Stirring the Other L.A.

How the media and immigrant advocates got 500,000 people to protest

Comments (0) By Daniel Hernandez Monday, Mar 27 2006

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“There’s nothing sleeping about these people,” said Maria Elena Durazo, the new interim executive secretary-treasurer of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor. “These demonstrations are going to continue, and I can guarantee you that within that million there are hundreds of voters out there.”

Maybe the immigrants and their supporters won’t even need to take their anger to the voting booth to have their demands met. Stripping away the flat-out draconian elements of the House bill, the Senate this week began considering a bill crafted in the Judiciary Committee that would effectively pave the way for the more than 11 million estimated illegal immigrants in the country to gain citizenship.

Street lessons: The first wave of student walkouts prompted by la gran marcha. (AP photo/Nick Ut)

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On Monday, as high school students across Southern California took to the streets once more, the other L.A., that English-speaking one, seemed to still have trouble wrapping its brain around the magnitude and significance of Saturday’s “Gran Marcha.”

Honking, perhaps out of custom, motorists drove past brown-skinned youth marching down Sunset, around City Hall and even on the freeways. On the 101 through Hollywood, fresh graffiti on a concrete piling spelled out the fundamental message of the weekend activity: STOP RACISM AGAINST MEXICANS.

The sense of bewilderment was apparent on Fox News even hours after the march. How does the nativist media machine react when the working masses who are never supposed to speak up finally get up and do just that?

Very, very carefully.

“Very impressive rallies today,” Fox News anchor John Kasich, a former Republican partisan in Congress, concluded on Heartland.

His courageous correspondent out in the field, accosted all morning by “fringe elements” at the rally in frightening Los Angeles, nodded seriously.