The Day Immigrants Won: Chronicles from the mass marches of 2006 by an activist who lived it
Victor Fernandez
There’s always a certain level of idealism and hope that comes with being new to activism. It’s a result of finally learning the truth behind many of the myths we were told growing up. It’s as if we can carry this new knowledge, that everyone has been blind to, and somehow that will spark massive change. That is usually very quickly dashed when the realities of organizing in politics comes into play. Changing the world for the better is one of the hardest things we can do. We have almost all of society organized against us. All of the corporate media, corporations, politicians, and all of their backers work tirelessly to make sure we fail, or worse yet, give up.
2005 was a dismal year for immigrant rights. Anti-immigrant sentiment was realized in the form of the Minuteman movement. Taking their name from the militias of the US Revolutionary war, this right-wing group sought to replicate the vigilante style patrolling of the border initially pioneered by the Ku Klux Klan. There was a feeling of powerlessness among my college friends. We did not know what to do, but there was an innate feeling within us that something had to be done.
Upon graduation, I made it a point to move to Los Angeles. LA is the epicenter of both immigration and immigrant culture. Back in the 80s, when people in my region meant they were going to the US, they said “Los Angeles.” There was no idea that there was anywhere else to go. It would be rightfully assumed that this would be the place with the best organizations and largest number of people ready to organize.
Once settled, it was surprisingly difficult to get involved. It took a while to get in touch with any local organizations. Even when I attended some events and met with organizers, there was never a call back. I would show up to meetings that were advertised only to find closed offices. Getting involved in organizing proved difficult. In spite of that, the primary way I could become part of the movement was attending counter protests against the Minutemen.
While initially a publicity stunt, the Minuteman project had morphed into a wider anti-immigrant movement. No longer content with going to the border and getting media attention, they organized local anti-immigrant initiatives. This would not only take the form of local laws and ordinances aimed at immigrants, but also involved protesting and harassing day labor sites and pro immigrant cities. It was billed as a grassroots movement of people fed up with border policies and immigration. The reality is that these groups were tied to the Klan and Nazi movements. How did we know that? All it took was going to their rallies and seeing their flags.
As a response, an ad hoc coalition of activists organized to both defend the day labor sites and counterprotest the racists. Made up from a coalition of individual activists, left wing organizations, anarchists, etc, this group would track the right-wing forums and find out their next target. Then it would call out a counter protest. The day of, activists would show up to counterprotest the Minutemen and their local affiliate, Save our State (SOS).
Much credit has to be given to the activists that took part in these initial counter protests. They followed the Minutemen/SOS from the very beginning. They disrupted their recruitment drive in Garden Grove, CA. One of my fellow activists was run over by one of them. Activists then followed them to Campo, CA at the border. They counterprotested them at their campsite. Unarmed pro-immigrant forces would confront armed wannabe militias. Since the Minutemen would sleep during the day in order to patrol the border at night, one preferred tactic was to drive around their campsite blasting Mariachi music at full volume during the day.
I missed those days, but I joined soon after. By the time I joined the counter protests, we would mobilize every weekend at different locations in Southern California to defend our cause. It was there where I met the socialists in the form of the International Socialist Organization (ISO).
Let me preface this by saying that I was not a socialist to begin with. At most I believed in left wing populism. It’s usually a common conclusion from learning about Latin American politics. I knew capitalism was problematic, but didn’t believe it was inherently flawed. I believed it could be altered. I did believe in protest and people power, but only in that it would reform capitalism, not change it to something else.
So why did I join a socialist organization?
After a few protests, a contact invited me to a meeting that was organizing against HR4437. HR4437 was a bill passed in the House of Representatives that would make any undocumented immigrant or person helping an undocumented immigrant, a felon. This would criminalize a whole section of the population. The most mind-blowing thing was that this was almost a done deal and nobody outside of a small group of activists even knew about it. Even in the meeting explaining the bill, it seemed so unreal and distant. It was there that I met members of the ISO.
During the first ISO meeting, I was immediately thrown into immigrant rights organizing. I was there to help with the counter protests and represent the organization in the newly formed immigrant rights coalition organizing protests against HR 4437. I was not alone. Seasoned organizers were there to help me. They had been to Campo and Garden Grove. They had made connections with all relevant immigrant rights organizations. They not only educated me on the state of the movement, but on the politics of immigration. One of their members, out of San Diego, even wrote a book on immigrant rights, No One Is Illegal. Even now, this book is the textbook to immigration politics. Anyone involved in immigrant rights must read this as a foundation of their immigration work.
Yes, this organization was not largely made up of immigrants or people of color, but it was not hesitant to put us in positions of leadership or to put itself on the line for the immigrant rights struggle. They proved this week in and week out in our constant confrontation of the anti-immigrant right wing, and in their leadership in the upcoming mass marches.
It was now 2006 and the pro immigrant groups started to coalesce around weekly meetings in Los Angeles. The passing of HR4437 in the House of Representatives instigated a congregation of all groups fighting for immigrant rights. It seemed like a vain effort. Leftists came together with liberal groups and nonprofits. Many of the leftist groups were remnants of the CASA movement of the 80s who won the legalization under Reagan and fought against prop 187. The main push was for a mass march against HR 4437. It seemed ludicrous to expect a large turnout. Honestly, we would have been happy with 10,000. It felt like a final exasperated, almost delusional, grasp at a fightback. However, we would not go down without a fight.
I remember going to various places and telling people about this. People were cordial but incredulous. I felt I was in another dimension talking about another reality and hoping people could cross a threshold that wasn’t there. Regardless, I continued organizing. The date was set for March 25, 2006. It was a day before the Cesar Chavez March and some groups wanted to combine the immigrant march with that march. However, they lost by one vote, and our march would go on independently. Now, the coalition organizing the march would become the March 25th Coalition.
Thus, our feeble attempt to fight back against overwhelming odds began. Our little march, which we hoped would be 10,000 people and would hopefully give us something to build on, would happen. I felt like it was too little, too late. Then, Chicago happened.
Chicago activists called out their march a couple of weeks before ours. They, like us, were making an attempt to show their disgust with HR4437. The organizing paid off. Local Spanish language DJs, who have a broad reach among the immigrant community, heeded the call. In fact, different radio stations competed to see who could bring out the most people. This resulted in a march of 300,000 in Chicago two weeks before our march. This radically shifted everything.
There are times when you read about the movements in the 60s or about revolutions when they talk about the “climate” or feel of the movements. There’s an energy around it and the people. It feels like a weight has been lifted and that everything is possible. Years of frustration and fear are wiped away, and real hope seems so close. This is real. This is what we felt after Chicago’s March. All of a sudden, people who looked at us as if we were crazy were even more enthusiastic than we were. The LA radio DJs picked up the call and now competed to see who could bring out the most people. In one of the interviews with March 25th organizers, they asked for help with a sound system and put my friend’s number out there. The next day, he had 300 calls from people willing to help out. We also found a DJ with experience in sound systems in mass marches in El Salvador. Together we split up the list and made the calls. For me, it was a real lesson in solidarity. Many of the people didn’t even have sound equipment but just wanted to help. They were willing to go out and buy DJ equipment themselves. Within a few days, we set up the sound system from whatever with we could cobble together
On March 24, 2006, I woke up to one of my friend’s texts. “The students are walking out”. Thousands of LAUSD students walked out of class all over Los Angeles. They then congregated on City Hall to protest HR 4437. LA is a huge city and many walked miles in order to meet in downtown.
At this point it is important to talk about two cultural movies that had come out by then. One was Walkout, a movie about the Chicano student walkouts in the 1960s. Another was A Day without a Mexican. The latter was a movie with the premise that Mexicans mysteriously disappeared one day and the ensuing fallout. Both these movies were fresh in our minds. It is fair to say that Walkout had an impact on the students in 2006. A Day without A Mexican would have an effect on everyone else.
It was a rule of thumb that whatever the LAPD announces as the attendance at one of our protests, we would double it. On March 25 2006, they estimated 500,000. Among our groups, we believe it was somewhere between a million and 1.5 million. The march was set for 10am at Olympic and Broadway, about a mile from LA City Hall. It was so packed that it started early. Everyone, as instructed by the radio DJs, was wearing white. Being at the front, rapidly shutting down streets and putting the final touches to the organizing, all we saw was a sea of white heading our way. Even when the front of the march reached the stage, there were still people lining up at the starting point.
The march turned into a downtown-wide rally with people coming in and out the entire day, effectively shutting down the center of the city. It was the largest march the US had ever seen. In that march, Los Angeles activists called out for a Day Without an Immigrant for May 1st. On this day, we would boycott all businesses and not go to work. We would show the power of immigrants through what would effectively be a national strike and it would happen on International Workers Day, May Day.
The strike callout was something many activists were discussing nationally. It was a great idea, but making it a reality among the undocumented immigrant population was difficult. Many were scared of deportation. However, the images of millions of people on the street in all US Cities emboldened many immigrants. While most of the protests were organized by people who had legal status, usually children or relatives of undocumented immigrants, the May 1st 2006 Day Without an Immigrant, put the organizing squarely in the lap of the undocumented.
With a newfound confidence that an entire movement and population was behind them, the undocumented population in the US began self organizing for May 1st. The organizers focused on the rallies for that day, but the heart of the organizing was among people in their workplaces, schools and communities. As this self-organization grew, the organization of the activists fractured. The top of the movement split.
The nature of the split was important in that it defined what happened to the movement and why it never grew past those first few powerful days. In the lead up to May 1st, some organizations disagreed with the strike aspect of the May 1st callout. They felt that we should show we are good citizens and go to work that day, but still voice our displeasure with HR4437. Thus, they called out their own May 1st march for the afternoon, as opposed to the 10am date set by the March 25th coalition. That way people could go to work and then march afterwards.
Yet, it was out of their hands. The callout had gone out and it was picked up organically by people. From March 25 to May 1st, it was a blur of meetings and protests done in the lead up to the Day Without an Immigrant. Given that I was a recent graduate, I helped organize a student march that brought thousands of students to Downtown LA in April as a lead up to a planned feeder march from East Los Angeles to downtown on May 1st.
In the early morning of May 1st, my activist friend got a call from an organizer in the fashion district, an area known as the alleys. This is a set of alleys in Downtown Los Angeles where discount clothing and goods are sold. It is widely popular with the immigrant community as a place to shop and work. Workers at these shops were shutting them down. They would grab all the products on display outside the shops and wheel them in and shut down their own workplaces. There was nothing the owners could do. It’s not like anyone was going to shop there anyway. So, she grabbed her bullhorn and got to work creating a feeder march from the Fashion District to City Hall.
I was in East Los Angeles, 5 miles away, preparing for a march in the historic Salazar Park along with a few hundred students. A Spanish language newspaper had picked up our callout for the student march and they published our march as one of the official feeder marches into Downtown LA for the 10am march. People waited along the march to join us as we passed by. The march, which went down Whittier Blvd, the heart of East LA, passed through some of the busiest areas of that neighborhood. It was eerie to walk down that street with all the businesses shuttered and no one out on the streets except us. It felt like an episode of the Twilight Zone. By the time we reached Little Tokyo, the historic Japanese community of Los Angeles, we reached more than a thousand people. We had to shut down 1st Avenue on our way to City Hall.
Little Tokyo was a ghost town and every restaurant had a sign in Japanese, Korean, Chinese and English saying that they were going to be closed in solidarity with the May 1st Day Without an Immigrant. Up until that point, I was an immigrant rights organizer mainly focused on the Mexican American and Chicano/a community. Immigrant rights was a natural way in which I organized to defend my people. However, seeing the solidarity of other groups helped me widen my view of the fight. Not only does the immigrant struggle encompass all races and ethnicities, but their support needs to encompass all sections of the population. This is a struggle of Mexicans fighting racism and oppression in the US AND it is also a struggle of all people who migrate here and work for a better life and it must be supported by everyone who works for a better life, whether they are born here or not.
The entire immigrant experience in the United States is meant to make immigrants feel powerless. The crushing bureaucracy of institutionalized immigration and the immigration enforcement system, the daily exploitation and abuse of employers, and the overwhelming hate and racism coming from politicians all work in unison to humiliate and demoralize the immigrant population. This is done by design since the immigrant population is at the heart of this country’s economy. Immigrants, particularly undocumented immigrants, form the foundation of agriculture, construction, food service, hospitality, and manufacturing. Currently, tech, one of the most dynamic industries, relies on a large number of H1B visa holders. Thus, a nationwide strike by immigrants and their supporters would shut down the whole country. That’s exactly what happened on May 1st 2006. The port of Los Angeles was effectively shut down when up to 90 percent of truckers refused to show up. This in itself cost the economy a billion dollars. Cargill, Tyson, and Seaboard, all food producers, had to shut down significant parts of their operations that day. Construction sites were empty. Fields worked by immigrants, primarily in areas like California and Florida were shut down. Plus, countless businesses that relied on immigrant labor and customers either shut down in solidarity or were forced to shut down because of lack of workers and customers. This was, and still is, the largest strike in US History and it was incredibly effective.
Within weeks of May 1st, and with the continued marches and actions, plus a general turn of popular opinion on behalf of immigrants, HR4437 died on the Senate floor. The marches killed the bill and also shifted the perspective of immigrants in this country. A majority of people now supported immigrant rights and a possible legalization was openly being discussed.
The Minutemen/SOS began to decline. No longer were they painted as a so-called vanguard of a silent majority, but were now a declining relic of a racist past. We continued counter protesting them all over Southern California, slowly chipping away at their morale. Eventually the entire movement collapsed on itself through infighting and their ranks went back to their online forums where they would resurface as the Tea Party and eventually MAGA.
We honestly felt as if legalization was around the corner. We had just shifted society and made history through our actions. We successfully defended the immigrant community. Now, we had a chance at real lasting change.
So why didn’t we get it? Why are we still in this same place?
– Victor Fernandez
-In Part Two will Victor will answer this question and list lessons from the movement for today.
Marx21 US 