Immigrant rights event draws big crowd

By Minnie Bruce Pratt
Syracuse, N.Y.

May 28, 2009

“Immigrant,” a bilingual community event on immigrant rights in Syracuse, held in the Blodgett High School cafeteria, drew a standing-room-only, multinational crowd of more than 110 people on May 14. Some participants traveled from as far as Buffalo, Rochester, Binghamton and Manhattan. La Casita Cultural Center Project organized the event, in collaboration with the Detention Task Force and the May 1st Coalition for Worker and Immigrant Rights/International Migrants Alliance.

From left, Luz Incarnación, José Peréz, Caroline Kim, Teresa Gutierrez, Aly Wane. photo: Leslie Feinberg

The event lasted several hours—from tapas to dinner to music. All remarks were translated into both Spanish and English. The program included panels, which gave voice to struggling undocumented workers, and round tables on the roots of migration and immigrant rights. Lead organizer for La Casita, Immaculada Lara-Bonilla declared: “The event succeeded in meeting our goals—to share stories of migration, illegal arrests and racial profiling; to provide information about legal rights for immigrants; to bring together different advocacy groups and the local Latino/a community and strengthen existing support networks; and to celebrate culture as a form of empowerment, including awareness about immigrant people’s cultural rights.”

Alison Mountz, an organizer with the DTF, said: “This event provided an opportunity for members of the DTF to meet and work in solidarity with groups across New York state. Hundreds of people have been arrested at workplaces across central New York and at the Syracuse train and bus station, as they have downstate. Often the families of those arrested on buses and trains live elsewhere, so we have been building a network to help families locate loved ones who disappear into the system.”

The DTF has been holding moving pickets and handing out leaflets at the Regional Transportation Center in Syracuse to protest the detentions by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Immigrant workers are also now being arrested by ICE at construction sites in the area, including the Carousel Mall.

Spontaneous applause greeted the remarks of Teresa Gutierrez, of the May 1st Coalition and the International Migrants Alliance, when she said: “I didn’t cross the border. The border crossed me.” Gutierrez, a Tejana, referred to the imperialist seizure by the U.S. of portions of Mexico in 1848, including what is now the state of Texas.

She pointed out that as corporations move throughout the world to make profits by exploiting workers, immigrants should certainly have a right to move wherever they need to. In response to a question from Gutierrez, a majority of those in the room raised a hand to indicate they were born in the U.S. Gutierrez emphasized that their solidarity was crucial to stopping the crises of racist profiling, check points and prison detention of immigrants.