Juan Crow

Juan Crow in Georgia

by Roberto Lovato

This article appeared in the May 26, 2008 edition of The Nation.

May 8, 2008

Justeen Mancha’s dream of becoming a psychologist was born of the tropical heat and exploitation that have shaped farmworker life around Reidsville, Georgia, for centuries. The wiry, freckle-faced 17-year-old high school junior has toiled in drought-dry onion fields to help her mother, Maria Christina Martinez. But early one September morning in 2006, Mancha’s dream was abruptly deferred.

From the living room of the battered trailer she and her mother call home, Mancha described what happened when she came out of the shower that morning. “My mother went out, and I was alone,” she said. “I was getting ready for school, getting dressed, when I heard this noise. I thought it was my mother coming back.” She went on in the Tex-Mex Spanish-inflected Georgia accent now heard throughout Dixie: “Some people were slamming car doors outside the trailer. I heard footsteps and then a loud boom and then somebody screaming, asking if we were ‘illegals,’ ‘Mexicans.’ These big men were standing in my living room holding guns. One man blocked my doorway. Another guy grabbed a gun on his side. I freaked out. ‘Oh, my God!’ I yelled.”As more than twenty Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents surrounded the trailer, said Mancha, agents inside interrogated her. They asked her where her mother was; they wanted to know if her mother was “Mexican” and whether she had “papers” or a green card. They told her they were looking for “illegals.”

After about five minutes of interrogation, the agents–who, according to the women’s lawyer, Mary Bauer of the Southern Poverty Law Center, showed no warrants and had neither probable cause nor consent to enter the home–simply left. They left in all likelihood because Mancha and her mother didn’t fit the profile of the workers at the nearby Crider poultry plant, who had been targeted by the raid in nearby Stilwell. They were the wrong kind of “Mexicans”; they were US citizens.

Though she had experienced discrimination before the raid–in the fields, in the supermarket and in school–Mancha, who testified before Congress in February, never imagined such an incident would befall her, since she and her mother had migrated from Texas to Reidsville. Best known for harvesting poultry and agricultural products, Reidsville, a farm town about 200 miles southeast of Atlanta, is also known for harvesting Klan culture behind the walls of the state’s oldest and largest prison. But its most famous former inmate is Jim Crow slayer and dreamer Martin Luther King Jr. His example inspires Mancha’s new dream: lawyering “for the poor.”

The toll this increasingly oppressive climate has taken on Mancha represents but a small part of its effects on noncitizen immigrants, especially undocumented immigrants, and other Latinos. Mancha and the younger children of the mostly immigrant Latinos in Georgia are learning and internalizing that they are different from white–and black–children not just because they have the wrong skin color but also because many of their parents lack the right papers. They are growing up in a racial and political climate in which Latinos’ subordinate status in Georgia and in the Deep South bears more than a passing resemblance to that of African-Americans who were living under Jim Crow. Call it Juan Crow: the matrix of laws, social customs, economic institutions and symbolic systems enabling the physical and psychic isolation needed to control and exploit undocumented immigrants. Listening to the effects of Juan Crow on immigrants and citizens like Mancha (”I can’t sleep sometimes because of nightmares,” she says. “My arms still twitch. I see ICE agents and men in uniform, and it still scares me”) reminds me of the trauma I heard among the men, women and children controlled and exploited by state violence in wartime El Salvador. Juan Crow has roots in the US South, but it stirs traumas bred in the hemispheric South.

In fact, the surge in Latino migration (the Southeast is home to the fastest-growing Latino population in the United States) is moving many of the institutions and actors responsible for enforcing Jim Crow to resurrect and reconfigure themselves in line with new demographics. Along with the almost daily arrests, raids and home invasions by federal, state and other authorities, newly resurgent civilian groups like the Ku Klux Klan, in addition to more than 144 new “nativist extremist” groups and 300 anti-immigrant organizations born in the past three years, mostly based in the South, are harassing immigrants as a way to grow their ranks.

Meanwhile, a legal regime of distinctions between the rights of undocumented immigrants and citizens has emerged and is being continually refined and expanded. A 2006 Georgia law denies undocumented immigrants driver’s licenses. Federal laws that allowed local and state authorities to pursue blacks under the Fugitive Slave Act appear to be the model for the Bush Administration’s Agreements of Cooperation in Communities to Enhance Safety and Security (ACCESS) program, which allows states to deputize law enforcement officials to chase, detain, arrest and jail the undocumented. Georgia’s lowest-paid workers, the undocumented, now occupy a separate, unequal and clandestine place that has made it increasingly difficult for them to work, rent homes or attend school.

The pre- and post-Reconstruction regional economic system centered on the stately Southern mansions that once graced Atlanta’s storied Peachtree Street has given way to a more global finance-driven system centered on the cold, anonymous skyscrapers that loom over Peachtree today. And in a more hopeful sign, some veterans of the civil rights struggle against Jim Crow are joining Latino immigrants in what will likely be one of the major movements of the twenty-first century.

These and other facets of immigrant life in Georgia, the Deep South and the entire country are but a small part of the labyrinthine institutional and cultural arrangements defining the strange career of Juan Crow.

The immigrant condition in Georgia worsened in the wake of the failed immigration reform proposal last year. The national immigration debate had the effect of further legitimizing and emboldening the most extreme elements of the anti-immigrant movement in places like Georgia. Since the advent of what he terms “Georgiafornia,” for example, D.A. King, a former marine and contributor to the anti-immigrant hate site VDARE, has leapfrogged into the national limelight to become one of the major advocates for deportation and security-only “immigration reform.” Strengthened by the defeat of national reform, King, State Senator Chip Rogers and a growing galaxy of formerly fringe groups succeeded in getting some of the country’s most draconian anti-immigrant laws passed. These new racial codes are disguised by the national security-infused bureaucratic language of laws with names like the Georgia Security and Immigration Compliance Act (GSICA).

Their efforts were egged on by the Bush Administration’s implementation of the ACCESS program last August. ACCESS provided new excuses for state and local officials to pursue the undocumented in states like Georgia. In tandem with the federal government, King and Rogers led the push to pass GSICA, which requires law enforcement officers to investigate the citizenship status of anyone charged with a felony or driving under the influence. GSICA and federal efforts laid the foundation on which the other legal and social structures of Juan Crow grow.

Georgia’s estimated 500,000 undocumented immigrants must think twice before seeking emergency support at hospitals or clinics because of laws that require them to prove their legal status before receiving many state benefits. “No-match letter” regulations requiring all employers to confirm the Social Security numbers of their employees have been issued by the Social Security Administration and have resulted in firings and growing fear among immigrants. But even without the no-match letters, undocumented immigrants in Georgia have many reasons to fear going to work. If they work at a company with more than 500 employees, for example (and most undocumented immigrants are employed in meatpacking, agricultural, carpet and other industries with hundreds, sometimes thousands, of workers), they must worry about laws that punish employers who knowingly hire undocumented immigrants and mandate that firms with state contracts check the immigration status of their employees. Similar laws denying or restricting housing, education, transportation and other aspects of immigrant life are also being instituted across Georgia.

For a firsthand look at how the interplay of state and federal policies fuels Juan Crow, one need go no further than the immigrant-heavy area surrounding Buford Highway in DeKalb County, near Atlanta. During the weekend of October 18, 2007, the Georgia Latino Alliance for Human Rights (GLAHR) and other advocacy groups from across the state reported sharp increases in arrests of immigrants in the area. “This weekend alone we received more than 200 phone calls from people telling horrible stories of arrests,” said GLAHR executive director Adelina Nicholls of Mexico City. “There are hundreds of Latinos who’ve been hunted down like animals, taken to jail, and they don’t even know why or whether or not they’ll be released,” said Nicholls more recently.

Nicholls and other advocates are working feverishly in response to the exponential increase in official and extra-official profiling of immigrants. Last year there were forty-four reported armed robberies of DeKalb County-area Latino immigrants in August alone. One especially outrageous incident took place just west of Atlanta, in the rural town of Carrollton, last June. Emelina Ramirez, a Honduran immigrant, called local police to report that her roommates were attacking her, punching and kicking her in the stomach. Ramirez was pregnant. Locals say that when police got to Ramirez’s apartment, officers handcuffed her, took her to jail and then ran her fingerprints through a federal database. After discovering that she was undocumented, they contacted federal authorities as stipulated under ACCESS and GSICA. Ramirez was then deported.

Nicholls says she and GLAHR staff exist in a perpetual state of exhaustion after having to expand their DeKalb County work to deal with cases like Ramirez’s. Adding to their load is the situation in nearby Cobb County, where the local jail has 500 adults captured on streets, at work and in their homes. All of these people, says Nicholls, are awaiting deportation.

Beneath the growing fear and intensifying racial tensions of Georgia lies the new, more globalized economic system that sustains Juan Crow. At the core of the economy in Dixie are the financial dealings taking place in the shiny towers of Peachtree Street, buildings constructed atop the ashes of plantation houses.

Lining Peachtree today are SunTrust, Bank of America and other titans of global finance with major operations in downtown Atlanta. Along with the financial players of Charlotte, North Carolina, the companies occupying the towers on Peachtree are among the prime movers behind the transformation and restructuring of the Georgia economy–and of its race relations. On Peachtree you can find US banks and financial firms investing in companies doing business in post-NAFTA Latin America, where nonunion labor and miserably low wages drive immigration to Georgia and other states. The investment portfolios of many of these companies have grown fat with high-yield investments in the poultry, meatpacking, rug, tourism and other Georgia industries employing undocumented immigrants from Mexico and Latin America. The need to keep down the wages of these undocumented workers is fulfilled with the legal, political and psychological discipline of Juan Crow. Along with the most visible legacy of Jim Crow–Georgia’s massive and growing population of black prisoners, housed in Reidsville and other, mostly rural prisons–the Peachtree State’s undocumented immigrants find themselves at the bottom of the South’s new political and economic order.

By keeping down wages of the undocumented and documented workforce, Juan Crow doesn’t just pit undocumented Latino workers against black and white workers. It also makes possible every investor’s dream of merging Third World wages with First World amenities. Promotional brochures put out by the state’s Department of Economic Development, for example, tout Georgia’s “below average” wages and its status as a “right to work” (nonunion) state. Georgia’s infrastructure, its proximity to US markets and its incentives–nonunion labor, low wages, government subsidies, cheap land–allow the state to position itself as an attractive investment opportunity for foreign companies. While the fortunes of Ford, GM and other US companies have declined in the South, the fortunes of foreign automakers here are rising. Companies like Korean car manufacturer Kia, which plans to open a $1.2 billion plant by 2009, see in Georgia and other Southern states a new pool of cheap labor. Of the $5.7 billion of total new investment in Georgia in 2006, more than 36 percent was from international companies–companies that were also responsible for nearly half of the 24,660 jobs created by government-supported foreign ventures that year.

Also critical to the economic strategies formulated in the towers on Peachtree Street is another Latin-centered component: free trade with Latin America. “We are the gateway to the Americas,” boasted Kenneth Stewart, commissioner of the Georgia Department of Economic Development. Stewart was among the more than 1,000 people, including three US Cabinet members and finance ministers, trade representatives, investors, corporate executives and politicians from thirty-three countries in the hemisphere, who attended the sold-out Americas Competitiveness Forum at the Marriott on Peachtree Street last June. As an organizer of the event, the gregarious Stewart, like many of the region’s economic leaders, considers hosting the forum a critical part of Atlanta’s bid to become the secretariat of the Free Trade Area of the Americas organization. Local elites support building a $10 million, privately financed FTAA headquarters complex, possibly in the area near Peachtree and the Sweet Auburn neighborhood.

Before being rapidly gentrified by the white-collar employees working in the Peachtree towers, Sweet Auburn, the birthplace of Martin Luther King Jr., was one of the cradles of the African-American freedom struggle. Echoing the connection frequently made here between increased globalization and commerce and improved race relations, Stewart told me that free trade “will benefit citizens of Georgia and the citizens of Mexico and other Latin American countries.” But when I asked him about the increased racial tensions, including the murders of some immigrants in Georgia, and about the growing repression of noncitizen Mexican workers, Stewart abruptly ended the interview.

For her part, Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin–among the most recent in a long line of African-American Atlanta mayors that includes former Martin Luther King colleague and Wal-Mart consultant Andrew Young (who has an office in a Peachtree high-rise)–also linked local freedom struggles with global free trade. Before the Americas Competitiveness Forum, she and other regional elites distributed splashy brochures promoting the city’s FTAA bid. Included in the brochure was a picture of the headstone of King’s grave, which bears the inscription Free at last. Free at last. Thank God Almighty I’m Free at last. The brochure promoting “the city too busy to hate” also paints a positive, global Kumbaya picture of the plight of Georgia’s migrants: “With its attractive quality of life and rapidly expanding job market, Metro Atlanta draws thousands of newcomers every year and has growing Latin, Asian and African American communities.”

“This is the home of Dr. King,” said Franklin in her welcome speech at the packed forum. “It is in the spirit of peace, it is in the spirit of collaboration and it is in the spirit of fairness that we attack this issue of [economic] competitiveness,” she told her audience in King-like cadences. But had Franklin taken her foreign visitors on the short stroll from their hotel to Sweet Auburn, they would not have found the racial harmony described in the glossy brochures and spirited speeches.

Documented and undocumented Latinos dealing with the economic and political effects of Juan Crow in Georgia (and across the country) find themselves unwitting actors in a centuries-old racial drama, which they must alter if Juan Crow is to be defeated. The major difference today is that Latinos also find themselves having to navigate a racial and political topography that is no longer black and white. Young Latinos, in particular, attend schools that teach them about Jim Crow while giving them a daily dose of Juan Crow.

High school senior Ernesto Chávez (a pseudonym) does not look forward to becoming one of the few undocumented students in Georgia to go to a university like Kennesaw State, which requires them to carry student IDs with special color coding, or to a college that denies them aid and forces them to pay exorbitant, nearly impossible-to-pay out-of-state tuition. He has already learned enough about Jim Crow–and Juan Crow–in high school.

Chávez, who sports a buzz cut and wears baggy clothes, said that when he studied Jim Crow in school, he identified strongly with the heroic generation of African-American youth who rebelled against it. “They couldn’t ride in the same trains, they couldn’t drink from the same fountains,” he said during an interview in a classroom at Miller Grove High School in the Atlanta suburb of Lithonia. “I felt mad when I read about that, even though they weren’t my people,” said the soft-spoken Mexican, who is part of the small but growing minority of Latinos at Miller Grove (African-American students make up about 93 percent of the student body).

Chávez said he came to know the limits of his physical, social and psychic mobility, thanks to the Georgia law that requires people to show proof of citizenship or legal status in order to obtain a driver’s license. “It’s hard to describe what it feels like to be ‘illegal’ here in Georgia. It’s like you can’t move,” he said, his voice cracking slightly. “It feels scary because you know that when you go out to a public place, you might never know if you’re going to come back. I’m really scared because my mother drives without a license. She’s scared too.”

Chávez and other Latino students also expressed their shock and dismay at being discriminated against by some of the descendants of those discriminated against by Jim Crow.

“When I first got here, I was confused. I went to a mostly white school in Gwinnett County and started noticing the fifth-grade kids saying things to me, racial stuff, asking me questions like, ‘Are you illegal?’” said Chávez as he fidgeted nervously in one of those ubiquitous and visibly uncomfortable school desks. “But when I was in seventh grade, I went to Richards Middle School, where it wasn’t the white people saying things, it was black people. They didn’t like Mexican kids. They would call us ‘Mexican border hoppers,’ ‘wetbacks’ and all these things. Every time they’d see me, they yelled at me, threatened to beat me up after school for no reason at all.” Asked how it felt, he said, “It’s like, now since they have rights, they can discriminate [against] others.”

Chávez’s family, along with many immigrant families in Georgia, will be watching closely to see how the state’s justice system deals with the still-pending 2005 case of six Mexican farmworkers killed execution-style in their trailers, which were parked near the cotton and peanut farms they toiled on in Tifton. Pretrial motions began last July in the case, in which prosecutors allege that four African-American men bludgeoned five of the immigrants to death with aluminum baseball bats and shot one in the head while robbing them in their trailer home. Though the face of anti-immigrant racism in the Juan Crow South is still overwhelmingly identified as white by the immigrants I interviewed, some immigrants also see a black face on anti-immigrant hate.

Politically, a growing divide has emerged between pro- and anti-immigrant blacks in Georgia. The African-American face of Juan Crow is embodied by State Senator and probable Democratic Atlanta mayoral candidate Kasim Reed (he’s also considering a gubernatorial bid). Reed proposed a five-year prison sentence for anyone caught trying to secure employment with a false ID. Local Latino and African-American activists have criticized Reed for what Bruce Dixon of the online Black Agenda Report called his “morally bankrupt attempt to outflank Republicans on the right.”

Activists like Janvieve Williams of the US Human Rights Network, based in Atlanta, counter the anti-immigrant tide by elevating the tone of the debate and shifting the terms to human rights. As an Afro-Panamanian immigrant, Williams says she feels discrimination from many whites in Georgia, but she also experiences discrimination from mestizo immigrants. Her perception of anti-immigrant sentiments among African-Americans adds another layer to the complex racial dynamics unleashed by Juan Crow. “I’m caught between African-Americans who don’t want to understand immigration and immigrants and Latinos who use words like ‘moreno,’ ‘negritos,’ ‘los negros’ and other terms that are not good,” says Williams.

But rather than see her Afro-Latino identity and her Latin American political experience as a barrier between communities, Williams–who co-hosts Radio Diaspora, a weekly Afro-Latino program that helped promote the 50,000-plus immigrants’ rights marches in 2006–uses Latin American media and organizing experience to cross linguistic and political borders. “We need to move from civil rights to human rights. We need to start using the language and tools of human rights around the issue of immigration. It’s an international issue that needs an international framework,” says Williams, whose organization co-sponsored the visit to Atlanta last May by the United Nations special rapporteur on the human rights of migrants. Williams’s organization brought together many groups who shared stories of Juan Crow with the special rapporteur, who took his report to the UN General Assembly.

In the same way that the concept of civil rights grew as a response to Jim Crow, the human rights framework advocated by Williams and other immigrants’ rights activists in the South and across the country challenges traditional approaches to race and rights. “Some civil rights leaders here don’t think human rights affects us in the United States,” says Williams. “A lot of the [civil rights] elders of that movement are not linked to the human rights movement, and that also gets in the way of working together.”

Not all of Georgia’s civil rights elders fit thirtysomething Williams’s description. The Rev. Joseph Lowery, the lieutenant to Martin Luther King Jr., says he did not perceive the threat that some whites and African-American Georgians felt from the massive immigrant marches of 2006; instead he sees in the millions marching in Atlanta and across the country “instruments of God’s will to change this country.” Reverend Lowery, who now leads the Georgia Coalition for the People’s Agenda, has spoken eloquently and vociferously against what he considers “wicked” immigration policies and has attended pro-immigrant rallies. He believes that massive immigration to the United States came about because of the workings within the tall buildings like those in spitting distance of his office in the historic Atlanta Life building on Auburn Avenue. “We’ve globalized money, we’ve globalized trade and commerce, but we haven’t globalized fairness toward work and labor. The solution to the ‘problem’ of immigration and other problems is globalization of justice,” he said.

Speaking of the relationship between American blacks and Latino immigrants, Lowery said, “There are many differences between our experience and that of immigrant Latinos–but there is a family resemblance between Jim Crow and what is being experienced by immigrants. Both met economic oppression. Both met racial and ethnic hostility.

“But the most important thing to remember,” said Lowery, as if casting out the demons of Juan and Jim Crow, “is that, though we may have come over on different ships, we’re all in the same damn boat now.”

Scholar, Activist Rudy Acuna Responds to Arizona’s “Big Lie” Law, SB 1108

This just in from Rudy Acuna, author of Occupied America, one of several books identified as “anti-American” by Arizona Rep. Russell Pearce, R-Mesa and other backers of the racist SB 1108 bill. Rudy’s letter to the Tucson Citizen rightly denounces the dangerous tactic of the “Big Lie” inherent in SB 1108. Well made points by an eminent scholar and committed activist, one I have great affection for and admiration of.

Letter to the Editor:

Unlike many of the present day squatters in Arizona, I have deep feelings for Arizona. My mother’s family, the Elíases lived there for centuries.

But recently I have been swimming in a sea of emails alerting me to Rep. Russell Pearce, R-Mesa, amendments to Senate Bill 1108 that would permit Arizona to confiscate books, ban Chicano studies and exclude the Movimiento Estudiantil Chicanos de Aztlan (MECHA) from Arizona’s campuses.

I am 75-years young and have lived through the McCarthy era and read about similar thought control crusades which history has exposed as idiotic. In the 1920s the words to the pledge of alliance were changed from “my flag” to the “flag of the United States” so aliens would not cross their fingers and salute a foreign flag. The present proposal ranks along side these kinds of idiocies.

If Pearce has his way, Arizona schools would ban courses “denigrate American values and the teachings of Western civilization” and would teaching practices that “overtly encourage dissent” from those values, including democracy, capitalism, pluralism and religious tolerance. Rep. Pearce who is not the sharpest knife in the box then would bar public schools, community colleges and universities from allowing organizations to operate on campus if it is “based in whole or in part on race-based criteria.” Among the books designated for burning is my book Occupied America: A History of Chicanos which has received the Gustavus Myers Award for an Outstanding Book on Race Relations in North America.

I am personally offended by Pearce’s labeling my book as seditious. Unlike Pearce I served in the armed forces and did not claim deferments. I was a full time student in good standing at the University of Southern California during the Korean War. I volunteered draft. Pearce and many of the thought control cadets took another route. Moreover, many of the statements Pearce attributes to Occupied America were in quotation marks. Having taught well prepared students from the University of Phoenix, I know that Phoenix teaches its students what quotation marks mean. .

For Pearce’s information, history is probative. It builds. That is why the content of U.S. history courses change from elementary through high school. University courses which Pearce should are much more complex.

What I am more concerned about are Pearce’s attempts to smear MECHA. Adolph Hitler was a proponent of the use of the Big Lie as a viable propaganda technique. Hitler said that the bigger the lie the more adapt people were to believe it.

Pearce implies that MECHA excludes other races and promotes racism, which is just not true. For Pearce’s information, MECHA organizations on every campus are chartered by student affairs. In order to be chartered, the organization has to be open to all students regardless of their race, ethnicity or religion. Every campus differs. I have visited hundreds of campuses throughout the country and have found that on some campuses the majority of the members were non-Mexican American.

I entered education because I wanted to give gang kids an alternative – I loved the kids but hated gangs. Many former gang members are today lawyers, medical doctors and teachers because of Chicano studies and MECHA. Indeed, in California 85 to 95 percent of all Latino elected officials are alumni of this organization. Frankly, people like Pearce relish in the portrayal of Mexican Americans as gang members rather than university graduates because they can step on us.

The Big Lie strategy of Pearce and company is effective because most people become paralyzed in the face of the Big Lie. During World War II, most Americans turned a deaf ear to the herding of over 100,000 Japanese Americans into concentration camps. As a Mexican American I am proud of 16-year old Ralph Lazo from Belmont High in Los Angeles who said that this is not right and declared himself of Japanese decent and went to Manzanar with his friends. That is in Occupied America.

Mexican Americans should realize that these attacks are today directed at them because Pearce looks at them as weak. He has not yet taken on the Hillel or the Newman Clubs on college campuses who like MECHA do fine work and incidentally have Jewish Americans and Catholics as their core members.

Hopefully, Arizonians will wake up and people like Pearce will suffer the same fate as the Pete Wilsons did in California. His attacks are race specific and based on the Big Lie. And history will unfortunately judge Arizonians.

Rodolfo F. Acuña, PhD
Chicana/o Studies Department
California State University at Northridge

Still They March: Nationwide Rallies Highlight Failure of War on Immigrants

The battle for immigrant rights rages daily in the heart, mind and lanky 10 year-old frame of Chelsea resident and May Day marcher, Norma Canela. Norma’s mother Olivia illegally crossed the borders of Guatemala, Mexico and the U.S. almost eleven years ago from Honduras. Born shortly after her mom came to the U.S., Norma says attending one of the over 200 May Day marches for immigrant rights made her feel “good, like we could help people get their papers!”

Chanting, singing and marching alongside so many others in the Chelsea march, also provided the energetic 4th grader a counterbalance to the crush of loneliness (”I feel like nobody wants to help us”), fear (I’m scared they might take my mom”) and isolation (”Sometimes I feel alone”). If, it achieved nothing else, march organizers say, the May Day mobilizations gave Norma, Olivia and the 12 million undocumented immigrants and their families living in United States a dose of hope in the face of an escalating war on the undocumented.

Yelling “Alto a las redadas! Alto a las deportaciones!”(Stop the Raids! Stop the Deportations!) the tens of thousands of immigrants and their supporters marching throughout the country on May Day believe they took crucial steps for a movement trying to defend families like Norma’s from a multibillion dollar war being waged on immigrants. On May Day they hoped they helped align the movement’s agenda, animate its base and flex its power.

Relieved, yet still animated after organizing the largest (30,000 +) of the hundreds of May Day marches in towns and cities throughout the country, Christine Neumann-Ortiz, Executive Director of Voces de la Frontera in Wisconsin, a low-wage and immigrant workers center, said that the day’s primary objective had been accomplished. “Almost all immigrant rights groups are now on same page as far as opposing measures that criminalize immigrants and demanding legalization in the first 100 days of the next [President's] administration” said Ortiz adding “I think across the board most groups are calling on Bush Administration put an immediate end to raids and deportation.”

Prior to today’s marches, the fissures and differences around strategy for immigration reform had split the movement. Some groups supported ‘tradeoffs’ -legalization for even heavier enforcement- like those contained in the now defunct McCain-Kennedy bill while other groups didn’t. May Day march organizers also found themselves on the defensive against what Ortiz calls ” a kind of low-intensity conflict” unleashed on immigrants shortly after the historic May Day marches of 2006: thousands of raids on homes and workplaces conducted by heavily-armed immigration agents, deployment of 6,000 national guard troops to the border, billions of dollars in government contracts to military-industrial companies like Halliburton, Blackwater and Boeing to build the infrastructure to surveill, trail and jail immigrants.

Against the backdrop of the intense escalation of attacks and the fear these attacks engendered after 2006, Ortiz and other organizers like Gladys Vega of the Chelsea Collaborative believe they also succeeded in injecting some “animo” into their movement. “On a daily basis, we have to deal with community members terrorized by raids, facing increased problems in the workplace because of the tighter (employment) regulations” said Vega adding “Here in Chelsea, a city that is 63% immigrant, 350, mostly Latino families had their houses foreclosed on and we can’t just sit by and watch.”

In response to what she considers the very predictable mainstream media stories focused on the decreased size of the May Day marches, Vega said, “When your community and you have to do so much and when there is so much repression against immigrants and their families, the real story is how so many people overcame their fear and marched in 200 cities.”

Now Ortiz is ready to pull out a defensive posture and launch an offensive. “Marching is one critical piece but not the only one” said Ortiz. “Most of us are also involved in the massive push for voter registration, citizenship drives and getting people to vote. May Day was also about sending a message to the Republicans and Democrats, about holding their feet to the fire.”

Norma and Olivia can’t cast a vote this election season. One is too young, the other doesn’t have the papers. But they are still involved in the electoral process. How? “I talk to our family and friends who can vote; I make phone calls, distribute flyers, attend events anything I can do I do it” said Olivia. For her part, future voter Norma, who sometimes joins her mother’s electoral activities, offers up some immigrant rights strategy of her own, “We’re going to march until they (the government/immigration authorities) get bored. Then we can all be safe.”

5 Reasons to Participate in the Immigrant Rights Marches on May 1rst

As the Mayday marches approach, I hear the pattering of well-meaning, but worried hearts. Some have told me that they are worried that Mayday may become low-turnout day. Though normal and to be expected, especially in a climate so toxic with state and corporate media-sponsored hopelessness, such fears need to be recognized and dealt with, for such personal, internal negotiations in times of global crisis are the stuff that the best political dreams are made of.

So, as we ponder whether to move our bodies to march in an age when politics and, especially, “progressive” politics, have given way to the important, but largely disembodied politics of the web, here are a few things to consider:

1. Marching Matters - we might want to remember what ACTUP, Latin American and other activists taught and told us: silence=death. As the Pentagon propaganda scandal makes chillingly clear, the domestic war, the war within the borders is primarily psychological and symbolic. Elites know this and so should we. Add to the equation the physical war targeting migrants and you get a situation that demands that we demonstrate self-respect and courage in the face of such serious repression. Rather than simply absorb the messages of hopelessness and discouragement coming out of our TVs and computer screens (and even from some of our friends and families), let’s move our bodies against the state and the elite interests controlling it. One of the best antidotes to the fear and isolation propagated by the media, government and other interests is to march with others. Marching helps us realize that, in a pathologically ill country, migrants and their supporters are, indeed, “aliens”; Marching reminds us that, yes, we are not alone. Regardless of how many of us march, it’s critically important that those living in isolation and fear, especially our children and young people, need to see some of us raising our fists and heads before injustice. Next time someone tells you “marching doesn’t matter”, just ask them what marching might mean to those undocumented parents who’ve never participated in marches or anything political and who’s small children watched them come out of the political closet of undocumented status for the first time in their lives.

2. The Government has Spent Billions to Attack Migrants and Destroy the Immigrant Rights Movement - in case you didn’t realize it, in times of war and declining empire, immigrants and those who defend them become enemies of the state, useful enemies that help militarize life within the borders of the “nation”. Just look at what happened after 9-11, especially after the marches of 2006: raids and home invasions by the thousands, massive deployments of thousands of heavily-armed ICE agents and national guard troops, billions spent on defensive walls, electronic surveillance and military equipment,..the list goes on and on. The exponential amounts of money, imprisonment rates and the state violence aimed at migrants should make abundantly clear what we’re witnessing: a domestic war on immigrants. Local, state and federal governments have spent billions to destroy us, yet still we march.

3. The mainstream media is fatally ignorant of -and antagonistic towards- immigrants and immigration issues - you might remember that this is the same media that repeated mantra-like that the marchas of 2006 “came out of nowhere”; the same media that then proceeded to report on the marches without context, reporting as if Mojadopotli, the God of the Undocumented, magically moved DJ’s as he/she rained millions of marchers down on hundreds of U.S. towns and cities. Rather than worry that your local and national media are already reporting on the marches as a failure because “far fewer” people are “expected” to show up, you might stop for a moment to consider that the media is simply doing its political job-and then march anyway. And there are much better, even funner ways to spend your Mayday than taking in gobs and gobs of messages from the most sophisticated and private sector-driven spin and propaganda system ever devised.

4. Movements have their ebbs and flows-and we’re ebbing right now - if your political commitment depends on the fix of massive marches for you to feel good or inspired, you might consider checking into a political detox facility immediately. Such conjunctural logic fits perfectly into the “look, their marches have diminished” “reporting” that we even hear from the Spanish language and broken-Spanish-inflected reporting of some Latino surnamed reporters. Not to march means we further enable the diverse and cowardly interests aligned against migrants: Minutemen, the Bush Administration, the media, Democrats and Republicans and others. The moment we forget that the true measure of movements that inspire social and political change is what happens in the heart and mind is the moment we allow the whispers and hollers of our adversaries to crystallize inside of us. This dark, defensive moment will pass only if at least some of us continue to carry the candle of hope.

5. Immigrants Still Lead the Way - more than anything, Mayday should serve to remind us of the power of immigrants to alter history. It’s because of immigrant workers that children (at least most working class children) no longer languish in factories; it’s because of immigrant workers that there’s an 8 hour workday; it’s in no small part because of immigrants and other free, partially free and wholly unfree workers that any “freedom” exists in the cold heart of the most powerful and most rapidly declining empire ever.

So, in the face of the unholy alliance of interests aligned against us from above, let us march if only to connect to the tradition of freedom brought from below.

A marchar!

Bush,Calderon Plot Economic and Military Integration at NOLA Summit

At the center of today’s “Three Amigos” Summit in New Orleans between George W. Bush and his homologues, Mexico’s Felipe Calderon and Stephen Harper of Canada, is the sovereignty-swallowing nexus between trade, migration and military policy. As mentioned in this AP piece, Bush and Calderon held bilateral talks today in which they discussed NAFTA, the proposed free trade agreement (FTA) with Colombia and regional security. Much of the chatter in the press focused on how Calderon and Bush “defended” NAFTA and free trade.

Lacking in all of the coverage of this and other regional summits is any notion of the symbiotic relationship between trade and militarization throughout hemisphere, including the U.S.. None of the press, for example, makes the connection between how economy-integrating trade policies like NAFTA or the proposed U.S.-Colombia FTA are inevitably accompanied by increases in the domestic policing and military budgets of the U.S. and its “Latin American trade partners” like Colombia, home to the worst human rights record in the Americas thanks to the more than $4 billion in military aid it receives from the U.S.

As they continue negotiating an exponential increase in the military aid Mexico receives from the U.S., Bush and Calderon appear to be plotting a Colombianization (drug wars, counterinsurgency wars combined with free trade) just a stones throw from our southern border.

Nothing was said in today’s summit coverage about how Calderon and Bush are actually “defending” free trade with real guns and real troops.This link between increased free trade and mushrooming military budgets makes sense when we consider that border-smashing corporate interests represented by Bush and Calderon need uniformed people with guns to quash social tensions (formerly known as class conflicts) exacerbated by economic restructuring. Put another way, when the soft power middle class cushion between rich and poor gets tattered beyond repair by free trade, it is replaced by the hard power military cushion in both the U.S and Mexico.

Following the same free trade+militarism=freedom formula, Bush and Calderon continued their plans to implement “Plan Merida”. Better known as “Plan Mexico”, Bush and Calderon’s plan is a “security” agreement designed deal with the “threat to our societies by drug trafficking and other criminal organizations operating on both sides of our common border. According to the Times Picayune, Bush told Calderon “I want to work with you in close coordination to defeat these drug traffickers”. After agreeing with Bush, Calderon added, “Recently, NAFTA has come under criticism, and I don’t believe people are realizing the benefits it has brought to the United States and Mexico”.

As I’ve stated here and elsewhere, such “benefits” come complete with plans for intensified militarization to respond to the post-cold war need for new enemies that both legitimate militarism and promote free trade as well as the idea of the state itself. Bush and Calderon are clear that, in the absence of the internal and external communist threat of the previous era, immigrants, drug cartels and youth gangs are joining “terrorists” in the mish mash of enemy-making in the post-Cold War politics of the hemisphere. For more on how this applies to immigrants in the U.S., see this recent piece. Those protesting the cheapening of their lives in the U.S. and Mexico are also joining the ranks of the unruly masses requiring enhanced legal and police control. Policing at protests like those of New Orleans preview and expand the closing of public space and rights by the true sovereign of our political and economic system: border-hopping big capital.

Interestingly, those protesting the summit included both locals organizing a very important “People’s Summit”, some left-leaning Latin American solidarity organizations and right-leaning Lou Dobbs “pro-sovereignty” groups and individuals, many of whom are quite anti-immigrant. Also curious was how Bush introduced New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin as “el alcalde” (Spanish words for “the mayor”). I remember being in New Orleans shortly after Katrina and hearing responses to Nagin’s statements about the need to “stop New Orleans from being overrun by Mexican workers.” I wonder what Nagin was thinking as he stood next to Bush and Calderon (see below) while they announced trade and military agreements that will foment further migration to New Orleans from Mexico?

ICE Raids Return to Instill Fear, Sow Hatred Before Mayday Marches

In another sad, but predictable display of government fear-mongering and manipulation, the Bush Administration again deployed heavily-armed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents in several U.S. states. More than 375 people were arrested in 8 states during the largest raids in several months, according to this report in USA Today.

As was the Bush Administration’s habit prior to major mobilizations like those of 2006, the current raids communicate multiple messages to multiple audiences. The primary message to the undocumented community is “Don’t march. Watch out.”; The raids also provide red meat to the rabid Republican (and many Democrat) anti-migrant among us. As I’ve written here previously, the raids also serve to help the state bolster and normalize the militarization of the “homeland”, the country within the borders. Wouldn’t you do the same thing if faced with the catastrophic failure of the “American Dream”.

As you watch the frequency of these raids increase, have no doubt about this: they will continue far and beyond the elections and will continue regardless of which candidate (yes, even Barack Obama), which party prevails in November. In what is starting to feel like mathematical precision, predictability the raids are occurring as if in inverse proportional to the degree of economic - and political (think how the 2000 and 2004 elections broke the system) decline. History teaches us that countries, empires in decline need wars foreign and domestic in order to reinforce the idea that they are legitimate and real. So, it’s not just politicos using migrants to appear like they’re doing something; It’s the unholy alliance of interests sitting atop this Titanic ship of state.

The Rotten Tomatoes of Immigration Politics: Major Penn. Farm Shuts Down

This story in today’s Philadelphia Enquirer tells the sad, but revealing tale of one Keith Eckel, the soon-to-be former head of the largest tomato producing operation north of the Mason-Dixon Line. After decades of being the most important tomato grower on the East Coast, Eckel announced yesterday that he will be closing down his farm because he can’t find the 180 workers he needs to keep his business competitive and operational. Though successfully ignoring the plight of the workers, the story does say a lot about what many of us predicted would come about as a result of the repression unleashed on migrant workers.

“It’s a sad day,” said Eckel, who blames his woes on the lack of immigration reform. “We’re closing a part of our business that we really love.”

Eckel’s plight mirrors that of many farmers in the U.S., increasing numbers of whom find themselves living in a country where fewer and fewer natives want to work the land, a country in which gigantic agricultural and other corporate interests have hollowed out the economy and decimated the American Dream by exporting jobs. But rather than denounce, as Eckel did, the powerful interests responsible for the growers plight, many U.S. natives are drinking deadly doses of the nativist Kool Aid defining the new racial politics of the post-Mason-Dixon, post Southern Strategy moment. Minutemen, Republicans and growing numbers of Democrats and other politicos have made an industry of the politics of industrial decline.

Critical to any political strategy aspiring to reverse the anti-migrant hysteria is doing what Keith Eckel did: sling the rotten tomatoes of immigration politics at the right targets-politicos and the parasites of economic decline attached to them. Time to bust out our own radical Raid: truth backed by facts and political action like upcoming May 1rst (May Day) actions.

Hate Groups Funding Ads Pitting Latinos Against Blacks

This story from ABC 7 in Arlington, Virginia reports on the latest ad antics of the anti-immigrant set. Ads placed across the U.S. by a group calling itself the Coalition for the American Worker (CAW) are blaming black unemployment on Latino immigrants.

The problem with the article is that is fails to point out that the main group behind CAW is Numbers USA, a racist hate group headed by Roy Beck, who is also the spokesperson for CAW.

To further entangle matters, the spokesperson in the ads is Frank Morris, a former head of the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, whose “facts” are wholly and absolutely fudged:

That ABC-7 should cover this so uncritically no longer surprises given the degree to which lies and myth have thoroughly saturated the political sphere and society in general.

But what this should move some of us to do is re-read people like Hannah Arendt, Jacques Ellul and others who’ve watched the especially rapid spread of such screed in times of crisis. Give their latest racial riffs, Hillary Clinton’s campaign seems to have caught on - but in the wrong way.

All the more reason to make three of my favorite words today’s anti-mentira mantra: Claridad, Claridad, Claridad.

Basta Ya: Boycott “Si Se Puede” in Elections

In their harried pursuit of Latino votes in previous and in upcoming primaries like that in Texas, candidates Obama and Clinton have added another to the still-growing string of records broken this election year: number of times the phrase “Si se puede” has been used in a U.S. presidential election.

The record is being broken in large part thanks to the powerful, yet deadly combination of the exponential growth in the Latino electorate and the fabulous lack of imagination of campaign strategists. In their efforts to highlight the “intimacy” and “unity” between the candidates and Latinos, rally after rally in Dallas, Houston, El Paso and other urban, suburban and rural parts of Texas has included loud, mantra-like repetitions of the Spanish language phrase, which means “Yes We Can”.

Originally coined in 1972 by my friend, United Farm Workers co-founder, Dolores Huerta, “Si se Puede” became the UFW’s motto ; It then transcended the UFW to become an important slogan for many labor, immigration and other historic struggles involving the country’s largest “minority”.

And now, in what appears to signal another mainstreaming of a Latino trend, many, if not most Clinton or Obama rallies include some mention of the English or Spanish or English and Spanish language political slogan (see New York Times pic above).

While it is true that the mainstreaming of “Si Se Puede” provides us with another signal of how the larger body politic is successfully adjusting to the death of the black-white electorate, this mainstreaming comes at a high cost: the cheapening of “Si Se Puede”. To transform a term rooted historically in the salt of the earth struggles of working class Latinos in the campaigns of candidates who also repeat mantra-like the phrase “middle class” alters and diminishes the political value and movement power of “Si Se Puede”. That my friend, Dolores Huerta, uses the term to promote her favored candidate, Hillary Clinton, saddens me less because I am anti-Clinton than because I was pro-Si Se Puede since my political childhood.

Before the inevitable moment when big corporations start using the term as slogans in ads selling us cars, burgers and tampons arrives, let us put up a big “No Pasaran” (They Shall Not Pass) before the forces of Little Political Imagination: BOYCOTT “SI SE PUEDE” IN ELECTIONS-AND BEYOND. Such a boycott may well free up and force the creative energies to come up with newer, fresher and less-compromised political language.

Si Se Puede is Dead. Que Viva……………………….

Speech: National Security and the Birth of the Anti-Immigrant State or Immigrants and the Birth of the National Security State?

And now for something that deviates from but is directly related to the election mania gripping the country.

This speech given at the Brecht Forum captures well some recent thoughts about the relationship between immigrants and the national security state. Basic idea is that immigrants provide the state with another excuse to put more people with guns in our midst, especially in times of crisis.

The speech goes against the traditional logic around immigration, which tells us that raids, repressive laws, etc. are solely about elections or about controlling low wage undocumented workers needed for corporate and private profits.

While winning elections and keeping a surplus of low wage labor are a part of the immigration equation, these explanations hardly capture the cavernous motives beneath the current immigrant zeitgeist. Stuff in the speech also runs contrary to the rather tired argument that what’s happening around immigration is just about immigrants. It’s also about controlling people like many of you and me, citizens.

To vary on a theme that defined the Clinton era, “It’s the national security state, stupid.”

Lurking beneath the stale arguments of pro and anti-immigrant forces is a nation state, an elite that’s preparing for the social unrest due to the death of the American Dream (if it ever actually existed).

I shared a 2 minute clip of the speech previously, but this link features the speech in its entirety (14 minutes).Hope you like it. I actually think it’s one of the better talks I’ve given in some time. Please do email me or comment if you listen to this as these ideas are a work in progress and I value your thoughts and opinions about it.

And thanks to the Brecht Forum and the folks at Law and Disorder Radio for the opportunity to share these thoughts.

Super Duper Discussion on Democracy Now: Race, Empire and the Primaries

After burning the 3am oil trying to get a grasp on the ultimately ineffable workings of the body politic, I got up at 5:30 am (can you hear the roosters?) to join Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman and guests Bill Fletcher and Frances Fox for an out-of-the-corporate-media box discussion about race, empire and the primaries. Thanks to Amy and fellow panelists, this really turned out to be as probing a discussion about the elections as I’ve had the pleasure of participating in. Check it out!

Those of you without audio setup can read the transcript here (just delete the “Uh”’s)

Super Duper Surg(e)imiento: How Obama Is Cutting Into Clinton’s Latino Advantage

After hearing about Ted Kennedy’s endorsement of Barack Obama, my father, Ramon, says it made him think twice about his support for Hillary Clinton. “That (endorsement) matters” he said as he watched Spanish language Obama ads squeezed in between Univision news reports of the Kennedy endorsement, “They (the Kennedy’s) have a lot of history with us”.

That Ramon, who was defensive the last time I asked him about who he’d vote for, is now rethinking his previous support for Clinton previews what may be a big Super Duper Tuesday surprise: Obama cutting into Clinton’s lead among the more than 10 million Latinos eligible to vote this week.

National polls like the recent USA Today poll show Obama either drastically or completely reducing Clinton’s lead across the country. But other developments indicate that what pundits and media outlets have been calling Clinton’s Latino “firewall” may also be falling. A case in point is Arizona, where Obama actually leads Clinton among Latinos by 53-37 percent, according to a recent poll conducted by McClatchy newspapers.

Conventional wisdom tells us that history, political patronage and the much-coveted endorsements from members of most the Latino politirati are driving Latinos voters like Ramon towards Clinton. But Arizona tells us that history may still be in the making-and remaking. While the Kennedy endorsements do bring a new glow to the hallowed velvet pictures of JFK adorning homes and apartments of many older Latinos, Obama’s Arizona advantage can hardly be explained solely in terms of the spirits of our Latino political past.

Obama is also speaking to the present and to the future. Whether or not Obama can cut Clinton’s Latino advantage by Tuesday, his gains in Arizona provide valuable object lessons with regard to Latino politics, object lessons that take us far beyond the now ridiculous ideas about Latinos’ racist refusal to vote for a black person. Principal among the lessons of Arizona is the strategic priority placed on new Latino voters.

“It’s not rocket science” says Cuauhtémoc “Temo” Figueroa, the former union organizer who is the Obama campaign’s National Field Director. “We can’t win without new voters. We need young people, immigrants and other voters traditionally left out of the elections” said Figueroa from the very loud Obama campaign office in Fresno, California adding “New voters were key to victory in Iowa and new voters are key to winning the Latino vote.”

Central to dropping Clinton’s advantage are Obama’s appeals to the more than 2 million immigrants and first and second generation Latinos added to the rolls of eligible voters since 2004. In Arizona, unions like the SEIU and nonprofits like the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project have undertaken massive voter registration campaigns. Such intense focus on new Latino voters comes atop political soil prepared by what huge majorities of these Latinos consider the fertilizer of anti-immigrant politics.

Obama’s efforts in Arizona and across the Latino U.S. are yielding fruit in no small part because he, more than Hillary Clinton, has intensified his organizing around and his stands on immigration, the definitive issue of Latino politics. Though many polls show the economy, education the Iraq war are the top issues for Latino and other voters this election year, massive marches, polls and common sense tell us that immigration is shaping the political consciousness of an entire generation of new voters. Clinton, who has both avoided or flip-flopped around the issue, is counting on history, name recognition and the endorsements she received from the majority of old-line Latino political leaders like Raul Yzaguirre, the former head of the National Council of La Raza or United Farmworkers leader, Dolores Huerta.

To counterbalance pull of the Latino political past, Obama has started more aggressively deploying a browner, more pro-immigrant variant of the future-oriented message that fueled his victories in the largely black and white states of Iowa and South Carolina. Obama’s unswerving support for driver’s licenses for the undocumented and his commitment to deal with immigration reform early in his tenure are being noticed in Latino voter’s homes as well as in editorial offices of newspapers like of the Los Angeles-based La Opinion, which recently endorsed him. Editors at the country’s largest Spanish language newspaper said they were “disappointed with her (Clinton’s) calculated opposition to driver’s licenses for the undocumented, which contrasts markedly from the forceful argument in support made by Obama.”

Endorsements from Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano and Congressman Raul Grijalva have, no doubt, helped the Illinois senator as well. But Obama’s lead in Latino Arizona, one of the centers of anti-immigrant movement in the United States, comes in no small part because his message is accompanied by more serious organizing and investments in the Latino electorate. At the same time, a more nuanced understanding of the Latino electorate as a segmented electorate makes targeted messaging more effective, especially in the younger and newly naturalized segments of the electorate. Many of these voters either don’t know or could care less that my friends Dolores Huerta and former HUD Secretary Henry Cisneros are backing Hillary Clinton.

Beyond the simplistic storyline of Latino unwillingness to support a black candidate, explanations of Obama’s recent Latino surge must include the former failures of the black and white leaders of the Obama campaign. Sources close to the Obama camp tell me that the campaign has started shortening a Latino learning curve made steeper by, for example, an operation in which key Obama staffers charged with securing the Latino vote did not, until recently, have direct access to campaign leaders like David Axelrod.

Whether or not the Obama campaign is successful in dropping the Clinton tally among Latinos like my father, Ramon, Super Duper Tuesday will provide more than a few of the object lessons that political strategists and pundits will study long after the general election in November.

Presidential Candidates Take the ‘Social’ Out of ‘Change’

Presidential Candidates Take the ‘Social’ Out of ‘Change’

New America Media, Commentary, Roberto Lovato, Posted: Jan 16, 2008

Editor’s Note: Presidential candidates now clamor for change, and many invoke Martin Luther King, Jr. for their own political benefit, but lost in the debate is the social movement of change, notes NAM contributing editor Roberto Lovato.

The spirit of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. still seems to stir serious controversy among politicians. But, as we’re witnessing with the latest racial politics pushing the primary process, the King icon is also being used to build the fortunes and legacies of these politicians, especially those who would be president.

Despite a racial controversy involving a newsletter bearing Ron Paul’s name that called King a “world-class adulterer” and “pro-communist philanderer,” the Republican candidate plans to launch a new and likely record-breaking multimillion dollar “super Tuesday” fundraising campaign on Jan. 21, Martin Luther King, Jr., day; Mitt Romney mentioned seeing King only to later “clarify” that he never actually saw him; Rudy Giuliani regularly makes references to King in speeches, books and security consulting engagements that earned the former New York mayor the millions of dollars that were, until recently, paying for his campaign. And Democrats Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are in the midst of a fierce battle over the MLK legacy to see who deserves to win the black vote.

Lost in the bickering over and celebrations of King as an individual is any notion of the social movement that defined King and an entire generation. Similarly, the mind-numbing mantra of “change” mouthed ad infinitum by all of today’s presidential candidates would have us believe that they, not we, are the arbiters of change. The King anniversary appears to provide candidates an opportunity to remind us that they have a monopoly on “change.”

The most recent electoral banter around King takes place within the collective amnesia about his views, especially his later views focusing on issues dogging us to this day: racism and poverty, prisoners and war. To the detriment of our political process, we forget that King’s views came about at least in part as a response to a black political milieu defined not just by white racism, but by the wealth of spirited action and the intellectual perspective provided by millions of people, thousands of organizations and other, less-requited political stars – Angela Davis, the Black Panthers and their combination of service and calls to militancy; Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam and their own brand of self-determination; Stokely Carmichael and the more militant students of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. These and many others influenced and pressured King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in the 1960s.

As the harried run toward this year’s King celebrations and the South Carolina primary continues, the practically propagandistic repetitions and variations of words and phrases like “change,” “hope,” “content of character”, “I have a dream” and other King-isms are coded and distributed for mass consumption like Coca-Cola. Coke is, in fact, the main corporate sponsor of a gigantic new civil rights museum located just a shout from Ebenezer Baptist Church and King’s birthplace in Atlanta.

Nowhere is this denial of the “social” in “change” better exemplified than in statements made by Hillary Clinton, who said last week, “Dr King’s dream began to be realized when President Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It took a president to get it done.” Few among the pundits noted how Clinton’s framing of the issue deleted the social component of change. Instead, the media, pundits and even community leaders are engaged in a heated discussion about what the candidates believe: whether it was King, the individual, or Johnson, the individual, who “realized” the dream.

This climate has benefited Barack Obama, who speaks more skillfully than any other candidate to a still mostly white electorate that is largely unwilling to deal collectively with issues of race and racism beyond the platitudes one hears during official celebrations of King. Obama’s King-like cadences and charisma give us that semi-religious feeling that goes with being part of a social change movement -only without a social change movement.

In critical ways, the lack of the “social” in our discussions of “change” allows us to gloss over crucial differences between Obama the candidate and King, the leader of the Poor People’s Campaign. When asked how he would like to be remembered after his death, King said, “I want you to be able to say that day that I did try to feed the hungry. And I want you to be able to say that day that I did try in my life to clothe those who were naked. I want you to say on that day that I did try in my life to visit those who were in prison.”

Like his competitors, Obama spends most of his time making speeches packed with calls for tax cuts and other proposals targeting the crumbling bastion of individualism: the “middle class.” He spends little to no time at rallies dealing with those most devastated by the lack of change: working class people, especially young people like those fueling the Jena Six movement. As he and the other candidates vie to be the inheritors of the King legacy, those who would be King say not a word about forcing “change” in a prison industry that predicts the value of its stock based on the future school performance of black and Latino third graders.

As we decide, during these times of continued crisis, on whom to vote for and what to do beyond the ballot box once they get elected, we might do well to recall the words of Martin Luther King, Jr., social change agent: “Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable… Every step toward the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering,
and struggle; the tireless exertions and passionate concern of dedicated individuals.”

Not one dedicated individual, but many.

WBAI Interview About Obama and “Progressivism”

This just in from New York’s own WBAI. Check out this interview on Wakeup Call. Host Mario Murillo queries historian Gerald Horne, political scientist Valeria Sinclair-Chapman and yours truly about how “progressives” should deal with Barack Obama. Together, I think we brought a broader context to discussion about Obama, “change” and “hope”; We talked about such things as the historical context for Obamania, gender and Obama/Clinton and the geopolitical and economic context for the rise of populist, liberal pols like Obama, Clinton and Edwards.

Hope you like it!

Philanthropy Illustrates How Immigration Will Not Stop Without 2 Things: Latin Development & Latinos

This story from the San Francisco Chronicle illustrates nicely how communities in América Latina and the United States are and must be at the heart reducing migration from Latin America to the United States (if indeed that’s what corporations and consumers really want, that is). Though I don’t think the implicit analysis of immigration in the story runs much deeper than a dry creek near the border, I do appreciate the focus on the border-smashing work of Hispanics in Philanthropy (HIP), a group founded by Douglas Patino (a good and honored friend) and other, mostly Latino leaders from the growing universe of Latino philanthropy .

The story makes clear how, rather than adopt the tired and untrue (and largely ineffective) approach of traditional philanthropy, which limits itself to working within the confines of that deadly illusion known as “the border”, HIP adopts what wonks call a “transnational” approach to dealings within the hemisphere Of América.

HIP’s leader, Diana Campoamor, a Cubana immigrant of much consequence, has a choice quote in the story, one powered by her own personal and professional experience (as opposed to the political desperation mixed with a growing sense of decline that motivates politico and racist alike). The quote along with her example as a leader of Latino extraction makes the point solidly:

“People don’t leave their homes unless there’s a hardship, economic or political,” said Campoamor, the president of Hispanics in Philanthropy, who is herself a refugee from Cuba. “Everyone should have a choice. We want to help people have a job and a chance to stay where they are, and to have a voice in their communities and their countries.”

I really like this story because, too often, we forget the economic and material component of the migration equation and, instead, focus solely on the politics of immigration as if it were really defined by politicos, Lou Dobbs and aging (Minute)men in search of a new frontier, a less flaccid empire. Unless Obama (or whoever ends up inheriting the mantle of declining power) can reverse the decimation of the state undertaken by Reagan, his descendants and the corporations that support them, the solutions will have to come from the rest of us.

But before getting too gushy I should mention that, even with good work like that of HIP or the hometown associations (also mentioned in the story) that send billions to América Latina each year, migration to the U.S. will continue without 2 other essential things: stopping the addiction of U.S. corporation and consumers to imported cheap labor and dealing frontally, decisively with the failure of capitalism in the hemisphere. And Barack Obama will fix this in his first 100 days in the White House, right?

Economic aid to give Mexicans, Central Americans work at home

Tyche Hendricks, Chronicle Staff Writer
Sunday, January 6, 2008

From her office on the edge of San Francisco’s Financial District, Diana Campoamor was networking - meeting for drinks with a banker, compiling a briefing book for a foundation trustee, exchanging phone calls with colleagues in Mexico City.

She was putting all the pieces in place so her group, Hispanics in Philanthropy, could cut its first check this month for a three-year, $219,000 grant to expand a goat-cheese cooperative in Guanajuato, Mexico.

More goats, corrals, pasteurizing equipment and refrigerators should allow the operation to grow from one village to four, providing work for hundreds of peasant farmers who might otherwise join their siblings and cousins as illegal immigrants harvesting peaches, slaughtering chickens, driving nails and scrubbing dishes across the United States.

The group’s decision to fund economic development projects in Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America, after almost 25 years working in U.S. Latino communities, is part of a movement taking hold in Northern California to tackle the root causes of illegal immigration.

“People don’t leave their homes unless there’s a hardship, economic or political,” said Campoamor, the president of Hispanics in Philanthropy, who is herself a refugee from Cuba. “Everyone should have a choice. We want to help people have a job and a chance to stay where they are, and to have a voice in their communities and their countries.”

Immigration is again moving front and center on the U.S. political stage. On the presidential campaign trail, Republicans are vying to be the toughest on sealing the border and enforcing immigration law, while Democrats temper the bad-cop rhetoric with talk of guest worker programs and a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants already here.

But if there is to be a lasting solution to illegal immigration, experts say, it will involve changes not just on this side of the border but in Mexico and Central America, which together account for three fourths of the estimated 12 million undocumented people in the United States.

“As far as what I’ve read about what the candidates are saying, I don’t see much discussion. It’s cheap rhetoric,” said Luis Guarnizo, a professor in the school of agriculture at UC Davis. “Everybody’s looking for a quick fix, the right slogan. … But we have to look at the larger picture. This is not just a law-and-order issue, it involves economic issues, social issues. Migration is a global process.”

In Northern California, some grassroots development and immigrant groups are trying a different approach. They reason that if people in Latin America had a way to lift themselves and their communities out of poverty, they wouldn’t need to leave home, risk their lives crossing the border and live on the margins of U.S. society to earn a living and support their relatives back home.

The projects range from small to large, and involve a variety of players - major foundations, socially conscious consumers and migrant workers themselves - in diverse approaches to improving life in some of the communities that are sending undocumented immigrants north. They’re helping build lagging village infrastructure, incubating productive rural projects and giving farmers fair access to global markets.

Part of the solution

Luis Alberto Rivera is president of an association of Californians originally from his hometown, Coalcomán, in the central Mexican state of Michoacán. Seeing thousands of Coalcomanenses migrate to the United States, Rivera and his compatriots were determined to do something to help improve life back home.

“We decided to push the authorities to clean the rivers, because they’re polluted,” said Rivera, a U.S. citizen, from his home near Modesto. “The whole ecosystem, the ability of people to get food from the river is destroyed. People are migrating because their life is over when the rivers are polluted. But if we go back and restore them, I think that’s part of the solution.”

Rivera and members of his hometown association offered to fund a sewage treatment plant and talked the town government into installing a system of sewers to collect the wastewater. They’ve set a fundraising goal of $100,000 and have already held a couple of benefit dinners in the Central Valley.

And the group plans to apply for matching funds under the Three for One program, whereby the Mexican federal, state and local governments each pitch in a dollar for every dollar contributed to a project by Mexican migrants outside the country.

Recognizing the billions of dollars that expatriate Mexicans send home each year to their families, the Mexican authorities created the matching fund arrangement in 2002 to channel some of that money to public works. In 2006, more than 1,000 Mexican migrant groups contributed close to $20 million to community improvement projects in 845 rural and urban locations, according to Martha Esquivel of Mexico’s Department of Social Development.

Rivera hopes his efforts will encourage more migrants to get involved with their hometowns in Mexico and work to fix the problems that forced them to leave home in the first place.

But some observers criticize the matching-fund program, saying it’s the responsibility of the Mexican government to build clean water systems and to provide schools, ambulances and other infrastructure, not the duty of Mexicans who left home due to a lack of opportunity.

After years of being all but ignored by their government, however, “the Three for One begins to signal to remittance senders that they’re going to get some respect,” said Campoamor.

She is an advocate of building links between immigrants in the United States and their hom