A Los Angeles native of Mexican and Salvadoran descent, Rubén Martínez is one of the United States’ most trenchant writers on immigration and the migrant experience. His books, including Crossing Over: A Mexican Family on the Migrant Trail (2002); The New Americans (2004), a companion volume to the PBS series of the same name; and The Other Side: Notes From the New LA, Mexico City and Beyond (1992), combine essay and reportage on migrant life. He is at work on a new book, American Monsoon: The New War for the West. Martínez is an associate editor at Pacific News Service and a professor of literature and writing at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. He has appeared as a guest commentator and essayist on Frontline, Nightline and All Things Considered. His honors include a Freedom of Information Award from the ACLU, a Greater Press Club of Los Angeles Award of Excellence and an Emmy for hosting the PBS series Life & Times. On the occasion of NACLA’s 40th anniversary, Deidre McFadyen spoke with Martínez about the resurgent immigrant rights movement.
Do you think that the mass demonstrations and actions in 2006 have sparked a new “civil rights movement” around immigrant rights?
The migrant marches were undoubtedly historic and unprecedented. Although there have been sporadic incidents of undocumented immigrants organizing to defend, or in this case to expand, their rights, it had never, never been on this scale. The movement was beautifully organic, catapulting past the traditional leadership—faith-based immigrants’ rights advocates, some progressives in labor—which always had its heart in the right place but had not done well in the awkward task of being the “voice of the voiceless” (an unfortunately patronizing mainstay of the American left).
What do you say to those who compare the immigrant rights movement to the civil rights movements of the 1950s and ’60s? Is that a fair comparison?
Comparisons to the civil rights movement were made by some in the media and by some self-serving, self-appointed “leaders” who grabbed the microphones in the chaos of the moment. The comparison is superficial, and I think insulting to the memory, and ongoing energy of, the actual civil rights movement, a fundamental progressive American narrative that will not, and should not, be displaced. Simply, African Americans in the Jim Crow South and Latin American immigrants scattered across the country today have fundamentally different experiences. No matter how bad conditions can get for undocumented workers, they are not chattel, period. This new movement is possible to an extent because of the example of what came before, but it flows from a different social and economic model—globalization—and at least for the moment the imagined and implied goals are specific to immigrant laborers. It remains to be seen if this community can imagine a narrative that speaks beyond itself, like the civil rights movement did in the mid-1960s.
While immigrants and advocates from many ethnic and racial backgrounds have participated, the immigrant rights movement has been viewed as mostly a Latino (largely Mexican) movement. How do you see the role of Mexicans within this movement? Will this movement lead to greater political power for Latinos in the United States? Is there a rift between African Americans and Latinos around this issue that needs to be addressed by both sectors?
You’re pointing to the real problems exposed by the mass demonstrations —contradictions that were invisible when the immigrant communities were, well, invisible. So the movement is beautifully organic, and organically troubled. The fact that the movement is by and large understood as a Mexican phenomenon is practically unavoidable because of sheer demographics—the vast majority of immigrants from Latin America living here are from Mexico, casting a long shadow over the nevertheless substantial numbers of Central Americans (most of whom are from El Salvador and Guatemala).
So Mexicans play a de facto hegemonic role and are seemingly aware of their position in that they’re always reminding us of their Mexican-ness. That red-green-white flag has been fairly ubiquitous. It was also over a decade ago during the precursor to this year’s movement, the marches against then-Governor Pete Wilson and the anti-immigrant ballot initiative he supported. Then as well as now, it was something of a political liability, although in the end, save for hardcore nativist activists and their brethren at Fox and Lou Dobbs at CNN, the reception to the marches was largely sympathetic. That is, except in one important regard: The marches have certainly not helped deal with long-simmering tensions between black and brown in America. Those tensions are a daily fact of life here in Los Angeles, where competition between the communities exists in virtually every public realm—municipal politics, the labor economy, the housing market, street gangs, the prison system, public schools. Mexicans have not helped their cause, and have not furthered better relations with African Americans, with their nationalist posturing, which can be understood as a simple defensive reaction to nativist racism.
This is a very young movement. This is a movement led by people who were long ignored in our public life and then suddenly thrust into it by the nativist reaction. I don’t think many immigrants imagined themselves as having much in common with any particular group in America. But now that this community has “come out”—in a way it was first “outed” by the nativists and then outed itself in the marches—it must begin the process of imagining itself not on the margins but at the center. In places like Los Angeles, that is precisely where immigrants are.
What would it mean for the movement to imagine itself at the center? What sort of shared vision can you see the movement promoting?
I’m referring not just to demographics but to social and cultural and even political position. In the end, the nativist reaction came too late; what the Minutemen seek, mass deportation, is largely impossible because it cannot be done without measures that most Americans would not abide. Immigrants are at the center of our lives in symbolic and literal ways. The fact that the typical middle-class urban family with two working parents is likely to have a Mexican or Central American woman spending more time with the children than the parents do—that is an economic relationship, a relationship of power and also one of incredible intimacy. Media is becoming more and more Hispanicized. Top radio markets in many urban centers conduct their business in Spanish. (That was very much on display during the marches last spring; without the enormously popular drive-time Spanish-language DJs who called people out from the shadows, there would not have been a mass movement.) Urban space is being realigned according to the culture and economy of the newcomers. Just as the European immigrants of the late 19th and early 20th centuries made their Little Italys and Little Warsaws, so today we have a tremendously energetic, and entrepreneurial, street life. There is even a growing presence on network primetime TV, a space that has only recently begun to tentatively welcome the color brown. The concept behind the comedy hit Ugly Betty is a translation of a Colombian telenovela. Last year, Matt Santos, a Mexican American character played by Jimmy Smits, won the presidential election just as The West Wing wrapped up. In real life, Antonio Villaraigosa, the favorite son of East Los Angeles, the most mythologized Latino barrio in the country, was elected mayor of the second-largest city in the country, and there is talk that he might become the first viable Latino presidential candidate in our history.
Across the country, in cities and small towns, immigrant and native breach the gap imagined by those who insist on using difference to divide. “Mixed race” relationships, and the children that result from them, are on the rise. America will change the immigrant. The immigrant will change America. Forget the ludicrous rhetoric of reconquista—this is a profound, sublime process. America has undergone it before, and it is again.
Would you say more about how immigrants inhabit the center in Los Angeles?
I have returned to my hometown of Los Angeles after nearly a decade away, and it is a model in many ways of the immigrant city that is taking its first real steps to integrate its immigrants. The labor movement is more powerful here today than perhaps at any other time in the city’s history, making real-world gains like living wages for workers in the immigrant-heavy service sector. The local school district has gone on a building spree, finally dealing with the gross overcrowding of immigrant classrooms. There are communities across the country taking such steps.
I think in the end there are more communities moving in a progressive direction than places like Hazelton, Pennsylvania, which enacted astoundingly aggressive immigration legislation. The progressive story isn’t as sexy as the nativist one, sadly, which is why we’ve heard so much more about the Minutemen hunting migrants than we have about the Samaritan groups that have been in the desert much longer and offer succor to those same migrants. The headlines just don’t correspond to the reality in our communities.
While the draconian Sensenbrenner bill stalled, not only did broader immigration reform fail—the only piece of legislation to pass the Congress in 2006 was to extend the border wall—but in places like Arizona, Georgia and Texas, we see efforts to strip whatever basic rights that immigrants and their American-born children now have. What are the prospects for comprehensive immigration reform (i.e., legalization, worker rights, family reunification and backlog reduction) with the new Congress?
The 2006 midterm election is cause for cautious optimism for immigrants’ rights—it basically stopped nativist momentum in its tracks. But it hasn’t rolled back any of the federal, state and local legislation, some of it extraordinarily vicious (and patently unconstitutional, such as turning landlords into immigration agents).
I say “cause for cautious optimism” because the fact that Congress is in Democratic hands does not automatically augur any amelioration. It was, after all, the Democratic Party that brought us the building blocks of today’s wall—Operation Gatekeeper and other operations that built insurmountable barriers at various high-density crossing points on the line that essentially pushed migrants onto deadly paths in the Southwestern deserts.
At this point, the movement needs to move away from responding to the nativists to pushing their natural liberal and progressive allies, who now have a modicum of power.
What role do you see unions playing in the efforts to win legalization for millions of undocumented workers?
Whatever gains the unions have made in the last couple of decades is directly attributable to immigrants, documented and not, energizing the rank and file, much as labor was fueled by an earlier wave of European immigrants in the early 1900s. And it is in the labor movement that immigrants have their best opportunity to speak to the broadest possible constituency, bypassing the culture wars altogether and tackling that most prickly of issues in American politics—class. The nationalist imaginary I referred to earlier is partly responsible for keeping immigrants from fully regarding themselves as capable of leadership beyond their own ranks, but there is a tremendous opportunity for a revived labor movement to provide leadership in the vacuum created by globalization. Through labor, immigrants could finally reach out to communities that should be allies—working-class folks of every color.
Should unions accept a guest-worker program to deal with future flows of immigrants once legalization happens, or should they draw the line on this issue and reject temporary worker visas?
It’s a conundrum. Realpolitik would seem to dictate that guest worker is a necessary step to affording some kind of rational program to the cross-border situation, given the much nastier possibilities out there. On the other hand, the old arguments about how guest workers harm “native” workers remain relevant—globalization thrives on displacing workers. But what if labor took cross-border organizing more seriously, gave some real meaning to all those unions that have “international” in their names? Shouldn’t labor be helping frame the debate, rather than fumbling around for the lesser evils?
What is your reading of the diversity and cleavages in the “pro-immigration reform” camp? And the cleavages in the movement itself, particularly those that surfaced between the March mobilization (which had the support of a broad coalition that included the Catholic Church, the National Council of La Raza [NCLR], Antonio Villaraigosa and other Democrats) and the May 1 demonstrations (which many sectors linked to the Democratic Party refused to endorse, and in which the left wing of the movement had a much more central role)?
Above all, this was a grassroots movement. Activists of all stripes like to invoke that cliché, of course, but this is one of the few cases that merits the moniker. And it was a long time in the making. The idea of this kind of mobilization—unique in that the undocumented represented themselves—had been around for years. I remember sitting in a Mexican bar on Whittier Boulevard in East Los Angeles sometime around 1991 and hearing a crew of day laborers talk about what would happen if all the mojados (wetbacks) got together and walked off their jobs. Music groups like Los Tigres del Norte had imagined such in their corridos as well.
And this movement occurred at the grass roots because, frankly, the leadership had utterly failed. Latino elected officials were among the least likely to approach the issue, seeing it as certain political death. The handful of progressive activists who stuck by the migrants were just too marginal to draw more than occasional attention to the issue (and failed to strike upon a media-savvy strategy like that of the Minutemen). It’s true that Cardinal Roger Mahony (leader of the immigrant-heavy, largest Catholic parish in the country) made an impassioned statement at the beginning of the year basically saying the church would conduct massive civil disobedience. But if Mahony had really wanted to be a leader on the issue, he would have made the statement years ago.
Once the massive marches began—we must remember that the numbers that turned out were due mostly to Spanish-language popular media—the leadership scrambled to take credit for and to direct the movement. I think both the mainstream players (the church, unions, Villaraigosa, the NCLR, etc.) and the more left-wing elements were equally distant from the millions on the streets. The day laborer from Jalisco, the nanny from Guatemala City—had the NCLR or Refuse & Resist ever reached out to them before? I don’t think the split between the center and the left of the political class means much in the end. What counts is the will of the migrants to continue to represent themselves, and the role of Spanish-language popular media in organizing them.
What about the diversity and divisions within the “anti-immigrant” movement, which includes some within the “fair trade” camp? After all, many pro-labor Democrats voted for the wall and stepped-up border enforcement, arguing that they were protecting the U.S. working class.
I hate to sound dogmatic and schematic here, but for me there is a clear ethical border on this issue, and I can’t differentiate between a “green” paranoid about population growth and some nauseating “populist” Democrat. Of course there are issues to discuss in terms of the impact of migrants on wages, and the possible displacement of workers in some sectors of the economy. But the border is deadly, period. It’s an immoral, hypocritical line. For me that is the primordial issue, and any discussion that doesn’t deal with the bodies of the dead is also immoral and hypocritical.
That said, many of those stirred by the Minutemen are decidedly working-class, and it is fairly obvious that their passion is essentially class-based (and unfortunately marinated in traditional borderlands racism). It would be wonderful if labor could find a way to help cross the border between working-class whites and their migrant brethren. But there are less and less working-class whites in labor these days. The only institution that could possibly help bridge the divide is evangelical Christianity (the one space where migrants and working-class whites have something in common!), but the leadership there remained utterly silent on the issue—they couldn’t deal with the obvious contradiction of a Bible full of rhetoric about “welcoming the stranger” on the one hand and arch-conservative neo-Christian attitudes on the other. So it doesn’t look like that dream coalition will arrive anytime soon.
But it might not have to. The alliance between working-class migrants and middle-class liberals and elements from the right wing, including George W. Bush himself, looks like it might suffice for some movement on the issue—some basic reform package before 2008. How good or bad that legislation is will depend on many factors, but one thing is clear: The migrants will be heard. For the first time, they are truly a part of the debate.
The immigrant rights movement leapt on the political stage with those massive nationwide rallies in the spring of 2006, but the rallies called since then have drawn far fewer participants. What will it take for the movement to sustain its momentum?
I think the movement stumbled on its own success. The massive turnouts stunned everyone, including the migrants themselves, and it was difficult for anyone to imagine exactly what direction the movement was supposed to take—prolonged work stoppages, focus on electoral and legislative politics, César Chávez–style performances, simply continue marching, etc. The hesitation was understandable; this is a juridically vulnerable population, after all, and tactics like civil disobedience suddenly become a complicated choice. It also appears that ultimately the consensus was to pull the punch and allow mainstream liberal political forces to do their job of organizing in an election year. Lord knows there were people in Democratic leadership circles worried about repercussions at the polls if the movement took any missteps (such as violence at a march) or just wore on people’s nerves. Now the question is whether or not the Democratic Party can exercise true political leadership on the issue and enact meaningful reform.
Federal immigration officials raided six plants owned by Swift & Company, the world’s second-largest beef and pork processor on December 12, 2006. Nearly 1,300 people—almost 10% of Swift’s workforce—were hauled off. What is the significance of this raid? If raids on this scale continue, will they weaken the movement or invigorate it?
Here it appears that the Bush administration is pushing in different directions simultaneously: sending a message to labor that it should sign on fully to a guest-worker initiative on the one hand, and throwing some red meat to the nativists on the other. The symbolism of the act was terrible in the migrant community, by the way: December 12 is one of the holiest days of the year for Latin American Catholics, the Virgin of Guadalupe’s feast day. I would be surprised if there were many more of these massive raids, but it was a particularly vulgar act. If raids of this sort indeed were to continue, there’d soon be chaos in the migrant communities, and I think it’s impossible to predict how the movement would respond to such an extreme scenario. The most obvious radical tactic would be for citizens to serve as shields for noncitizens.
But in terms of the balance sheet, 2006 was largely positive in terms of immigration politics. The marches will go into the history books as a unique moment in the life of the “foreigner” in America. They were the culmination of a long social and political process, one that will come to be seen undoubtedly as a watershed like the earlier great waves of migration in the mid-19th and early-20th centuries.
I really do think much of the reaction to the immigrant is a delayed response—part of the “native” population has been startled awake to realize that a momentous change is taking place, and the response is clearly one of fear. It is fear we hear on AM talk radio and in the racist screeds of writers like Samuel Huntington. And fear, of course, can be a dangerous thing. By contrast, in the migrant communities there is ambition and hope. People weren’t looking over their shoulders for the migra at the marches. They felt secure in the rightness of the cause and in the strength of their numbers, and they felt secure that they had a right to protest, whether they had papers or not. Perhaps they felt, for the first time, truly American.
Deidre McFadyen worked as a NACLA editor from 1991 to 1996 and now serves on the Board of Directors. She is an editor and writer at the United Federation of Teachers, in New York City.
