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1 BandingTogether for Survival The phone rang at the California immigration organization, and the message was urgent: a man was on the verge of death. Rushing to the site, the staffers discovered to their horror a person reduced to “skin and bones, almost like a cadaver, or like the people found after World War II at the gas chambers. The people that brought him abandoned him in the desert,” according to one of the rescuers, Soledad “Chole” Alatorre.1 This was but the latest outrage that she and her colleague Bert Corona had encountered. When some growers detained workers in empty gasoline barrels, Alatorre likened this “hateful and underhanded” treatment to slavery. Similar incidents in Florida resulted in the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) mounting a photo exhibition about contemporary slavery in the fields. “When CIW co-director Lucas Benitez speaks of ending chattel slavery, he’s hardly exaggerating,” reported The Nation. “His organization has pushed the Department of Justice to prosecute five agricultural slavery rings in the South. In one case, undocumented workers had been bought from smugglers and kept under armed watch, their wages garnisheed to pay for their housing and other ‘debts.’”2 Simmering resentment over such horrors helped lay the groundwork for the mass immigration marches of 2006 (with the spark provided by a congressional bill that, if enacted, would have made it a felony to violate immigration regulations or even to assist an undocumented immigrant). In the history of the United States, never had so many demonstrators turned out. From Chicago to the Deep South, they marched in 140 cities, with more than a million demonstrators in Los Angeles alone. Incredibly, the mass movement took place virtually without incident, with people mostly wearing white shirts and carrying American flags. Almost universally, they cast their message in terms of sober civic engagement, as if to give lie to those characterizing immigrants in general and Mexicans in particular as ignorant aliens lurking in the shadows. By demanding legislation to regularize the legal status of millions of people residing in the United States, the activism served notice to policy makers that immigrants were not some sort of disembodied “problem.” 4 chapter 1 Despite the banner headlines, however, one major aspect went virtually unreported: the self-help/mutual aid organizations so instrumental in this mobilization. Called hometown associations (HTAs) (Clubes de Oriundos in Spanish), each HTA is comprised of people from the same hometown in Mexico. It was not media outlets but rather three Latina social scientists who noted that “the three states that experienced the largest turnouts in the spring, 2006 marches, by far—California, Texas, and Illinois—are also the three states that together account for the vast majority of Mexican HTAs.” Indeed, although the US immigrant population is diverse, Mexicans famously constitute the largest cohort, as has been the case for decades . Thus, the second-most prominent flag, after the Stars and Stripes, was that of Mexico. As a report by the Russell Sage Foundation noted, “Due in part to sheer numbers and new destinations, the most recent waves of Mexican immigration are leading to fundamental yet energizing social change in American society.” After all, as they noted, “Mexico shares a 2,000-mile border with the United States and has become the country’s second most important trading partner,” even as “Mexican-origin communities in the Southwest . . . predate the arrival of Euro-Americans, as the names of streets, rivers, cities and states attest.”3 Certainly this is true of the marches’ epicenter, Los Angeles, with Mexicans the largest group of new residents—and also the largest population group when the city was part of Mexico. At the Los Angeles marches of 2006 and 2010, many of the placards featured Bert Corona. He passed away in 2001, and the rescue by Corona and Alatorre of the skeletal immigrant in the desert in fact took place some forty years ago. In the words of Alatorre, “We saw what would happen in the future.”4 Yes, Corona and Alatorre’s Hermandad Mexicana Nacional (HMN) anticipated today’s immigrant organizing . Their trailblazing organization at the same time drew on an even older tradition, the mutualista movement of the early 1900s. HMN constituted “a mutualista organization, a self-help social service agency that was also utilized as an organizing strategy,” according to one researcher.5 Alatorre herself puts it this way: “We said, ‘This we’re not going to be able to do by ourselves,’ for there were so very...

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