People We Meet: ‘All my aunts in Pavia were Communists’ 

Giuliana Milanese buttonholes passersby as she trudges up Cortland Avenue.

“Are you a San Francisco voter?” she asks, proffering an orange Bernal Heights Democratic Club slate card of candidates from her shoulder bag. 

Occasionally, she adds, “parli Italiano?” just in case she meets a paisano.

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. 

Name a progressive cause in the last 50 years — better schools, affordable housing, even bringing down the statue of Christopher Columbus near Coit Tower — and the chances are good that Milanese has been involved.

The only thing this longtime labor activist, organizer and Bernal resident won’t do any longer, she says: “I do not go door knocking anymore or phone banking, ’cause I might just tell people to fuck off, and I don’t want to do that. No, honey!”

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 “radicalized 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!”

She reluctantly enrolled at San Francisco State University at her mother’s behest, majoring in art and Italian, which she speaks fluently. After college, she traveled frequently to Italy to connect with relatives, who introduced her to the Italian Communist Party.

“All my aunts in Pavia were communists.”

Back home, she was active in the civil rights movement and, in 1970, she traveled to Cuba with one of the early Venceremos brigades. She attracted the attention of the FBI and, more importantly, of her future husband, Bill Sorro. 

The youngest of eight, he was born in the Fillmore to Filipino immigrants. He was working as a community organizer, had four children (“Bill’s first litter”), and was separated from their mother. 

Milanese moved into his room at the International Hotel on Kearny Street, a decades-old single room occupancy hotel for immigrant Filipino workers. They cooked in a community kitchen down the hall; Milanese got hooked on pork buns and sesame rolls, she recalls, and Sorro’s kids stayed with them on the weekends. 

“Those were some of the best years of my life! The manongs (Tagalog for older brother, it also means Filipino immigrant worker) loved Bill’s kids; they left their own kids in the Philippines, or never had kids, and they embraced ours.”

Milanese and Sorro married in a ceremony at the I-Hotel in 1973. Complete with a roasted pig.

“It was great, but not a good place for a baby, so in 1975, before Giulio was born, we moved to Bernal Heights, where Bill’s mom and some siblings lived.” 

By then she and Sorro were deeply committed to the fight to save the I-Hotel, which had been bought by developers. Eviction took nine years. 

“The only action I didn’t do was chain myself to the fence, because I was pregnant at the time,” 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, 

“I got a bad feeling in the USSR,” she grimaces, “and furthermore, the CP was very good on workers’ rights, on blacks and Latinos, but they were absent on the gay question, the Asian question, and women.”

She voted to leave the party at their annual convention in Cleveland in 1992.

She adds cheerfully, “I loved the Italian communist party ’cause they were completely independent, they weren’t Maoist or Trotskyist. “

After the loss of the I-Hotel, Sorro worked as an ironworker, becoming one of the first men of color to integrate the union–and then as an activist, especially for housing.

His work is memorialized in the Bill Sorro Housing Program, a nonprofit dedicated to creating affordable housing, and the Bill Sorro Community at 1009 Howard St., an affordable housing complex built in 2017. 

Five years before he died of cancer, he spoke about his wife in a 2002 KQED documentary.

“Giuli’s the love of my life,” he says in the film, “She’s 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.”

While Sorro worked for affordable housing, Milanese got involved with the city’s 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.)

That 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. 

Giuliana supported him, volunteered on his campaign for supervisor, and “was with me in the hospital when my partner died of AIDS in 1994, five days before I was elected Supervisor,” Ammiano says. “Giuliana is one of the reasons I’ve had a successful political career.”

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. 

“I’m 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,” she says.

She worked there 12 years, retiring in 2007 to care for Sorro.

With age, Milanese no longer travels to Italy, but she’s still active. Currently she is on the board of Coleman Advocates for Children and Youth and 48 Hills, the online daily news site.

She continues to distribute slate cards and, with Indivisible SF, she joins the vigil every Friday afternoon in front of the Bernal Heights Branch Library to support Palestinian and immigrant rights and oppose ICE. These days, there’s no shortage of causes to support. But that’s characterized Milanese’s life from the start.

“Giuliana has never had an interest in her own advancement, which made her a powerful force,” says Aaron Peskin, former president of the Board of Supervisors, who has known Milanese since they worked together on the 1999 mayoral write-in campaign for Ammiano.

“Underneath her gruff exterior, she is a very loving, warm person who suffers no fools and puts up with no bullshit.”