Tuesday, March 28, 2006

Immigrants' rights and workers' power in Los Angeles and beyond

The immigrants' rights march in Los Angeles on Saturday was by far the biggest and most beautiful demonstration I've ever been a part of. In any direction you looked, it was impossible to see where the crowd ended. The planned route simply could not contain the multitudes who showed up, and it has been widely reported that the march stretched out for two dozen blocks. I parked my car in Pico-Union, a working-class immigrant neighborhood across the freeway from the downtown business district where the march took place, and it seemed like every family in the neighborhood was on their way to the march; people just kept pouring out their front doors and walking down the sidewalk in white t-shirts, carrying Mexican, Salvadoran, or American flags. Sunday, a few thousand farmworkers from all over the West Coast took up the mantle of the previous day's Gran Marcha, processing from City Hall to the Los Angeles Cathedral for a mass in honor of Cesar Chavez. Yesterday it was impossible to drive a few blocks without coming across crowds of students marching through the streets, pursued by overwhelmed campus police officers. Even today thousands of students walked out of class and into the pouring rain.

About two and a half years ago, I attended a significant but modest rally on the lawn of Los Angeles City Hall to kick of the Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride. As the freedom riders moved east to Queens, they built a national network of previously isolated unions and community groups fighting for immigrant workers' rights, put the issue of immigration reform on the map, and kicked of the legislative battle that eventually would pit bills featuring a "path to citizenship" (McCain-Kennedy and AgJobs) against Sensenbrenner's HR4437, which would make felons out of all undocumented immigrants and anyone--from charity workers to neighbors to union organizers--who helped them stay in the country or simply refused to turn them in to la migra. That draconian measure, in turn, prompted at least half a million people to surround that very same City Hall lawn three days ago.

In other words, the Freedom Ride has snowballed, after 30 months of grassroots organizing and legislative jousting, into a massive uprising of immigrant workers, not only in Los Angeles, but all over the country. And I use the phrase "immigrant workers" for a reason. Despite the preponderance of Mexican flags, the march was at least as much about workers' rights as it was about identity politics. The most overwhelming message conveyed by the marchers' signs, chants, and casual conversations was "we're here to work, to give our families a better life, and we deserve respect for doing the work that keeps this country's economy moving." It's no accident that leaders of HERE were the main organizers of the Freedom Rides, and that SEIU picket signs were almost as ubiquitous as Mexican flags on Saturday. That wasn't just a bunch of Mexicans on the street over the weekend, it was the new American working class.

Can this workers' uprising be sustained? There is reason to believe it can. When Maria Elena Durazo, the head of UNITE-HERE Local 11 and the LA County Federation of Labor, spoke from the podium on Saturday (the same podium she had spoken from as the chairperson of the Freedom Rides two and a half years before), she refered to preparations for a paro nacional (national strike) in the hotel industry, most of whose workers are immigrants of one nationality or another. The goal of this year's hotel workers' organizing campaigns will be to capture the energy of this weeks immigrants' rights demonstrations and turn it into a powerful workers' movement.

3 Comments:

At 8:58 PM, Blogger submarino said...

P.S. Let's not forget that real, sustainable workers' power will require a multi-racial movement, as at least one African-American speaker reminded the attendees of Saturday's rally. And it's fortunate that beneath the march's superficial Mexican nationalism there was a multi-racial spirit. For example, one of the labor leaders who spoke from the podium, Mike Garcia, repeatedly invoked "la raza" to great applause from the crowd. But his union, SEIU Local 1877, is leading a major effort to organize predominantly African-American security gaurds into the same union that already represents their latino immigrant brothers and sisters who work as janitors in the same commercial office buildings.

 
At 8:25 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Thanks for your insightful comments on this. It must have been incredible being part of the march in LA. Your observation that this is the new American working class is profound and real. Just to point out another labor connection, one of the main leaders of the massive Chicago march on March 10th, Jose Artemio Arreola, is a public school janitor who is on the Executive Board of his union local, SEIU 73 in Chicago. In an interview here: http://fightbacknews.org/2006/01/arreolainterview.htm he talks a little bit about what this new upsurge means for labor.

 
At 12:06 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Hi, it's been a while but thought I'd post a comment.

Weirdly, although I think we disagree on nearly all particulars, it seems like our general strategic orientations are quite similar. (With the possible exception of the leading role of trade unions). Right now I think there are a couple of things the left needs to acknowledge.

1) Massive social movements are needed to create any kind of systemic change.
2) We are nowhere near any kind of sustained movement of this type (immigrant rights marches provide some hopeful glimpses), and the anticapitalist left is not in any kind of position (theoretically as well as practically) to interact with a mass movement productively as an independent political force.
3) Maintaining a connection with the masses in practice is thus even more crucial. This must be something more real than creating a left pole and waiting for it to attract the oppressed due to the correctness of your analysis.

I think a number of conclusions regarding political strategy result from these premises, but I'll leave that for another time.

 

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