantifiably would not be standing here right now, speaking in this room with you all, alongside all these amazing people—none of you would have ever had to hear my name or see my ugly face, if I wasn’t such a hopeless, relentless, lifelong lover of stories.

(Also, I know y’all were hoping Kim Kelly would be here today. I apologize, I am no Kim Kelly. I am a fill-in for Kim Kelly, but I am one-third of the tattoos and one-third of the talent. So that’s what you’re getting today!)

I wouldn’t be doing the work that I do now as a journalist and Co-Executive Director of a news organization, I certainly wouldn’t be doing it the way I do it, I would not have pursued all those ill-advised degrees in literature before that, I would not have written or said or filmed all the things that I have and will, if I wasn’t an eternal believer in the awesome, human-making, history-making, and society-making power of stories.

Whether I’m reading them, writing them, watching them, listening to them, studying them, teaching them, recording them, filming them, remembering them, dreaming about them, thinking about them, or thinking through them, I love stories, and I need stories to live. Always have, ever since I can remember remembering anything.

Like any fool in love would do, I followed that need wherever it took me. I have madly chased it headfirst into the best and worst times of my life. It got me to the most beautiful, ivy covered college campuses I’ve ever seen, and it got me through the most body-crushing, mind-numbing, soul-rotting jobs I’ve ever had. It led me to my wife and fellow literature dweeb Meg, who’s sitting back there, and it opened up the path for me to make the purpose-filled life I have now, and to do the purpose-filled work I do now.

I have continued to chase that love and that need for stories headfirst into the best and worst places in the world, where the best and worst of humanity is on display. From picket lines to protest marches, from union halls to student encampments on college campuses, from the horror-filled halls of immigration courts where masked federal thugs are kidnapping and disappearing innocent people daily, to rural, urban, and suburban communities fighting data centers all over the country, from “deep red” Texas to “deep blue” Maryland, from Occupied Palestine to East Palestine, Ohio, from communities that have been devastated by poverty, industrial pollution, and organized abandonment and disinvestment to communities that have been devastated by plant closures and school shootings, from poisoned coal mining towns in West Virginia to poisoned neighborhoods in South Baltimore where that very same coal ends up, where that very same coal sits and moves through the giant coal terminal pier right next to people’s houses, and where that very same coal ends up in the poisoned lung tissue of the people who live there and have been inhaling that toxic coal dust for generations.

I have followed my need for stories and our people’s need to have our stories told and heard. I have followed that need to wherever I need to be, and I have followed it all the way here to Wheeling, West Virginia. (You wanna talk about stories? There are a few more storied places than this.)

And though it has caused me and my family more pain and grief and debt and disappointment along the way than I can ever possibly sum up to you, I have learned to check myself by asking myself: If the need that I have, if the love that I’ve followed, brought me to this beautiful place and gave me the chance to be here now with you beautiful people, then how can it be wrong?

If that need and that love has led me to my life’s continuing work of lifting up the stories of our fellow workers around the US and around the world, of using every medium and platform and every tool and skill I have to offer to help people find confidence in their own voice and share their story in their own words—if it has guided me to the frontlines of the class war to report the news through the stories and voices and faces and lives and bodies and souls and firsthand realities of the people at the center of “the story”—if that absurd, magical, lifelong pursuit of stories has in any way helped me help other working people like me and my family believe that their stories are actually worth telling and hearing and remembering, that their lives truly do matter more than this world has led us to believe and that we all truly do deserve better than what this world has forced us to accept—and if it has helped me help others see that we can get better and make a better world the better we are to each other and the more we share our stories and listen to each other’s stories—if my love and my need for stories and my belief in stories has contributed anything at all to that, then how can it not be worth it?

But when I say, “I wouldn’t be here without the stories that made me,” I also mean it in the sense that I wouldn’t be the “I” that I am. I am me because of the stories that made me, the stories that made me more me than who I was before I experienced them, the stories that continue to make me who I am now and who I will be in all those versions of me to come.

I come from a family of storytellers. Being here in West Virginia, I got a sense you guys will know what I’m talking about. One of many things Mexicans and West Virginians have in common. I am the me that I am because of the people who raised me, the people who are and continue to be my life, the people who taught me how to live and be a person and become a self through their presences, their absences, and their stories. The stories they told and the stories they showed me and my siblings. Stories that hit back to the deepest end of my childhood beginnings of consciousness, stories that built my consciousness, stories that brought me out of human mud and helped shape me into human being.

For the same reasons I can always remember it being such a natural feeling to look out car windows and be fascinated and dazzled by all the warm lights of being out there, all those other homes and other lives people-like-me-but-not-me are living—for the same reasons I’ve always wondered about those other homes and lives and people—for all the same reasons I have always projected myself outward onto them and thought about them out of genuine curiosity and interest and goodwill—and for all the same reasons I have grown as a person the more I consider selves and lives that are not mine, I have always been naturally drawn to stories as a lifesource. Stories my family told me, stories I heard on the radio or saw on the TV, stories I read, stories I created.

Stories about human-beings-like-me-but-not-me, living in selves-and-bodies-like-mine-but-not-mine, living in times, places, circumstances, and worlds that are not the ones I live in and experience everyday. Stories that take my lifeworld and my perspective and open them up, open me up, to lives-like-mine-but-not-mine, to human perspectives other than the only perspective I can ever have and have ever had ever since I was born, ever since I’ve been me, Maximillian Lee Alvarez. All those stories now live on in me, and will continue to live on in me, so long as I live on as me.

Those stories live on through me in the impressions they have left on me. And they will continue to live on in me as formative parts of the person I became once those stories and my experiences of them became part of me. And they will continue to be a part of me and every version of me—all those selves I’ll ever become—so long as I am gifted to live on this earth as me.

These stories live on in the words I say and in the stories I tell to others. Because they have shaped the “me” that I am and the ways I use language to communicate with others and with myself, and the ways I use language to communicate myself to others and to myself.

They live on in the ways I cope with pain and failure, and what I learn from them.

Those stories live on in my thoughts and in the way I think. Now and for the rest of my life, they have their place in the vast, dazzling multiverse of mindstuff that my mind has to draw upon and remember from and think and dream and imagine with.

Over my lifetime, the stories I’ve found, the stories I’ve made, and the stories I’ve been told have shaped, challenged, corrected, sharpened, and reinforced my internal sense of right and wrong, good and evil, beautiful and ugly, and what it means to be good, do good, and live a good life.

And if you’re feeling lost about those things right now, I’m telling you: Go back to our stories! We are not the only ones to face hard times. Our ancestors who faced such times left us their stories so that we would know what to do now. Don’t let those stories go to waste! There is power in them. We have power in them. (More on that in a minute.)

All those stories live on in the ways I try and have tried and will try to live and act and see and be in the world, in the ways I try and have tried and will try to see and treat other people and other life. And again, what I’m saying is true for me is, I fully believe, true for each and every one of us. And that on its own—even if you just take the people here in this room—is a miracle of life and nature and god and a joyous wonder to behold, on par with gazing out at the stars in the sky!

And yet, we so disinterestedly take all this for granted every day. We don’t appreciate stories enough, including our own stories and the stories of others. And I don’t think we appreciate this enough about the stories that make us and the roles stories play in making us human (and the role storylessness plays in our loss of humanity).

Just like we have been trained and trained ourselves to accept an unacceptable culture of violence and mass death that takes and destroys life everywhere with the kind of scale and self-serving abandon that would make the ancient gods of old blush, we have been trained and trained ourselves to lose touch with the magical, life-giving force of stories. And our life-sustaining love for stories has been beaten out of us by AI slop, by a shitty, commercialized culture industry, by living under capitalism and end-times fascism, etc. I get why we feel that way, and I feel it, too. But there’s something really, really wrong there.

Like our air and water and soil and atmosphere, I think we have been trained and trained ourselves to let stories be poisoned and polluted for so long that we will at worst cheer on their destruction or at best live monotonously without any urgent sense of duty or need to stop the destruction. Both paths inevitably lead to the same place: our own peril as a people, a society, and a species.

That’s why I think we miss the magic of stories and the magic in stories that’s all around us, available to us in so many forms, living in our heads and shaping who we are every day.

That’s why I think we tend to look at stories and the stories of others so mistrustfully or disinterestedly or scornfully or selfishly. We tend these days to not look for stories at all, let alone stories that challenge us and grow us. We don’t give them our time, and so many that are shoved in our faces aren’t worth our ime. And when we do look for them, we often look for the stories that we already know or stories that ultimately serve to stop us from growing and knowing more, stories that serve to stunt our being and reinforce the selves and prejudices we already have. What a waste of good magic!

Of course, we all want stories like that to some extent, and we all need stories that function like that to some extent. We all watched The Office five times during Covid. That’s fine. But what I’m talking about goes much deeper.

I’ll use myself as an example to try to explain.

I grew up in Southern California, post-Cold War, in the ‘90s. We were a middle-class mixed-immigrant family. We were the American Dream. And that’s why my dad and my mom and my family were so depressed after the 2008 Crash and the Recession, because we had had and lost the American Dream, and that really does a number on you and your soul.

The era I grew up in before the Crash was an era of America in which a lot of the dreams that I was foolish enough to have for my life still felt possible. And over the last 25-30 years, I think a lot of us have come to the awakening that many of those dreams, our dreams, are not possible in America anymore. At least not for working people like us. And after doing this kind of work for nearly a decade now, I’ve gotten confirmation from working people all over this country that I’m not the only one who feels that way.

It’s a real gift to contain all those different selves that I’ve been over my life, including the deep-red-conservative, Orange County dumbass who didn’t know much about life. I don’t despise or regret that version of myself, I accept him for all his faults. And I know I had a lot of right reasons for believing the wrong things back then. And I know that I still have so many good parts of me that were there in me when I was a conservative and that are here in me now as the lefty nut job you see before you. Because they’re just good things about being a good person. I don’t care who taught them to me, I’m just grateful they did.

I don’t see people in rigid identity or ideology boxes, and I try not to see myself that way either. And I definitely don’t like to see stories that way. And it’s in part because of stories that I don’t see the world that way. And yet, in this country, that is the way that we have trained ourselves to see each other and ourselves and our stories.

I remember being that younger, more conservative-type person and going into a Barnes & Noble and saying, “I want to read good, classic literature.” And the employee I talked to was like, “Oh, do you want French literature? Spanish literature? Feminist literature? African-American literature?” And I remember saying, “No, no, no. I want literature. I don’t want any of those ‘special interests.’”

That was a very juvenile way for me to think and feel about literature, but I think a lot of us can still relate to that feeling. I’m so grateful to literature especially, and to all the storytellers in my life and all the storytellers I’ve come across in my life, for teaching me over time, and for constantly reminding me, that that’s not what stories are there for. I’m grateful to them for teaching me how much it cheapens our relationship to stories—and the potential and beauty and magic we can derive from them—when we look at them and treat them this way. And stories themselves are the cure for this sickness. The more I read literature of all kinds, the less I thought about stories this way. The more I loved and connected with literature of all kinds, the more I grew and felt and thought and developed as a person with different kinds of me inside.

And so, I learned a very valuable lesson early on in life: That literature about other people, and that stories about other people—from other people’s perspectives, about the ways that they are living as people in this world—are not a threat to who I am. They make me who I am. They grow who I am.

And it’s for those reasons that it seems so clear and obvious when I say, “I wouldn’t be here without the stories that made me, and you wouldn’t be here without the stories that made you.”

Think of all those stories that still live in your head today, that you still talk about with your friends and siblings, that you still have living somewhere in the recesses of your mind as warm memories of reading a good book, watching a good movie, or having a good conversation.

For me, I think about sitting in my living room with my whole family back home, watching the movie Glory, the epic historical drama about the 54th Massachusetts, the first Black regiment to fight in the Civil War. Why did our whole family of Alvarezes connect with that movie? I could go on a whole dissertation about why we connected with that movie (but I won’t do it here, don’t worry). We bawled our eyes out watching it then, and I still bawl my eyes out when I watch it now. We saw so much of ourselves—the Americans we believed we were, the America we believed we lived in and believed we were a part of—in that movie. And we clearly weren’t the only ones.

It doesn’t matter that I don’t know what it’s like to be a “freed” Black slave in the Antebellum South; and it doesn’t threaten my understanding or sense of being to watch a movie that storytellers, story-makers, and story-actors have produced to try to help me understand. It enhances my being. It gives me more access to beings- and selves- and lives-like-mine-but-not-mine, and they then become part of my experience and shape who I am and how I am in the world.

That’s part of the magic I’m talking about, the magic that makes us who we are, which we all just take for granted. It’s like we put on glasses that removed the power of stories from our vision, made it invisible to us. But it’s there. It’s all around us. It’s there in us.

It was there when I was listening to Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car” while driving here to Wheeling. Truly, one of the most beautiful stories about love and working-class life ever told in our language. And no matter what stage of my life I was in, it didn’t matter to me that I didn’t know what it was like to live as a Black, working-class lesbian in the industrial Midwest around the ‘80s and ‘90s. I still knew enough to know that to live was to love, to seek love, to be loved, and to pursue happiness, and I still knew enough to know why it is a heartbreaking tragedy for someone to have their love and their lives and their happiness denied or taken from them.

Who among us human beings hasn’t feared making the wrong choice immortalized in Chapman’s line, “We got to make a decision: leave tonight or live and die this way”? Who among us living people cannot relate to the pain and fear and drama and yearning in the stories of other people who spend their precious, short time on this earth living unfulfilled, unhappy lives full of unrequited love and unrealized dreams, even if they weren’t our dreams?

I could relate to that even as a kid. I relate to it so much more now as an adult, now that I am far more aware of the limited time we in general and I specifically have to live. And that gives me so much more capacity to feel empathy and solidarity with others whose lives and loves and happiness and flourishing are beaten, crushed, lost, or denied. How could I feel anything but the natural human solidarity my heart feels when listening to Chapman’s song? And how can I not remember that listening to the song as a kid helped me begin to imagine and explore the unknown emotional depths of my own human heart?

The specifics of the story and the selves involved do not describe the specific story and self I already know as my own, but they still embody dramatically heightened versions of what I have known and experienced in my own life, dramatically and beautifully heightened versions of our human experience of life and love and loss and yearning.

None of the details that differentiate the story in “Fast Car” and its lovelorn protagonist from my own life story are reasons for me to say, “That’s not my story.” Those are reasons for me to connect with another person’s story—to get closer to them, and to become more myself, the more they and their story become part of me and mine.

Here’s another story. My wife Megan Berkobien just co-translated this book I’m holding in my hand, Goodbye, Ramona by Montserrat Roig.

It’s a beautiful, incredible book. Everyone should go read it. It’s a Catalan novel about Spanish Civil War times. I don’t know what the hell that’s like, but for the same reasons that my Mexican ass got two useless degrees in Russian literature, I don’t care. I don’t need anyone’s cultural permission to connect with my fellow human beings. Reading the stories of other people has only ever given me light and goodness. It’s never taken anything away from me or made me a worse person.

Reading the first chapter of Goodbye, Ramona transports me to the mind of a trapped woman—a woman whose husband is a tyrant and makes her feel powerless—as she wanders like a ghost in the streets looking for him after he has suddenly gone missing in the wake of a bombing in Barcelona. In Roig’s beautiful, harrowing description—and in Meg and Cristina’s beautiful, harrowing translation—you see the damage of his tyranny on her psyche, and you feel the fear and anxiety in the way she describes what she’s doing and what she’s thinking.

That’s the raw, human stuff that makes me feel as close as I can get to living and seeing through the head of another person. What a gift that is! And how necessary it is, especially in times like these when we live and exist so far away from each other, when we are so alienated from each other and isolated from each other, when we can be standing next to other people in the grocery store line or sitting next to each other in traffic but the spaces between us and our minds and hearts feels as vast as the distance between us and the moon.

We have stories to bring us closer, and yet we continue to let capitalism, a broken society, and the wickedness of the powerful push us away from each other. But it doesn’t have to be this way. And I hope that the stories that I have helped to tell, all these stories I’ve recorded and published, will continue to remind people of that. I hope these stories remind people of who we really are and who our neighbors really are. I hope these stories by and for our fellow workers not only remind us that every life is precious, but that they remind us what life is all about. I hope that they remind us what a gift it is that we are all here, and what a cosmic tragedy it is that we allow life itself and our lives to be treated with such inhumane disregard.

That’s why I interviewed the family of a Kroger worker, Evan Seifried, who committed suicide just an hour north of here, in Milford, Ohio, in 2021. And that’s why Evan’s story has impacted me so much.

For 19 years, with a virtually spotless record, Evan worked at a local Kroger grocery store in Milford, where he eventually became the dairy department manager. But from October 2020 to March 2021, Evan suffered a torturous campaign of bullying, harassment, and sabotage from two store managers, and his union abandoned him when he needed help. Evan took his own life, and his family will never be the same, and the world will never be as bright as it was with Evan in it. I thank god that I don’t know firsthand what it’s like to go through such a horrific tragedy, but because I heard them tell it, every other thing about me and my human being feels the Seyfried’s story and their pain and their fight for justice as my own. After learning about Evan’s story and after speaking with his loved ones about his story many times, I am forever changed by him and by them.

So, of course, I thought of Evan and the Seyfrieds, and I thought of my own family, when I saw the soul-crushing news story this past week of Pierre Damas Bel, the poor 20-year old young man who committed suicide in Springfield and walked into traffic after our government slapped a criminal ankle bracelet on him and told him he was a worthless cockroach. I know what it feels like to have others in my own country, even my own government, see me this way. Everyone here has some way of trying to understand what that feels like, but we don’t try hard enough. Stories help us get better at trying. And we need to get better, we need to do better, we need to be better. For Evan, for Pierre, for all of us.

I’m not the same person I was when I walked into that Barnes & Noble way back when looking for “just good literature.” I don’t look to stories or look for stories in that same one-way, transactional mode anymore; I don’t look to stories or look for stories that are just going to reflect me back to me.

I don’t just gravitate to stories that I gravitate to because I see something of me reflected in them. I gravitate to stories because a light in them draws me in, and that light then reflects in me and stays with me after I connect with them.

Every great human-made creation, construction, and operation embodies a whole that would not exist but for the sum of every worker and every ounce of human work that contributed to its existence. All those workers with all their lives and all their labor contributed to bringing all these magnificent things into existence, and all of us workers with all our lives and all our labor contribute to them, improve upon them, and keep them running. So, too, have all these stories contributed to bringing the me that I am into existence. And these stories will continue their work of shaping how I live and act and see and feel and think.

Stories have been and continue to be the most ever-present, ever-abundant, ever-beautiful reminder that I need other people to live, to be, to be me.

And the ever-present, ever-abundant, ever-beautiful number and forms of human stories all around us—all the stories that have already been told, all the stories yet to be told, all the stories that live on in our books, our films, our songs, our campfire tales—each and every one of them is a reminder to us that we need each other, too.