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<\/p>\n\u00a0Giuliana Milanese buttonholes passersby as she trudges up Cortland Avenue.<\/p>\n
\u201cAre you a San Francisco voter?\u201d she asks, proffering an orange Bernal Heights Democratic Club slate card of candidates from her shoulder bag.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Occasionally she adds \u201cparli Italiano?\u201d just in case she meets a paisano.<\/p>\n
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At 82, clad in flannel shirts, a San Francisco Seals baseball cap and sturdy walking shoes, she never slows down, even as the street gets steeper.\u00a0Name a progressive cause in the last 50 years \u2014\u00a0better schools, affordable housing, even bringing down the statue of Christopher Columbus near Coit Tower \u2014\u00a0and the chances are good that Milanese has been involved. The only thing this longtime labor activist, organizer and Bernal resident won\u2019t do any longer, she says:\u00a0\u201cI do not go door knocking anymore or phone banking, cause I might just tell people to fuck off and I don\u2019t want to do that, no, honey!\u201d<\/p>\n
Milanese, born in Oakland in 1944 to Italian immigrants and raised in a flat above their grocery store in Temescal, has been fighting for labor, social justice and anti-racist causes since she was a girl. Twelve years at Holy Names \u201cradicalized me cause it made me sooooo angry! My brother got to go to Oakland Tech with one of the Black Panthers, and I had to go to Holy Names!\u201d<\/p>\n
She reluctantly enrolled at San Francisco State at her mother\u2019s behest, majoring in art and Italian, which she speaks fluently.\u00a0After college, she traveled frequently to Italy to connect with relatives, who introduced her to the Italian Communist Party.<\/p>\n
\u201cAll my aunts in Pavia were communists.\u201d<\/p>\n
Back home, she was active in the civil rights movement and, in 1970, she traveled to Cuba with one of the early Venceremos brigades. <\/a>She attracted the attention of the FBI and, more importantly, of her future husband, Bill Sorro.\u00a0<\/p>\n The youngest of eight, he was born in the Fillmore to Filipino immigrants. He was working as a community organizer, had four children (\u201cBill\u2019s first litter\u201d), and was separated from their mother.\u00a0<\/p>\n Milanese moved into his room at the International Hotel on Kearny Street,\u00a0a decades-old single room occupancy hotel for immigrant Filipino workers. They cooked in a community kitchen down the hall\u2013Milanese got hooked on pork buns and sesame rolls, she recalls \u2013\u00a0and Sorro\u2019s kids stayed with them on the weekends.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThose were some of the best years of my life! The manongs (Tagalog for older brother, it also means Filipino immigrant worker) loved Bill\u2019s kids; they left their own kids in the Philippines, or never had kids, and they embraced ours.\u201d<\/p>\n Milanese and Sorro married in a ceremony at the I Hotel in 1973. Complete with a roasted pig.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was great, but not a good place for a baby, so in 1975 before Giulio was born, we moved to Bernal Heights where Bill\u2019s mom and some siblings lived.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n By then she and Sorro were deeply committed to the fight to save the I-Hotel,<\/a> which had been bought by developers. Eviction took nine years.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThe only action I didn\u2019t do was chain myself to the fence because I was pregnant at the time,\u201d she says. By then, Milanese had joined the Communist Party and become its Northern California organizer. She renounced the Party after traveling to Moscow in 1987 with a study group,\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cI got a bad feeling in the USSR,\u201d she grimaces, \u201cand furthermore, the CP was very good on workers\u2019 rights, on blacks and Latinos, but they were absent on the gay question, the Asian question, and women.\u201d<\/p>\n She voted to leave the party at their annual convention in Cleveland, in 1992.<\/p>\n She adds cheerfully, \u201cI loved the Italian communist party cause they were completely independent, they weren\u2019t Maoist or Trotskyist. \u201c<\/p>\n After the loss of the I-Hotel, Sorro worked as an ironworker\u2013becoming one of the first men of color to integrate the union\u2013and then as an activist, especially for housing. His work is memorialized in the Bill Sorro Housing Program,<\/a> a nonprofit dedicated to creating affordable housing, and the Bill Sorro Community <\/a>at 1009 Howard Street, an affordable housing complex built in 2017.\u00a0<\/p>\n Five years before he died of cancer, he spoke about his wife in a 2002 KQED documentary. \u201cGiuli\u2019s the love of my life,\u201d he says in the film, \u201cShe\u2019s my comrade, my sister, my lover, my best friend. She really helped show me about manhood and what strength really is about. One of the secrets is to bite your tongue and listen. And your sister, your friend, can show you a whole bunch.\u201d<\/p>\n While Sorro worked for affordable housing, Milanese got involved with the city\u2019s public schools where their sons, Giulio and Joaquin, were enrolled. (Her older son is a high school teacher, and her younger son works at Edgewood Center for Children and Families. She has four grandchildren.)<\/p>\n \u00a0That was in 1990 and Tom Ammiano, who would later become a SF Supervisor and state assemblyman, was on the school board and was under fire for his support of AIDS education.\u00a0Giuliana supported him, volunteered on his campaign for supervisor, and \u201cwas with me in the hospital when my partner died of AIDS in 1994, five days before I was elected Supervisor,\u201d Ammiano says. \u201cGiuliana is one of the reasons I\u2019ve had a successful political career.\u201d<\/p>\n In 1995, she signed on as an organizer for the California Nurses Association, working on campaigns around single payer initiative, safe staffing, stopping the closure of units, fighting managed care, and training nurses to do public speaking.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m most proud of training nurses to speak out, to talk at PTA meetings, at senior centers, at public forums to discuss single payer, to explain healthcare for all,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n She worked there 12 years, retiring in 2007 to care for Sorro.<\/p>\n With age, Milanese no longer travels to Italy, but she\u2019s still active. Currently she is on the board of Coleman Advocates for Children and Youth<\/a>, and 48 Hills<\/a>, the online daily news site.<\/p>\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/giuliane-863x640.png\")
Giuliana Milanese leading a demonstration with the California Nurses Association.<\/p>\n
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