I'm an illegal Immigrant too! I support the Boycott on May 1st! Does that make me an illegal? I'm a proud seventh generation Californian, I have ancestors who founded the city of LA back when the US was only 13 colonies and also have native blood that settled here via the frozen bearing straights who knows how long ago!
How many of those illegal immigrants came here because of the foreign policies of the US? Think of all the wars that were inspired by Yankee Imperialism down south of the border and once you become educated you will understand why they come here with the US Government placing their hand picked dictators to enslave those populations then training the death squads to keep them in line you will see the US is the one that created all of the reasons for them leaving their homelands!
http://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/warisaracket.htmlHere is a letter to the editor sent to me.
Quiet Insurrections! -May Day, Letter to the Editor and Grandmother's tales
To all:
On the crest of the impending wave about to strike every city and town this
Monday, I offer the following musings: The first is a letter to the editor, I
sent to both the L.A. Times and the Pasadena Star News. The second; My
Grandmother's Knitting Needles, was first published in LoudMouth Magazine, Cal
State L.A.'s Feminist Newspaper in Issue 4: Winter 2004. It is the story of
my own grandmother and a reminder that if we dig deep enough, most of us will
find that at least one member of our family is an immigrant with dubious entry
documents, or no documents at all. While current immigrants hail mostly from
Mexico, Central America and Asia, immigration discrimination has been a national
plague dating back to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and since then,
reflected in one piece of repressive legislation after another; directed
mostly against peoples of Asia, the global South and Eastern and Southern
Europe. Poor working conditions, exploited labor, insufficient educational
programs have long plagued wave after wave of immigrants. The exploitation of
undocumented workers has been a keystone of U.S. capital. The pejorative anti-
Italian term WOP, simply means, "without papers", used to refer to undocumented
immigrants, by greedy employers. The term was used universally, it simply stuck
on the Italians.
So, I hope to make my way down to the demonstrations on Monday, but should my
health limit my participation, I offer these quiet insurrections.
Peace with justice, from occupied Atzlan,
Emma Rosenthal
________________________________
Dear Editor:
Only workers in the United States and Great Britain have to declare a boycott
on May first, not to go to work on that day. In all the other countries in the
world, May Day is a holiday: International Workers' Day, which grew out of the
Haymarket Riots in Chicago, Ill. in 1886 when eleven people were killed during
a demonstration, when a bomb went off in the crowd, and police fired on strikers
fighting for the eight hour work day. Five activists, four (German) immigrants
-anarchists, were accused of throwing the bomb, and despite witness testimony
to the contrary, were hung, executed by the state. May Day grew into an
international holiday, but in the U.S. due to red baiting and reactionary labor
and governmental policies, an alternate Labor Day became the official holiday.
Cleverly timed for the first Monday in September, before the school year begins,
working class contributions and consciousness are little recognized even for one
day, in our nation's schools.
Few workers in the U.S. know the words to Solidarity Forever, leave alone the
words to the Internationale, few know about the Haymarket strike or the Uprising
of the twenty thousand. Few know who Samuel Gompers or Eugene Debs are. We are
a people from many lands, torn up by the roots, wandering aimlessly, unaware of
our own past as immigrants or as workers.
But this Monday brings a new breeze to the U.S. and labor landscape, because we
are about to witness, and many of us are about to participate in the largest
strike, perhaps the largest mass mobilization, in U.S. history. It is no
accident that we are brought back to our own history, our own May Day by
immigrant workers, reminding us of the international holiday that actually began
on U.S. soil. Oh the many contributions of immigrants to our wide, deep and
varied cultural mosaic.
These are exciting times indeed.
Emma Rosenthal
__________________________________
My Grandmother's Knitting Needles
By Emma Rosenthal
"What the woman who labors wants is to live, not simply exist--the right to
life as the rich woman has it, the right to life, and the sun, and music, and
art. You have nothing that the humblest worker has not a right to have also. The
worker must have bread, but she must have roses too." -Garment worker Rose
Schneiderman, August 1912
Her hands moved like mercury. The click clack of the needles, back and forth,
the yarn spinning from the ball on the floor into the moving swarm of hands and
needles, emerging as form, as hats, gloves, scarves, sweaters. "Watch and
learn," she would tell me, and I tried but all I saw was the miraculous
transformation of a ball of yarn into cloth. She had grandmother hands, bumpy
where the veins stood out, loose soft skin.
"Before a girl could get married in my village she had to prove that she was
patient enough for the task," she told me. "They would give her a bundle of
tangled yarn," she would say, as we would struggle to untangle wool, or rope
or extension cords. She told the story as she wound yarn into balls for
knitting. "If she could not untangle the yarn, she could not get married."
I remember that story every time I have something to untangle. I would never
settle for a village marriage, but patience is a skill applied to any task
worthy of completion.
By the time she was five she had lost her entire immediate family. It is not
clear if they died of illness and starvation, or were killed in pogroms,
massacres committed by Polish or Russian authorities against the Jewish peasants
throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Either way, it was
governmental policies towards the Jews that killed them, living in the region
that was Poland one day, Russia the next, bombarded by Cossacks, government
sanctioned thugs that rode in on horseback killing and destroying everything in
their sight, slashing open the bellies of pregnant women, raping children,
killing the livestock, burning homes. She remembered being thrown into a root
cellar by her aunt when she was only six to hide from the Cossacks, hidden among
the carrots and parsnips, potatoes and rutabagas while death, destruction,
ravaged in the streets above her. At six, she landed on Ellis Island in New York
Harbor, with her aunt and nephews, on the false passport of her dead cousin.
They came to join her uncle in New York, in America, where there is such
abundance that they shovel gold in the streets. What she found was the tenements
of New York's Lower East Side. Delancy Street, Hester Street. A three room,
cold water walk up flat on the fourth floor. There was no bath, the toilet was
in the hallway, shared by all the families on the floor. She slept in the
kitchen.
   She decided to go to work. At age nine she went to the factory by day and
school at night. Now she had three different identities, as common to the
immigrant experience as cheap labor and cloth dust. She was of course, herself
“ Anna Kaufman “ daughter of Aaron Moses Kaufman and Choma Reingold. Her
passport gave her the identity of her dead cousin. And now she had a third set
of documents, for work, identifying her as a thirteen year old. She found
employment in an umbrella factory, making the tips of umbrellas.
She worked there for three years. By the time she was 12, she was able to
make every part of the umbrella and was now a shop forelady. It was that year,
1909 that a strike broke out in the garment industry. The strike, led mostly by
Jewish and Italian immigrant teenagers, was named the Uprising of the 20,000.
Not a machine whirred, not a wheel turned. The strike that began on November 22,
1909, lasted almost four months, through the winter and ended on March 8, 1910.
She wasn"t a leader in the strike, but she left her lofted position of middle
management and walked out with the other workers in one of American history's
biggest strikes. "I didn"t want to be a scab," she told me.
Such a different world, where a 12 year old girl knows the sanctity of a
picket line and the importance of righteous bread.
" Watch and learn," she would tell me, her hands moving like silver as
yarn became cloth. "Watch and learn." She would tell me.
I still can't knit. I never have crossed a picket line.
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