At Immigrant Rally, Divided They Stand

"Say you work in a restaurant and I work in construction," he said. "I lose my job and you lose your job [for joining the boycott]. I can go to your restaurant and you can go to my construction. They need us. We are not afraid."

Garcia is as hard a worker as any, and he says he knows stuff about roofing that his boss depends on. He says he earns about $1,000 in a good week and sends $800 of it back to his mother and two sisters in Mexico. Yesterday cost him about $140 in lost wages.

"If I have to do this I'm going to do this to catch their attention," Garcia said.

To boycott or not to boycott? So much riding on the answer in individual lives, such high stakes for a movement groping for its voice and next steps.

But there in the park, with the guitars and the flags and the children in strollers, at a time and a place when the tactical rift could have betrayed weakness and the spectacle of protesters protesting the protest, the leaders showed some savvy. They pretended there were no differences of opinion. They shared one stage, one sound system near the statue of Joan of Arc, and they didn't talk about whether to boycott or not to boycott. It was too late for that anyway. They kept saying over and over how united they were.

"All organizations present are united for legalization" of those without papers, shouted a typical speaker. "We demand real comprehensive reform legislation that recognizes the contributions of" -- here it comes -- "hardworking immigrants."

Did Cesar Chavez have to fake a united front during the five-year grape boycott he launched with the United Farm Workers in 1965? In any case, it was an effective tactic. In the end, growers agreed to let the union bargain for the workers, and they got higher wages, health care and retirement benefits.

The dissonant thing about Chavez as an inspiration for the current movement, however, is that he didn't care much for undocumented workers. He considered them "strikebreakers." He came to Washington in 1979 to accuse immigration authorities of letting such workers avoid the law in order to defeat the union.

Chavez himself may have been inspired by the Montgomery, Ala., bus boycott in 1955-56, sparked after Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat. The boycott brought the bus companies to the brink of bankruptcy and proved the mettle of the civil rights movement. But it took the Supreme Court to finally desegregate the buses.

Still, the bus boycott made a 26-year-old preacher named Martin Luther King Jr. a national figure, and set a tide in motion -- a taste of what possibilities were in the air in the park yesterday.

Yesterday's rally also drew energy from fiction. People in the crowd were passing out fliers about the 2004 mockumentary "A Day Without a Mexican" -- as if we could have forgotten. The premise of the movie is that suddenly all the Latinos disappear from California -- all the nannies, groundskeepers, street sweepers, car mechanics. The state can't function and goes crazy.

Which is also what happens in a fictional Southern town in the 1965 play "Day of Absence" by Douglas Turner Ward. All the black people suddenly disappear. The playwright later said he had been in Montgomery during the bus boycott, and he had been inspired by what happens when invisible people make themselves visible by, paradoxically, disappearing. Not riding the bus, not going to work.

Some of the boycotters were like Juan Arreaga, 30, who came from Mexico 10 years ago, lives in Manassas and owns a remodeling business. He gave all 40 of his workers the day off. Nobody was going to get fired for this "boycott." It wasn't a radical, personally risky act. Nor was it for Carlos Rosales, a self-employed financial analyst in Hyattsville, who boycotted himself.

Joanna Salguero and Jacqueline Ortiz are cashiers at a fast-food restaurant in Centreville. They boycotted. But they got permission from their boss.

If your boss says it's okay, or if you are the boss, is that a boycott? Do you have to risk getting fired for the act to acquire moral gravitas?

No, said the organizers. The point was just to show how many productive Latinos there are. Permission or no, there they were, there in the park, standing up to be counted.

Carlos M. Bermudez, chef with a food-service company in the District, boycotted -- but he went to work Sunday to cook all of yesterday's food ahead of time. In other words, he found a way to work and boycott.

The un-boycotters, for their part, looked for ways to show workplace solidarity. Germain Gutierrez, 27, from Beltsville by way of El Salvador, got to the park a little late. He had reported to the D.C. body shop where he works. But his boss let him leave after he put in four hours.

Think of all the cars coming in after a weekend of wrecks. Think of all the minivans of the Bethesda matrons, and the BMWs of the K Street lawyers.