The anti-immigrant “Minutemen Civil Defense Corps” organization has begun the construction of a “security fence” along the Arizona border, a fence that includes barbed wire, razor wire and steel rail barriers. Read the full story here.

Border Tightrope is an exhibition of paintings by Gregg Stone, Emigidio Vasquez and Ramon Carillo. Opening Reception: Saturday June 3rd, 7-10pm (coincides with 1st Saturday Artwalk in the Santa Ana Art Village.) Show runs: June 3 - June 28. Also showing: No Border Brown-Shirts with featured artists: Sergio Hernandez, Pat Sparkuhl, Paul Vauchelet, Crol, Werc, Manone, Gregg Stone, Marka 27, Ricardo Duffy, Guilermo Bejarano, Patrick Martinez, Asylm, Magu. The exhibit is at the Orange County Center for Contemporary Art (OCCCA). 117 N. Sycamore Street. Santa Ana, CA 92701 Phone: 714/667-1517. For more information, visit the gallery’s website at: www.occca.org

[ The following article was written by photographer, David Bacon, who also took the photos accompanying this story. The pictures show Mixtec immigrants from Oaxaca, Mexico, who work in the strawberry fields of Oxnard, Califas. The photos are part of Bacon’s Living Under the Trees series. ]

SAN FRANCISCO, CA (5/25/06) — When the US Senate today passed its version of “comprehensive immigration reform,” Senators from both sides of the aisle claimed that despite the enormous controversy it has generated, passing a bill with flaws was better than passing no bill at all. Outside the beltway and its coterie of lobbyists, however, a groundswell of community groups now argue that Congress would do better to pass no bill than a bill that reconciles the proposal just passed by the Senate, and that passed last December in the House of Representatives.

In a statement condemning the Hagel-Martinez compromise, S 2611, the proposal that just passed on Thursday, a national group of immigrant rights advocates convened by the National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights argued Wednesday that “the rush to reach a bipartisan accord on immigration legislation has led to a compromise that would create deep divisions within the immigrant community and leave millions of undocumented immigrants in the shadows.”

“The current Senate bill,” said Sheila Chung, of the San Francisco Bay Area Immigrant Rights Coalition, “does not reflect the immigration reform called for by millions of immigrant communities marching the streets.” The United States is currently home to over 12 million people without immigration documents, which makes them and their families subject to deportation, and vulnerable to exploitation at work. Nevertheless, the groups point to provisions of the Senate bill, which they say will make immigrants much worse off than they are even at present. Those include:

– Under the Hagel-Martinez legalization plan, undocumented immigrants with less than two years in the US (about a million people) would be immediately subject to deportation. Those with two to five years would also have to leave the country, and could apply to reenter through some currently unknown process. The ability of border stations to handle the applications of the 3-4 million people involved is extremely doubtful, given the current years-long backlog in normal visa applications.

– S 2611, like HR 4437 passed by the House in December, would ramp up the enforcement of employer sanctions. This provision of current law makes it a crime for undocumented people to hold a job, and is used frequently by employers to retaliate against workers who try to enforce labor standards or join unions. The Social Security Administration would become immigration police, forcing all workers to carry a new national ID card, and would require employers to fire anyone who’s documents they question. The current Basic Pilot program, which moves in this direction, has shown the SSA database to be rife with errors.

– The Senate bill expands current guest worker programs and establishes new ones, allowing employers to recruit workers outside the country on temporary visas. These new contract workers would be vulnerable to employer pressure, since their visa status would be dependant on their employment. Further, as the AFL-CIO’s Ana Avendaño points out, “this turns jobs which are now held by permanent employees with rights and benefits into jobs filled by temporary, contract employees. It basically takes the jobs of millions of people out of the protections of the New Deal, won by workers decades ago.” The labor federation points out that if currently undocumented workers and new immigrants were given permanent residence status instead of temporary visas, they would be able to exercise their rights as workers and community residents.

– S 2611 “vastly increases detention and deportation, and further militarizes the border,” according to the New York-based Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund. The Halliburton Corporation has already been given a US contract for construction of immigrant detention facilities near the border with Mexico, and proposals have been made for reopening closed military bases to house deportees and detainees. The bill, which makes document fraud an aggravated felony and grounds for deportation, would result in the criminalization of the millions of immigrant workers who have had to provide false Social Security cards to employers in order to get hired.

Stan Mark, AALDEF director, warned before passage of S 2611 that “the upsurge in the mass movement will redefine this debate well into the elections if Congress passes their so called “compromise” of comprehensive immigration reform.” He calls instead for eliminating current laws penalizing lack of legal status, especially employer sanctions. “The political climate of the debate,” the AALDEF leader says, “has converted this immigration bill into a Trojan horse into which lawmakers have crammed anti-immigrant and undemocratic policies.” The NNIRR declaration, a similar set of principles enumerated by AALDEF, and other programs put forward by groups outside Washington, all emphasize the need for positive, pro-immigrant alternatives. They include immediate legal status for the undocumented, easier family reunification and elimination of the backlog in processing visa applications, no expansion of guest worker programs, ending the indefinite detention of immigrants, restoring due process to immigration proceedings, and, instead of the new walls Congress wants to build, ending the militarization of the US border with Mexico.

Since the Senate has approved a bill far removed from these principles, and the House passed an enforcement-only HR 4437 even more hostile to immigrants, immigrant rights advocates believe killing all current proposals is their only option. That might in fact be the outcome of efforts to reconcile the House and Senate bills, since the most conservative House Republicans oppose any legal status for the undocumented. “It is possible that a reconciliation between HR 4437 and S 2611 will not happen in the conference committee,” speculates Evelyn Sanchez of the Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride. “Should this happen, we will have time to continue pushing for real and fair comprehensive immigration reform. If HR 4437 and S 2611 are successfully reconciled, and the President signs the bill into law, then we have the task of overturning that law.” This is a grim scenario, but despite it, advocates are unwilling to give up. “It’s been done before.” she says.

[ In this Column of the Americas, Roberto Rodriguez writes about the role of racism in the immigration "debate." The author can be reached at: XColumn@gmail.com ]

What does it say about a society that has to write into law its national language? What’s next, an official color (white)? An official food - (bread)? An official religion (Christianity)? An official song (God Bless America)? An official history (Pilgrims)?

When Sen. Henry Reid noted that the effort to proclaim English as the nation’s official language was racist, he was denounced as a lunatic by the usual right wing kooks. Texas writer Molly Ivins also made the same observation regarding Congress. No word of what she is being accused of yet.

For years, the term racist has been over-used to the point that nowadays, it is virtually meaningless. Besides, bigots have learned to neutralize the word (racist) by preemptively claiming that their opponents will use it against them simply to stifle debate. (They also cynically accuse peoples of color who fight for their rights of being racists themselves - cute logic). For instance, in the immigration debate, they say their beef is with illegal immigration, not immigration.

In other words, they welcome migrants of any color and from any country, as long as they immigrate legally. Thus, (they reason) they cannot be accused of being racists as all they’re asking is for immigrants to abide by the rule of law. OK.

So then what does affirming the English language have to do with notions of legality/illegality? What does it matter what language the national anthem is sung in? What does waving the Mexican flag have to do with legality/illegality? Might it instead be an indicator of manipulated and misplaced frustrations?

Of course, the above actions have nothing to do with illegal immigration. At best, it is cultural angst. There is no official U.S. culture (yet), but more than anything, America is an idea. And truthfully, it has always been a religio-racial-politico ideal as embodied by Providence and Manifest Destiny. From this nation’s beginnings, many colonists conceived of America as the new promised land… as a variation of Columbus’s mission to civilize the natives… or to exterminate them on their way toward building heaven on earth.

The original ideal of many of the colonists was to civilize all of the Americas - to bring it under the dominion of a Christian Protestant universe. That was also part of the reason for the Mexican American War… not simply to expand slavery, but to take all of Mexico. However, the idea of taking an entire nation of brown people under the U.S. umbrella was seen as too daunting a task for many adherents of Manifest Destiny, so they took only the northern half.

Yet, this isn’t restricted to history. As illustrated in the neoconservative document: “The New American Century,” the plan all along has been for the United States to dominate, first the continent, then the world. All of it has something to do with establishing God’s Kingdom on Earth. (At least, that’s the cover story for secularists). And like all great world civilizations, what better place to establish it than here — the new promised land?

Yet, always standing in the way are little brown people. Blacks too. What to do with them (besides getting them to fight against each other)? They certainly cannot be treated and viewed as peoples, but simply as exploitable labor forces. Are they deserving of civil and human rights? Of course not. As Otto Santa Ana writes in “Brown Tide Rising”: “Civil rights and human rights only pertain to humans.”

Yes. That’s what’s at the core of this immigration debate; many conservatives (and liberals) have convinced themselves that people of color are not fully human. Santa Ana traces this idea to the 19th century. Many Indigenous peoples trace this foundational idea to 1492. The European idea of the Americas was always predicated on the belief that they needed to civilize subhuman peoples - peoples who could never be afforded rights equal to that of Europeans… thus the rationale for the land theft. Native and African peoples were always deemed subservient and illegitimate populations, not worthy of full humanity.

In all these centuries, what has changed?Conservatives are adamant, not in resolving the issue, but in punishing and not rewarding (amnesty) illegal immigrants. Why? Because to do so would be to surrender the idea of a hierarchical society. It would be to surrender the idea of dominance and their civilizing mission. The very idea of viewing brown peoples as equals - as full human beings — must be quite an abhorrent thought.

© 2006 Column of the Americas

The deadline is tomorrow, May 22. Los Angeles City is using eminent domain to take away 14 acres of garden space from the 350 gardeners and their families who live and work there. The city and farmers have until tomorrow to raise millions of dollars to buy the land back from wealthy developer, Ralph Horowitz.

While the city will pay billions of dollars to create a shop-heavy entertainment center downtown, and $80 million to spruce up a stadium for a possible NFL team, it won’t come up with the monetary support to keep these hard-working men, women, and children from being thrown out into the street.

Mostly Mexican and Central American, and largely Spanish-speaking, these farmers/gardeners made a weed-infested block of South Central LA come alive with food crops and medicinal plants–the largest urban garden project in the country–for almost 13 years.

Xispas urges all our readers to contact the city, send emails and make phone calls to Mayor Villaragoisa and all councilpersons demanding they help the South Central farmers to continue beautifying a run-down section (considered the poorest in the county) instead of turning the land over to more warehouses (there are already miles of industry and warehouses in Vernon and the LA City area surrounding the garden on 41st street). Take a strong stand. We only have one day!

Whatever immigrant rights activists have been saying about a war against the undocumented have been proven right.

President Bush on May 15 made a speech to the country proposing the deployment of 6,000 National Guard troops on the US-Mexico border (which will include units serving two-week stints before being “rotated out” and replaced by other units—a total of around 150,000 troops will be deployed in a year’s time).

While Bush says this is not “militarization of the border” (a foregone conclusion, unfortunately) these probably include battle-weary units in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as units that may end up there. Catering to the most conservatives elements in the Republic Party and to groups like the Minutemen, Bush ignored millions of people who peaceably took to the streets for amnesty and a fair & equitable border policy. He ignored the largest social mobilization in the history of this country.

Even Nixon, one of this country’s worst presidents, couldn’t entirely ignore the Civil Rights Movement (despite doing all he could to derail it), which at its heights did not produce the numbers of demonstrators that came out on this past May 1 for immigrant rights.

The Senate is presently debating new immigration policies that will probably include a guest worker program (which immigrant rights activist are largely against), some level of amnesty, and greater border enforcement. The government, led by Republicans, has diverted the rising anger toward war, high gasoline prices, and eroding economic realities into “secure our borders” demagoguery that has further divided the country.

The backlash against the past several weeks’ national marches, walkouts, and boycotts has taken the form of death threats to Latino politicians; a Mexican restaurant burned to the ground with anti-immigrant graffiti on the walls; a Mexican teenager beaten, sodomized, and left for dead by other teenagers yelling out anti-Mexican epithets; and renewed activities by the Minutemen, including in a largely Black LA neighborhood that got booed by a counter demonstration of Blacks and Browns.

Now the government has joined in with the vigilantes. The only solution the government has is war and war propaganda. History will judge the Bush Administration and the Republicans as one of the most racist and corrosive elements in US history.

While Iraq has proven to be a failure—with growing casualty counts on both sides—and Hurricane Katrina dramatized the failure of this government to respond with men and resources to protect the poor and defenseless, they’re going to go all out to send armed troops to the border??

Failure after failure should tell us that we shouldn’t go along with anything Bush or the Republicans say or do.

Mexico and the rest of the Americas (and other countries of the world for that matter) should decry this development. Most of all, every American should be outraged. We cannot better our lives, our futures, our economy, or social standing by attacking other workers whether from Mexico or Iraq. That is the Bush way. That is the Republican way. That is the way of failure.

Mexicans and Central Americans are not immigrants. They are indigenous people (more so than many people who claim to be Native American) who have been following these migrants trails for tens of thousands of years.

Conservatives think by declaring the brown-skinned native people to be foreigners and “illegals” they can turn history and truth on its head. Now the white-skinned invaders who only have 225 years as a country (and only 500 years of existence on this land) are now the true “natives.”

Borders are a relatively new phenomena, created by rich and powerful men that no worker—whether they are White, Brown, Black, Native, or Asian—should recognize if other workers are hungry and in need of a decent existence.

Now is the time to expand the mobilization of millions for immigrant rights to include the rest of the poor, the disempowered, and abandoned—citizens, legal residents, and the undocumented. The divisions and diversions are to undermine any level of unity people attain; our aim should be to increase this unity and truly pressure this government to change course or be replaced by one in tune with the real aspirations and needs of everyone.

Placing National Guard troops on the border is a sign of the most moral ineptitude—as is the war in Iraq. The ground has widened for us to truly push back the Empire-building strategies of this global capitalist class to a vision of a new America that makes sure the highest levels of health, housing, education, and work needs can be obtained for all.

By Danny Alexander, May 5, 2006 (Cinco de Mayo)
From his blog “Take Em As They Come”
(www.takeemastheycome.blogspot.com)

A few years ago, a friend of mine–Creek Indian, from Oklahoma–was boarding a Kansas City bus when the brown-skinned bus driver half-joked, “You Indians sure look a lot like Mexicans.”
My friend snapped back, “Nah, you Mexicans just look like Indians.”

Of course, the joke was the thing not said–how political borders divide native Americans to the point where ethnic similarity is a surprise. Obviously the difference in red and brown is not some biological equation that comes out of miscegenation between Spaniards and Indians (certain kinds of facial hair maybe), but it is division born out of the rise of nation states, and with multinational business driving the World Trade Organization and World Bank to solutions such as NAFTA, the border that divides the indigenous people of North America above and below the Rio Grande is a border that no longer exists for the CEO. In other words, these borders only blind average Americans to our common ground.

As if there’s an American identity without our brown brothers and sisters. Let’s assume we can forget how Mexican migrant farmworkers played a fundamental role in establishing our agricultural economy or how the “Bracero” program–exploiting migrant farmworkers when we needed them in 1942–helped us to win World War II and ensure our role as a superpower. Even if we can forget how brown Americans built this country, how can we imagine an American culture without its Latin influences?

Of course, many never even contemplate the way our culture is fundamentally shaped by the influence of West Africans. Black Americans just came here with the Europeans in the 1500s and built the country. From our uniquely American accents, grammar and vocabulary to our popular culture, no aspect of our culture has ever developed independent of this influence. And the same should really be said of our Latin American influences, in part because they overlap so much.

If we talk music, that truth is plain, starting with the fact that it’s nearly impossible and probably meaningless to try to separate the West African and Latin American influences on the musics of the diaspora, the path of the slave trade through Latin America. From rhumba bands to the Bo Diddley beat, “Louie Louie” to “96 Tears” to “Land of a 1000 Dances,” hip hop to reggaeton–Latin American polyrhythms have shaped our popular culture.

Even those aspects of our music most stereotyped as ethnocentric–the “western” ranchera sounds in country and western, or the Spanish style Nudie suits or cowboy hats and boots–all spring from Latin American tradition. And out of this exchange, there are those fascinating dialogues between Germanic and Eastern European farmers and Latin Americans that create the common ground of polka and norteno, with Tex Mex and Southern R&B talking back and forth between accordian and Farfisa and Hammond B3 and whatever descendent of Casio we’ve graduated to now.

And then, of course, there’s the core symbol of the democratization of American popular music, that instrument just about everyone could order from Sears on the cheap and play in their living rooms, bedrooms or on their front porches. That Spanish string instrument that embodies virtually all of the big gestures in rock and roll–the gunslinger’s weapon, the axe, the iconic tool of rock bravado–la guitarra, the Guitar. Take away the guitar, do we even have what we think of as the rock revolution; take away the Latin influence, is rock even possible?

After all it’s not the individual parts that matter so much as the mix that can’t be disentangled. It’s fairly easy to see how Latin American music helped to shape both California rock and modern country, for instance, just as it’s easy to see the role it played in the attitude, identity and feel of gangsta rap and its inheritor, crunk. We can say that Roy Orbison sang like some lost opera star because he grew up listening to ranchera music in Texas, and that would be true. But there’s also what Roy Orbison sang about–lost love and loneliness, sure, but also, over and over and over again, of dreams. Are there Latin American roots not only when Bruce Springsteen trots out “Rosalita” but when he evokes Roy Orbison for the dreams of “Thunder Road” or when he closed his last tour singing Suicide’s “Dream Baby Dream” like a prayer for the country? Yes. Of course.

The Latin fabric that is essential to the American identity isn’t overlooked because it’s minor or anything close to invisible. It’s overlooked for more insidious reasons, most fundamental being that if we confront our Latin heritage, then we may have to come to grips with how such accepted notions as borders actually serve to keep average people fighting one another instead of joining voices in unity.

As should be clear, our cultural intuition is already far ahead of the curve. American music is Latin American music, and I don’t have to cite Sean Paul, Rihanna, Daddy Yankee, Akon, Frankie J or Shakira at the top of the charts to prove that. And when the nation’s leaders don’t seem to have any concept of what it means to tell the truth, maybe we shouldn’t be too quick to dismiss the political dimensions of Wyclef Jean and Shakira singing, “Hips Don’t Lie.” Amen to that.

So when Prince winds up his new search for grace, 3121, an album laced with Spanish themes, it shouldn’t be surprising that he finds communal salvation with Sheila Escovedo providing enough timbales to make Tito Puente proud. This is music for an America without borders, where all the strains of our peoples’ culture work together. The result? Go play that jam and tell me it doesn’t sound like liberation.

by Tom Hayden
From www.truthdig.com - May 2, 2006

I wore the multicolored Aymaran flag of Bolivia to the
May Day march in Los Angeles, the same day that Evo
Morales, the first indigenous president of Bolivia,
nationalized the oil and gas fields. It seemed right to
recognize the reappearance of the indigenous in the
Americas. I gazed at Marcos Aguilar, one of the UCLA
hunger strikers for Chicano studies in 1993. Now he
stood bare-skinned and feathered, leading a traditional
dance below the edifice of the Los Angeles Times.
Rather than becoming assimilated into gringotopia, he
was forcing the reverse, the assimilation of the
Machiavellians into the new reality of L.A. Another
hunger striker from those days, Cindy Montanez, was
chairing the state Assembly’s rules committee. Another
UCLA student, a beneficiary of ’60s outreach programs,
was mayor of the city.

Contrary to most mainstream commentary, these protests
were part of a continuous social movement going back
many decades, even centuries. And yet the commentators,
especially on the national level, once again summoned
the stereotype of the lazy Mexican, the sleeping giant
awakening. For years it was convenient to blame apathy
and low participation rates on the Mexican-Americans
and other Latinos, ignoring the racial exclusion that
prevailed east of the Los Angeles River. In 1994, the
same “sleeping giant” arose against Pete Wilson’s
Proposition 187. It previously awoke in the 1968 high
school “blowouts,” the 1968-69 Chicano moratorium and
the farmworker boycotts, which were the largest in
history, and, in an earlier generation, the giant awoke
in the “Zoot Suit Riots” and Ed Roybal’s winning
campaign for City Council. The giant never had time to
sleep at all.

In the Great Depression, in the lifetimes of the
parents and grandparents of today’s students, up to
600,000 Mexicans, one-third of the entire U.S. Mexican
population, many of them born in the United States,
were deported with their children back to Mexico, their
labor no longer needed.

Out of nowhere?

There is a frightening gap between the white perception
of this 50-year trauma of deportation and the
experience of Mexicans and other immigrants, like the
Salvadorans who were driven here by the U.S.-backed
civil wars of the 1970s. Somewhere between amnesia and
a self-induced lobotomy, the gap needs to be closed in
the dialogue that may come of these historic protests.
The mere passage of time may erase white memories and
guilt, and induce acceptance among Mexicans, but it
does not legitimize the occupation itself. The wound
will not disappear under American flags, searchlights
and border walls.

The fundamental issue still shaping attitudes down to
the present is this: Either the Mexicans (and other
Latinos) are immigrants to a country called the United
States or the U.S. is a Machiavellian power that denies
occupying one-half of Mexico for 156 years. During the
1846-48 war against Mexico, at least 50,000 Mexicans
died. The fighting took place across many cities
considered pure-bred American today; in Los Angeles, a
revolt temporarily drove out the U.S. Army. Guerrilla
resistance by Mexican fighters left a mythic legacy of
those like Joaquin Murrieta and Tiburcio Vasquez, names
still alive among Mexican-American students today.
Meanwhile, The New York Times was declaring in 1860:
“The Mexicans, ignorant and degraded as they are,
[should welcome a system] founded on free trade and the
right of colonization so that, after a few years of
pupilege, the Mexican state would be incorporated into
the Union under the same conditions as the original
colonies.”

After unilaterally annexing Texas in 1845, despite
massive protests, the U.S. president sent troops 100
miles into what previously was Mexican land. When the
Mexicans retaliated, the U.S. declared war on the
pretext that Americans had been attacked on American
soil. When it ended, the U.S. took 51% of Mexico’s
land, including California, where the discovery of gold
had been kept secret from Mexican negotiators. At least
100,000 Mexicans and an additional 200,000 indigenous
people lived on those lands. Ever since, those people
and their descendants have lived in a split-
consciousness similar to that of African-Americans
described in W.E.B. DuBois’ “The Souls of Black Folk.”
Each new generation of immigrants fuels that
consciousness all over again.

Under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the imposed
settlement of the 1846-48 war, the inhabitants of the
occupied territories were granted legal, political,
educational and cultural rights as citizens, not as
immigrants. Some of the earliest official documents of
California were required under the treaty to be printed
in Spanish and English. This treaty, which was
unenforced, became the basis for later movements
stretching into the 1960s, movements that gave the
Southwest an Aztec name (Aztlan) and demanded the
return of former land grants. It was not unlike Radical
Reconstruction, the period after the Civil War when
Gen. Sherman’s official promise of “forty acres and a
mule” was withdrawn.

Today’s demonstrations are not demanding implementation
of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Modern Mexican-
Americans have made the legalization of undocumented
workers as United States citizens their consensus
demand. But there remains an unspoken difference
between two states of mind regarding the meaning of the
border. In every generation, immigrant workers and
youth have claimed their American rights without
abandoning the memory of their deeper historical ones.

A significant number of white Americans, especially
among the elites, still hold to nativist definitions of
American identity, in contrast to those multinational
corporations that tend to be more interested in cheap
foreign labor than in keeping American white.

Conservative journals like the American Outlook publish
articles glorifying “the Anglosphere” as the standard
of globalization (March-April 2001). Kevin Phillips is
quoted in the article as still longing for an American
culture whose “core thought is a kind of English
revivalism.” Regarding this month’s demonstrations, the
black neoconservative Thomas Sowell has criticized the
“demanding” and “threatening” tone of “people who want
their own turf on American soil…” (L.A. Daily News,
April 29, 2006).

No one lends an Ivy League luster to the Minuteman
Mentality more than Harvard University professor Samuel
Huntington. A proud “Anglo-Protestant,” Huntington
previously advocated the “forced urbanization” of the
Vietnamese peasantry into a “Honda culture” as a
formula for ending the nationalist uprising. In
the&nbsp’70s, he complained that an “excess of
democracy” threatened Western authorities. More
recently, he formulated the strident doctrine of “the
clash of civilizations,” decreeing that Islamic culture
is incompatible with democratic civilization. Finally,
he has weighed in on “The Hispanic Challenge,” arguing
that Latino immigration is “a major potential threat to
the cultural and possibly political integrity of the
United States” (in Foreign Policy, March-April 2006).
Huntington argues that Mexican-Americans are too close
to their traditional culture to become assimilated as
patriotic Americans. By this he means, of course, that
they cannot become imitation WASPs, whose identity he
sees as basic to the American nation. For Huntington,
assimilation seems to mean submission and disappearance
into the master culture, a viewpoint still held by
many. We defeated you, and now you should become like
us.

Largely forgotten in the current debate, too, are those
among the elites who still consider Mexico itself a
strategic long-term threat. The late Caspar Weinberger,
a secretary of defense under Ronald Reagan, wrote in
1998 of planning for a theoretical “next war” against
Mexico, opting for the military option in case “it
becomes necessary to go down in and try to catch [a]
rebel leader in Mexico and restore democratic rule to
Mexico” (interview with “Chuck Baldwin Live,” Feb. 17,
1998). The Harvard historian of Chiapas, John Womack,
has written that in the 1990s “the US government, in
particular the Defense Department … wanted ‘low-
intensity’ warfare in Mexico” (”Rebellion in Chiapas,”
Harvard, 1999).

But the U.S. has historically been the destabilizing
force in Mexico, most recently with the North American
Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which has flooded the
country with corn and other products and replaced
indigenous manufacturing with the maquiladora economy,
thus displacing at least hundreds of thousands of
Mexicans, many of whom seek survival in el norte.
Perpetuating the cycle is absolutely crucial to neo-
liberal economics. But it also perpetually stimulates
rebelliousness, in fact and memory, among those who
take to U.S. streets today, and who shortly will be the
urban majority in a new America.

As people of color, mainly immigrants, edge closer to
majority status in key states, their relatives to the
south are becoming nationalist, populist majorities in
country after country, with interests that sharply
conflict with the disintegrating U.S. Monroe Doctrine
of 1823. If the populist mayor of Mexico City is
elected president of Mexico this fall, NAFTA itself
will die or be re-negotiated. This is the first time in
many decades that the interests of Latinos in the U.S.
are closely converging with the governments and people
of the nations of the south. As seen even in the recent
international baseball championships, the willingness
of America’s major league Latino players to join the
lineups of their homelands shows the fluid nature of
borders and solidarity. A policy beyond the Monroe
Doctrine will have to be crafted for the United States,
with Latinos in the lead. As Evo Morales of Bolivia is
suggesting, “another annexation is possible,” the
annexation of the United States into peaceful
coexistence with Latin America.

Some would argue that America must simply follow the
path of previous immigrant generations, like my Famine
Irish ancestors. It is true that the slum-dwelling
Irish, Jews and Italians rose in time to the middle
class, and the same future may lie ahead for the new
immigrants. We can see signs of the past in the growing
ranks of Latino trade unionists and mayors and other
politicians. But the difference in the histories is
race and class. If neo-liberalism has failed to widen
the American middle class since 1973, how will it
expand to provide decent jobs for the aspiring
immigrants in today’s underclass? Is there another New
Deal just over the horizon, or a hardening defense of
the status quo?

Huntington’s Anglosphere is dying, if only through
demographics. It is a matter of time–of when, not
whether. The newcomers have neither the need nor the
capacity to assimilate into a declining Anglosphere.
They will remain multicultural of necessity, the hybrid
multitude arising from the depths of empire and its
resistance. The real question is how the rest of
America, the rest of us, can assimilate and find
belonging within all the Americas, where so many flags
are fluttering in the gusts of self-determination.

In Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Portland, Tucson, New Orleans and over 200 American cities - millions of workers stayed off their jobs to protest against repressive legislation aimed at undocumented immigrant workers. The national May 1st Day without an Immigrant boycott and strike brought sectors of Los Angeles to a standstill. Two enormous mass marches, one in downtown L.A. and the other along Wilshire Boulevard, clogged city streets with up to two million workers. Hundreds of shops and businesses closed their doors in solidarity, tens of thousands of students walked off campuses all across the city, and the ports of L.A. were effectively shut down by truckers who had walked off the job.

These were the largest demonstrations in the entire history of Los Angeles, but they are also indicative of something much greater. Immigrant workers in the United States, with their massive demonstrations and work stoppages, have breathed life into International Workers Day, or May Day. That holiday is celebrated around the world each year on May 1st, as an expression of solidarity with the industrial workers killed by Chicago police in 1886 while demanding the eight hour day. While virtually ignored in the United States, the day is a legal holiday throughout much of Latin America (and indeed the world.) Spanish speaking immigrants have brought to the United States a lived tradition of celebrating May Day, as well as a sophisticated understanding of labor organizing and worker’s rights. When it was proposed months ago that May Day be designated as a national day of protest for Immigrant Rights, mainstream politicians and community leaders discouraged the idea - with some going so far as to plea with workers to stay on their jobs and not participate in May Day. However, the appeals of the timid and the backwards were ignored by the masses, who stopped work and poured into the streets in their millions.

In Los Angeles, wave after wave of demonstrators filled the streets. Most wore white and U.S. flags were displayed everywhere. Spanish was the dominant language on the streets that day, with most protestors being Mexicano - but many other Latinos were involved as well. Large numbers of L.A.’s Asian community turned out, especially for the march down Wilshire Blvd., which runs through L.A.’s huge Korean community. Some of the signs carried in the marches read: Nigun ser humano es ilegal (No human being is illegal) - Our citizenship wasn’t a problem when you sent our children to war - Are our troops in Iraq illegal too? - Jose called in today, Make your own taco, USA. - Hoy marchamos. Manana votamos (Today we march. Tomorrow we vote) and No Somos Crimales, Ustedes nos hacen criminales (We’re not criminals, You make us criminals.) Pictures of the massive L.A. marches taken by photographers Stephen Sakulsky, Rogue Gringo and JLR, can be viewed at the L.A. Indymedia website.

May 1st, 2006 was not the end or the culmination of a people’s struggle, it was the beginning, and in the months to come that fight for the rights of all will grow stronger. The people made history on May Day, but there’s much left to accomplish. Now stronger bonds must be forged between immigrant and U.S. workers - for our interests are one and the same.

Nuestro Himno is an updated version of the Star-Spangled Banner that’s sung in Spanish. A loose translation of the original, you can think of the song as an anthem for Immigrant Rights - and it couldn’t come at a more perfect time. The song is presently sweeping the country, becoming a hit among the Spanish speaking population, but also raising the ire of rightwing nativists. Even President Bush commented on the song, saying “I think the national anthem ought to be sung in English” (a language he has not yet mastered.) Those performing on the song include Mexican pop star Gloria Trevi, and Puerto Rican reggaetón stars Ivy Queen and Tito El Bambino.

Writing for the New York Times, Kelefa Sanneh calls Nuestro Himno the “protest song of the moment,” and describes it as “an unlikely collaboration between dozens of pop stars you may never have heard of and a 19th-century amateur poet. The result is ‘Nuestro Himno,’ a new version of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner,’ sung by Latin pop stars. Francis Scott Key’s lyrics have been translated into Spanish, but the basic message — a stirring tribute to a waving flag — remains the same.”

Here’s a sampling of the lyrics:

Its stars, its stripes, Freedom, we are equal
We are brothers, in our anthem.
In the fierce combat is a sign of victory
The glow of battle, in step with liberty
My people - keep fighting, It’s time to break the chains
At night they said: “It’s being defended!”
Oh say! Your starry beauty is still unfolding.

Read the complete lyrics to the song in Spanish and English. Listen to Nuestro Himno online, and download the mp3 file to your computer. !Oh decid! Despliega aún su hermosura estrellada.