Today They March, Tomorrow They Vote
Images from the LA Times of yesterday's anti-Immigration Reform protests in California. I wish I could have gone, but I'll have to let my fingers do the walking on the keyboard. UC Irvine was unnaturally quiet. Well, at least the construction sites were quiet. See the first comment below -- there was a march and police presence on campus. My bad, for not knowing.)
Workers took the day off to participate in the marches in Santa Ana and on campus, but otherwise there was little evidence on the street of the powerful popular protest movement (I stand corrected again -- see below) that mobilized a million marchers in Los Angeles proper and countless more in the smaller cities and counties. Vegetables rotted in the downtown wholesale markets as workers took to the streets.
6 Comments:
not true that UCI was quiet - there was abig march on campus with megaphones in the front and police in the back
Thanks for the correction...and glad to hear it -- I should say that the construction sites were quiet!
There's a part of me that wonders if the day's effect would have been more unsettling if the boycott wasn't accompanied by street protests.
What do you mean anonymous II? Should more effort have been made to focus on a no buy day? I heard a lot of contradictory stuff about the boycott coming from organizers in the days preceding May 1.
I bought two iced coffees, but stores were looking pretty empty, even in the ritzy Newport Coast area where Republicans didn't seem to care that much.
Anonymous II here. I guess my post reveals the degree of my familiarity with the perspective from the street of the events that occurred this past Monday. In the coverage provided by the mainstream media outlets, the events were referred to as "A Day without Immigrants" and "national boycott." I found the use of the term boycott a bit confusing since it implies activism by consumers. The term strike may have been more appropriate to refer to activism by laborers, especially to correspond with May Day.
Had the term strike been used, I would have understood the walking out on job sites and taking to the streets as one continuous protest action. However, because boycott had been used, I understood the acts of not going into work and of taking to the streets as separate and confusing combination of activist tactics.
Having said that, I thought it would have been much more effective had the organizers not provided images of street protests to media outlets and instead gave the people of this country direct firsthand experiences as well as media images of the following.
Imagine how unsettling it would have been to bypass a silent construction site, an empty grocery store parking lot, etc. to arrive at your destination only to find the owner of the establishment harried at trying to manage understaffing, or even better, that a sign indicating "Closed" greeted you at your destination, leaving you to figure out what next... The combination of encountering silence where there should have been clamor and a disquieting rupture to reliable daily routines would have been uncanny. Perhaps this deserved being played out by itself.
I get your point now, anonymous regarding confusion of strike and boycott.
This gets to the heart of what is at stake in the struggle for justice for all immigrants, legal and illegal -- does the May Day action demand the rights of labor or flexing the muscle of the power consumerism?
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