Quick Take
Santa Cruz Vice Mayor Shebreh Kalantari-Johnson says she has lost contact with relatives in Iran amid the regime’s escalating crackdown on nationwide antigovernment protests.
Grace Chinowsky is Lookout Eugene-Springfield’s city of Eugene and University of Oregon correspondent. She is working in Santa Cruz through the end of January.
The group chat that Shebreh Kalantari-Johnson uses to communicate with her extended family in Iran has fallen silent.
The aunts, uncles and cousins who remained in Iran when she and her immediate family fled to the United States in 1984 haven’t replied to messages in the WhatsApp group for about 10 days.
“I feel helpless,” the Santa Cruz vice mayor and city councilmember told Lookout on Tuesday. “There’s not much I can do right now, and that’s really not a great place to be in.”
Protests against Iran’s Khamenei regime, fueled by the Islamic Republic’s struggling economy, broke out in late December and have since spread nationwide, posing the biggest challenge to the authoritarian theocracy in years.
The regime, which came to power in 1979, prompting Kalantari-Johnson’s family to leave the country, has responded to the antigovernment protests with an internet blackout and a crackdown that human rights groups say has killed thousands.
Kalantari-Johnson most recently spoke to her relatives in Iran, who mostly live in Sari, the capital of the northern province of Mazandaran, when this wave of protests began. Some of them took to the streets at the time, feeling “cautious hope,” she said.
Since then, she hasn’t heard anything from them, except for a phone call her parents had with their siblings about a week ago, before authorities further tightened the internet blackout.
Different than before
“It’s very hard to see your birth country, your country of origin, literally light up in flames,” Kalantari-Johnson said. “I don’t know if any of my friends and family have been injured or killed. It’s hard to not know what’s happening to family members, so just on a personal level, it’s devastating.”
Kalantari-Johnson, who hasn’t visited Iran in 13 years, added that she is experiencing survivors’ guilt. She questioned why she is in the U.S., safe and able to exercise her freedoms, while Iranians confront a more dangerous reality.
But even amid the fear and uncertainty, her parents and other Iranian relatives say these protests are a contrast to those during the Women-Life-Freedom movement in 2022, the Green Movement in 2009 or the Iranian Revolution in 1979.
“Your everyday people are not able to make ends meet, and they are taking to the streets,” Kalantari-Johnson said, which gives these protests a different feel, especially for her dad.
The Iranian capital of Tehran has one of the largest bazaars in the country, which she described as the community’s “heartbeat,” and merchants there, historically supportive of the regime, are now protesting on the streets every night after shuttering their shops for the day.
“My dad, being the eldest of eight who dropped out of school at 12 to work in the bazaar so he could provide for his family, really understands that, in a visceral way,” Kalantari-Johnson said.
What should be done
The Iranian American community in Santa Cruz is small, Kalantari-Johnson said, unlike its more visible presence in other parts of California, which has the largest Iranian population of any state in the country.
She keeps in touch with fellow Iranian American locals using a group chat, but they haven’t yet organized any action in response to the regime’s crackdown on protesters. She admitted that she’s unsure that a demonstration in Santa Cruz would do anything to help the thousands of Iranian protesters being injured, killed or imprisoned overseas.
“I can’t dictate the actions of people in Iran. That’s not my place, right?” Kalantari-Johnson said. “I want to provide support. I don’t really know what that looks like right now, other than making sure people are informed about what’s happening.”
Santa Cruz resident Roya lived in Iran until 2010, when she was 23. She requested that her last name not be published because she fears government retaliation against the family she left behind. She lost contact with them for four days before her brother-in-law called Monday to confirm everyone is safe.
The few Iranians that Roya knows in Santa Cruz are “deeply distressed and heartbroken,” she said. Some are traveling to the Bay Area to join protests condemning the regime’s brutality.
Roya said despite witnessing repression in “everyday life,” she had hope for more gradual reform during her youth in Iran.
“Now it is clear that [the Islamic Republic] is a corrupt and violent regime with zero tolerance for dissent. People lost all hope for reform and as a result, here we are,” Roya said. “Iranians gave the regime too many chances, and every time the Islamic Republic disappointed us. We didn’t get to the point to openly chant ‘Down with the Islamic Republic’ and ‘Death to Khamenei’ in one night.”
‘They did not ask for this’
So what do Kalantari-Johnson and Roya want Santa Cruz residents to know about these protests? The vice mayor pointed to the regime’s daily, systematic oppression of Iranians that has persisted for almost 50 years, including through mandatory veiling for women, abductions and executions.
“Even though in ‘79 the people of Iran asked for a revolution, they did not ask for this,” she said. “They replaced one authoritative dictatorship with an authoritative regime.”
Kalantari-Johnson also recalled her own encounters with the regime’s morality police, who enforce rules for modest behavior and dress.
They approached her at gunpoint on multiple occasions during her visits to Iran over the years to tell her to cover her hair, she said. In 1994 when she was a teenager, she paid to take a horseback ride on a beach in Iran, and they stopped her and ordered her to dismount because a woman riding in public could attract men’s attention.
“When you live with something for so long, it’s just part of your day,” Kalantari-Johnson said. “That fear becomes part of your day. It’s like the fear is in you, it’s in your body.”
Respect the complexity of the struggle
For her part, Roya said the history of her country and the current protests are complicated, and asked her neighbors to listen to the people on the ground in Iran.
“Too often, because Santa Cruz leans strongly against Trump politics, people view Iran’s uprising through a simplistic, ideological lens,” Roya said. “Listening to Iranians and respecting the complexity of their struggle is itself meaningful support.”
Kalantari-Johnson believes the vast majority of Iranians want a regime change to restore basic rights, though she said she has “no confidence” in President Donald Trump to act in the best interests of the people of Iran.
Trump, who has encouraged the protests and floated the idea of regime change in Iran, announced on Tuesday that “help is on the way” and advised Americans to leave the country — a promise that Kalantari-Johnson said sparked debate among the Iranian American community.
“This is a complicated space,” she said. “The people of Iran are asking for help because there’s fear and desperation, and when you’re reacting from a space of fear and desperation, you’re not thinking about the unintended or intended consequences of tomorrow.”
When asked if she personally feels afraid to speak out against the regime, given her family in Iran and her own prominence in Santa Cruz, Kalantari-Johnson flatly said no.
“There may be some risk,” she said. “But it’s worth taking.”
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