Beacon Broadside

Lillian Faderman reading from My Mother's Wars

Lillian Faderman is an internationally known scholar of lesbian history and literature, as well as of ethnic and immigrant history. She is the author of such acclaimed works as To Believe in Woman, Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers, Surpassing the Love of Men, I Begin My Life All Over, and her memoir Naked in the Promised Land.

Last Thursday, Faderman read from her new book, My Mother's Wars, at one of our favorite bookstores, the Brookline Booksmith. We recorded her reading a few passages from the book, and we're happy to share those videos with you here.

A story of love, war, and life as a Jewish immigrant in the squalid factories and lively dance halls of New York's Garment District in the 1930s, My Mother's Wars is the memoir Lillian Faderman's mother was never able to write. The daughter delves into her mother's past to tell the story of a Latvian girl who left her village for America with dreams of a life on the stage and encountered the realities of her new world: the battles she was forced to fight as a woman, an immigrant worker, and a Jew with family left behind in Hitler's deadly path.

The story begins in 1914: Mary, the girl who will become Lillian Faderman's mother, just seventeen and swept up with vague ambitions to be a dancer, travels alone to America, where her half-sister in Brooklyn takes her in. She finds a job in the garment industry and a shop friend who teaches her the thrills of dance halls and the cheap amusements open to working-class girls. This dazzling life leaves Mary distracted and her half-sister and brother-in-law scandalized that she has become a "good-time gal." They kick her out of their home, an event with consequences Mary will regret for the rest of her life.

In the first passage, Faderman reads about her mother's participation in a garment workers' strike. 

Lillian Faderman At Brookline Booksmith, Part 1

 

In the second passage, Mary makes a desperate attempt to save the lives of her family in Latvia.

Lillian Faderman At Brookline Booksmith, Part 2

 

In the third passage, Mary has discovered that she is pregnant again, after having submitted to two wrenching back-room abortions. Unmarried, Mary faces the prospect of single motherhood.

Lillian Faderman At Brookline Booksmith, Part 3

 

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Out Now: My Mother's Wars by Lillian Faderman

An acclaimed writer on her mother's tumultuous life as a Jewish immigrant in 1930s New York and her life-long guilt when the Holocaust claims the family she left behind in Latvia 

A story of love, war, and life as a Jewish immigrant in the squalid factories and lively dance halls of New York's Garment District in the 1930s, My Mother's Wars is the memoir Lillian Faderman's mother was never able to write. The daughter delves into her mother's past to tell the story of a Latvian girl who left her village for America with dreams of a life on the stage and encountered the realities of her new world: the battles she was forced to fight as a woman, an immigrant worker, and a Jew with family left behind in Hitler's deadly path.

The story begins in 1914: Mary, the girl who will become Lillian Faderman's mother, just seventeen and swept up with vague ambitions to be a dancer, travels alone to America, where her half-sister in Brooklyn takes her in. She finds a job in the garment industry and a shop friend who teaches her the thrills of dance halls and the cheap amusements open to working-class girls. This dazzling life leaves Mary distracted and her half-sister and brother-in-law scandalized that she has become a "good-time gal." They kick her out of their home, an event with consequences Mary will regret for the rest of her life.

Eighteen years later, still barely scraping by as a garment worker and unmarried at thirty-five, Mary falls madly in love and has a torrid romance with a man who will never marry her, but who will father Lillian Faderman before he disappears from their lives. America is in the midst of the Depression, Hitler is coming to power in Europe, and New York's garment workers are just beginning to unionize. Mary makes tentative steps to join, despite her lover's angry opposition. As National Socialism engulfs Europe, Mary realizes she must find a way to get her family out of Latvia, and she spends frenetic months chasing vague promises and false rumors of hope. Pregnant again, after having submitted to two wrenching back-room abortions, and still unmarried, Mary faces both single motherhood and the devastating possibility of losing her entire Eastern European family.

Drawing on family stories and documents, as well as her own tireless research, Lillian Faderman has reconstructed an engrossing and essential chapter in the history of women, of workers, of Jews, and of the Holocaust as immigrants experienced it from American shores. 

"This is an exquisite piece of history—both resonantly personal and full of revelatory moments in the history of women and of New York in the early days of the garment workers union and the shadow of the Holocaust." —Dorothy Allison 

"Faderman's story of her immigrant mother is so vividly imagined that you can taste the borscht Mary eats, squirm at the claustrophobia of her tiny rented room, and be swept up in the sensual delight that will betray her." —Janice Steinberg, the author ofThe Tin Horse 

"This book is a work of originality, written with such imaginative sympathy that I read it with unabating pleasure from beginning to end." —Vivian Gornick, author of Fierce Attachments "Lillian Faderman is an extraordinary storyteller, one of the few who can tell a painful story, with a complex ending—and imbue it with humor, sensuality and earthy grace, in every sentence." —Amy Bloom, author of Away 

"My Mother's Wars tells the aching story of immigrant factory workers in the decades preceding World War II -- sad lives made sadder by the terrified knowledge that their families in Europe are being extinguished. The book is part memoir, part reconstruction … and all artistry." —Edith Pearlman, author of Binocular Vision

Listen to Lillian Faderman on Tablet Magazine’s “Vox Tablet” podcast today.

Read this Q&A with Lillian Faderman at The Philly Q.

EVENTS:

New York: Bluestockings, Tuesday, March 5, 7 p.m.

Free Library of Philadelphia, March 7, 2013 as part of the Free Library of Philadelphia Author Events.  

Brookline Booksmith, March 14, 7 p.m.

Book Passage (Bay Area, CA), April 14, 1 p.m.

Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, April 20-21.

My Mother's Wars by Lillian Faderman, preface

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A Visit to Havana: A Book That Takes on Immigration Myths Makes its Cuban Debut

Aviva Chomsky is Professor of history and Coordinator of Latin American Studies at Salem State University in Massachusetts. Her many books include They Take Our Jobs! And 20 Other Myths about Immigration, and A History of the Cuban Revolution. A new book on immigration, Undocumented, is forthcoming in Spring 2014 from Beacon Press. 

Aviva Chomsky in Havana. Photo courtesy of the author.

I’ve been traveling to Cuba regularly since 1995, for research, to attend conferences, and to take students on short-term study abroad trips, when those have been allowed under the Clinton and Obama Administrations. (Such trips were prohibited under the Bush Administrations.) I’ve published several articles in Cuban journals, mostly about Cuba-related themes.

Last weekend, I was in Havana to present the new Cuban edition of ¡Nos quitan nuestros empleos! (the Spanish translation of my book They Take Our Jobs!, which was published by Beacon in 2007) at the International Book Fair in Havana.

Shortly after They Take Our Jobs! came out in English, friends in immigrants-rights organizations told me that we needed a Spanish-language version. It took a while to find a publisher (Haymarket Press) and even longer to finish the translation. My Cuban friend who helped with the final editing of the Spanish version, Alfredo Prieto, offered to help me find a publisher in Cuba as well. He put me in touch with Fernando García of Editorial Nuevo Milenio, who ended up bringing out the beautiful Cuban edition. I am thrilled to have the project come to this fruition, and that I was able to be Havana for its release.

Most often, my trips to Cuba begin in Miami, a strange, liminal place that always seems like a good way to transition from the United States to Latin America or vice versa. The driver of my hotel shuttle asks me where I’m going. “Cuba,” I tell him. “You are going to my country,” he replies. I switch to Spanish and ask him how long he’s been in the United States. Since 1998, he tells me. “Here you work very, very, hard,” he goes on. “I’ve lived well here, don’t get me wrong. But Cuba is my country, and that’s where I want to live. Cuba is wonderful. It’s just the government that’s bad, that’s ruined everything.”

Even though my flight doesn’t leave till 9, I have to check in at 6. This is an improvement over the last time I went, using the same charter company, Marazul Tours. Last March I was told to arrive at the airport four hours ahead of the flight and look for an agent wearing a blue t-shirt in Terminal G. Needless to say, there was no blue-shirted agent anywhere to be found, and nobody answered the phone at the several numbers I had for Marazul. Nor were there any counters that seemed connected to our charter flight, which didn’t appear on any of the “departure” screens. Finally a rumor reached our ears—other passengers looking for the same blue t-shirt thought we should try Terminal D. With little else to go on, I and my 13 students trudged over to Terminal D. Still no blue shirt, and no flight listed on any screen, but the rumors grew thicker, and, finally, we found ourselves at an anonymous-looking counter checking in. It was like being in Cuba before we even left Miami—somehow you just have to figure out how to do things that seem impossible—resolver, as the Cubans say.

This time, though, I arrive as instructed with only three hours to spare. Terminal G is teeming with blue-shirted representatives, and multiple flights to Havana are listed on every screen. There are only two people ahead of me in line, and I am quickly checked in. The only sign that this is not a normal flight is when I try to use my credit card to pay the $20 to check my bag. “Sorry, we only take cash,” I am told. The blue-shirted representative says he’ll wait for me while I run to the ATM.

I usually try not to check my bag, but this time I’m carrying many bottles of medicines and hand sanitizer that my Cuban friends have requested. I’m also carrying a half pound of baker’s chocolate—they want me to bake brownies while I’m there.

A grey-haired gentleman going through the same lines asks if I’m with a group. No, I say, and you? “Yes, we are a gentle group,” I hear him reply. I look around—his companions look gentle enough, but I’m still confused—are they Quakers, or something? Then he starts to tell me about the activities they’ll be doing in Cuba, and I realize that they are dentists—a dental group.

By 7 I’m at the gate. I order a cafe con leche from a nearby stand before I sit down. “Ya está dulce,” the server tells me kindly as she hands it to me. We’re almost in Cuba—the coffee automatically comes sweet, and in Spanish.

My seatmate on the first leg of my journey—from Ontario, California, where I am teaching at Pomona College, to Dallas—was a graduate student in Spanish returning home from a job interview. I’m reading a book called Dangerous Trade: Histories of Industrial Hazard across a Globalizing World. The third chapter is about a mercury mine in Almadén, Spain. “That’s where my father worked—he was a mining engineer,” she offers. When the mine closed, the town died—now there is hardly anyone left. She came to the United States to study, and will probably stay. Migrations and global connections are everywhere.

My seat partner on the plane to Havana tells me that she is going back to Cuba for the first time since she left, in 1968, at age 13. “Look, I’m trembling,” she tells me as the plane touches down. Her grandmother left Spain for Cuba in her 30s, and returned for the first time when she was 80. “I’m almost as bad,” she says. I’m embarrassed to tell her that I’m going to Cuba for the publication of my book on immigration.

If the Miami airport experience has improved, the Havana experience has not. The line through immigration takes over an hour, and the bags have still not appeared when I finally get through. Nobody seems to know which of the two baggage claim areas our bags will be on. It’s hot, noisy, and crowded, and it’s not clear where there are lines to stand in and where we are supposed to go. Somehow, though, my suitcase appears and I manage to pass through the required lines and exit the terminal. As always, there is a huge crowd of excited friends and relatives waiting for people from the Miami flights.

Every time I travel to Latin America, I’m reminded how important, and how complicated, water is. At home, we expect clean water to flow reliably from every pipe whenever we turn a faucet or push a handle. Kitchen sink, bathroom sink, shower, toilets—there are so many places where something can go wrong—assuming that there is water at all, and that it’s not contaminated. The TV screen in the airport welcoming travelers to Cuba flashes health warnings, one of which is (in Spanish) to always boil your water before you drink it. This time, my friends advise me to use boiled water to brush my teeth and to rinse dishes and vegetables in boiled water after washing them.

Sometimes you can avoid the foreign-tourist-in-Cuba experience of being “hustled” by staying away from hotels and tourist sites. This time, though, I’m approached while waiting on a busy street in Centro Habana outside my friends’ apartment. It’s 96 steps up, and someone has to come down to unlock the street door for me. “Are you visiting Cuba for the first time?” a young man asks me from inside a neighboring storefront offering “economist/accounting services.” “What are you doing here?” I’m a professor, attending the book fair, I tell him. “Oh, a professor, what do you teach? Are you interested in economic issues?” Yes, I say. “My friend just wrote a book on cuentapropismo, he reveals. “I have a dozen copies at my place down the street. Do you want one?” Maybe, I say guardedly, but I don’t have much room in my luggage. “Are you married?” he continues without missing a beat. “I really like you. (Me caes muy bien.)” “Yes, I’m married” I lie. “It doesn’t matter!” he exclaims. “It can be our secret dream! Nobody has to know!”

The book fair is amazing. The main installation is at the El Morro fort just outside the city. The parking lot is filled with buses and cars, and walkers are flowing in as well. The many streets inside are packed with people. Publishers’ displays are interspersed with food stalls, children’s activity stations, and performances. There is no security visible, and the crowds are relaxed and jovial. The only thing I can compare it to is First Night in Boston. But here everyone has come to look at books!

A young man approaches me after a presentation by the sister of one of the Cuban 5, national heroes, imprisoned in the United States on charges of espionage. They were spying on right-wing Cuban American organizations that had planned and carried out armed attacks against Cuba. “You probably don’t recognize me,” he says shyly. “You were friends with my mother in 1995, when you were in Cuba with your kids. I was a baby then, but when you left, you gave my mom the child seat from your bicycle. I rode around in it for years.” He’s the same age as my son, in his third year at the university.

There are multiple rooms with concurrent book presentations going on all day, every day. Mine is at 3:00 Saturday afternoon. About 30 people fill the room. Two commentators precede me: one describes my book in detail, and the second one gives my biography. I hope he is around to write my obituary, because he gets it all so right: my intellectual trajectory, my activism, my work life. It’s exactly how I want to be remembered.

I decide to tell the audience about four life experiences that brought me to write They Take Our Jobs!. They were experiences that opened my eyes to the myths I had been living with, and together made me want to write a book that would do the same for others. There’s a great word for it in Spanish: concientización. There’s no perfect translation in English, but it’s something like consciousness-raising, or political awakening.

The first experience was when I left college after my first year, in 1976, to work for the United Farm Workers in California. I was looking for something different to do, but I had no idea what I was getting myself into. I had, of course, been eating fruits and vegetables all my life, but as far as I knew, they came from the supermarket. It had never occurred to me that everything I bought at the store had a history, and that someone had to plant, care for, and harvest all of that produce. With the farmworkers I was thrown right into the middle of a world I had no idea existed: a world where almost everyone was Spanish-speaking and Mexican, and where they worked long hours under harsh conditions to harvest the food we blithely purchased in Massachusetts.

The second experience I recounted was at UC Berkeley, where I was exposed to Chicano Studies and had the chance to study with, and then teach for, one of the discipline’s founders, Carlos Muñoz. The whole premise behind the Chicano Studies movement—like those that pressed for the creation of African American and Native American studies programs during that same tumultuous decade of the 1970s—was that existing curriculums were basically the study of white people, and had left out the experiences of people of color in the United States. Once again, this was an eye-opener. All that history I had been learning all of those years, that was an exclusive, politicized, history? There were whole histories that it had left out? I decided to become a historian.

The third experience was when I got to Bates College in 1990, fresh PhD in Latin American history in hand. Being in Maine, one of the coldest and whitest states in the country, Bates had been very slow to diversify, and its Latino student population was extremely small and extremely new. Both students and faculty urged me to create a course on Latino history, and I was eager to do so. A lot had changed since my Chicano Studies days, though. Latin American immigration had skyrocketed, and it had diversified both in its origins—including far more Caribbean, Central American, and South American immigrants—and in its destinations, moving out of its traditional centers in California and the Southwest. The new discipline of Latino—rather than Chicano, or Boricua (Puerto Rican) studies—was developing. I jumped on the bandwagon and decided I needed to become part of this new wave of Latino history.

Finally, the experience that led directly to They Take Our Jobs! came in May of 2006, with the massive immigrants rights demonstrations. I participated in a small part of the nation-wide movement, in Salem, where immigrant-owned businesses closed and children stayed home from school on May 1, the national “day without an immigrant.”

The next day, I was in my department office conversing with an African American colleague. Nearby, some white students were complaining about the demonstrations. “I don’t have anything against immigrants, only illegal immigrants. My ancestors came here legally! These immigrants should do it the right way, following the law, like my ancestors did.”  This was a discussion I had engaged in a million times already, and I had my response ready: Your ancestors came here legally because they were European, and there were no legal restrictions on European immigration at the time. But somehow, looking at my colleague, it struck me for the first time: Only white people say that! Of course the ancestors of most African Americans came here “legally” too—because their enslavement was perfectly legal. But white people who are so proud that their ancestors came legally are basically saying that they are proud to have benefitted from white privilege.

I decided not to get into an argument at that moment, but when I got home and opened the local newspaper, the front-page article about the demonstrations quoted a white observer making the same comment. It seemed more useful to compose a letter to the editor explaining my thoughts, so I did; it was published the next day. And a few days later an editor from Beacon Press called me saying that she had seen my letter, and wondered whether I’d be interested in expanding it into a book. That was the seed of They Take Our Jobs!.

The eminent Cuban historian Jorge Ibarra attends my talk. “Whatever happened to your book on Haitian migrant workers in Cuba?” he demands. On my first visit to the island, he had provided invaluable help orienting me to the historiography, and the archives, relevant to my research. “I never wrote the book,” I confess. “I published the research I did here as an article in the Hispanic American Historical Review, but then my work ended up moving in different directions.” “I still have the original, typed manuscript of that article!” he tells me proudly. “You gave it to me when you came back the next year, when you were working on it.”

As I get ready to leave the fair, I’m asked to sign a statement, a letter to Comandante Presidente Hugo Chávez Frías. “The undersigned intellectuals, artists, writers, and guests who are participating in the Twenty-second International Book Fair in Havana, from the San Carlos Fort in La Cabaña, wish to send the President of Venezuela, Hugo Chávez Frías, our solidarity and our commitment to accompany him day by day in these moments of his recovery, because we know that he is carrying out a battle and his spirit of struggles continues intact in these difficult but hopeful moments he is living through,” the letter begins, in somewhat typical flowery Spanish-language style. “You have succeeded in extending ties of unity to other continents and countries besieged at this time by the twenty-first century wars of recolonization, and you have always accompanied them with your solidarity. Dear Comandante, you have succeeded, along with other compañeros, in achieving the uncompleted dream of Simón Bolívar, José de San Martín, and other heroes of our independence, frustrated by another imperial expansion that framed our dependence since the end of the nineteenth century... You are at the forefront of this battle with your strength, courage, and love. Adelante, Comandante, our peoples are waiting for you.”

It sounds a lot like a song I played for my students at Pomona last week, “Simón Bolívar,” written in the early 1970s by the Chilean group Inti Illimani.

Simón Bolívar, Simón,
revivido en las memorias
que abrió otro tiempo la historia,
te espera el tiempo Simón.
Simón Bolívar, razón,
razón del pueblo profunda,
antes que todo se hunda
vamos de nuevo Simón.

You still live in our memories, Simón
History has opened another era
Time is waiting for you, Simón...
Before everything is lost
Let’s try again, Simón.

The letter is not written exactly with the words I would have used, but I don’t care, it’s basically a get-well card, and I sign it, imagining that one day David Horowitz will discover it or the National Enquirer will splash a headline, “Aviva Chomsky claims Hugo Chávez at ‘forefront of battle’ and calls for him to forge ahead!” But I doubt I’m important enough for it to merit any notice at all. And it feels like the least I can do.

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David Bacon is a writer and photographer. He is the author of Illegal People: How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants and the forthcoming The Right to Stay Home: Ending Forced Migration and the Criminalization of Immigrants. His photographs and stories can be found at http://dbacon.igc.org.

This post originally appeared at TruthOut.

A scene from the million-person march in Los Angeles in 2006. (Photo: David Bacon)

We need an immigration policy based on human, civil and labor rights, which looks at the reasons why people come to the U.S., and how we can end the criminalization of their status and work. While proposals from Congress and the administration have started the debate over the need for change in our immigration policy, they are not only too limited and ignore the global nature of migration, but they will actually make the problem of criminalization much worse. We need a better alternative.

This alternative should start by looking at the roots of migration - the reasons why people come to the U.S. in the first place. Movement and migration is a human right. But we live in a world in which a lot of migration isn’t voluntary, but is forced by poverty and so-called economic reforms.

Our trade policy, and the economic measures we impose on countries like Mexico, El Salvador or the Philippines make poverty worse. When people get poorer and their wages go down, it creates opportunities for U.S. corporate investment. This is what drives our trade policy. But the human cost is very high.

In El Salvador today, the U.S. Embassy is telling the government to sell off its water, hospitals, schools and highways to give U.S. investors a chance to make money. This policy is enabled by the Central American Free Trade Agreement, whose purpose was increasing opportunities in El Salvador for U.S. investors. It was imposed on the people of that country in the face of fierce popular opposition.

Alex Gomez, a leader of Salvadoran public sector unions, came to San Francisco in February to explain what the consequences of this latest free trade initiative will be. He says if these public resources are privatized, tens of thousands of workers will lose their jobs, and their unions will be destroyed. They will then have to leave the country to survive. 

According to Gomez, four million have already left El Salvador. Two million have come to the US, not because they love it here, but because they can’t survive any longer at home. These migrants come without papers, because there are no visas for two million people from this small country.

The North American Free Trade Agreement did even more damage than CAFTA. It let U.S. corporations dump corn in Mexico, to take over the market there with imports from the U.S. Today one company, Smithfield Foods, sells almost a third of all the pork consumed by Mexicans. Because of this dumping and the market takeover, prices dropped so low that millions of Mexican farmers couldn’t survive. They too had to leave home.

Mexico used to be self-sufficient in corn and meat production. Corn cultivation started there in Oaxaca many centuries ago. Now Mexico is a net corn and meat importer from the U.S.

During the years NAFTA has been in effect, the number of people in the U.S. born in Mexico went from 4.5 million to 12.67 million. Today about 11% of all Mexicans live in the U.S. About 5.7 million of those who came were able to get some kind of visa, but another 7 million couldn’t. There just aren’t that many visas. But they came anyway because they had very little choice, if they wanted to survive or their families to prosper.

Our immigration laws turn these people into criminals. They say that if migrants without papers work here it’s a crime. But how can people survive here if they don’t work? We need a different kind of immigration policy - that stops putting such pressure on people to leave, and that doesn’t treat them as criminals if they do.

What would it look like?

First, we should tell the truth, as the labor-supported TRADE Act would have us do, which was introduced into Congress by Mike Michaud from Maine. We should hold hearings as the bill says, about the effects of NAFTA and CAFTA, and collect evidence about the way those agreements have displaced people in the U.S. and other countries as well.

Then we need to renegotiate those existing agreements to eliminate the causes of displacement. If we provide compensation to communities that have suffered the effects of free trade and corporate economic reforms, that were intended to benefit U.S. investors, it would be more than simple justice. It might give people more resources and more of a future at home.

It makes no sense to negotiate new trade agreements that displace even more people or lower living standards. This administration has negotiated three so far, with Peru, Panama and South Korea. It is now negotiating a new one -- the Trans Pacific Partnership. These are all pro-corporate, people-displacing agreements. We should prohibit these and any new ones like them. Instead, we need to make sure all future trade treaties require adequate farm prices and income in farming communities, promote unions and high wages, and don’t require the privatization of public services. 

Increasingly these international agreements, like Mode 4 of the World Trade Organization, treat displaced migrants as a cheap and vulnerable labor force. Our trade negotiators call for regulating their flow with guest worker programs. This is exactly the wrong direction. We should ban the inclusion of guest workers in any future trade agreement or treaty instead.

When diplomacy doesn’t work, U.S. military intervention and aid programs are to support trade agreements, structural adjustment policies or market economic reforms. This has been U.S. policy in Honduras and Haiti, for instance. This also must stop. If the U.S. Embassy is putting pressure on countries like El Salvador to adopt measures that benefit corporate investors at the expense of workers and farmers, the Ambassador should be recalled and the interference halted.

Finally, we should ratify the UN Convention on the Rights of Migrant Workers and Their Families. This international agreement would give us an alternative framework for recognizing the rights of displaced migrants, and the responsibility of both sending and receiving countries for their protection.

The failure of successive U.S. administrations to even present this agreement to Congress for ratification highlights the unpleasant truth about the real effect of our immigration policy. When millions of migrants arrive here, they are criminalized because they lack immigration status, especially when they go to work.

Labor and civil rights advocates often fondly remember the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act because of it had an amnesty, signed by President Ronald Reagan, which gave legal status relatively quickly to almost four million people. But the law also contained employer sanctions for the first time, which we often forget. That provision says that employers will be fined and punished if they hire undocumented workers.

This provision was promoted by those who said that if work became illegal, then undocumented migration would end. This clearly failed, since the number increased many-fold in the years that followed. Compared to the pressure to leave home, criminalizing work was not a deterrent to those who sought work here so that their families at home would survive.

This provision sounded like a law against employers, but it was not. It became an anti-worker law. No boss ever went to jail for violating it. The fines were not great. When the government agents seek to enforce it, employers who cooperate with them are forgiven. But over the last four years alone, tens of thousands of workers have been fired for not having papers. The true objects of punishment under this law have always been workers, not employers.

Now Congress is talking about a new reform, and we have to use this opportunity to push to repeal this law. Some think that since a new legalization will hopefully give many undocumented workers legal status, sanction won’t really affect anyone anymore. 

But even the most positive predictions about a new legalization still assume that millions of people will not quality because of stringent qualifications, high fees and decades-long waiting periods. Those people will still be subject to the sanctions law. And the day after a new reform passes millions more people will come to the U.S. because of the same pressures that caused past waves of migration. This is especially true if a new immigration reform ignores the need to renegotiate trade agreements and eliminate the huge displacement of people.

These future migrants are not strangers. They are the husbands and wives, parents, and cousins of people already here - people who are already part of our communities. They come from the same towns, and are linked to neighborhoods here in the U.S. by the ties that have been created by migration, work and family. They will work in our workplaces, participate in our organizing drives, and belong to our unions. We need to keep the sanctions law from being applied to them, making it a crime for them to work. Unfortunately, however, Congress members aren’t talking about getting rid of sanctions. In fact, they and the administration want to make the current application even worse.

So let’s do a reality check. Let’s tell the truth about how has this law been used. 

One method for enforcing sanctions happens when an employer uses it to screen people it is going to hire, using an error-filled government database called E-verify. Congress and the administration are calling for making it mandatory for all employers to use this database, and refuse to hire anyone who it flags as undocumented. 

For people who are currently working now and have no papers, what it means is that if they lose their jobs, it will be much hard to find others. That will make people fear taking any action that offends their boss, like joining a union or complaining about illegal conditions. That’s good for the boss, but bad for the workers.

Employers today not only use this database to screen new hires - they also use it to reverify the immigration status of people who are already working. This is a violation of the law. Once it accepts the form filled out by a job seeker (called the I-9), along with their ID, the employer can’t reverify it all over again at some point in the future. But they do. Sometimes it’s convenient to get rid of workers who have accumulated benefits and raises over years of service, and replace them with new hires at lower wages. 

Reverification just happened, for instance, to three workers who belong to the International Longshore and Warehouse Union at Waste Management, Inc. in San Leandro, California. The union has gone to the Oakland City Council to protest these illegal firings, because WMI operates under a city garbage contract.

Employers sometimes announce they intend to begin using the E-Verify database when their workers start to organize. That’s what managers announced at the Mi Pueblo supermarkets in northern California. There E-Verify checks are being used to terrorize workers to keep them from supporting a union, Local 5 of the United Food and Commercial Workers.

Another method for enforcing sanctions against workers is even more widespread. Immigration agents, working for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), go into the personnel records of an employer. They then compare the information given by workers on the I-9 form to the E-Verify database, looking for workers who don’t have legal immigration status. ICE then makes a list of those workers and sends it to the company, telling the employer to fire them.

This is what happened at Pacific Steel Castings in Berkeley, California, last year. Two hundred and fourteen workers were fired as a result. Some had worked in the foundry for over 20 years. Many lost their homes, and their children’s dreams of going to college were destroyed. 

Over last four years, hundreds of thousands of workers have lost their jobs in these enforcement actions, called I-9 audits. Almost five hundred janitors in San Francisco, and over a thousand in Minneapolis. Thousands of workers doing some of the hardest work imaginable in meatpacking plants around the country. Farm workers. Construction workers. But the employers all given reduced fines, and many immunity from punishment entirely, if they cooperated in firing their own workers.

If unions and communities mount a fight that exposes the terrible human cost of these firings, it is possible to stop them. The young Dreamers showed that this is possible. These courageous young people convinced the administration to stop deporting students brought to the U.S. without papers as children. They forced the administration to change the way it enforces immigration law. It can be done for workers too, if there’s a fight.

But we must also change the sanctions law. Otherwise, our experience over the 25 years since it passed shows that immigration authorities will simply find another method for making working a crime for people who don’t have papers.

The other unpleasant truth about sanctions is that they are linked to the growth of guest worker programs. One of the main purposes of making it a crime to work without papers is to force people to come to the U.S. with visas that tie them to their employers and recruiters. These workers are often more vulnerable than the undocumented, since they get deported if they lose their jobs or get fired. Guest worker programs have been called Close to Slavery by the Southern Poverty Law Center and others who have documented their extreme exploitation. The sanctions law functions as a way to pressure people into choosing that path to come to the U.S. to work.

When employer sanctions are used to make workers vulnerable to pressure, to break unions or to force people into guest worker programs, their real effect is to force people into low wage jobs with no rights. This is a subsidy for employers, and brings down wages for everyone. The sanctions law makes it harder for all workers to organize to improve conditions. This doesn’t just affect the workers who have no papers themselves. When it becomes harder for one group to organize, other workers have a harder time organizing too.

Some Washington lobbyists accept as a fact of life that the sanctions law will continue, or even worse, that E-Verify will become a mandatory national program for all employers. But for unions and workers who have had to deal with its effects , it would be much better to immediately repeal it, and dismantle the E-Verify database. 

The use of the sanctions law against workers and unions is what led the California Labor Federation to call for its repeal as early as 1994, a position it continued to adopt in successive conventions. Other unions joined it including the garment unions and service employees. Finally labor councils in California and then around the country passed resolutions making the same call, and sent them to the historic AFL-CIO convention in Los Angeles in 1999. This led to an historic debate and the adoption of a new, pro-immigrant policy. Delegates at that convention believed that we have to stop enforcing immigration law in the workplace, because its real effect is to make workers vulnerable to employers, and to make it harder for all workers to organize to improve conditions.

In addition to repealing the national sanctions law, we should also prohibit states from enacting copycat measures. These laws have passed not just in Arizona or Alabama or Mississippi. California passed a state employer sanctions law before the federal law took effect in 1986.

What would really help workers to raise wages and improve conditions is much stricter enforcement of worker protection and anti-discrimination laws, for everyone. Funding used for immigration enforcement on the job should be given instead to the Department of Labor, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the National Labor Relations Board and other labor law enforcement agencies. It will be a good day for all workers when ICE agents instead become wage and hour inspectors.

Threats by employers who use immigration status to keep workers from organizing unions or protesting illegal conditions should be a crime. That makes it necessary to overturn two Supreme Court decisions, Hoffman and Sure-Tan. In these cases the court said that if workers are fired for union activity and have no papers, the boss doesn’t have to rehire them or pay them lost wages, because the sanctions law makes it illegal to employ them to begin with. But when there’s no punishment for violating labor rights, workers have no rights. This also hurts other workers in the same workplace who want to organize a union, since it makes the undocumented so vulnerable. Instead, we should increase workplace rights by prohibiting immigration enforcement during labor disputes or against workers who complain about illegal conditions.

To ensure that in the workplace we all have the same rights we also have to eliminate the way undocumented people get ripped off by funds like Social Security and unemployment. All workers contribute to the Social Security fund, but because undocumented people are working under bad numbers, they pay in but can never collect the benefits. This will come back to haunt us when those workers need disability payments or get too old to work - something that happens to us all. This is the reason we set up the Social Security system to begin with - because we don’t want old people eating dog food, regardless of where they were born.

Instead today the Social Security number has become much more a means to check immigration status, harming workers instead of providing them the benefits that were its original and true purpose. There is a simple solution to this problem as well. Social Security numbers should be made available for everyone, regardless of immigration status. Everyone should pay into the system and everyone has a right to the benefits those payments create. By the same token all workers should be able to receive unemployment benefits regardless of status, since they and their employers pay into the funds. 

In the end, we need an immigration policy that brings people together, instead of pitting workers against each other, as our current system does. During a time of economic crisis especially we need to reduce job competition, rather than stoking fears. In 2005 Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee of Houston made an innovative proposal that would have set up job creation and training programs for unemployed workers at the same time that it would have given legal status to workers without papers. This proposal put unemployed workers and immigrants on the same side, giving them both something to fight for whether they were out of work, or working without immigration status. 

This proposal, and the others made here, are part of the Dignity Campaign, a plan for immigration reform based on human, civil and labor rights. In the last three years, local unions and labor councils in San Francisco, Silicon Valley and Alameda County adopted resolutions supporting the Dignity Campaign, arguing that trade policy is linked to the increasing vulnerability of immigrant workers because of the sanctions law and guest worker progrsms. The Labor Council for Latin American Advancement adopted a similar resolution.

An immigration policy that benefits migrants, their home communities, and working people here in the U.S. has to have a long term perspective. Instead of just trying to please interest groups well-represented in Congress, we need to ask, where are we going? What will actually solve the problems that we experience on our jobs and in our homes with current laws and policies? 

We need a system that produces security, not insecurity. We need a commitment to equality and equal status - getting rid of color and national lines instead of making them deeper. We need to make it easier for workers to organize, by getting rid of what makes people vulnerable -- to end job competition we need full employment, and to gain organizing rights we need labor law enforcement together with eliminating sanctions and firings. It’s not likely that many corporations will support such a program, so the politicians who represent us have to choose whose side they’re on. 

Working people in Mexico, El Salvador, the Philippines, the US and other countries need the same things. Secure jobs at a living wage. Rights in our workplaces and communities. The freedom to travel and seek a future for our families, and the ability to stay home and have a decent future there too. The borders between our countries, then, should be common grounds that unite us, not lines that divide us.

 

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Why American Apparel is Still Ethical Even if the CEO Disappoints

Award-winning journalist Fran Hawthorne has been a writer or editor at Fortune, BusinessWeek, Institutional Investor, and other publications. She is the author of several books including Ethical Chic: The Inside Story of the Companies We Think We Love and The Overloaded Liberal: Shopping, Investing, Parenting,and Other Daily Dilemmas in an Age of Political Activism.

Dov Charney has his good points. Really.

Sure, employees have filed at least 10 lawsuits against the founder and chief executive of sexy-clothing-maker American Apparel, alleging sexual harassment, bullying, violence, and illegal use of corporate money. His firm went bankrupt once and has skirted the financial edge two more times.

The newest lawsuit—brought by the male manager of an American Apparel outlet in uber-cool Malibu, California—claims, among other things, that Charney spewed obscenities at him for poor sales, called him “a fag” and “a f***ing Jew,” tried to squeeze and choke him, and then tried to rub dirt in his face.

Actually, this is an improvement over some of the earlier legal actions, in which Charney was accused of grabbing his penis in front of one female worker and using company funds to buy sex videos for himself. At least this time, he apparently is concerned about store sales.

Yet, the case against Charney is not that simple.

The same bravado and willingness to buck conventional wisdom that allegedly produce the sexual filth, also propel Charney to open his big mouth for unpopular causes of social justice.

While other U.S. companies hire undocumented foreign-born workers mainly to cheat them out of wages and overtime, knowing that they don’t dare complain, Charney champions their rights. He marches in Los Angeles’s biggest Latino parade, donates money to immigrant rights’ groups, ran ads supporting citizenship, and designed two special lines of T-shirts as fund-raisers.

While other U.S. clothing-makers ship their production out to sweatshops in places like Bangladesh, Vietnam, Honduras, and China, seeking the lowest wages possible, regardless of safety or health, Charney makes everything in the U.S. At American Apparel’s airy, light-filled main factory, workers can get subsidized health care, subsidized meals, free loaner bikes, free massages, free English lessons, discount bus passes, and free international calls back home (to all those countries they may have illegally come from). 

Charney also vigorously opposed California’s Proposition 8, which banned same-sex marriage.

In short, if you’re concerned about corporate ethics, those two sides of Dov Charney can drive you crazy. Hate him or love him?

But there is a simple solution: Hate the man, love the company.

While Charney may be the drum major of the parade, the qualities that make American Apparel an ethical business should be pretty well entrenched throughout that factory by now. After 15 years, it would be hard to tear out the sunny windows or yank away the health care and English lessons. Company officials claim their  “vertically integrated” manufacturing platform has proved that making clothing in America is cost-effective.

Thus, the good parts should keep running even if Charney disappeared.

By the same token, the harassment and abuse lawsuits are only against Charney, personally, No other American Apparel executive has been accused of talking and acting dirty. Get rid of Charney, and the harassment and bullying should stop.

Charney probably owns too much of the company to be fired outright, and anyway, it’s often his creative vision behind the popular designs.

Instead, American Apparel should keep him locked up in a tower with lots of porn videos, Hungry Man frozen dinners, consenting (and over 18) young women—and a laptop with a good graphics program. Every now and then, a few upper-tier managers could come by to talk about plans for new hoodies or dresses. But never, ever, ever let Dov Charney out. 

T-Shirts image from Bigstock.

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Double standard

David Bacon: A Year in Labor Stories

David Bacon is a writer and photojournalist based in Oakland and Berkeley, California. He is the author of Illegal People: How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants, and his new bookbook about migration and work will be published by Beacon Press in 2013. 

Bacon writes about labor, immigration, and international politics for The Nation, In These Times, American Prospect, TruthOut, among other publications, and he regularly appears on KPFA and KQED radio. The East Bay Express described his work: "As the US labor movement has come under near constant attack in recent years, the Oakland journalist is one of the last of his breed in the country." 

For Labor Day, we've collected some of Bacon's stories about labor as a snapshot of a year in workers' rights. 

All photos copyright David Bacon, used by permission of the author.

 

UpFront on KPFA: (August 22) David Bacon interviews a house cleaner about California's Domestic Workers' Bill of Rights (which passed the California Assembly this past week). Interview starts at 18:15.

UpFront - Drones, Castlewood, Vote Suppression - August 22, 2012 at 7:00am

Click to listen (or download)

 

"In early April, an anti-immigrant bill like those that swept through legislatures in Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina was stopped cold in Mississippi." How Mississippi's Black/Brown Strategy Beat the South's Anti-Immigrant Wave The Nation, April 20.

"Employers say they’re 'independent contractors.' Drivers call that a legal trick to deny them their rights–a nice-sounding label obscuring an ugly reality." Seattle Port Strike Challenges "Independent Contractor" Lie In These Times, February 21.

"Migrant rights activists, artisans and public officials spoke about the important role migration continues to play in Oaxaca's economic, social, political and family life. The state in southern Mexico is the source of one of the largest waves of migration from Mexico to the United States." "Oaxaca's New Government Calls for Migrant Rights," TruthOut, January 5.

"A bruising 16-year battle, the fight brought together African American, white, and Mexican immigrant workers, who were able to find common ground despite the company’s attempts to use racial division and immigration enforcement to try to defeat them." "Common Ground on the Kill Floor: Organizing Smithfield," Labor Notes, April 20.

Can the Triquis Go Home?

Today's post is from David Bacon, a former union organizer and a fellow at the Oakland Institute. Bacon is the author of Illegal People and the forthcoming The Right to Not Migrate. This post originally appeared at New American Media.

OAXACA, MEXICO -- Just before Christmas, the women and children who'd spent 17 months living on the sidewalk outside the governor's palace in Oaxaca announced they were going home. In the spring of 2010, these refugees abandoned their homes in San Juan Copala, the ceremonial center of the Triqui people. Many houses were burned after they left.

Stringing tarps and ropes across the palacio's outdoor colonnade, they set up their planton, an impromptu community of sleeping and cooking areas across the sidewalk from the zocalo, the plaza at Oaxaca's heart. It looked hauntingly similar to the settlements of the Occupy protesters that spread across the United States last fall, but rather than fighting to remain in their tents, the Triqui families in the planton were fighting for the right not to live there, for the right to go home.

Finally, this December, they announced an agreement with representatives of Gabino Cue, elected governor last July, who promised to protect the families if they returned to San Juan Copala. Still, many question whether they can really go back safely. Even more importantly, they ask what can bring an end to the violence that has claimed the lives of at least 500 people over the last two decades.

This question is not just debated on the sidewalk by the zocalo, or only in Oaxaca. It is asked, albeit in whispers, by migrant farm workers in Baja California and Sinaloa, in northern Mexico, and in Hollister and Greenfield, in California's Salinas Valley. 

Indigenous Triqui children march through the streets of Oaxaca on December 19, 2011, to protest a wave of killihngs in their home community of San Juan Copala.

Mixtecos have been leaving Oaxaca for decades, driven mostly by the endemic poverty of the Mexican countryside, says Gaspar Rivera Salgado, a Mixteco professor at UCLA and past coordinator of the Binational Front of Indigenous Organizations. Yet for many years the Triquis, who were equally poor and live in the same region, stayed put. Their migration only began when the violence in their communities made life unbearable.

Once displaced, they began to migrate within the Mixteca region, then within Oaxaca, and then within Mexico. They traveled north, following other Oaxacans to San Quintin in the 1980s, and then in the 1990s, to California. 

Triqui migrants might have escaped the violence, but not the political presence of the groups they were fleeing. Wherever they went, the Movement for the Unification of the Triqui Struggle (MULT) and the Social Welfare Group of the Triqui Region (UBISORT) sent agents, requiring people to pay monetary quotas and participate in mobilizations.

In the 1980s, Triqui activists organized MULT. "It was a grassroots organization to fight the caciques (rural political bosses) over control of land, forests and other natural resources," says Rivera Salgado. "The caciques were so violent that MULT members had to arm themselves. Eventually, those armed men became a paramilitary group. The caciques were overcome, but what began as a grassroots organization became something different. There was no transition to a civil society form of organization."

A Triqui boy carries a sign that says, "We want justice for the widows, the orphans and our injured.

Eventually MULT itself fractured into factions. One faction became UBISORT, which began fighting MULT for political control of Triqui communities. Oaxaca's repressive state government used the conflict to enhance its own control. 

UBISORT was organized with the support of then-governor Jose Murat, and became a political support base for Oaxaca's old governing party, the PRI (Party of the Institutionalized Revolution). MULT organized its own political party, the Popular Unity Party. But behind the parties were the guns.

"A civil war went on between them," Rivera Salgado says. In 2006, Raul Marcial Perez, a leader of UBISORT, was assassinated. Then in October, 2010, Heriberto Pazos, the founder of MULT, was gunned down in the streets of Oaxaca city. 

In the only municipio that remained in Triqui hand, San Martin Itunyoso, Antonio Jacinto López Martínez, a MULT leader, was elected president in 2004, but then couldn't take office because of threats, and fled to the nearby city of Tlaxiaco. Last October, as he was crossing the street there with two members of his family, a gunman shot him in the head. Many others were killed in years of violence and retribution.

The Triquis attempted to create an autonomous town in San Juan Copala, and were expelled by paramilitary gangs.  They carried crosses with the names of people who were killed.

The High Cost of Migration

For Triquies, migration has had a high cost - they've had to fight for survival wherever they went.  "They faced tremendous racism and prejudice," Rivera Salgado charges. "They're always the outsiders, treated like savages."

Over the course of some 25 years, so many have fled the political murders plaguing their homeland that they've formed towns like Nueva Colonia Triqui, or New Triqui Town, in Baja's San Quintin Valley. In that colonia, or in California's Triqui neighborhoods, people ask whether peace is possible, and if it were, would they go home too?

"People left looking for a better future, but they worry about the safety of their families at home," says activist Elvira Santos (whose name has been changed), pointing to the fear that many Triquis share of reprisals for speaking publicly not only against themselves, but also against their families in Oaxaca.  "They'll think twice before going back because the conflicts and the same armed groups are still there."

In north Mexico, migrants found farm labor camps with dirt floors and no electricity. When they wanted homes for children and families, Triquis and other indigenous migrants had to mount land invasions, building houses on Federal land, and then awaiting the police sent to evict them. 

The march called on the governor, Gabino Cue, to guarantee their safety when they try to return to the town and to arrest those responsible for the killings.

In one of the most celebrated cases, Julio Sandoval, a Triqui leader from Yosoyuxi, was imprisoned for two years in the penitentiary in Ensenada for helping families settle in Cañon Buenavista.

When Triqui migrant farm workers arrived in Greenfield, the local police and legal system condemned them for cultural practices like home births or early marriages, or for drinking in public, a normal activity at home. Eventually they reached agreement with the local police chief, who even set up a desk in the police station for a Triqui leader to provide translation. 

Then town residents, who saw the migrants as unwelcome invaders, tried to fire the chief. The Triqui community by then numbered at least 3,000 people. Helped by the United Farm Workers, migrants marched through town to assert their right to live there.

Roots of the Violence

Adelfo Regino Montes, a Mixe indigenous leader and writer for Mexico's leftwing daily, La Jornada, traces the violence in the Triqui region to "political submission, territorial disintegration, economic exploitation, racial discrimination and exclusion in every aspect of daily life." 

Triqui men joined the women and children in the march.

After Mexico won its independence, Triquis controlled three municipios, or counties, where they were the majority. That gave them some degree of political power. After the Mexican Revolution, however, two of the municipios were dissolved, and much of the community's autonomy was lost.

"San Juan Copala itself was no longer a municipio," Santos explains. "Many mestizos [people of mixed indigenous and Spanish ancestry] didn't want Triquis to have power. They introduced alcohol and arms in order to gain control of the land and resources." Those caciques  ruled Triqui towns using repression and violence.

"[Triqui municipios] were dispersed into districts where non-indigenous people are the majority," Regino Montes said in a 2010 Jornada column. "The big majority of Triqui communities have been excluded from any decisions that affect their lives and destinies, undermining their autonomy and freedom to make their own choices. Those decision remained in the hands of the caciques, the state and federal governments, and the party leaders of the PRI."

In the only municipio that remained in Triqui hands, San Martin Itunyoso, Antonio Jacinto López Martínez, a MULT leader, was elected president in 2004, but then couldn't take office because of threats, and fled to the nearby city of Tlaxiaco. Last October, as he was crossing the street there with two members of his family, a gunman shot him in the head.

The women carry a banner that says, "Neither forgive nor forget, punishment to the assassins.   Autonomous town of San Juan Copala."

"The violence is created by a lack of the assertion of the rule of law. But the government has excused its failure to stop it with such racist ideas as 'Triquis are savages and uncivilized,'" Rivera Salgado charges.

Indigenous self-government

Looking for a way out themselves, in 2007 Triqui activists created the autonomous municipio of San Juan Copala, inspired by the experiences of the Zapatistas in nearby Chiapas. "They recreated the system of indigenous self-government," Regino Montes wrote, "the only real possibility for peace in the region."

"They were looking for a political alternative," adds Rivera Salgado, "and they used the political process.  They weren't armed. And they won in a clean election."

Those activists had roots in another splinter from MULT, called MULT Independiente, or MULT-I. UBISORT and MULT united against them, and eventually laid siege to the town, which went on for months. A number of residents were killed. 

A Triqui girl carries a sign that says, "Long live the autonomy of the native people of the planet earth."

On April 27, 2010, a caravan of Mexican and European human rights activists set out for San Juan Copala.  They were stopped at a roadblock, and gunmen began shooting. Beatriz Alberta Cariño Trujillo, a Mexican human rights activist, and a Finnish supporter Tyri Antero Jaakkola, were murdered. The others fled into the hills.

Human rights lawyer Gabriela Jimenez Rodriguez said she was captured by hooded men who told her they were from UBISORT and MULT. "They told us than no one could pass here, that it was their territory."  Finally she and others were released. Police recovered the two bodies, but never tried to enter the town.

On August 22, three more people were killed and two wounded, as they drove to nearby Santa Cruz Tilapia, where residents were also trying to establish an autonomous municipio. One was the town leader, Antonio Ramirez Lopez, 78 years old. 

Then in September, 500 paramilitaries surrounded San Juan Copala and told supporters of the autonomous municipio they had 24 hours to leave. "That wasn't just a threat," Reyna Martinez, one of the town's leaders, told La Jornada. "They did the same thing in San Miguel Copala, where they killed twelve of our colleagues in the city hall. Neither state nor Federal authorities dare even to come into San Juan Copala.

Women and children walked past the street vendors selling toys in the city's main plaza, with the star and masked figure on their banner showing their connection to the Zapatista movement.

No need for protective measures?

Oaxaca's governor at the time, Ulisses Ruiz, notorious for his violent suppression of the teachers' strike of 2006, said there were no gunmen, deaths or disappearances in the Triqui region, and no need for protective measures for residents. By that time, families who'd fled were already living in the planton outside his office, and some had gone to Mexico City to set up a similar planton there. "They got us to leave," said another leader, Marcos Albino Ortiz, "but that doesn't mean we've given up."

Last July, however, Gabino Cue, who Ruiz defeated in the election of 2004, beat the PRI candidate for governor. UBISORT campaigned for the PRI. MULT's PUP ran its own candidate, viewed largely as an attempt to draw votes from Cue. After the election, Cue put Region Montes in charge of the state Secretariat of Indigenous Affairs. Rufino Dominguez, former coordinator for the Frente Indigena de Organizaciones Binacionales, was appointed director of the Oaxacan Institute for Attention to Migrants.

The women in the planton didn't stop demonstrating against the government, however, and the violence continued. In August three MULTI members were killed in Agua Fria. Their bodies were brought to the planton for a public funeral. In October, Reyna Martinez was arrested with two dozen others for occupying a piece of land near the airport, in an act of civil disobedience. They demanded that the new state government provide protection to allow their return to San Juan Copala, pay for the destruction of peoples' homes there, and arrest those responsible for the killings. And in December women and children in bright red huipils marched through Oaxaca city, demanding the government accept the conditions.

In response to the pressure, Rufino Juarez, a UBISORT leader, was arrested in May for killing MULTI activist Celestino Hernandez Cruz a year earlier. Cue's administration then issued arrest orders for a number of others, but so far none have been detained, with one exception. Authorities did arrest a MULTI founder and retired teacher, Miguel Angel Velasco, accusing him of arranging the disappearance of two young women from MULT in 2007.

The planton in front of the governor's palace on the main square in Oaxaca.

Nevertheless, Marcos Albino Ortiz, says that the state government "has fulfilled about half of what it agreed to. We're going back to San Juan Copala, and we're talking with the communities there to ensure they support our decision. Our objective is to pacify the region." He predicts that the state and federal police will provide an escort, along with representatives of the Interamerican Commission for Human Rights, which has issued orders of protection for many of the activists. Some 135 families have received some restitution for their burned homes, he says.

Can Triquis go home?

To ensure peace in San Juan Copala, however, some police presence there is unavoidable, at least in the short run, Rivera Salgado believes. "The litmus test is whether the government will create the conditions in which people can go home," he says. "You can't change overnight a situation that's existed for 30 years. In the short term they have to disarm the armed people. This can create political space. But military occupation is not a long-term solution. People need to become a force for change themselves."

Following the ambush of the caravan, Regino Montes asserted, "The solution must be the recognition and respect, in law and in action, for the process of Triqui autonomy." Now he is a responsible official in a government that has the power to implement that recommendation.

Peace in Oaxaca may encourage Triqui migrants to return, but going home won't be easy. No one can afford to go back to Oaxaca, just to take a look. 

A child sleeps in a planton set up by the Triquis in Mexico City's zocalo, or main square.

Triqui migration hit the U.S. after the amnesty of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, so most people have no legal immigration status.  They can cross the border into Mexico, but coming back to the U.S. is a much bigger problem. It's expensive -- $2500 for a coyote for the crossing is two months wages for a farm worker. Plus, it's more dangerous every year, as people get pushed by increased enforcement into the most remote sections of the border to cross. 

Going back home is a permanent decision, not a temporary visit. Nor has the fear of violence there diminished. In the last few years, five Triqui families even won political asylum, helped by San Francisco's Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights. Nevertheless, "most migrants get much harsher treatment now," according to Rivera Salgado. "The current enforcement policy is based on excluding them, through violence and jail at the border, and isolation and fear in their community. The idea is to make life so hard for them in the U.S. they'll have to leave.  But where are they supposed to go?"

"I think a lot of people would go home if they could," Santos believes. "Our land is very productive, and as farm workers here we've seen new crops that we could grow in Oaxaca. But we need jobs and schools there, and especially security. Right now, we don't know if we can even hope for that. Some of us have lost hope. Our governments have made these promises before. It would be good if it were true this time, but we have to see if their actions match their words.""

"And where is home?" asks Rivera Salgado. "Lots of Triquis have grown up in San Quintin or Greenfield by now. Yet the first generation still yearns for connection to San Juan Copala. It is part of their identity and sense of belonging.  Everybody needs that."

It’s time for LGBTQ Groups to “Come Out” Against the ICE “Secure Communities” Program

Andrea Ritchie is a police misconduct attorney and organizer in New York City. She co-coordinates Streetwise and Safe (SAS) and is co-author, along with Joey L. Mogul and Kay Whitlock, of Queer (In)Justice: The Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States.

As we celebrate National Coming Out Day – a day to stand up for who we are, honor our individual and collective power, and stand up for what we believe in – dozens of LGBT groups are “coming out” against a federal program that places thousands of LGBTQ people and communities at risk of violence and violations of our human rights.

The Secure Communities Program – dubbed “S-Comm” because there is nothing secure about it – dramatically widens the immigration enforcement dragnet by sweeping everyone fingerprinted by local police into the sights of immigration authorities. While there are already immigration agents stationed in many of the country’s jails to check the immigration status of anyone detained while awaiting trial or sentenced after conviction of a crime, by requiring that all fingerprints taken at the point of arrest be forwarded to immigration authorities, S-Comm dramatically increases the number of people subject to scrutiny of their immigration status. Under S-Comm, anyone arrested and fingerprinted by police - regardless of whether the charges against them are ultimately dropped, found to be baseless, or dispensed with through community service or a diversion program - could potentially be placed in deportation proceedings, regardless of whether they were profiled, arrested without any basis whatsoever, or picked up on a minor offense.

The program is coming under increasing attack from all quarters – not only by immigrant rights advocates, but also law enforcement agents and politicians. The governors of Illinois, New York, and Massachusetts all decided to pull out of the program, only to be told they couldn’t when the federal government took all pretense of consent out of the picture and made the program mandatory. After some minor adjustments, the administration set up a task force to assess and address concerns with the program. The task force’s listening tour was met with growing criticism, protests, and walk-outs. Ultimately, a number of task force members resigned prior to the release of the final report, including a former Sacramento Chief of Police. At the same time the National Day Laborers Organizing Network (NDLON) released a report highlighting the devastating impacts the program has already had on immigrants across the country.

As I was speaking at the recent Lavender Law conference about the issues raised by Queer (In)justice, someone said “there was  time when we would be arrested just for being who we are.” The sad truth is that all too many of us continue to be arrested just for being who we are – particularly if we are poor, of color, young or immigrants in addition to being LGBT or Q. Under S-Comm, arrests based on persistent, pervasive and deeply rooted perceptions of LGBTQ people as inherently disorderly, sexually deviant, and violent will be more likely to lead to immigration detention and deportation for LGBTQ immigrants.

As documented in Queer (In)Justice, LGBTQ people, and particularly LGBTQ people of color, immigrants and young people, continue to be profiled by police at alarming rates on a daily basis as more likely to be engaged in “lewd conduct,” “loitering for the purposes of prostitution” and other sexual offenses – often without any basis beyond gender nonconforming appearance or expression. LGBTQ people, communities and establishments continued to be targets of discriminatory enforcement efforts. Thousands of LGBTQ youth who live on the streets because they have been pushed out of or runaway from their homes or foster care programs are at risk of arrest every day for minor offenses such as turnstile jumping or sleeping on a train because there is nowhere else safe for them to sleep at night. These are the members of our communities for whom the criminalization of LGBTQ people and the injustices of the criminal legal system will only be compounded by programs such as S-Comm.

I need look no further than my own client files to put faces on the people in our communities who will be affected by S-Comm: a Latino gay man falsely arrested  for “lewd conduct” based on a police officer’s entirely false accusation that he inexplicably dropped his pants as he took a walk in a park near his home in Queens; a homeless gay man who may in fact have been looking for some anonymous companionship in a remote area of Central Park where no one but the officer who arrested him was present, while heterosexual couples make out freely on the Great Lawn; a Latina transgender woman profiled as being engaged in prostitution as she walked to the store; a homeless LGBTQ teen arrested for “loitering”; a lesbian immigrant who was arrested when the police were called to respond to violence against her, who now lives in fear that the next time they come she will be arrested again. All were released from police custody shortly after arrest and never went to jail. Under S-Comm, because fingerprints taken from them at the police precinct would be forwarded directly to ICE, those among them who also happen to be undocumented would immediately find themselves in the cross hairs of immigration enforcement, even as the original charges against them were dismissed.

Concerns about the consequences of S-Comm for LGBTQ people go far beyond what will happen once they are deported – homophobia, transphobia, violence, and denial of basic needs await them in U.S. immigration detention facilities. Christina Madrazo, a Mexican transgender woman, was raped by a guard at the Krome Immigration Detention Center in 2000. Antonio O., a gay man and legal permanent resident from El Salvador arrested on a minor drug offense in 2007 was repeatedly denied HIV medication at an ICE processing center. Victoria Arellano, a Latina transgender woman held at the same facility, ultimately died shackled to her bed after being denied appropriate HIV/AIDS medication and treatment over an extended period of time.

S-Comm is an LGBTQ issue.

The over 60 signatories to the call from LGBT organizations for an immediate end to the program feature groups large and small, national and local. They include the nation’s oldest anti-violence program, Community United Against Violence in San Francisco, the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, the National Center for Lesbian Rights, and the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs, along with Gay Straight Alliances, campus-based Outlaw groups, statewide LGBT equality coalitions, the Center for Constitutional Rights, legal advocacy programs, organizations working with homeless LGBTQ youth, and grassroots groups working on a range of issues from supporting LGBTQ people in prisons to building safer communities for LGBTQ people.

It’s time for more LGBTQ groups and advocates to follow their lead and join the chorus of voices speaking out against S-Comm, and the license to profile, detain and deport LGBTQ people it creates. Come out against S-Comm, sign onto the statement, and let’s put our energies, advocacy, and political capital behind our signatures. S-Comm is one of my top 6 LGBT Equality issues - I hope you’ll make it one of yours.

A Reason to Vote Along Racial Lines (In the All-Star Game, At Least)

Rebecca Alpert is Associate Professor of Religion and Women’s Studies at Temple University and the author of Out of Left Field: Jews and Black Baseball (Oxford University Press, 2011). This post originally appeared on the Oxford University Press blog. 

Growing up as a baseball fan in the 1950s and 60s, I could not wait until the All-Star game rolled around every July. (Imagine my delight during the years when there was a second game in August!) Back then, fans didn’t choose the players, so I would eagerly anticipate the announcement of the teams in the newspapers. Then I would rummage through my baseball card collection to pull out the All-Stars and admire their accomplishments. Watching the game on television was thrilling to me, no matter the outcome. If I was in summer camp, my mother would dutifully send me the newspaper clippings and box scores. My parents were avid baseball fans, but this exhibition game meant nothing to them. I am not really sure why it appealed to me, then or now. Taking my son to the game when it took place in Philadelphia in 1996 was a peak moment. For me it is an annual ritual on my sacred calendar, a holy day to celebrate like the birthdays of family and friends, Thanksgiving, Passover.

When I began to do research on the roles Jews played in black baseball a few years ago, I was delighted to find out that the Negro Leagues had their own all-star game (called the East-West game and held in Chicago every year) that was the centerpiece of the black baseball season. From its inception in 1933 the East-West game provided an opportunity for all the men of African descent who could surely have been in the majors if not for the color line to showcase their talent in a very public way. This knowledge permitted me to justify my obsession with the All-Star game; now not only a guilty pleasure but also a potential vehicle for a political message.

Imagine my despair when I learned last year that the 2011 All-Star game would really be a vehicle for another kind of political message. Despite serious protests this year’s game will be taking place in Arizona, home of the infamous SB 1070, the bill that would permit law enforcement officials to request documentation from anyone who might appear to be an illegal immigrant. Almost one-third of those on major league rosters are now Latino. Doesn’t the baseball establishment understand that this Arizona law is demeaning to people of Latin American ancestry? Don’t they see the connections to the embarrassing color line that forced black Americans to be second class citizens in baseball for so many years? Why wouldn’t they want to move the game to another venue to support their players who could be subject to this humiliating (and possibly unconstitutional) law?

Immigration rights groups have called for a boycott, and I have signed their petitions, but the game is surely not being moved. How could I possibly observe my annual ritual this summer? While wondering whether I should even participate in the voting for the starting line-ups, it occurred to me that voting held the answer to my dilemma. What if, like the East-West game, all the starting players were from one racial/ethnic group, only in this case Latino? Wouldn’t that send a message to Arizona and Major League Baseball? So that’s what I intend to do with my 25 votes. And I encourage you to do the same.

It’s easy. Just go to the ballot and vote for your local team (in my case Placido Polanco , Carlos Ruiz, and Raul Ibañez of the Phillies), future Hall of Famers (like Vladimir Guerrero, David Ortiz, Albert Pujols, or Alex Rodriguez), perennial stars (Carlos Beltran, Bobby Abreu, Alfonso Soriano, Melky Cabrera, Aramis Ramirez, Adrian Beltre, Miguel Tejada, Jorge Posada) or this year’s standouts (Placido Polanco again, José Bautista, Adrian Gonzalez, José Reyes, Miguel Cabrera, Gaby Sanchez, Maicer Izturis, Alberto Callaspo, Yadier Molina, Martin Prado, Starlin Castro, Jhonny Peralta, Yunel Escobar, Jonathan Herrera, Asdrubal Cabrera, Emilio Bonifacio, Orlando Cabrera, Robinson Cano) or 2010 World Series heroes (Elvis Andrus, Nelson Cruz, Freddy Sanchez, Pablo Sandoval).

Don’t wait—vote early (you have until June 30) and often (25 times on the internet and whenever you’re at the ball park) and send a message to the majors that the All-Star game should showcase not only our best players but also our best values.

If you liked this post, you may also be interested in Raceball: How the Major Leagues Colonized the Black and Latin Game. Read an excerpt of Raceball on Scribd. 

After the Fire: Improvements for Some Workers, But Not All

The 1911 Triangle Waist Factory fire elicited an outpouring of sympathy and helped humanize eastern European immigrant industrial workers in the eyes of affluent white Americans, but reforms aimed at bakeries demonized the workers who the country's single most important food. In today's post, Aaron Bobrow-Strain, chair of the Department of Politics at Whitman College and author of White Bread: A Social History of the Store-Bought Loaf, looks at how reforms in food safety did little to help the workers in that industry, and how fear continues to adversely affect workers in today's food chain.

Last weekend, thousands of people attended events commemorating the one-hundred-year anniversary of Triangle Waist factory fire, which killed 146 young immigrant garment workers just off New York's Washington Square Park. The centennial commemorations, coming at a moment when worker organizing is vilified and under attack across the country, were a chance to remind Americans of the suffering and struggle it took to win basic workplace protections that we take for granted (at least for now).

Child labor laws, workplace safety regulations, sprinkler systems in office buildings, and limits on the length of the work week can all be traced back, at least in part, to the outpouring of anger and sympathy that followed the Triangle fire. As David von Drehle notes in his classic account of the fire and its aftermath, key provisions of the New Deal can even be traced to the tragedy of March 11, 1911. Union workers and non-union workers alike, we all owe a debt to the women who died in the Triangle fire and the labor reformers who took up their cause.

But there is also a lesson in the Triangle fire for millions of Americans who care about working to make a better food system. And, sadly, it is not so inspiring.

After the fire, 400,000 people—almost one in ten New Yorkers—took to the streets, joining a funeral procession for the fallen workers. In the weeks and months that followed, union and upper class social reformers demanded action. Pressure built on the government and businesses to do something to prevent similar tragedies. Charges were filed, blame circulated, and blue ribbon investigatory committees were appointed. Of all the inquiries, the most far-reaching was conducted by the newly created New York Factory Investigating Committee.

Garment factories figured prominently in the Committee's investigations, of course, but the Committee extended its mandate to include other industries—particularly small neighborhood bakeries. This focus might sound a little strange today, when we associate small local bakeries with community, pleasure, and authentic eating. But the reality then was a bit different.

Poorly capitalized and facing cutthroat competition, small immigrant bakeries slashed any cost possible. They stretched and whitened cheap flour with plaster of Paris, borax, ground bones, pipe clay, chalk, alum, and other nefarious compounds. They sold underweight loaves, and they worked laborers as hard as they could. Immigrant bakery employees typically worked 14+ hours a day during the week and 24 hours on Saturday. And they worked underground in damp, super-heated and unventilated cellar bake rooms. As the lyrics of an 1884 union anthem from St. Helen, Oregon, asked, "Full eighteen hours under the ground, Toiling and making bread! Shut off from air and light and sound, Are we alive or dead?"

Beginning in the 1870s, labor organizations were able to bring these abuses to light and raise public outcry about "Slavery in the Baker Shops." Sensational descriptions of unventilated and pestilent cellar bakeries filled local newspapers and echoed through the city's lecture halls. Sanitary inspectors painted pictures of dark, vermin-infested caves with raw sewage dripping from pipes into dough mixing troughs, street dust and horse manure blown onto dough, bread cooling on dirt floors, and whole families sleeping on rag piles in bakeries, alongside their chickens. In the worst cases, bakers worked ankle-deep in water and sewage when storms backed up city drains.

But the outcry was not what unions had hoped for. Rather than rousing sympathy for exploited workers, unions and their allies succeeded in focusing the country's outrage on dirty bread and the dirty hands that made it. By the time of the Triangle fire, small local bakeries were terrifying symbols of physical and social contagion in the minds of middle and upper class consumers.

Thus, although social reformers like Frances Perkins hoped that the tragedy's aftermath would spur changes for immigrant food workers, the Committee had other ideas.

When it came to garment factories and other industrial workplaces, the Committee worked to protect workers. When it came to bakeries, the Committee worked to protect consumers—often at the expense of bakery workers who were consistently reviled as the cause of New York's bread problem, rather than its biggest victims.

With a few exceptions, committee members darted around witnesses' appeals for workplace safety regulations, restating the bakery problem as a question of how best to control immigrant workers. One public health doctor who testified before the committee observed that nearly 100 percent of New York immigrant bakery workers showed signs of tuberculosis, bronchitis, and other lung infections. But the Factory Inspection Committee took this as evidence of bakers' poor hygiene, not unsafe working conditions. As city Health Commissioner Ernst Lederle argued, "cellar bakeries themselves were not the problem," the problem was that "the people were dirty and careless."

Anxiety about small bakeries was a gift to the country's growing number of large industrial bread manufacturers, and they fanned the flames of fear, running advertising about the risk of catching typhus and tuberculosis from immigrant bakery bread. But were small local bakeries really that unsafe for consumers?

Probably not—and this is what makes it interesting. Reading pages of testimony and the reports of sanitary inspectors one thing comes clear: while many other pieces of the American food supply—like milk and meat—were, in fact, threatened by germs, bread was fairly sanitary. Sensationalist reports of contaminated bread were just that: sensationalist.

Affluent New Yorkers were not really anxious about bread, they were anxious about unfamiliar immigrants touching food. The bread coming out of small local bakeries wasn't really a public health threat—at least not a threat to consumers.

But, as Frances Perkins argued at the Factory Investigating Committee hearings, bakeries were a threat to the health of bakery workers. Fixated on a potent combination of fear of germs and fear of immigrants (two things that often go together in America), social reformers had a hard time seeing this, however, even amidst the upwelling of sympathy following the Triangle fire.

While young female immigrant garment workers could be portrayed as helpless innocents (despite their active involvement in strikes and struggles to win rights), "swarthy" male bakery workers could not be allowed to touch the nation's food.

In the end, prompted by the Factory Investigating Committee, New York and jurisdictions around the country passed laws regulating sanitary conditions in small bakeries. The laws, designed to ease consumer anxieties, in some cases made life harder for immigrant bakery workers. For example, many cities passed sanitation regulations making it illegal for workers to sleep in bakeries, but didn't address the 14-18 hour workdays that prompted bakers to grab whatever sleep they could, wherever they could.

What lessons can we draw from this story today? As hard as it's been for American workers to win work place safety protections, it's been harder for food chain workers. It shouldn't be that difficult to see that improving conditions for food workers can only increase the safety of food for consumers, but racialized fears of immigrant hands touching the nation's sustenance often get in the way.

Photo by liberalmind1012 on Flickr. Used under Creative Commons.

Tucson Festival of Books: Dispatches from the Borderland

Margaret Regan, author of The Death of Josseline: Immigration Stories from the Arizona-Mexico Borderlands, will once again appear at the Tucson Festival of Books. Her appearance at the 2010 festival was broadcast on BookTV; you can watch it on YouTube.

Regan will be a panelist in two different sessions. For "Borderlines," Regan will join Phil Caputo, a Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist and a novelist (Crossers),and Thomas Cobb, novelist whose Crazy Heart was turned into the Oscar-winning film, for a session on writing about the border. The panel will meet at 11:30 a.m. Saturday, March 12, in the Catalina Room of the UA Student Union.

Regan will also be speaking at 4 p.m., Saturday, in Gallagher Theater in the UA Student Union, in the session "Dispatches from the Borderlands: Human Rights, Personal Stories." Moderated by journalism professor Jay Rochlin, the panel also includes authors Sam Quinones (Antonio's Gun and Delfino's Dream) and Kathryn Ferguson, Norma Price and Ted Parks (co-authors of Crossing with the Virgin). The session will be broadcast live by CNN's Book TV.

In December, Regan's book was named a winner in the 2010 Southwest Books of the Year Best Reading competition run by the Friends of the Pima County Public Library. Judge Margaret Loghry noted, "All concerned citizens should read this collection to better understand the issues in the borderlands today." The Unitarian Universalist Church also selected The Death of Josseline as a Common Read, to be read and studied by congregations nationwide.

 

Public Workers: A Visual Reality Check

David Bacon is the author of Illegal People: How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants. He is a writer and photojournalist based in Oakland and Berkeley, California. 

In California cities like San Jose, voters this election passed ballot measures to weaken the retirement system for public workers.  These are the same kind of measures that have brought workers into the streets of France for weeks in protest.

Beyond the ballot initiatives, the election season of 2010 was filled with rhetoric blaming public workers for the economic woes of cities and states.  It's hard to understand, in an era of foreclosures by banks that pay their executives bonuses of millions of dollars, while getting bailouts from the Federal government, why public workers should be held responsible for the current economic crisis.  Who contributes more to the welfare of our communities - a teacher or a hedge fund manager?

But perhaps the most important thing to remember is what these workers do.  These photographs are meant to inspire some obvious questions.  Can people do this work, if they're then cast adrift once they're too old?  What would happen to all of us if they didn't do these jobs?  

All photos © David Bacon.

Sam Johnson, a worker for the City of Burlingame, prepares to tap a water main to provide water service to a home.

Reader's Guide: The Death of Josseline

Margaret Regan's The Death of Josseline: Immigration Stories from the Arizona Borderlands has been praised as, "A keen-eyed perspective of how questionable public policy has resulted in far too much preventable loss of life," (Midwest Book Review) and, "A humane, sensitive, and informative perspective on a current and controversial topic" (Ana Castillo, author of The Guardians). 

The book has been chosen as this year's Common Read by the Unitarian-Universalist Association, and a reader's guide is available on Beacon.org.  Read an excerpt below or at Scribd and get talking about the human stories behind the contentious issue of undocumented immigration. 

You can also read these previous posts at Beacon Broadside by author Margaret Regan, or browse all of our posts on immigration.

A Shallow Grave in the Desert

Fourth of July in the Borderlands: Praying for Rain

An Unsolved Murder, A Wave of Hysteria, and Deaths in the Desert

The Death of Josseline: Immigration Stories from the Arizona Borderlands

Boston and the Irish, on the Anniversary of the Ursuline Convent Riots

On August 11 and 12, 1834, a riot fueled by anti-Catholic fervor resulted in the burning of an Ursuline Convent in Charlestown, Massachusetts, in what is now Somerville. In this excerpt from A City So Grand: The Rise of an American Metropolis, Boston 1850-1900, Stephen Puleo examines the height of Irish immigration to the city in the years following the riot, and the deeply anti-Catholic and anti-Irish discrimination the new arrivals faced.

The Know-Nothing Party flag.

When Charles Dickens visited Boston in 1842, he might have had the Irish in mind when he told guests at a dinner in his honor: "Virtue shows quite as well in rags and patches as she does in fine linen . . . she goes barefoot as well as shod . . . she dwells rather oftener in alleys and by-ways than she does in courts and palaces." He urged Bostonians to "lay [your] hands upon some of these rejected ones whom the world has too long forgotten" and to understand that "these creatures have the same elements and capacities of goodness as yourselves."

But Dickens's message went unheeded during the height of Irish immigration to Boston.

Thousands of Boston Irish, who had witnessed such devastation in their own country—who saw it transformed from a nation of bucolic splendor to a blight-infested isle of death—arrived in their adopted city to find not succor but prejudice, not welcome but suspicion and contempt. Boston's closed Yankee society, its deep anti-Catholicism, its intellectualism—all of these were completely foreign to, and conspired against, the bedraggled Irish who stepped weakly off the coffin ships and sought refuge among her narrow streets. Beginning in earnest with the ransacking and torching destruction of the Ursuline Convent in Charlestown in 1834, the Athens of America, one of the most progressive and educated locales in the New World (or the Old World, for that matter), rejected the Irish with an unprecedented, unrelenting, white-hot vitriol that rocked the newcomers and left them dispirited and disillusioned.

But not broken.

Link Roundup: Pink Slips and Poor Health, Stepford Sluts, and the Value of Marriage

On the New York Times' Well blog, Dr. Danielle Ofri (Medicine in Translation) looks at the connection between unemployment and poor health. Dr. Ofri also contributed a "Cases" column for the Times about how a physical examination can help a patient's mental well-being.

From Stepford wife to Stepford slut: Gail Dines (Pornland), looks at how the idealized pop culture feminine image has morphed from Betty Draper to hardcore porn star. Also check out this great interview about gonzo pornography at vocalo.org.

"'Jesus!' he said. 'Did you see how many Mexicans they’ve got?'" This Is American Soccer posted a second excerpt from Steve Wilson's The Boys from Little Mexico.

Sonia Sanchez "drenches her words in honey goodness so they sound like the sweetest thang you've ever heard," The Root gushes in this feature interview, where the poet discusses what she's reading and the future of African-American literature.

Chalk the union of one man and one woman up to the good influence of their gay friends: it took a lesbian wedding for Jeremy Adam Smith to understand the importance of marriage.

At Education Next, David Chura discusses teaching students behind bars.

Eddee Daniel (who appeared on Beacon Broadside as a guest blogger a while back) reviews The Coming Population Crash.

Have a great weekend!

Protestors Demand Immigrant Rights and Condemn SB1070

Today's post is from David Bacon, author of Illegal People: How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants. For more articles and images, see http://dbacon.igc.org, and read more about Beacon's immigration titles at "Beyond SB1070" on Beacon.org.

 In San Francisco and Oakland, immigrants and community activists protested Arizona's SB 1070, which would require police and local law enforcement to check the immigration status of people they suspect might be undocumented, on the day the law took effect.  A day earlier Federal Judge Susan Bolton invalidated much of the law, but demonstrations involving thousands of people took place against the law around the country nevertheless.

In San Francisco demonstrators also protested cooperation between police and immigration agents in arresting people for deportation, in front of the office of California Attorney General Jerry Brown.  Brown, a candidate for governor, ruled that San Francisco could not opt out of the Secure Communities program, which mandates such cooperation and would invalidate San Francisco's sanctuary city ordinance.  Protestors then went into Brown's office and told one of his assistants about their objections to his action.

Renee Saucedo, an attorney with La Raza Centro Legal and a leader of the protestors, said:  "It's no coincidence that Arizona has this outrageous law, because all the proposals from Washington on immigration reform encourage the same criminalization, racial profiling and discrimination.  Immigrant communities are demanding an end to these policies and laws, including "Secure Communities" and "E-Verify."  We deserve a new direction from Washington, with real change, including legalization and workers' rights."

An Unsolved Murder, A Wave of Hysteria, and Deaths in the Desert

Today's post is from Margaret Regan, author of The Death of Josseline: Immigration Stories from the Arizona-Mexico Borderlands. Read more about Beacon's immigration titles at "Beyond SB1070" on Beacon.org.

Robert Krentz was a modern cowboy. When he patrolled his ranch northeast of Douglas, he rode an ATV, not a horse. No matter. A rancher was a rancher and Krentz's family had run cattle on this 35,000-spread since 1907. Krentz had been trying to restore the parched land, and his innovative water system helped convert a portion of it into a wildlife habitat. In 2008, just after its 100th anniversary, the Krentz ranch was inducted into the Arizona Ranching Hall of Fame.

Krentz was a big man, tall and heavy, and, at fifty-eight, prematurely snowy-haired. He was known as a gentle giant, given to helping out needy border crossers in this heavily traveled migrant corridor. They walked his land regularly, and once his house had been broken into. "If they come in and ask for water, I'll still give them water," he told a PBS interviewer back in 1999. "That's just my nature."

Saturday, March 27, 2010, was a cool day for early spring, only 50 degrees or so. Krentz rumbled out on his ATV to check his water lines, his dog trotting along beside him. There'd been some trouble lately in these rural Cochise County grasslands. Residents blamed migrants for a rash of home robberies. And the day before, Krentz's brother Phil had spotted some drug mules on their ranch and called the Border Patrol; agents arrested eight undocumented immigrants and picked up nearly 300 pounds of marijuana.

At some point Saturday, Rob radioed into Phil; over the crackly airwaves Phil heard the words "illegal alien."

That was the last time Rob Krentz's family heard from him. Hours later, his body was found out on his ranch, still on his ATV. He'd been shot multiple times; his dog lay wounded beside him. The death of Robert Krentz changed the conversation about immigration in the United States. The killing made national and even international news. The county sheriff pleaded for calm, noting that the murder was unsolved (it remained unsolved as of July 2010), but that didn't stop anti-immigrant groups from asserting flatly that Krentz had been shot in cold blood by an undocumented immigrant, or felled by a Mexican drug dealer. Angry citizens around the country demanded that the federal government take action.

Immigration Mythology: The Rules Apply to Everyone

The following is an excerpt from "They Take Our Jobs!" and 20 Other Myths About Immigration by Aviva Chomsky. The book was called "An indispensible guide to the current debate on immigration" by the late Howard Zinn. Read more about Beacon's immigration titles at "Beyond SB1070" on Beacon.org

Myth 7: THE RULES APPLY TO EVERYONE, SO NEW IMMIGRANTS NEED TO FOLLOW THEM JUST AS IMMIGRANTS IN THE PAST DID

One of the most oft-repeated—and most puzzling—comments regarding the debate on immigration goes something like this: "I'm not against immigration, but I'm against illegal immigration. New immigrants should play by the rules, like our parents and forebears did."

The sentiment reveals a lot about how we've been taught to think about U.S. history: we've been taught to think of this as a country of white, voluntary immigrants. The history of people who don't fall into that category is incidental, rather than central, to the story we learn in school. "The rules," though, were different for Europeans than for Africans, Asians, and Native Americans. For the latter, "the rules" meant enslavement, exclusion, and conquest.

What the people (generally of European origin) who point to "the rules" ignore, moreover, is that when their parents and grandparents came to the United States, they in fact did exactly what so-called "illegal" immigrants are doing today. They decided to make the journey, and they made it. All they had to do was get together the boat fare. The rules were different then. U.S. law explicitly limited citizenship and naturalization to white people. Nonwhites, however, were denied both entry and citizenship. Through a complex process of omission and commission, the law dictated open immigration for white people and restricted immigration for people of color. Immigration and naturalization law created, in the words of Aristide Zolberg, "a nation by design."

Americans by Choice

Danielle Ofri is a writer and practicing internist at New York City’s Bellevue Hospital. She is the editor-in-chief of the Bellevue Literary Review. Her newest book is Medicine in Translation: Journeys with my Patients. You can follow Danielle on Twitter and Facebook, or visit her homepage.

Read more about Beacon’s immigration titles at “Beyond SB1070” on Beacon.org

The first thing I always do on July 4th is unfold my New York Times to where the Declaration of Independence is printed on the back page, as it is every year. I’m a fairly jaded New Yorker, but seeing the original writing every year always makes my heart skip a beat. And now that I have three young children, I’m even more thrilled to show off this documentary evidence of what it means to be American. Plus, I get to impress them with how I still remember the first paragraph by heart from my junior high school days.

This year, when I flipped through the newspaper, something else caught my eye. A full-page ad from the Carnegie Corporation declared, “Immigrants, the Pride of America.” Centered among 46 photos of immigrants with impressive resumes was a picture of the venerable American capitalist with the following text below:

“Andrew Carnegie, who founded Carnegie Corporation of New York in 1911, was an immigrant from Scotland. We at Carnegie Corporation salute his legacy, along with the contributions of the millions of other immigrants who have made, and continue to make, our nation strong and vibrant. We are committed to helping immigrants become integrated into the civic fabric of our nation because enlightened citizenship is the everlasting strength of our democracy. Our national motto, E pluribus unum— “out of many, one” — continues to be an ideal we can all aspire to and a true guiding light for our nation.”

I’m not normally swayed by such unabashed patriotism, but after the steady stream of vitriol in the immigration debate, this was a welcome relief.

How to Fill the College Education Gap

Steve Wilson is the author of The Boys From Little Mexico: A Season Chasing the American Dream. Read more about Beacon’s immigration titles at “Beyond SB1070” on Beacon.org

As our representatives once again consider how to legislate immigration reform, one of their first priorities should be to reconsider one languishing immigration program--The DREAM Act.

The Development, Relief and Education of Alien Minors (DREAM) Act, first introduced by Senator Orrin Hatch (R) in 2001, aims to create educational equality. The legislation, currently on everybody's backburner, would allow certain undocumented immigrants to receive conditional residency if they either attend a university or join the U.S. military. To qualify, immigrants would have to enter the U.S. at age 15 or younger, graduate from an American high school, and have good moral character.

In the past, the bill has been promoted as a palatable form of immigration reform. It only affects people who entered the country as minors, presumably brought into the U.S. by their parents. These kids form a rapidly growing group today; about 2.4 million undocumented people aged 24 and under live in the U.S. right now.

But promoting the DREAM Act as legislation that should be passed, as a means of addressing some unfairness that exists because the alien minor didn't choose to enter the country, is wrongheaded. Not only is this sales pitch politically ineffective to most conservative politicians--after all the DREAM Act has been around, going nowhere, for a decade--but it misses a more dire predicament the U.S. faces today: we're running out of college graduates. The DREAM Act is a simple way to get more.