About 200 members came to DC 37 Oct. 28 and saw
"Echando Raices/Taking Root," a new video highlighting
the uphill struggle of undocumented workers in the United States.
The film examines the growth of the immigrants' rights movement
among farm workers in California, home of the richest agricultural
land in the world, and day laborers in Houston, the fourth largest
city in the United States.
In the lush fields of California, where workers from Mexico have
traditionally picked fruit for substandard wages, the labor force
has changed drastically. New workers include those from Laos and
the indigenous Mixteco people from Mexico, who are exposed to even
more exploitation from their bosses because they do not speak Spanish.
At a Houston factory, management assigned Mexican workers the worst
paying and most difficult jobs and left Vietnamese immigrants relatively
better off. "It was a classic case of divide and conquer,"
said Linda Morales of the Sheet Metal Workers Union. Rather than
accept their fate, the Mexican workers reached out to the union,
which filed a lawsuit for them.
When a 1996 change in federal immigration law endangered the residency
of 400,000 people—many of them already established workers
with children born in the U.S.—the Mexican community organized
feverishly. Immigrant workers in Houston launched the Association
for Residency and Citizenship in America. With labor and other allies,
they got President Clinton to sign an amnesty law.
"The ARCA case represents something amazing," says University
of Houston professor Daniel Rodriguez. "A marginalized people
who are undocumented organize a movement that reaches Washington.
That's difficult for U.S. citizens to do."
A panel discussion after the video included Sylvia Ash, Chief Counsel
of DC 37's Immigration Program, Artemio Guerra from the NYC Civic
Participation Project, Bill Granfield, President of HERE Local 100
and Ester Chavez from the Immigration Rights Project. Ms. Ash pointed
out that DC 37's Immigration Program has helped as many as 8,000
people become American citizens.
The program was co-sponsored by the Authors' Talk Committee of the
DC 37 Education Fund and many other groups, including the American
Friends Service Committee, which produced the video.
"Echando Raices" is available at the DC 37 Education Fund
library.
—Alfredo Alvarado