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Saturday, April 8, 2006
Hundreds of people gathered in Chicano Park today to rally and march for migrants' rights. At the 1PM rally in the park, an indigenous group danced in the kiosko. Later, they walked and danced at the front of the march. Students, adults, children, and Mexican@, Chican@ and civil/humyn rights activists, marched through Barrio Logan and surrounding neighborhoods in Central San Diego and returned to Chicano Park. Some people watching from their homes joined the march. There was a significant police presence during the rally and march, though not as large as when there were the student rallies. This writer heard a white police officer diss and try to provoke one of the organizers or security personnel helping to keep marchers to the designated route and street lanes.
Today's rally and march, while planned, received little attention in the media, not even a mention by San Diego Indymedia until very late. English- and Spanish-speaking mainstream media have both been focusing on Sunday's rallies and marches in downtown San Diego.
Marchers demanded civil and humyn rights and peace, and opposed racism. They said migrants weren't terrorists. One sign read: "Tierra y Libertad." Another read: "Chicano Power." One chant was "¡Zapata vive! La lucha sigue! ¡Zapata vive vive! La lucha sigue sigue!" Several people held a poster with a picture of Zapata. The poster said the march was for humyn rights. Today's march happened to be on the weekend before the anniversary of Zapata's death (April 10). A couple marchers wearing big-head puppets called for justice for hundreds of wimmin and youth murdered in different cities and towns along the southern U.$. border. There were also several anti-border and anti-Migra chants. This writer did not hear any explicitly revolutionary or progressive nationalist chants during the rally or march, but today's event illustrated some differences with previous demonstrations that opposed HR 4437 but not necessarily border and anti-immigrant repression in general.
The exact text of the infamous HR 4437 legislation is no longer as much of a rallying point since the Senate has gone on to consider other reactionary legislation, some of which draws from HR 4437. Some signs singled out and protested HR 4437, but in general there were more calls for people's unity and Raza unity than anything else. What's interesting about this is that the marchers weren't protesting HR 4437 just to support some alternative repressive bill like Arlen Specter's Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act of 2006. Instead, many were protesting the whole anti-immigrant movement. In contrast, some labor-union organizers of some much-publicized April 9/10 events throughout the country endorse Specter's bill. They trade one repressive bill for another. What they call "comprehensive" legislation is actually a compromise with fascists and white nationalists who want to increase the repression of migrant proletarians. The whole so-called immigration reform debate seeks to intensify the repression of migrants.
Some have pointed out that anti-HR 4437 protesters differ over the issues of amnesty and open borders. Some people protesting HR 4437 don't support legalization for undocumented migrants, even if the legalization process would be difficult and take a long time. Some just oppose the provisions in HR 4437 that would criminalize undocumented migrants and those helping them, some without recognizing how the bill would affect documented migrants and entire communities.
Protests against HR 4437 in general have been progressive. Some groups have tried to channel these protests to other ends, trying to turn them into something that could be used to support repressive proposals like Specter's.
A slick postcard-like announcement distributed at today's rally in Chicano Park, listing some phone numbers but no names of organizers, calls for "comprehensive, humane immigration reform that rewards hard work, protects lives, & reunites families." "United we stand! Immigrants are America!" These slogans are problematic. Even the Minuteman vigilantes say they are saving lives by trying to get the border sealed. Different pieces of proposed immigration and border legislation, including the so-called Kennedy-McCain bill, are said to be "comprehensive" but contain repressive or restrictive provisions (worsening the status quo of repression and immigration restrictions). And protesters wave Amerikan flags for various reasons, not all of which are connected to die-hard Amerikkkkan patriotism, but "United we stand! Immigrants are America!" is clearly intended invoke the power of 9/11 warmongering rhetoric while wrongly defining settler Euro-Amerikan parasites as immigrants. It's long past time to recognize that patriotism in the Euro-Amerikan context means support for imperialism and repression.
A few different rallies and marches are scheduled to take place in downtown San Diego Sunday. Reports suggest that there is some division along political lines having to do with whether to support amnesty. For MIM, allowing undocumented migrants to become U.$. citizens if they want to is not an end in itself. Any call for amnesty must be part of a larger opposition to imperialist borders, imperialist repression, super-exploitation, the global patriarchy oppressing the world's wimmin and youth, and national oppression.
This writer predicts that the mainstream media will try to pit the different rallies and marches against each other, using the relatively tame messages of the larger events to marginalize the smaller ones. The media will also exploit disagreements over the Amerikan and Mexican flag thing to turn it into a divisive issue.
Some demonstrators are going to put forward messages that are more establishment-based, trying to influence the legislative process, as if amnesty without more border repression were really part of this immigration debate. There are these kinds of differences. However, it is important to recognize that the different events may also represent different demographics and genuine political differences, not just different degrees of subjective distaste for amnesty or deportation. Some of the events have more student leadership. Others have more religious leadership and more union participation. Union-led contingents are particularly likely to support compromise legislation for certain reasons. The media likes to misrepresent open-borders advocates as unsophisticated people practicing racial identity politics, whereas people actually have different reasons for supporting open borders.
As with many other united movements, there are going to be political and tactical differences, and even differences in goals for the same movement. However, the demonstrations and rallies against the anti-immigrant movement have a progressive nature that makes it more difficult for reactionaries to draw from racism, white nationalism and terrorism fears to generate support for anti-immigrant repression. In the process, there is increasing awareness of white supremacy, the police as an occupation force of oppressed-nation communities, and the failure of the system to uphold civil and humyn rights even for oppressed people inside imperialist countries.