Cause Transforms Woodbridge Teen Into Activist Leader

Cause Transforms Woodbridge Teen Into Activist Leader

Sixteen-year-old classmates Salem Trad, left, and Anthony Lemus helped organize protests at Freedom High School in Woodbridge. (By Kevin Clark -- The Washington Post)

Anthony Lemus, 16, was in his Woodbridge townhouse with a classmate, both of them huddled at a computer crafting a major speech, a manifesto in 500 words railing against the federal immigration legislation. As the high school junior tapped away at the keyboard with a determined glare -- "A lot of people assume we are just gang bangers, but out here in the crowd all I see is future doctors and lawyers" -- his concentration drifted. He changed the music to psych himself back up.

Would it be "On My Block" by Scarface? "Under the Bridge" by the Red Hot Chili Peppers? Or "Hotel California" by the Eagles? Finally, his friend, Salem Trad, turned to Lemus and smiled: "We got to close it up because we can't make it too long. I say you finish it off."

Lemus did finish off the speech, and now he is known as one of the Washington area's most vocal organizers of the recent student demonstrations against the crackdown on immigration. In protest after protest, and in language that was as urgent as it was uncomplicated, his voice raised the rallying cry: "They're trying to kick out the hardest-working people in America!"

The charismatic junior at Freedom High School in Prince William County, home to more Hispanics than the District, led hundreds of teens in walkouts with the single-mindedness and savvy of a well-honed politician -- not exactly the darling of the school system, hardly an Ivy League-bound student, but a guy who seized the galvanizing moment and took a stand, earning the respect of students and teachers alike. A guy whose drive, like so many other teenagers', is at odds with his youthful insouciance.

The demonstrations that swept the country and the Washington area produced no single nationally known leader, but instead multiple stewards -- such as Lemus -- who have risen up from their neighborhoods, workplaces and schools.

Now that the school protests have petered out and last week's climactic march to the Mall has passed with no concrete plans for what will unfold next, Lemus wonders whether he can sustain his newfound interest in activism and politics or whether it will be undone by what he admits are his wayward tendencies.

Despite his obvious zeal, Lemus is a study in paradox:

He often serves as a hallway peacemaker at Freedom but until now has never participated in any serious extracurricular activities that would empower him to make real change at his school. Although he spoke in passionate sound bites about the immigration battle on Capitol Hill, until this month he had known little about his own parents' arrival in the United States and even thought his mother was illegal (she's not).

Last week, he sat in his family's Woodbridge townhouse listening -- for the first time -- to his Salvadoran parents recount how they illegally crossed the border into the United States in the 1980s.

Lemus heard his father, Tony, a furniture mover, describe how he had been a union leader for a carton factory in San Salvador. Fearing that he would be drawn into the country's civil war, he fled to Mexico. He then hid in the trunk of an American's car for the passage over.

Then the teenager got to hear his mother's story. Reina Lemus, a house cleaner, explained how she hid in a cave and then slipped over from Tijuana in the middle of the night, evading sweeping searchlights.

Anthony fell silent, considering the magnitude of his parents' experiences and what had been his lack of curiosity about their lives.