Looking up at the faraway figures standing onstage, Hareth tried to imagine herself up there one day, too. She couldn’t remember ever in her life seeing so many people peacefully together, so many people who looked like her, so many people asking for something that seemed so awfully basic—not just a law, but to be seen, to be recognized.
The march in Washington was big, yet it wasn’t the biggest march that spring. Across the United States millions of immigrants, many in the country illegally, came out during the spring of 2006 and shook the nation awake.*
The same day Hareth went to the National Mall, at least 100,000 rallied in Chicago;2 up to 500,000 had rallied the day before in Dallas, with smaller marches in cities such as Nashville, Boston, and Atlanta.3 The marches were for the most part led by adults. Still, in a handful of cities, including Los Angeles, New York, and Boston, young leaders like Walter Barrientos, whom Marie had met at the Capitol, spoke about the DREAM Act to ensure it wasn’t forgotten in the broader call for immigration reform. Walter and another rising young leader, Cristina Jiménez Moreto, helped organize buses to take students to the demonstrations in New York and good-naturedly competed with their friends in Boston to see who could get the biggest DREAM Act banners on the nightly news.
In Chicago, college senior Tania Unzueta biked twenty minutes across the city to join the demonstrators along Lake Michigan, shivering in the chilly wind but warmed by the crowd. Tania worked part-time at a community paper and radio program, and as she wove through traffic she considered the question one of her bosses had posed to her a few days before. Are you a journalist or an activist? You have to choose.
What was she? She was an undocumented immigrant. She was also a hard-driving honors student who’d been her high school swim team captain and had dreamed of going to college. She’d wanted to do things the right way and had voluntarily returned to her native Mexico in 2001 after graduation in the hope of obtaining a student visa. At first, she’d viewed the trip as an opportunity to see her grandparents and cousins for the first time in years. That changed after her visit to the US embassy. Years later Tania still remembered a US official not only denying her student visa request but also berating her for the thousands of dollars the federal government had spent on her elementary and secondary education. And by returning to Mexico, Tania had triggered the ten-year ban against reentering the United States. Senator Durbin had come to her rescue, helping her obtain humanitarian parole.* She’d been given a year and had returned to Chicago to attend the University of Illinois. But now she was once more undocumented and generally tried to keep a low profile when it came to her status. Initially, she had planned just to cover the event for the community paper. Then her father, who’d helped organize the march, suggested she speak at the rally. They needed more young, undocumented people to share their stories, he’d urged. He’s right, Tania thought. This march, this movement, needs more young people.
As she parked her bike and made her way through the demonstrators, Tania felt the energy of the crowd course through her. This wasn’t the path she had wished for. But if her choice were between journalist and activist, there really was no choice, not today. She stepped up onto the stage.
Most Americans who watched English-language TV coverage of the rallies nationwide were dumbfounded. Where had these masses of people come from? In Washington, Leonard Downie Jr., then the executive editor of the Washington Post, summoned the department heads to a meeting. Many major news outlets, including the Post, had missed the huge story in the run-up to the marches. He didn’t intend it to happen again. Downie created new beats, making immigration a top priority; similar conversations took place in newsrooms across the country.
Had the Post or the rest of the country followed the Spanish-language media chatter, they wouldn’t have been surprised at all about the rallies that spring. Those newscasts were covering the run-up to the marches around the clock. Some of the cameramen and field producers were the sons and daughters of undocumented immigrants or had once picked strawberries themselves.
But in 2006, an invisible wall existed between Spanish-language and mainstream English-language media. Few journalists in the mainstream media were bilingual, and even fewer considered it worthwhile to follow what was happening in Spanish. That invisible wall allowed both Democratic and Republican candidates to say one thing in Spanish to one group of constituents and a completely different thing in English to another. It was what allowed most Americans not to see the millions of people living in fear as they quietly helped keep the engine of the US economy running.
Still, pressure for reform had begun to grow on all sides. In the twilight of his presidency, George W. Bush pushed once again for comprehensive immigration reform that would resolve the situation for millions of immigrants living in the country illegally. To get business on board, the bill made it easier for companies to hire temporary workers, and it toughened enforcement policies. It was the kind of comprehensive legislation not seen since the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, passed under President Ronald Reagan. It was a bill that could secure the increasingly unpopular president4 a legacy beyond the quagmire of the Iraq War. For Democrats and Republicans in Congress, tackling immigration was good policy and good politics—controversial enough to energize their bases and boost turnout during the midterm elections.
Immigrants, already concerned about the stepped-up enforcement, waited nervously to see what kind of bill would prevail. The bad news arrived in time for the December holidays, with the House passage of a measure by Wisconsin Republican representative Jim Sensenbrenner. The bill, officially titled the Border Protection, Antiterrorism, and Illegal Immigration Control Act of 2005,5 quickly became known simply as the “Sensenbrenner bill.” It would make living in the United States without a valid visa no longer an administrative violation; now it would be a federal crime. Overnight, millions of people would qualify as criminals. Those who provided undocumented people with shelter or even a ride to work (or hired them as a gardener or nanny) could also face felony charges and up to three years in prison, possibly more.
Even Republican lawmakers quickly realized adding the criminalization section was akin to dropping a smoldering match on Southern California’s parched San Bernardino Mountains. Sensenbrenner tried to save his bill, offering to tone down the language. But Democrats weren’t having it. Anything that would give the proposal a better chance was bad news from their perspective. The majority of Democrats voted to keep the bill as is, strategically ensuring the bill would leave committee with a so-called poison pill, one they hoped would doom it or at least create a significant backlash.
Then they promptly voted against the entire proposal. The bill passed the GOP-led House anyway and, by December 2005, sailed over to the Republican-led Senate.
The backlash outside Congress was swift. The name Sensenbrenner became a new rallying cry on the lips of immigrants, prompting marches around the country.
DARIO GUERRERO MENESES rode with his dad to downtown Los Angeles to join some 400,000 people for the May 1 march on International Workers Day. Like Hareth, he was headed into eighth grade in the fall, and a top student who’d just won a spot at a summer program sponsored by Johns Hopkins University. Dario daydreamed about becoming a physicist and rarely missed class. But when his dad suggested they go with friends to show solidarity, he jumped at the chance.
Dario Guerrero Sr. had worked his way up from contractor to manager in his small company, now overseeing a dozen other immigrant laborers. The work meant he had medical insurance, and it had enabled the family to leave their cramped apartment and purchase a small two-bedroom house a few blocks from the freeway in the commuter town of Carson. It also meant Dario’s father was rarely home, leaving Dario’s mother to oversee the day-to-day child care. Spending a day with his father usually meant helping out at a work site. Dario knew his dad wouldn’t take the day off if this wasn’t something important. Besides, Dario liked the idea of joining in with so many other Mexican immigr
ants.
As they sped up the 405 freeway that morning, Dario sat packed into the back seat with several of his father’s friends, listening happily as the men cursed the traffic and pretended to spot la migra. They parked on the outskirts of downtown, and Dario watched the undulating crowd, some carrying Mexican flags, most carrying American ones, wondering what it must be like for all those people, his father’s friends, who’d crossed the border illegally and whose lives remained forever in limbo. At his magnet school, Dario was one of the few Mexican Americans in the honors program and definitely one of the few who had to commute to get there, but that was nothing compared to what some of his father’s workers had to go through. After all, his parents owned a house, or at least they had a mortgage. They had come on a visa. His dad had a driver’s license. And at work his dad was almost el jefe.
Yet as they walked under the bright sun, images Dario usually shoved to the back of his mind flitted to the forefront: multiple credit card offers and other mail he’d seen arrive for his father in different names; his parents’ reluctance to talk to police; the fact that his dad and mom had never taken him to visit Mexico, the country they professed to love so much. Dario turned to his father. He looked so free, happier than Dario remembered seeing him in a long time.
Dario Sr. glanced over at his son. He wondered whether now was the time. It would be a relief to come clean, yet such a burden. His son was so smart, too smart for his own good sometimes, but still he hated to weigh the kid down. He’d tell him when he had to, not before. He grinned back at Dario.
They turned toward the thousands of people streaming past them. Staring at the humanity before him, Dario silently asked the same questions those in the English-language media were beginning to ask: Where had they all come from? What had united them all enough to come out on this day? The Sensenbrenner bill might have been the catalyst. But the Los Angeles turnout, and indeed the turnout nationwide, was the result of more than anger and frustration. It also took careful planning by immigrant advocates and an extra push from two American traditions: the Catholic Church and the morning radio DJ.
In early March, Los Angeles Catholic cardinal Roger Mahony gave an Ash Wednesday address encouraging both parishioners and clergy to defy the Sensenbrenner bill, were it to pass. It was a call to action echoed by clergy nationwide. Still, the activists needed something more, a megaphone to reach beyond their echo chamber. They found it in a pair of the nation’s top Spanish-language radio hosts, better known by their on-air monikers: Tweety Bird and The Boogeyman.
Eddie “Piolín” (Tweety Bird) Sotelo had crossed the border illegally years before, working as a DJ long before a radio station manager helped him get a work permit and eventually a green card. He’d never forgotten the fear and the stigma he faced early on as he tried to keep his immigration status a secret. He had made it his personal mission to stop the Sensenbrenner bill. When he heard about the marches, he decided to pitch in, orchestrating a secret meeting with his rival DJs, including his mentor Renán “El Cucuy” (The Boogeyman) Almendárez Coello, who had spoken at the 2003 Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride. Together, the group agreed to promote the demonstrations.
“I told God that if he gave me an opportunity as a radio announcer, I was going to help my people,” Sotelo told the Los Angeles Times shortly after the first LA marches.6 In late April, he devoted several hours of his show to the bill and the march, time usually spent more on the latest celebrity sex scandals and off-color jokes. Soon the DJs’ messages were picked up by the Spanish-language TV stations and unfurled across their syndicated radio broadcasts nationwide.
IN MIAMI, the showing that spring was far weaker than in other major cities. Only a few thousand people turned out. Miami was not a place where people marched. The high heat and humidity made afternoon strolls anywhere but the beach unpleasant six months of the year. For many residents, especially those from Cuba, such events also left a bad taste, too much a reminder of the “spontaneous” pro–Fidel Castro marches that were compulsory back home. For others from Latin America, protesting in the streets had landed friends and family in jail or worse.
But that was only part of the reason. By 2006, more than half of Miami-Dade County residents had been born outside the United States.7 The nation’s two largest Spanish-language media companies had most of their studios there. Top doctors, lawyers, and city officials were bilingual. It wasn’t just a badge of pride to speak two languages; it was often a requisite for doing business. Many immigrants in Miami weren’t living outside the main power structure. They were part of it.*
Not all of these people were well off by any means. Many were South American immigrants who had overstayed visas after fleeing economic and political crises back home and did fear deportation. Still, they enjoyed a level of social, if not economic, support regardless of their immigration status, a security not always accorded to many recent arrivals in other parts of the country.
Puerto Ricans were also flocking to Florida, skyrocketing from roughly 100,000 in 1980 to more than 1 million by 2014.8 Unlike other new arrivals, Puerto Ricans could speak up because they didn’t have to worry about being in the country illegally. They were already citizens.
Conversely, those immigrants in South Florida who didn’t have that support—and those who were black or looked more indigenous, including the Haitian and Central American tomato pickers, hotel workers, and home builders—often had even fewer resources and support networks than immigrants in places such as California and New York, where they made up a larger share of the undocumented community. Many couldn’t risk marching. And yet in small pockets elsewhere in the state, marchers did come out en masse, with some 75,000 farmworkers and allies turning out on April 10 in Fort Myers.
But for Felipe, the thousands of protesters who did show up might as well have been a million. Living in a Portuguese-speaking home where the Univision and Telemundo networks were rarely on, he was almost as surprised as the rest of America to see so many people pouring into the streets. The TV images of flags waving past the heart of downtown Miami and past the historic Freedom Tower, where Cuban refugees had once been processed as they fled Castro’s revolution, etched themselves into his brain.
Felipe joined the marchers that day, and seeing all those people together, he could feel something new breaking loose inside. The change wasn’t immediate. Over the next year, he still spent most of his extracurricular energy on the church. By 2007, he began dating a young woman and proposed to her less than twelve months later. It was as if he were fighting against his own rebellion. He hoped that if he could commit to his fiancée, he could rid himself of the Devil once and for all. The two married in 2008 but separated a few months later. Felipe castigated himself. He had failed at one of the most sacred promises, failed to rid himself of the Devil, failed to listen to the voice inside that had warned him that he was making a mistake.
As he struggled with his marriage, Felipe began to struggle more with the church’s rigid rules. He began to chafe at the pressure not to maintain friendships with those who’d left it. Slowly, school activities replaced the singular focus the church had held in his life. He began to frequent SWER, the immigrant student group his friend Gaby had introduced him to. After Gaby’s home was raided by immigration agents and another friend was detained, Felipe grew more outspoken. He threw himself into his student government responsibilities and into SWER activities with the same energy with which he had not long before proselytized for the church. He was elected student body president. Now Felipe turned to the Florida Immigrant Coalition’s director, Maria Rodriguez, for the counsel he’d once sought in the church. Unlike the pastors, Maria didn’t condemn him for whom he was attracted to. For the first time, Felipe began to believe that even his sexuality might be worthy of respect in God’s eyes. Still, he kept that and his immigration status to himself and to his close circle of friends.
It was in SWER’s cramped campus office that Felipe met a tall, charismatic Colombian named Juan Rodriguez
. Juan was in the process of legalizing his immigration status thanks to his stepmother. Unlike Felipe, he’d come to the United States as a small boy, but he had lived most of his years in South Florida as an undocumented immigrant. He had spent high school determined to win an academic scholarship, joining the creative writing club and pretty much every other nonsports extracurricular activity at school. He’d graduated with top marks. And yet like Felipe, his immigration status had relegated him to janitorial work until he, too, found his way to the honors college at Miami Dade.
Juan listened to Felipe lament the demise of his marriage and the uncertainty of his future. Juan was outspoken both politically and personally, unabashed about his attraction to both women and men. His blunt confidence was infectious. When Felipe stood next to Juan, his legal status, the arguments within his family, none of it mattered quite so much. When Juan laughed, Felipe could breathe more easily. Sometimes Felipe looked over and caught his friend staring back. Sometimes he had to look away. But at that time Juan had a girlfriend, and Felipe was still married, at least on paper, and he still feared the Devil inside.
So he focused on the political. He could feel it, something was happening. In pockets around the country, young immigrants who had quietly honed their organizing skills campaigning for college access were beginning to find one another. As with the student group in Miami, they often became active with the broader immigrant coalitions first before splitting off on their own.
Back in 2005, the National Council of La Raza had held its annual conference in Philadelphia and brought together several of these up-and-coming leaders. Julieta Garibay, a shy student at the University of Texas at Austin, was close to earning her nursing degree but had no way of finding employment in her field. Tired of lying to even her closest friends, she had sent out an email blast, sharing her predicament with them. To Julieta’s surprise, her in-box was flooded with confessions like her own. Soon after, she began organizing a support group for fellow undocumented students at UT Austin and was invited to speak at NCLR’s national conference. NCLR leaders suggested that she combine her talk with those of other burgeoning undocumented leaders: Walter Barrientos, the Guatemalan activist, now a graduate of Baruch College in New York; and a Peruvian from Boston named Carlos Saavedra. They shared similar stories. They promised to stay in touch. And they did, over the next few years forming a small but tight-knit network, spread out across the country.
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