[Marxism] Undocumented in America

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

New Left Review 47, September-October 2007

Has the mass immigrants’ rights campaign of 2006 been asphyxiated by the 
Democrats’ embrace? Two Los Angeles activists recount the movement’s 
progress since the Chicano struggles of the 60s, and current defence of 
America’s sans-papiers from state and vigilante attacks.

JESSE DÍAZ & JAVIER RODRÍGUEZ
UNDOCUMENTED IN AMERICA

NLR: Could you tell us about your backgrounds as Latino immigrants’ 
rights activists in the United States, and how you were radicalized? [1]

Rodríguez: I was born in 1944 in Torreón, Coahuila, but my family comes 
from the northern mountains of Durango. My father was a Communist and a 
trade union leader. When I was five we moved to Ciudad Juárez, on the 
border. In 1953 my father went to work in the us as a farmworker, under 
the Bracero quota scheme that was in place then. [2] That same year, 
when I was nine, I got deported from the us—I was working as a 
shoe-shine boy and had gone over to El Paso for the day, but was picked 
up within a few hours. Three years later, in 1956, I crossed the border 
for good with my mother and brothers, arriving in Los Angeles that 
August. We lived in the city centre, and could smell the noxious fumes 
from the meatpacking plants and other industries. I went to the public 
junior high school; there was no ‘English as a Second Language’ 
programme then, just ‘Foreign Adjustment’ schemes. My first act of 
rebellion was in music class, when we were forced to sing patriotic 
American songs; I refused. As a punishment they put me at the back of 
the class. Mexicans were constantly being reminded of their difference: 
we would be called ‘wetback’ and ‘tj’—short for Tijuana. We all felt the 
discrimination and exclusion, and began to think about fighting back 
against it. In 1965 we held a demonstration against police brutality in 
our neighbourhood. From there I jumped into political activity, entering 
the radical Latino wing of the Civil Rights movement.

Díaz: My family is originally from Aguascalientes, Mexico, but I was 
born in la in 1964, one of seven children. I was raised in Chino. We had 
a big house, but we lived poor: we didn’t get our first television until 
I was fourteen. As I was growing up I saw my parents help a lot of 
immigrants: they lived in a trailer at the back of our yard, worked with 
my father in landscaping or helped my mother round the house. As a child 
I was aware of the Chicano movement—I would see the Brown Beret marches 
going down Central Avenue—and experienced discrimination and racism, 
especially from the police. But I didn’t really connect with the 
movement until I got to college in 2000.

NLR: How did you become involved in the struggle for immigrants’ rights?

Rodríguez: After 1965 I became involved in a local Chicano organization 
called Casa Carnalismo—Mexican slang for ‘brotherhood’—which mobilized 
people from the neighbourhood and college students. The struggle for 
Latino labour and civil rights was gathering pace at this time: in 
California, César Chávez of the National Farm Workers Association led 
the grape pickers’ strike in 1965, and the next year, Rodolfo ‘Corky’ 
Gonzáles, a former prize-fighter, set up the Denver-based Crusade for 
Justice, the first Mexican American civil rights organization; in 1967, 
Reies López Tijerina and his Alianza Federal de Mercedes (Federal 
Alliance for Land Grants) seized a courthouse in New Mexico. Student 
groups began to form on campuses. In California, Chicano organizers came 
into contact with Black activists—the Panthers, George Jackson, Angela 
Davis—and played a role in the wider struggles against discrimination, 
racism, police brutality and the Vietnam War. In 1970, the Chicano 
Moratorium movement against the war organized a big march in East la 
which the police broke up in an infamous rampage, killing three people.

In mid 1974, several of us from Carnalismo decided to join forces with 
Bert Corona—a legendary figure in the immigrants’ rights movement. He 
was from the binational community in El Paso–Ciudad Juárez, but had come 
to California in the 1930s, working as a longshoreman before becoming a 
labour organizer. In 1968 he and Soledad Alatorre founded casa, the 
Centro de Acción Social Autónomo, which aimed to organize the immigrant 
community and provide them with legal advice, documentation, help with 
housing and so on. The number of undocumented Mexican workers had 
increased substantially after the end of the Bracero Program in 1964. 
casa was the first to organize undocumented immigrants, though it also 
focused more generally on working-class Mexican-Americans. casa 
eventually disintegrated amid major political divisions in 1978.

NLR: What has happened to the movement since spring 2006?

Rodríguez: Like any mass protest movement in the us, the immigrants’ 
rights movement always ran the risk of being diverted into the 
Democrats’ electoral machine. The legislation put forward since hr4437, 
in offering a limited track to legalization, succeeded in drawing the 
support of many mainstream Latino leaders—for example Raúl Murillo from 
Hermandad Mexicana Nacional and Juan José Gutiérrez from Latino Movement 
usa gave qualified backing to the strive Act—as well as the seiu and 
organizations like the National Council of La Raza, though the afl-cio 
and many ngos have been opposed. This co-optation of one wing of the 
movement by the Democrats, along with raids and deportations later in 
2006, made us lose a lot of the momentum we had built up during the 
spring. As a result, the battle in Washington since 2006 has been 
between the mainstream and the Republican Right—and by the summer of 
2007 it was clear it was the Right who won. They managed to mobilize and 
unify their grassroots through talk radio stations, and the cira was 
effectively strangled by Republican legislators in June.

This division between the pro-amnesty forces and the Democratic 
establishment is the background to the demonstrations we organized this 
year. The actions on March 25 and May 1, 2007 were both a lot smaller 
than in 2006. On May Day there were again two demonstrations: ours, 
which went to City Hall, and another one backed by the Latino 
establishment and Cardinal Mahony, which ended up in MacArthur Park. The 
MacArthur Park march was violently broken up by the police, who injured 
over 100 demonstrators and several journalists. It showed all the claims 
that the lapd had been reformed to be completely empty—though the 
widespread public anger over this may make it more difficult for them to 
clamp down on immigrants in the same way in the future.

Between them, the two May Day marches this year drew up to 100,000 
people, but we had twice as many as the afternoon one. Mobilizations 
took place in 75 cities; besides the major urban centres, there were 
marches in places like Denver, Phoenix and Milwaukee. These were also 
much smaller than in 2006, though still significant. The May boycott 
wasn’t observed nearly as much as last year, but we did manage to shut 
down la and Long Beach harbours and the garment district, as well as 
stopping many cargo deliveries across la county. Another boycott we 
called for September 12 was not such a success, however; the momentum is 
visibly down compared to 2006.

Díaz: All along, the fundamental principle of our movement has been 
full, unconditional amnesty for all undocumented immigrants, and full 
labour and civil rights for anyone working here. But Somos América, 
which is little more than a cover for the Democratic Party, used the 
mobilizations to push forward a set of legislative proposals totally at 
odds with this; they essentially switched to supporting the guest worker 
programme. This would, of course, serve the interests of the big 
corporations the Latino establishment is linked to—if you go to one of 
the National Council of La Raza’s events, for example, there is 
corporate sponsorship from the likes of Wal-Mart and Home Depot, and 
they get millions in grants from Citibank, Pepsi and Ford. When we sent 
a delegation to Washington, dc in April 2006 to lobby against the 
proposals then being debated, we found the mainstream Latino ngos and 
activists and the seiu working hand in hand with the Congressional 
Hispanic Caucus, promoting legislation that would criminalize 
undocumented workers, pushing them underground and making it easier to 
exploit them. This comes on top of deportation raids that would break up 
families and leave hundreds of thousands of people without a livelihood, 
and the massive militarization of the border.

The Hispanic Caucus and figures like Gutiérrez have not spoken out 
against the violence on the border, the construction of the border wall 
or the raids. Meanwhile, the ufw and the seiu—including its vice 
president Eliseo Medina, himself a Mexican immigrant—have given their 
backing to a ‘blue card’ scheme for agricultural labourers, which is 
being promoted in Congress by the California Democrat Senator Dianne 
Feinstein. This has led to something of a backlash from the seiu rank 
and file against the leadership, who are now planning a new push in 
favour of these temporary schemes.

In the meantime, there have been splits on our side. Hermandad Mexicana 
Nacional has fractured as regional leaders of hmn have taken different 
positions on the proposed immigration bills. A large part of the 
movement has been absorbed by the legislative cycle. It has to be said 
that at this point in time the movement is a shadow of its former self.

What challenges does the immigrants’ rights movement face now?

Díaz: At the moment the priority is to defend our communities against 
raids and deportations. Beyond that, we have to get back to ground level 
organizing—small-scale forums, organizing from within the community, 
local marches. The spring 2006 mobilizations showed us how easily the 
movement can be co-opted by mainstream groups. Many people put their 
faith in the Democrats, who simply sold us out. We weren’t able to 
sustain the momentum of 2006 into 2007. Now, all the leading Democrats 
have one eye on the 2008 elections, and are trying to stall the 
immigration debate. We have applied for a permit to march on the Capitol 
on May Day 2008, and are now focusing our efforts on that. Many of our 
people feel discouraged, that their efforts were fruitless, or that 
their leaders let them down. We need to learn from this anger at what 
has happened over the past year if we want to mount any kind of 
challenge in future.

full: http://www.newleftreview.org/?page=article&view=2689

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