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IMMIGRANTS FROM A DEEPER SOUTH When Mexican artist Diego Rivera traveled to the great metropolis of New York City during the Great Depression, he was both “amazed and appalled” at the shantytowns, breadlines, starvation, and suicides that he found to be endemic to a city that was for non-natives like him the very symbol of the United States. As New York journalist Pete Hamill wrote in his book on Rivera in 1999, the heavy-set, cigar-chomping, “‘big-jowled paisano’” and world-famous muralist proceeded to paint his conflicting views in one of his most compelling works, Frozen Assets. The painting is a haunting depiction of the American metropolis as a place of towering, overwhelming wealth and power built atop the countless, faceless legions of its anonymous workers.1 “At the top loomed skyscrapers like mausoleums reaching up into the cold night,” Rivera once said about his painting. “Underneath them people were going home, miserably crushed together in the subway trains. In the center was a wharf used by the homeless unemployed as their dormitory, with a muscular cop standing guard. In the lower part of the panel, I showed another side of this society: a steel-grilled deposit vault in which a lady was depositing her jewels while other persons waited their turn to enter the sanctum.”2 In 1930s New York, many of those people “miserably crushed together ” were likely immigrants or the children of the earlier great waves of immigrants from Ireland or Southern, Central, and Eastern Europe, the ones escaping the barren farms, ghettoes, and pogroms of their motherland to accept the beckoning of poet Emma Lazarus inscribed at the base of the Statue of Liberty: Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.3 Chapter 12 210 211 Immigrants from a Deeper South Many of those earlier generations of immigrants brought with them radical, sometimes even socialist, ideas about the relationship between work and capital. With names like Dubinsky, Potovksy, Hill, Hillman, Reuther, Frankensteen, and Zaritsky, they and their counterparts elsewhere in the country would play a great role in expanding the U.S. labor movement and its challenge to capital’s otherwise unfettered dominance. A new generation of immigrants is now landing on America’s shores, and many of them come from Diego Rivera’s homeland. Most are just as tired and poor as those Emma Lazarus had in mind. They’ve come to work, to send money to their families back home, perhaps, too, to establish themselves for good in a new homeland. Unlike those “huddled masses” Rivera saw at the base of the skyscraper canyons of New York, many in this new generation of immigrants are coming to the U.S. South, a region whose own backwater poverty so long stood in great contrast to the rest of the nation. This is a region that has known sprinklings of immigrants—the Chinese and Italians of the Mississippi Delta, the Cubans in Tampa and Miami—but never a wave of this proportion in its modern history. These immigrants come from a land where revolutionaries Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata were heroes of the people, where the great populist murals of Rivera, David Álfaro Siqueiros, and José Clemente Orozco are national treasures. Even in the United States, they can point to César Chávez, the legendary founder of the United Farm Workers union, as one of their own. They are part of yet another “new” South that finally may never again be able to divide itself solely according to a racial fault line of black and white. Their voices are being increasingly heard, although the press has yet to see them as fully incorporated into society. When tens of thousands of immigrants in the South and around the country marched and chanted, “¡Si Se puede!” (“Yes! We can!”) during “National Day of Action for Immigration Justice” on April 10, 2006, the nation listened— even if just briefly. Victories gained by the Farm Labor Organizing Committee (FLOC) in North Carolina and the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) in Florida are part of a nationwide movimiento in which these new immigrants are taking a stand for their rights. Still, on a day-to-day basis, they remain largely invisible even though they’ve been arriving in large numbers for more than a decade. Night had descended outside, blanketing the corner of Martin Luther King and Main with a gloomy darkness. East Biloxi...

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