Join the Largest Social Movement of Our Decade

By Valerie Benavidez, WireTap. Posted April 7, 2006.

You are about to meet the largest social movement of our decade. All across the country young people are organizing. Immigrants and non-immigrants, we are taking to the streets to protest some of the most racist legislation to ever enter the halls of Congress. We are walking out of our schools, organizing the social justice community and rallying our statehouses. April 10 will be the National Day of Action for Immigrant Justice, and it will be the biggest day of demonstrations around the nation.

We urge you to join local groups, participate in the actions on April 10 and speak your voice through the ballot box. What happens to this community is happening to all of us, especially young people of color. The immigrant rights movement is the quintessential movement of this decade. The House proposal to make 12 million immigrants into felons is a truly criminal idea.

I'm a Latina who grew up in a predominately white rural community in Texas. My father is a Mexican immigrant, and my mother is a Mexican who was born and raised in San Antonio. I'm a Mexican who was born in the United States to citizen parents. So, I'm one of the lucky ones, right?

As I watch my country debate immigration reform, I question just how lucky I am. What exactly would ripping families apart, destroying children's livelihoods and perpetuating a culture of fear and blatant racism for young people of color in the United States do?

I grew up hearing the word "wetback" being used all over my town of Kerrville, "I've got some wetbacks working on my ranch," or "He's a pretty good wetback." I also learned quickly that my lower middle-class status afforded me certain social rights. I could be told by my affluent white friends, "You're different Val, you're not like the other ones." Something about the way people took pride in telling me "you're not like the other ones," always stuck out as wrong in my head. Most of my parents' friends were Mexican families, and we were often in the hood visiting our closest family friends and having various celebrations together.

While my white friends went on skiing vacations, Disney World vacations, and Florida beach vacations, my family took the same vacation every year -- one big road trip through South Texas to H.E.B. grocery store in Laredo to fill the car up with as much food and other essentials -- sugar, cooking oil, toilet paper, paper towels -- as we could for my great-grandmother and extended Mexican family.

My great-grandmother, "Abuelita," had a personal favorite -- Cheetos Puffs, because she didn't have teeth anymore and could fizzle them down easily with some soda. We always remembered the Cheetos. After we bought groceries, we'd cross the Texas-Mexico border in Roma, and entered Miguel Aleman, Mexico. At that point I said good bye to air-conditioning, paved roads, a bathtub and sleeping on anything other than some blankets on a concrete floor.

After a week of broken Spanish conversations, attending mass with my great-grandmother, having my hair brushed and braided by various aunts, eating mangos and paletas, and bathing in a metal trough on the front porch, we would leave Mexico and return to the United States. My parents would take us to Port Isabel, South Padre Island, and we would fish for a couple of days and play on the beach before we returned home to Kerrville.

I always knew I wasn't like the others, and the others in my opinion were the middle-class white families that so much wanted my total assimilation. I was a good student, and I did achieve, but I knew who I was. I had a tremendous amount of respect for every Mexican worker I ever encountered. Each worker was a part of my identity, and what was said about that worker and that worker's family was a reflection upon my own.

It is because of my sense of identity and my knowledge of the family history that the current legislative proposals in the immigration reform package infuriate me. I sat in silence and shock when I read that there was a proposal on the table to make every undocumented person in this country a felon.

Valerie Benavidez is the Alliance and Advocacy Director for the League of Young Voters.

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