Birth of a Movement

A remarkable event occured in Los Angeles on Saturday, March 25, 2006. Everyone who participated will remember it for the rest of their lives. Between 500,000 and one million people demonstrated in protest against the anti-immigrant "Sensenbrenner" bill HR4437. This piece of legislation would make presence in the United States without documents a felony. Providing any kind of aid that enables such a person to remain in the United States would likewise become a federal felony. Determining the legal status of persons would no longer be the exclusive province of the appropriate federal agencies, but would become the required task of every police officer, highway patrol, transit cop, etc. Local governments that refused to comply would lose federal funds.

The Los Angeles demonstration and the other large demonstrations around the country opposing HR4437 may well be the start of something very important, maybe comparable in their ultimate impact to the Montgomery bus boycott. There are a very large number of legal immigrants in the U.S. who have never bothered to become citizens or engage in political activity. They have spent their time working hard and raising families. These people will now have a sense that they can change the world through their own activity. The phrase "waking the sleeping giant" seems very apt.

This was quite an experience for everyone who participated. Virginia Franco and I participated as San Diego DSA representatives of a coalition that organized transportation to the protest from San Diego. This protest was by far the largest demonstration that either of us have ever seen. The atmosphere of the protest was very different from other protests we have participated in. It seemed that for most of the participants this was the first U.S. political event they have ever engaged in. These were by and large ordinary working class people, not the left-liberal middle class you see at antiwar protests. The police reported zero arrests; everyone that we saw seemed to be in a good mood, with lots of families and little kids. The number of American flags being carried outnumbered the number of Mexican flags by about 3 to 1.

We took some pictures and we present them to give you an a sense of the scale and mood of this historic event.