2006 marked a sea change in US politics, but the decisive moment was not election day, it was March 25th, the day that over a million Mexican and Central America migrants and their Chicana/o allies marched in the streets of Los Angeles, following a march of similar magnitude in Chicago. The movement was on – someone – millions of someones - sent a shocking message to the ruling elites of the most powerful empire in world history: The Republican juggernaut toward Fascism would stop at our door, and it would not take a single step further.
Brown people throughout the US were on red alert: the racists behind the rise of the shock troops called the Cazamigrantes (the Minutemen) were moving in Congress to make every migrant in the nation – everyone without papers, and everyone who “assisted” them – a felon. They would have unleashed a new wave of mass repression in the nation’s barrios, repression like the Zoot Suit Riots and Operation Wetback, making everyone with Brown skin an automatic target, a suspect in a felony, vulnerable to mass roundups and detention camps. Brown skin would become the new yellow star, one worn by every person of native decent in the country. The “Americans” – who are not “Americans” at all, but the descendants of foreign colonizers and conquerors, meant to declare this land off limits to the descendants of its original inhabitants, who knew no borders.
