Hello! This past Monday—Martin Luther King Jr.’s Day—gave me an opportunity to reflect on what happened with Civil Rights Movement in the 1950’s and 60’s. Analyzing what happened back then and what’s going on today with the DREAM Act movement (and other contemporary civil rights movements) I can safely say that they were movements that share numerous similarities. Moreover, Martin Luther King recognized a major block in the integration of African Americans to white society.

Martin Luther King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail (1963), a letter in response to the Statement by Alabama Clergymen is a prime example of a major obstacle that civil rights activist faced in the 1960’s but continue to face today. In that letter Martin Luther King stated,

First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice.

Reading this made me realize that people who tend to call themselves “moderates,” even in contemporary times have failed to support causes that will integrate disenfranchised populations. Nearly sixty years have passed since the great Martin Luther King Jr. pointed this out.

Martin Luther King Jr. added that “Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will.” What he’s trying to say is that the people who claim to be opened to “any” possibilities—those in the middle—fail to acknowledge the importance of certain issues and policies that should be promulgated.

Much has been said about what caused the DREAM Act to fail: was it politics? (Republicans did not want Obama to win); was it an economic issue? (Supply and demand of students and workers); were politicians acting in a manner that would guarantee them reelection? Or was it nativism and racism? However, most people have failed to see a major factor that resulted in the defeat of the federal DREAM Act, and that is—the moderate vote or as King stated “the white moderate.”

For instance, five Democratic senators voted against the DREAM Act: Baucus (MT), Hagan (NC), Nelson (NE), Pryor (AR), and Tester (MT). These senators are supposed to be progressive in ideology but they are representatives of conservative states hence they vote in a moderate fashion. In addition, there were six Republican “moderate” senators that voted no on the DREAM Act. Several of them had voted yes on past DREAM Act legislation. Moderate Republican senators voting no on the DREAM Act were: Collins (ME), Hutchison (TX), Kirk (IL), Lemieux (FL), Snowe (ME), and Voinovich (OH).

In short, this is an powerful example of how the “moderate” politician, organizer or citizen can fail to see the real issue at hand while defeating what Martin Luther King called a “just law”—a moral law.

What can we learn from this? We must realize that we cannot change the anti-immigrant philosophy (the extreme right), there’s no need to convince those that are already convinced (Dream Activists), but it is essential to inform, convince, and educate the “moderate population,” which might, in principle, support our cause but do not act in accordance to those beliefs—they’re passive. Every single one of us can do something to make this happen.

I wanted to commend Martin Luther King Jr. for his passionate efforts in favor of civil rights. As we can see here Martin Luther King Jr.’s teachings remain relevant.

“One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws” (Martin Luther King Jr.).

Jennifer Paz is the second of two children. She grew up in the metropolitan city of Los Angeles, where she and her older brother Francisco lived with their single mother in a small apartment room in “the ghetto”, otherwise referred to as South Central Los Angeles.

If you look at the demographics there are more liquor stores than libraries and many people live in poverty and under the shadows of immigration.  Just making it out of there unharmed is a success, as some might know by personal experience. As if that weren’t enough on its own, to have to survive the jungles of South Central Los Angeles as many undocumented kids have had to do for so long, Jennifer and Francisco have also had to endure the reality of being undocumented in the United States.

“Yes, we are criminals” many of these kids growing up in “the hood” begin to think in their-actually, our minds. Like when we try to find and do the jobs that no one in their right mind would do for the amount of pay offered. Or when we want something from the store but we have to face the reality of poverty. We see that our own peers don’t have to undergo any of this. Then we begin to question the very essence of our existence.

That is what Jennifer had to deal with at the tender age of eight. She was haunted by the idea of her legal status in this country. Forgetting that even if they did break man-made laws, it didn’t mean that they had no soul or that they were evil. Those were just the cards they were dealt in the game,

because in life there are always winners and there are losers and they both need to exist so that the balance continues.

“We always kind of knew of our status when we questioned our single mother, who deserves everything in the world that we can’t give her. But I hope God is real so that when she goes to heaven, or in her next life she’ll see wonderful things and she won’t suffer ever again.”

“I remember that she told me about my status when I was in middle school, and I didn’t believe her because I felt American enough, and I never talked about it with anyone because I figured this was the kind of thing that could just go away on its own, but what did I know, I was just a kid,” said Paz.

From the time that your parents spring something like that on you at such a young age, it either makes you stronger and more eager to move forward in your life, or you shut down and you resign to your life as an under achiever.
When I asked Jennifer about her struggles as she was growing up, she told me that she did undergo a lot of confusion and feelings of impotence, but something that hurt her more than anything in the world was the belief that she was alone in her desire to change her current condition. She said she wished she would have had more support from her family, mainly her older brother who understood the struggle and who she claims was one of her greatest heroes.

“My brother was very smart, but he gave into the temptations of the hood and he went all the way down. He decided that school wasn’t going to be for him; for whatever reason in his mind that let him think that, because he was a brilliant person with infinite potential if he only would have tried. I tried to stay strong but it’s not always enough. I graduated

high school, but then I was overwhelmed with all of the money and paper work that was required to go to a four-year college, and I systematically began to shut down at times too, so I can’t say that I blame him too much.” said Jennifer Paz.

Sometimes it’s time to get rid of the labels, and if you really want something to change, you change your approach to it. And it can be done-an excellent example of this is the father of the first civil rights movement of the turn of the century, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

This is why I would like to reach all of the dreamers in the hope that you too are done dreaming and you want to make this a reality. Like the great Rev. MLK Jr. once said, “A man can only ride your back if it is bent.” Not being oppressed by these conservative regulations imposed by a disenfranchised government who wants to postpone the lives of tens of thousands of students is not a dream, it is something that we need to make happen because our futures depend on it.

I urge all of the dreamers to unite and realize that this isn’t going to be an easy fight and we can use each other’s support and shoulders to lean on. I know that like Jennifer Paz we are all ready to change the oppression that is pushing against us and preventing us from being the very best we can be because like the great Dr. King said “In depriving a man of a job or income…you are in a real way depriving him of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness denying in his case the every creed of his society.”

Isabel Castillo tells a room of hundreds of her accomplishments, then stuns the crowd by telling them she’s undocumented.

Video, From the Harrisonburg Times.

Here’s the article.

This one is overdue. We lost a great historian and scholar last week when Howard Zinn, famous for the People’s History of the United States, passed away at the age of 87.

ImmProf blog found and linked to an interview with Howard Zinn where he explicates his view on immigration:

“If you don’t have a vision, for instance, of a world without national boundaries, you are not in a position to really evaluate very specific things, like should Congress pass this immigration law, or should we pass that immigration law, should we restrict immigration this much or immigration that much. But if you have that vision of the kind of world that you want, then it becomes clear what your attitude has to be towards immigration, which is people should be able to move: there shouldn’t be such a thing as a foreigner, an alien, an immigrant.”

Borders are human-made, geo-political constructions that should neither necessitate the deprivation of basic human rights nor cast people as outsiders. In our world, they function as a specific form of colonial domination that necessitates the delineation of an inside and outside, the marking and categorizing of certain bodies as alien and foreign for specific political purposes such as the “national security” project.

I had the privilege of meeting Howard Zinn briefly during one of his lectures against the war(s) while I was still an undergraduate student. Zinn did what we can call subaltern history in the frame of the United States, counter-hegemonic histories from below. He deconstructed History, the hegemonic narrative of the vanguard, and filled pages, lecture halls and our lives with counter-narratives. For example, in the People’s History of the United States, the Vietnam War is told from the point of view of protesters, workers are the main focus of industrialism and slavery is written from the perspective of the enslaved.

There’s a lesson here for DREAM Act students from the life and work of Howard Zinn.

Who will write your history? And more importantly, how will you let it be written?

I am not going to write a blog post full of inspirational quotes about ‘coming out’ from Harvey Milk and yours truly. I won’t talk about the power of narratives and story-telling for the umpteenth time and bore you with it. Just read the following blogpost from a stranger in Tennessee:

So, I’ll say that I met with two kids, C. and H., who are here illegally and have been since they were very small children. They’ve just finished up high school and they now can’t go to college at in-state rates or get jobs or drive or come to the attention of the police in any way.

I guess I must have known that there was no path to citizenship for these kids, but until you’re sitting across from someone and looking in his face when he says it, it doesn’t really sink in. There is no line for these kids to get in. They’ve been in the U.S. almost their whole lives. There’s no “back to where they came from” for them to go to, because they come from here. But there’s no way for them to become U.S. citizens.

I mean, seriously, when you’re sitting at a table with a teenage girl who speaks with a thick Tennessee accent and she’s talking about being afraid of being deported…

I’m going to write something strong and knowledgeable about this at Feministe, but here?

I can’t do it.

Read the rest of it here and make sure to leave comments.

BYLINE: By STEVE LAWRENCE, Associated Press Writer

State Sen. Gil Cedillo is trying to shine some light on a shocking but little known episode in American history. He faces an uphill battle.

The Los Angeles Democrat is the author of a bill that would require public junior high and high schools to teach students about the deportation of about 2 million Hispanics, including 400,000 Californians, to Mexico during the Great Depression.

Elementary schools would have the option of including information about the deportations in social science instruction.

The deportation program was started in 1929 by the Hoover administration, supposedly as a way to get rid of illegal immigrants and open up jobs during the Depression. Most of those rounded up and sent to Mexico were American citizens or legal immigrants, critics say.

Cedillo calls it “an embarrassment to all Americans.”

“Those that don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it,” he said. “That would be another tragedy upon a tragedy. … The way to avoid that is through education.”

Cedillo’s bill is scheduled to be considered Monday by the Senate Appropriations Committee.

That committee shelved an earlier version of the legislation last year as part of an effort to hold down spending. A committee analysis said the bill could lead to hundreds of thousands of dollars in state costs to reimburse school districts for a new mandate.

Cedillo said he might be able to “tweak the language regarding what’s mandatory, what’s optional or available” to get the bill out of committee.

Even if the bill clears the Legislature, it faces a possible veto by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who turned down similar legislation in 2006 that was introduced by then-Sen. Joe Dunn, a Democrat from Garden Grove.

The Republican governor says he has consistently rejected bills that require mention of specific events or groups of people in social science instruction.

“I continue to believe that the state should refrain from being overly prescriptive in school curriculum beyond establishing rigorous academic standards and frameworks,” he said in vetoing the Dunn legislation.

Schwarzenegger also vetoed a Dunn bill in 2005 that would have set up a fund to pay reparations to victims of the deportations. But the governor signed another Dunn measure that same year that officially apologized for the deportations.

The requirement for junior and senior high schools would kick in when the state Board of Education adopts new social science textbooks and curriculum frameworks. Cedillo said the board is going through that process now, which makes the bill timely.

On the Net: http://www.assembly.ca.gov and http://www.senate.ca.gov