The Day without Immigrants

"Are we witnessing history?" I asked myself as I went through the photos from L.A. Times' website. To see the numbers of people, legal and illegal immigrants and their supporters in these photographs of today's large nationwide protest stirs up pride within me. The pride is for my heritage, a line that leads south of the Mexico-U.S. border. I have pride for my grandfather who found work in the U.S. on the railroad, connecting the Southwest together. I have pride for him and his wife who instilled the importance of education in my father, who (with his wife) passed those traits on to me and my siblings. The pride is for the students that I have taught, the ones who have entered my classroom, coming from a different culture and a different background. The pride is for those students that I could see learn on a daily basis, picking up language tools that will assist them in this country. The pride is for their families, who come from innumerable hardships to work through even more hardships, so that they too can give their children a better life.

There is a civil rights movement going on in the United States, once again decades overdue. As far as I know, it is leaderless, unlike the movements of the '60s. This large group does not have one voice to follow, yet it is being led by the groups of people who share an idea and share a disdain for what the government claims is a problem. There is a voice that leads, and it is this shared voice. I am thrilled to have witnessed the beginning of it.

Yet I am discouraged as well. I read through scenes from around Southern California that were documented today.

"About 3:10 p.m. Pomona At a closed Burger King, the management posted in English and in Spanish this sign: 'Sorry, our employees didn't report to work. Thank you for being a loyal customer.' Above the announcement, someone scrawled: 'Fire them.'"

"About 2 p.m., Santa Ana Police Sgt. Lorenzo Carrillo estimated 5,000 marchers in Santa Ana, although organizers said the crowd topped 10,000 people. Most marched around a four-block square near the city's downtown. At one point, 16 sheriff's deputies sat on horses between the anti-immigrant protesters and the immigrant advocates to prevent any disturbances.

Barbara Coe, co-author of Proposition 187, the ballot initiative that sought to deny undocumented immigrants certain public benefits, said that by missing work, the immigrants 'are showing their true colors. They are disloyal to this country.'

Wiley Drake, a flamboyant minister who has an Internet radio program, said, 'We are outnumbered today, but we have to stand up for what is right. We support legal immigrants. There are legal immigrants who can pick lettuce and strawberries.'"

But it's discouragement like this that shows that this civil rights movement must continue, must not let up. If it means losing jobs, if it means being threatened and debased. The voices must remain as one to force the people of the U.S. to realize that we are a land of immigrants, which has become a land of the ignorant.

Now, if Native Americans came out and protested the immigrants and all ancestors of those immigrants being on their land and taking their jobs, that'd be a different story."