Cristina Tzintzún - Presente!: Latin@ Immigrant Voices in the Struggle for Racial Justice / Voces Inmigranted Latin@s en la Lucha por la Justicia Racial

IN ENGLISH

Preface

Juan Gonzlez

Between March and May of 2006, an estimated three to five million people, most of them Latin@s, filled the downtown streets of some 160 US towns and cities in the largest series of mass protests the nation had ever seen.

Not even during the heyday of the American labor movement in the 1930s or during the high tide of civil rights protests and public opposition to the Vietnam War during the 1960s, had such astonishing numbers paraded peacefully in so many different localities over a common grievance. Never before had a group at the margins of US society taken our political establishment by such complete surprise.

The immigrant rights protests of 2006 began as an attempt to stop the infamous Sensenbrenner bill, which aimed to criminalize undocumented immigrants and anyone who provided them help or public services. The protests marked a rare example of an outcast group suddenly rising up and forcing the majority to rethink accepted notions of democratic and human rights. They forced the mainstream media and ordinary Americans to confront one of the thorniest moral issues our nation faces in the twenty-first century: what to do about millions of undocumented immigrants who have settled here over the past few decades, performing the lowest-paid work with very little legal protection.

Unfortunately, information on the immigration debate has been largely dominated by people at the top of our society, given the propensity of the media to showcase the sound bites and pronouncements of those with power and money. This book offers you a very different perspective. It gives voice to the immigrants themselves and to their grassroots leaders who quietly built an astonishing social justice movement without any attention or recognition from the media.

As a professional journalist for thirty-five years, Ive been acutely aware of the extraordinary role news media play in creating the memory bank of any nation. Newspapers, after all, have often been called the first draft of history. The incidents the media choose to report, their interpretation of events, inevitably serve as raw material that is then mined by scholars, who come decades or centuries later to chisel more comprehensive historical accounts.

This book is the first serious attempt to document the origins and evolution of a pivotal movement in US history from the perspective of the actual participants in that movement.

For most of the 2006 Mega Marches participants, it was their first act of social protest, one that would permanently alter the way they viewed the world. Just as the 1963 March on Washington defined the outlook of many black Americans, and just as the college rebellions of 1968 shaped the thinking of a generation of white Americans, so did these protests represent a political coming of age for the nations Hispanic minority.

These were not simply gatherings of the undocumented, however. Hundreds of thousands of Latin@s who had been born in the United States or become naturalized citizens, or who were longtime legal residents, also participated. And leading the way in virtually every protest were startling numbers of US-born Hispanic high school and college students, many of them facing the prospect of being separated from their immigrant parents who could end up being deported.

All shared the same burning sense of outrage. All were fed up with the mainstream medias reigning stereotype that depicted hordes of Latin@s and undocumented workers as a new menace engulfing the country.

How did scores of little-known Latin@ activists manage to organize such unprecedented nationwide protests even though they were scattered across the country, possessed few financial resources, and had to overcome stiff opposition to their tactics from their allies in the political establishment? To fully comprehend their historic accomplishment, one must first dispel the notion that the leaders of the Mega Marches were some ragtag collection of inexperienced community activists or that Washingtons liberal politicians and union leaders orchestrated their moves. In reality, the Mega Marches represented the culmination of grassroots political organizing by three generations of Latin@ leadersthe oldest being the veterans of the Chicano and Puerto Rican nationalist upsurges of the 1960s and 1970s, the second being the leaders of the former Central American Sanctuary and amnesty movements of the 1980s, and the youngest being those who had organized against Californias Proposition 187 in the 1990s.

Many of the young people who now comprise the DREAMers were first spurred to action by the protests of 2006, and they now represent the future political leaders of the US Latin@ population.

But the immigrant rights movement has always been more than just a fight over legalization. Given our countrys history as both an immigrant nation and an imperial power in the world, the movement has been, above all, a fight over the future course of the nation itself and of our democracyover who is legitimately in the country, and who will be legitimately allowed to migrate here in the future.

Few observers have yet grasped this broader impact of the modern immigrant rights movements. In my opinion, it effectively marked the end of thirty years of conservative domination over national politics. Six months after the protests erupted in the spring of 2006, Democrats swept control of both houses of Congress, and one of the chief reasons for that historic power shift was the mushrooming Latin@ votes, as millions of US-citizen Latin@s, stirred to anger by the rise of anti-immigrant and anti-Latin@ fervor, suddenly turned out to vote at a record rate. The number of Hispanics casting ballots that November jumped by nearly 1 million over the previous midterm electionfrom 4.7 million in 2002 to 5.6 million in 2006. And since the Republican Party was most closely associated with the Sensenbrenner bill, the percentage of Latin@s who cast ballots for Republican candidates in the House of Representatives plummeted from 38 to 30 percent.

Then in 2008, Barack Obama, borrowing the fifty-year-old Yes, We Can slogan of Cesar Chvezs United Farm Workers union and of the immigrant rights movement, captured the White House. Obama owed his historic victory in no small measure to the overwhelming support he received from Latin@ voters. Some 9.7 million Hispanics cast ballots for president in 2008, 2.1 million more than in 2004, and 67 percent of those voters chose Obama.

The 2012 election showed an even bigger increase of 2.5 million in the number of Latin@ votes, reaching a total of 12.2 million, with an even greater share, 71 percent, favoring Obama over Republican Mitt Romney.

The November 2012 election left little doubt that a major shift was occurring in US politics, one perhaps as far reaching as the infamous Southern strategy that Republicans adopted in the late 1960sa strategy that appealed to racist sentiments of working-class whites in the South to woo those historically Democratic voters into the Republican Party.

All of these events are what brought us to this moment in 2013, when Congress and the entire nation finally began to rewrite federal immigration policy.

In the pages that follow, you will hear the inside account of how we got to this place, from some of those who helped build this historic movement. Each has a fascinating story. The kind of story you will never hear from an immigration reform advocate inside Washingtons beltway.

They are the kind of stories that remind us how history is made by ordinary people who do extraordinary things.

DREAMers are undocumented youth, named as such after the DREAM Act (Development Relief and Education for Alien Minors), which is a piece of legislation that would allow qualifying undocumented youth a pathway to citizenship by requiring completion of a college degree or two years of military service.