New Immigrants Teach an Old Lesson
Every so often, for good or ill, Los Angeles astonishes itself. Twice in the past half-century, the city that most embodied the post-World War II American dream was racked by massive racial rioting that shook the city to its core. Twice in the past half-century, L.A. also became the first American mega-city to elevate minority politicians to its top office -- electing as its mayor the African American Tom Bradley in 1973 and the Latino Antonio Villaraigosa in 2005, in both instances with heavy white support.
This past Saturday Los Angeles stunned itself yet again as more than a half-million largely Latino, preponderantly immigrant demonstrators jammed the streets of downtown to protest the draconian and xenophobic immigration bill that House Republicans passed late last year. Commentators have noted that this was the city's largest demonstration in recent decades, which is a little like characterizing a storm that drops five feet of snow in the Hollywood Bowl as unusually inclement weather. In fact, Los Angeles had never seen anything like Saturday's outpouring, which flooded downtown with more than 500,000 totally peaceful demonstrators.
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L.A. has never been a city for public outpourings of any kind; that's not been the Angeleno way. But somehow nobody remembered to tell this to L.A.'s huge immigrant population, and on Saturday, in all ignorance of the city's culture of noninvolvement, they redefined my hometown.
Of course, they've actually been redefining Los Angeles in less spectacular ways for the past 20 years, as anyone who's looked at a construction site or an office building's janitorial crew or the student body of any L.A. public school can attest. But the role that the immigrant population has played in transforming the city's political culture still isn't widely understood.
At Saturday's march, for instance, all 500 marshals were provided by Local 1877 of the Service Employees International Union -- the janitors union. Six years ago, the janitors galvanized Los Angeles with a successful three-week strike in which they paraded down the city's streets and encountered -- yet another moment of civic astonishment -- motorists who, though delayed by the marches, honked in support and cheered them on. Throughout their strike, the janitors also had the backing of virtually every L.A.-area elected official, and for good reason: They had helped put them in office.
For in the election-season endeavors of the L.A. labor movement, it's the janitors and the hotel workers -- local unions made up disproportionately of non-citizen immigrant members -- who walk the most precincts and make the most phone calls. Their civic participation, and that of their fellow immigrant activists in other unions, is one reason why California became so blue a state, with such a heavily Democratic House delegation, in the late 1990s.
Now, in the wake of Saturday's march, the political clout of these low-wage, can't-vote immigrants has reached all the way to the U.S. Senate. In part that's because they command the support of immigrants who can vote. In polling of the nation's immigrant population released yesterday (and conducted in nine languages), legal immigrants opposed key provisions of the House bill by overwhelming margins (73 percent opposed arresting undocumented immigrants as felons) and backed paths to legalization similar to those passed by the Senate Judiciary Committee on Monday. After all, the legal immigrants are often relatives of the illegal ones.
On the whole, L.A.'s immigrant-labor-Latino alliance is mercifully bereft of nationalist demagogues. More than once, immigrant-dominated districts have voted for non-Latino labor liberals over their Latino opponents. Villaraigosa, who addressed Saturday's rally, speaks more of a common good than of particularist ones, and enjoys the support of every ethnic group in town.
Which is not to say that L.A. has overcome its rifts of class, race and language. The non-Latino city and the English-language media were plainly stunned by the magnitude of Saturday's protest -- though on balance, it's hard to imagine a more healthy surprise. In laid-back Los Angeles, it's the immigrants who are forging a culture of civic activism, and teaching Angelenos how to be engaged Americans.
