Inspiring rally for immigrants' rights in Queens NY

["Julio Huato" <juliohuato@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

> Did anyone from the list spend the day at the New York rally to support the
> Immigrant Freedom Ride in Queens' Flushing Meadow? I wasn't able to spend
> much time there but it looked like an enormous outpouring of working people
> -- an enormous number of Latinos but also Africans, Koreans, Arabs and
> others under attack.  It seemed to me that  it was much over 100,000 and
> the organizers claimed it was 500,000. [...]
>
> I hope somebody can offer more detail.
> Fred Feldman

Fred,

The cops built a maze of fences through the main area of the rally.  They
made people go through narrow straits in order to move from compartment to
compartment.  That and the food and commercial stands on the avenue in front
of the meadow resulted in a certain fragmentation of the mass.  The big
monitors helped a little, but I still got stuck in an area where I couldn't
either move further into the area in front of the stage or even get out.  We
could meet the rest of our group until after Bronco (a Mexican band) played
a few songs and people dispersed a little.  I entirely missed the first
speeches.  I don't have an estimate of how many people attended.  According
to the NYT, the organizers' estimate was 100,000.

For the most part, the speakers (mostly, religious representatives, union
leaders, a congressman, and grassroots immigrant-rights activists) were on
message: legalization of immigrants, path to citizenship, family
reunification, respect for their rights as workers.  I would have added some
explicit slogan in defense of the immigrants targeted by Ashcroft under the
guise of the "fight against terrorism."  There were speakers who duly
connected the struggle with the struggle against the U.S. economic and
foreign policy.  The speeches were short and basically riveted the goals of
the movements.

I believe the overall strategy of this movement is the right one.  As far as
I can tell, this strategy is to present the interesting of undocumented
immigrants as perfectly compatible -- in fact, as a direct consequence -- of
the *best* values of the American people.  I'm glad they have gotten the
unions on board.  This is the right approach.

While the far right may want to present the situation as immigrants moving
to take over this or that southwestern state, which would make the hard
opposition to the rights of immigrants even harder, what the coalition is
emphasizing is the demand for respect of workers' rights, the culture of
immigrants of all nationalities, the rights of families to live together,
etc. and the commonality of their interests with those of workers from all
other nationalities and ethnicities.  The defense of the national rights of
Latino workers -- for instance -- doesn't require that they clash with
"white American" culture (whatever that may mean).

I am involved with faith-based groups (that don't think of themselves as
"political") that support immigrants, homeless, and the ill in concrete
legal and humanitarian ways.  So perhaps my perspective is tainted by my
experience as a volunteer in this type of organizations.  But IMO the deeper
inequalities affecting U.S. workers in urban areas nowadays are those of
economic, political and legal origin -- not those based on race, ethnicity,
or religion.

Here's the NYT note:


The New York Times
October 5, 2003
Immigrants Rally in City, Seeking Rights
By STEVEN GREENHOUSE

Tens of thousands of immigrants rallied in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park in
Queens yesterday with the hope of promoting an immigrants' rights movement
that will capture the nation's conscience the way the 1960's civil rights
movement did.

Coming from Mexico, China, Haiti and many other countries, the immigrants
are seeking to persuade lawmakers in Washington to, among other things,
grant legal status to more than 8 million immigrants.

"America is a land of immigrants; it was built by immigrants," said Roger
Toussaint, an immigrant from Trinidad who is president of New York City's
Transport Workers Union. "The justice that was extended to the immigrants of
the past should be extended to the immigrants of today."

Organizers estimated that about 100,000 immigrants and their supporters
crowded into the park, where they rallied alongside the giant steel globe,
known as the Unisphere, that was the symbol of the 1964-65 New York World's
Fair.

Cardinal Edward M. Egan, the archbishop of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of
New York, was welcomed with heavy applause and spoke for 10 minutes in
Spanish before turning to English.

"We cannot go on simply ignoring and tolerating the plight of our brothers
and sisters," Cardinal Egan said. "Families are being damaged by cruel
separation and in all too many instances shameful advantage is being taken
of men and women in the work force who do not have proper papers."

The rally was the final effort in a two-week campaign known as the Immigrant
Workers Freedom Ride, in which 18 buses carrying 900 immigrants and their
supporters traveled from Los Angeles, Seattle and eight other cities to
Washington and New York to press their case for immigrants' rights. The
effort was inspired by the 1961 Freedom Rides, in which blacks and their
allies boarded buses to help end segregation in bus terminals in the South.
White vigilantes severely beat some of those freedom riders and firebombed
one of their buses.

"Forty-two years later, the freedom riders of 2003, you, are going to win,"
Representative John Lewis, Democrat of Georgia and an organizer of the 1961
freedom rides, told the crowd. "We are one people, we are one family, we are
one house, and we are not going to let anybody turn us around. We've come
too far."

The rally was in many ways a multicultural festival, with salsa and reggae
music, signs in Creole and Spanish, and wafting smells of tortillas and jerk
chicken.

[There was no salsa music -- as far as I know.  The music by Bronco was
"norteña" with a bit of Mexican cumbia mixed.]

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/05/nyregion/05RALL.html?th=&pagewanted=print&position=

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