My wife and I at first wondered about the rationale for kaaping the kids out of school (she works at a school that is ~40% Mexican immigrant labor kids.  We came to the conclusion that the thinking was:

 

– that it was important to show the family connections at the rallies themselves - the ripple effect of whatever legislation is enacted through multiple generations in the community, and

 

– to allow the effects felt at the workplaces and retail points of purchase to also be felt in other areas where immigrant presence and participation is important, such as in the classroom.

 

Edit to add:  My wife also amailed me today and said that while attendance in class was indeed sparse today it has also been a hard to control day because everything is out of sorts.

 

I hope a lot of teachers across the country utilize the "teachable moment" presented to them today, to let the students in attendance today speak honestly about what they think of all this, do they prefer the environment with or without the diversity, etc.

 

Even in middle school my wife's students experience tension on these issues coming from both sides.  Their self-proclaimed 'hicks and spics' balance of power is quite a good microcosm of American social tension.

 

 

it's simple. less students in the classroom means less number of teachers needed. Thus non-tenured teachers would be let go, and they would loose their jobs just like the local shop-workers.

Lotta sirens in the last 15 mins. That can't be good.

300,000 in Chicago.

1 in 3 small businesses closed in L.A. today.

 

According to the AP.

300,000 in Chicago.

1 in 3 small businesses closed in L.A. today.

 

According to the AP.

 

Looking at the crowd shots, I believe it.

LMAO!

 

A day without Gringos...

 

That's what they are calling this in Mexico.

it's simple. less students in the classroom means less number of teachers needed. Thus non-tenured teachers would be let go, and they would loose their jobs just like the local shop-workers.

 

there's such a shortage of teachers at some schools i highly doubt that many would be let go.

I am proud to say I spent $200 today.

I am proud to say I spent $200 today.

 

Well, just remember that whatever services you bought, a Mexican immigrant would have done it for half that price.

I am proud to say I spent $200 today.

 

That's great, but that wasn't the point of their boycott. It didn't matter how much you spent.

This boycott is stupid s***. They come here to make money then try to negatively impact the nations economy. Talk about biting the hand that feeds you.

This boycott is stupid s***.  They come here to make money then try to negatively impact the nations economy.  Talk about biting the hand that feeds you.

OH NO... VICTIM!! VICTIMS IS ALL THEY ARE!!!! VICTIMS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I don't know how many people got to actually experience things, but I got out of work early yesterday so I went down and walked around for a while and took a bunch of pics. Of course the pics are on my computer at home, but somethings struck me. #1 was the insane amount of people that there were. There were crowds of people for literally miles. I walked down Jackson from the CBOT all of the way to Grant Park, and the crowds never stopped. When I got to GP I wandered around in there, and much of the main rally had broke up, and there were other little smaller rallies going on that people had done sort of improv. #2 was this one seemed to be way better organized than the last one. Instead of all of the Mexican flags that we saw last time, it was almost all US flags being waved by people. There were also way more signs and shirts that had been doled out to the crowds. #3 was the oddest to me, even after Tex had said it... Everyone was really happy. There was no anger, no drive, people were laughing and smiling and having a good time. I saw people playing Hacky Sack, soccer, and plenty of beer drinking going on. For a rally that is supposed to send a message, the passion level was really low.

 

I'll try to get some pics up later tonight.

For a rally that is supposed to send a message, the passion level was really low.

 

 

I was far away from any of the large metro protests and so I lack a first hand experience, but I'd hesitate to equate a generally positive vibe with lack of passion on the part of the participants. I think the real message to get out was to show a love for their adopted new home – even if their current status is more of a dysfunctional foster thing than an outright adoption by the country.

 

The organizers this time around know there was negative backlash to being openly hostilke to America, so the message got tweaked for the better.

 

The fact that a lot of participants have very different expectations of what realistically should happen legislatively also means that the message has to remain loose – that immigrant workers are a net benefit to our country and not a drain. Not all the participants are demanding immigrant amnesty, and hopefully a more tempered voice asking for a registered worker program with a clear path to citizenship takes sway.

 

YAS, of course the real intent is not to hurt the nation's economy. That is why this was a well coordinatted one day event. Make any economic impact a blip and not a sustained boycott, to get a message across without truly doing damage or risking business closures, jobs, etc.

Maybe that was it.

 

Also my expectations were for more of a buzz, a rally type atmosphere, but it felt more like a festival type feeling. I have been to a few rallies and speaking engagement, and there is a certian high that people have coming out of them, and that wasn't there yesterday. I know when I attended the rally for steel workers who didn't want Bush to drop the steel tariffs a few years ago, people were leaving that rally buzzing, and ready for action. I got the same feeling after attending a rally for the Democratic Socialists of America. I expected that yesterday, but I didn't see it at all.

 

To me it was strange, and not at all what I would have thought.

Catholic Nuns Ask Congress to Pass Humane Immigration Legislation

 

Call for focus on root causes of immigration, not criminalizing those who seek opportunity

 

WHAT: The Sisters of Mercy will hold a press conference to call on Congress to pass a compassionate immigration bill - one that addresses the factors underlying cross-border imigration.

 

Speakers include:

 

    * Sr. Mary Waskowiak, RSM, President, Institute of the Sisters of Mercy of the Americas

    * Sr. Gaye Moorhead, RSM, President, Sisters of Mercy of the Americas - Rochester Regional Community

    * Sr. Sheila Browne, RSM, President, Sisters of Mercy of the Americas - Auburn Regional Community

    * Most Reverend Francisco González, S.F., Auxiliary Bishop of Washington, DC

    * Sr. Simone Campbell, SSS, National Coordinator, NETWORK

 

WHO:The Sisters of Mercy of the Americas, joined by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops; NETWORK, A National Catholic Social Justice Lobby; the Catholic Alliance for the Common Good; and CLINIC (Catholic Legal Immigration Center).

 

WHEN:Thursday, May 4, 2006 at 10:45 a.m. EST

 

WHERE:Russell Senate Office Building, Room 428A, Washington, DC

 

WHY:Any authentic Christian response to immigration must seek to address the issue's root causes, while placing strong emphasis on protecting the lives and dignity of those who work hard to secure a better future.

 

###

 

The Sisters of Mercy of the Americas are an international community of women religious vowed to serve people who suffer from poverty, sickness and lack of education, with a special concern for women and children.  In innovative and traditional ways, Sisters of Mercy address human needs through collaborative efforts in education, health care, housing, and pastoral and social services.  Among Sisters of Mercy one can find doctors, lawyers and paralegals, theologians, immigrant advocates, missionaries, justice advocates and peace activists, prisoners of conscience, and foster mothers.  The Institute includes 25 regional communities with 4,515 sisters who serve in North, South and Central America, the Caribbean, Guam and the Philippines.  More than 2,800 associates, several Companions in Mercy, over 600 Mercy Volunteer Corps alumni, and hundreds of co-workers in Mercy-sponsored programs and institutions also share in our mission, following the example of Mercy foundress, Catherine McAuley.  For more information on how to join us in standing in solidarity with immigrants, go to http://www.sistersofmercy.org/justice/immigration

Maybe that was it. 

 

Also my expectations were for more of a buzz, a rally type atmosphere, but it felt more like a festival type feeling.  I have been to a few rallies and speaking engagement, and there is a certian high that people have coming out of them, and that wasn't there yesterday.  I know when I attended the rally for steel workers who didn't want Bush to drop the steel tariffs a few years ago, people were leaving that rally buzzing, and ready for action.  I got the same feeling after attending a rally for the Democratic Socialists of America.  I expected that yesterday, but I didn't see it at all. 

 

To me it was strange, and not at all what I would have thought.

 

Didn't you admit to getting there after it was over?

 

The accounts that I've heard are different from yours, and it sounded like there was certainly a buzz and rally atmosphere during the march and main speakers.

You know what? I'm tired of all this crap. These people are lawbreakers and need to be deported. Too many people have played by the rules, including the manager of the Chicago White Sox, and those people don't need to be insulted by a double standard. Send the illegals home ... use force if needed.

Didn't you admit to getting there after it was over?   

 

The accounts that I've heard are different from yours, and it sounded like there was certainly a buzz and rally atmosphere during the march and main speakers.

 

It was supposed to go until 4:30, but there were tons of people streaming out when I was walking around between 3:30-3:45. Either it was over early, or literally tens of thousands of people didn't think it was important enough to stick around for the whole thing. Either way the people leaving didn't seem like they had just been to a political rally for the future of 12 million people. If you would have put turkey legs in peoples hands, I would have swore I was looking at Taste of Chicago.

From Slate.com

 

http://www.slate.com/id/2140846/nav/tap2/

 

The Roots of May Day

Today's marchers are liberals' best hope.

By Nelson Lichtenstein

Posted Monday, May 1, 2006, at 4:10 PM ET

 

Today's May Day marches are putting hundreds of thousands on the street and have politicized more people than anything since the height of the civil rights movement. Like every other massive social protest in American history, the events have generated their share of fear. Democrats and some leaders of D.C.-based immigrant groups worry that the call to boycott work and shut down Latino-dependent businesses will generate a backlash. Republicans and nativists see them as un-American.

 

But all this is beside the point, a tiff that misses the marches' transformative impact. These May Day demonstrations and boycotts return the American protest tradition to its turn-of-the-20th-century ethnic proletarian origins—a time when, in the United States as well as in much of Europe, the quest for citizenship and equal rights was inherent in the fight for higher wages, stronger unions, and more political power for the working class.

 

Because today's marches are on a workday, they recall the mass strikes and marches that turned workers out of factories that convulsed America in the decades after the great railway strike of 1877, the first national work stoppage in the United States. Asserting their citizenship against the autocracy embodied by the big railroad corporations, the Irish and Germans of Baltimore and Pittsburgh burned roundhouses and fought off state militia in a revolt that frightened both the rail barons and the federal government. Hence the 19th-century construction of all those center-city National Guard armories, with rifle slits designed to target unruly crowds. The protesters wanted not only higher pay and a recognized trade union but a new birth of egalitarian freedom. Indeed, May Day itself, as an international workers holiday, arose out of a May 1, 1886, Chicago strike for the eight-hour workday. The fight for leisure—clearly lost today—was a great unifying aspiration of the immigrant workers movement a century ago with its slogan, "eight hours for work, eight hours for sleep, eight hours for what we will."

 

The largest mobilization of immigrant workers in U.S. history occurred in 1919, when President Woodrow Wilson's rhetorical celebration of self-determination and "industrial democracy," or self-rule at the workplace, echoed across steel districts from Homestead, Pa., to Gary, Ind. Strike organizers printed their handbills in 15 different languages. Immigrant churches and working-class lodge halls served as soup kitchens. The strikers called the mounted police "Cossacks." All these eruptions, which would successfully Americanize millions of immigrants in the 1930s, blended trade unionism, ethnic self-consciousness, and the demand for full citizenship. That unity proved essential for a long season of New Deal hegemony. And that's why this spring's awakening of a new generation of immigrant working-class half-citizens holds such promise for liberals.

 

The last of these great labor-strike demonstrations came in 1947. On an April workday, the United Automobile Workers flooded Detroit's Cadillac Square with more than a quarter million of its members to protest congressional enactment of the Taft-Hartley Act, which curbed union strike power and disqualified radicals from labor leadership. Most laborites called Taft-Hartley a "slave labor law." Then as now, the leaders of the demonstration were divided over tactics. The left, and not just those oriented toward the Communists, wanted to shut down the factories so that American unions could deploy, as one top UAW officer put it, "the kind of political power which is most effective in Europe." More cautious unionists, led by UAW President Walter Reuther, sought a huge demonstration but one that began only after workers clocked out for the day. Capitalizing on these internal divisions, and on the early Cold War hostility to labor radicalism and political insurgency, the auto companies took their pound of flesh. They fired key militants and cut off the tradition of white, working-class strike demonstrations in industrial cities for the rest of the 20th century.

 

For our generation, as for the one before it, the idea that we might change the conditions of work life and the structure of politics has seemed either radical fantasy or Parisian self-indulgence. Celebrations of May Day, the holiday that embodies that imagined link, have been consigned to the most self-conscious and marginal radicals. In 1958, President Dwight D. Eisenhower proclaimed May 1 "Law Day" so as to snuff out any proletarian embers that might have continued to smolder through the Cold War.

 

The 1960s civil rights and anti-war movements kept their distance from workplace actions, which became the province of an increasingly stolid and constrained trade unionism. The protests of that era were almost always held on weekends. The 1963 March on Washington, where Martin Luther King Jr. gave his "I Have a Dream" speech, took place on a sweltering Saturday afternoon. There were plenty of protest signs paid for by the union movement, but no factories shut down that day. The same is true of the big anti-war marches, and American feminists and gay-rights advocates have continued that tradition. The linkage between workplace protest and civil engagement has been broken—one reason that the boycotts and work stoppages today seem so novel and controversial.

 

When weekday work stoppages did take place, their marginality, and even alienation, from mainstream America was revealing. Arab workers put down their tools in June 1967 to protest U.S. support of Israel in the midst of the Six Day War. Millions of black workers left work when they learned of MLK's assassination on April 4, 1968, but black power efforts to use the strike to build a radical movement on the assembly lines largely failed in Detroit a year later. Today's marches and boycotts are restoring to May Day something of its old civic meaning and working-class glory. Even some of the most viciously anti-union employers of Latino labor, like Perdue, Cargill, and Tyson Foods, kept their factories closed. As in the crucial struggles that began more than a century ago, today's marches have forged a link among working-class aspiration, celebrations of ethnic identity, and insistence on full American citizenship. It's an explosive combination. And it could revive and reshape liberal politics in our time.

It did nothing but make more American's go against them. It was all about Illegal immigrants not legal immigrants they have no right to demand anything from US government.

Didn't you admit to getting there after it was over?   

 

The accounts that I've heard are different from yours, and it sounded like there was certainly a buzz and rally atmosphere during the march and main speakers.

YOU *WANT* this to be more then it was. Thanks for clarifying this.

YOU *WANT* this to be more then it was.  Thanks for clarifying this.

 

* *

While not agreeing much with the protestors' issues, I have to say that I LOVED THEIR BOYCOTT yesterday.

 

The freeways were clear, no traffic on the surface streets, no one hassling you at Home Depot, supposedly clear emergency rooms - this is how life in LA SHOULD be everyday.

well, there was more self control in this protest

 

no flag burning, ect.