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1 de Mayo, 2008
Marching Side by Side
Categorized under Cultura , Derechos Humanos , Raza , día festivo | Tags: African Americans, Amigos and Amigas, Blacks, Califas, Latino, May Day, Power to the People
HAPPY MAY DAY. And may the day resonate with the energy of our collective hopes and la lucha that can not end until justice is felt in the heart and the lives of all those who need to be so recognized. The USA teaches us many myths: the Hero Myth, the Great White Myth, the Savages in the Wild Myth, the GodDaddyNation Myth....and so on. Fodder for our cartoons, bland teen movies, and unceasing war rationales. The truth, while somewhat less glitzy, is just as exciting, age-old, and far more empowering. For we—the centuries-strong, the been-here-all-along, the weak, the meek, the She, the black, the brown, the grown-up-from-this-ground, the despised and forgotten and the poor and ground down—are in this fight together. And it is a fight, look all around. A fight for equality, a fight for justice, and sometimes simply a fight for food and human dignity. And as long as we are divided and fighting over scraps and ladder rungs and tossed off politician-dung, there is no justice. So let us remember why it is that we stand here, why we stood up; let us loan one another our strength, and move side by side.
The choir had just finished raising the roof inside St. Basil/Visitation Catholic Church in Englewood when a visitor, Mauro Piñeda, stepped up to the pulpit with an unexpected invitation.March with us on May 1, Piñeda urged the mostly black parishioners, invoking Martin Luther King Jr.'s call in 1963 to "lift our national policy from the quicksand of racial injustice."
As another Immigration march is scheduled to wend through Chicago on Thursday—now an annual rite of political passion for some and traffic frustrations for others—such pleas to African-Americans represent a new experiment in the fight for immigrant rights.
Organizers predict Thursday's march will be much smaller than the 2006 and 2007 marches that attracted hundreds of thousands of demonstrators and galvanized a movement.
Chicago police decided to allow Thursday's event to culminate in a rally at Federal Plaza, betting they would not need sprawling Grant Park to hold the marchers.
Should the turnout exceed the few thousand demonstrators that are expected, the march's endpoint could be switched to Grant Park, where the massive rallies of recent years finished, said Beatrice Cuello, a deputy police superintendent who oversees patrols.
This year organizers are battling the fear created by a government crackdown on illegal immigrants. Some activists, meanwhile, have diverted their energy toward the presidential campaign.
So local organizers are seeking to re-energize their movement, trying to transform a predominantly Mexican-immigrant campaign into one that joins communities of color with a broader working-class agenda.
They are pinning their hopes on the creation of a new "Black-Latino coalition" in Chicago that hearkens back to the 1980s partnership that helped elect Harold Washington, the city's first black mayor.
"You might ask: 'Why should we join your cause?' " Piñeda challenged his skeptical church audience. "My answer is because racism affects all people of color. If we don't join together, we will be defeated."
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Comentarios (1)
Meep dijo:
That's so awesome. I feel like our communities (the black and brown) are being divided and when we stop fighting I think something really good could happen. Now, if this could happen in Dallas, that would be great.
Palabras por Meep spat forth on el 1 de Mayo, 2008 at 08:16 AM