It had become common for undocumented activists announce themselves in the media one night—omitting details like their full names that might incriminate them—only to see their families’ homes raided the next. Documented allies saw their job as shielding the undocumented activists. Their allyship was based on the idea of defending the right of the undocumented to stay. What would it mean if undocumented youths decided to sacrifice their futures by placing themselves, unprotected, on the front line?
Many undocumented activists had come to feel they were running out of time. It had been three years since Comprehensive Immigration Reform had tanked. No new immigration bill had been announced, and the DREAM Act was now stalled, too. Each year they waited, they got closer to aging out of the window to qualify. What good was it to wait for an all-clear signal from Washington, DC? They were tired of being spoken for, talked to, and trotted out for press conferences. No more fear, no more shame, no more shadows.
The gathering voted to support a National Coming Out Day. On March 10, demonstrations were held across the country. In Chicago’s Federal Plaza, Tania rose to speak:
What does it mean to “come out”? ¿Qué quiere decir “salir de las sombras”? “Coming out” means telling a friend, a loved one, a classmate, a teacher, something that otherwise you would have kept private. It is using our lives and stories as a political tool for change.…
“Brothers and sisters, we must come out,” said Harvey Milk in 1978. “Come out to your relatives, come out to your friends, if indeed they are your friends, come out to your neighbors, to your fellow workers, to the people who work where you eat and shop, but once and for all, let’s break down the myths, destroy the lies and distortions.”
Inspiring, you know?
Except, except that we want to make it very clear that we are not here asking for acceptance. We are asking for change. We are asking for a chance to be able to contribute fully to our communities and our societies. We are asking for legalization.
I am going to ask you to imagine for a minute a country where twelve million people decide to come out of the shadows—an unstoppable movement of immigrants turned storytellers turned political activists for change.
Can you imagine living in a country where you can walk out of your house without wondering if you will ever come back?
When you can answer the door without fearing that it’s Immigration knocking and they have finally come for you?
Where you can vote?
Where you are allowed to be careless every once in a while because one mistake will not get you deported?
Where you can travel without having to make plans for which lawyer you’re going to call and who will tell your brothers and sisters or children or mother that you are not coming home as scheduled?
Can you imagine a country where we are free?
Last night—last night, when we were coming up with this list of possibilities I wish you could have seen the smiles on our faces. This world is possible.
So undocumented brothers and sisters, let’s come out and organize. Come out in your church. Tell your teachers, tell your friends. Ask the DJ for a mic at your next party and announce it over the speakers: I Am Undocumented.
The same day, from Los Angeles to Kansas City to Little Rock, undocumented youths were coming out to tell their stories. They introduced themselves and they stated—in another IYJL-coined-slogan—that they were “undocumented and unafraid.” The movement had found its voice.
Mohammad—a gay Iranian American whose family’s immigration application had been denied because their attorney had not informed them the fees had increased by $20—began quietly organizing the core of those who would end up in McCain’s office in Tucson. He sought out the activists who were especially energized by Tania’s proposal.
Lizbeth Mateo was the daughter of a taxi driver who had fled political unrest in Mexico. Her parents had received their green cards, but she had aged out of qualifying for her own as their child. She put herself through Cal State Northridge by working at restaurants, and began organizing undocumented classmates.
Yahaira had come to the United States for the first time with her seventeen-year-old single mother as an infant. After a second crossing at the age of eight, she settled in Napa Valley, where her mother found work doing housekeeping in a nursing home. The third time, she nearly drowned in the river passage.
She came of age in Kansas City, and even as her family disintegrated, she graduated near the top of her class. But when her peers went to college, Yahaira went to work. Only later did she find private universities that welcomed undocumented students. It took her eight years—and countless jobs—to receive her bachelor’s degree. She had also begun her activism, and soon found her way into the burgeoning national network of young organizers.
Mohammad posed a simple question: “What do you think would happen if a bunch of DREAM Act leaders got placed into deportation proceedings?” All of their work around deportations had confirmed that people could be mobilized to save leaders from deportation. Each of them had come to the same conclusion: the next stage of escalation would be to purposefully seek arrest and risk deportation.
Mohammad was persuading them they could be those leaders. They could sacrifice themselves. They could galvanize people. They might even be able to document conditions in the immigration detention centers, and organize detainees around human rights issues. The idea was insane, they all agreed, and it had to be done. And so they decided they would leave for Arizona after their May lobbying visit to Washington, DC.
But first, Yahaira needed to talk to her mother.
One afternoon, Yahaira had been driving home from an event when she came upon a DUI checkpoint. She panicked. For a moment she was certain she would be pulled over and it would all end, her entire American life. But she passed through, and the next morning when she was at her law office job, Mohammad reached her on Google Chat. The topic of their discussion was “This Crazy Idea.”
Now she had to tell her mother about her decision.
Why you? her mother asked.
She answers, If it’s not us, then who is going to do it? I am tired. I am tired of living like this. If I am going to leave, it is going to be on my terms. It won’t be at a driver’s license checkpoint, it won’t be outside a grocery store. I can’t do it anymore. And whether it’s now or whether it’s later, I’m going to be outta here by the time I’m 30 if something doesn’t change. I want to make sure I can leave knowing I did everything I could to change it, to fix my situation, in a sense. To have a shot, to say that I tried until I couldn’t try anymore. And there would be no additional questions, nothing else that I could ask myself. Really, is there anything else that is more in my control than that?
Her mother says, But you have a good job, you are getting paid $11.25 an hour. You are working in an office, air-conditioned. You’re doing really well.
But this isn’t the life I wanted for myself. I want more. You taught me that. You taught me to fight for my happiness. And you said that you brought me here because you wanted me to be happy. I’m trying.
Ok. I don’t like it. But it’s your life. You make that choice. I just really want you to think about it.
I have, Mom. Yeah.
Yahaira gave her Kansas City group final instructions on how to take care of her mother, to make sure that if it all went awry she would have a support system, that she would be fine. Then she left.
Now the press release has gone out, the social media activated, the Web site launched, the groups are at home on high alert. The demonstration has begun.
McCain’s secretary is making it easy. Clear a path for fire access, she says. And all those press people can’t come in all at once. Let them in one at a time. Everyone in the media will get their interview, their photo op. The reporters and photographers and cameramen line up for their turns. A policeman brings the DREAMers cookies.
At that moment, across the street, in Tucson’s gleaming new federal building, an i
mmigration judge is presiding over a model of bureaucratic efficiency bluntly known as the “Streamline.”
Every weekday at 2:00 p.m., a line of a dozen orange-jumpsuited immigrants—shackled at the wrists and ankles and chained to each other, many of whom do not even speak Spanish but languages indigenous to villages from southern Mexico to Nicaragua—shuffles into a courtroom well to face the judge, their skins dark from the desert sun, chapped by wind and heat.
Lawyers and translators move into position as the judge reads the immigrants their charges. Each pleads guilty. All of them are then quickly shuffled off, for the next dozen to step in. Within the past forty-eight hours, these invisible men and women have been spotted and captured by ICE. Within another forty-eight hours all of them will be disappeared, most likely on a bus to the other side of the wall in Nogales, left to the goodwill of Catholic soup kitchens in a teeming city some of them have never seen.
The DREAMers know this is happening. They yearn to intertwine themselves with these immigrants’ stories and longings. They know they have the privilege to ask: who is American? Who is human?
A Tucson police sergeant is mediating between them and the McCain staff. Five o’clock passes. 5:30. He looks at Mohammad. You remind me of my son. He says to them all, You have to think about your futures. What if you want to get jobs? What if you want to vote? What if you ever want to run for office?
At 6:30, the sergeant gives a final warning. The group has been deliberating over the complexities of Tania’s case, and convinced her it’s OK for her not to be arrested, but instead to be their spokesperson. She stands to depart.
The sergeant says, I just want you to know there will be no handcuffs unless you resist. I’m not interested in making this a show. You can come willingly or not.
They follow him to the police van. Mohammad and Raul are separated from Lizbeth and Yahaira. Lizbeth waves in thanks to the hundreds of supporters who have gathered outside McCain’s office. The van pulls out toward the federal detention center. Yahaira looks through the caged window at the long line of police cars behind, their lights flashing. Oh my God, we’re actually going to jail, she thinks to herself. This is happening.
By the evening the women are in their prison white, sitting in the holding pen of the Pima County jail, a place called “The Pit,” where all overnight prisoners are held. There are benches but they are not allowed to lie down. It is cold but they will not be offered blankets. Still, there is TV, they will be given sandwiches, and there are people to talk to. Outside their supporters are holding a vigil. Yahaira thinks of her mother. She closes her eyes.
In the morning they can hear the ICE officials through the doors. Who are they? Where is their Web site? They made the cover of the New York Times? What are we supposed to do with them? What is DC saying?
One by one they are called in to see a judge, who reviews their charge—misdemeanor trespassing. Is there an ICE hold? he asks. There is none. Then each is called in to see Department of Homeland Security officials. Yahaira thinks, We’re about to get deported. She thinks about where she may be headed—perhaps Eloy or Florence. She goes over what she is supposed to and not supposed to say.
But DHS is friendly. The hardest question is what she wants from McDonald’s. Then they are being taken into the van, again uncuffed. At 8:30 p.m. they are released from the ICE processing center. They had planned to be in detention for two weeks. They had planned to be placed into deportation proceedings. None of that will happen. After less than thirty-six hours they are, in a sense, free. There will be a night to celebrate. They will sleep, they will dream. And then they will awake the next morning to plan.
Three days later, undocumented activists shut down Wilshire Boulevard. Hunger strikes break out in six states, including a sit-in at New York senator Charles Schumer’s office. On July 20, twenty undocumented youths from across the country, all in blue gowns and caps, are arrested in Washington, DC, after a day of demonstrations in the Hart Senate Office Building.
By December, with the president’s backing and with Comprehensive Immigration Reform nowhere in sight, the DREAM Act has moved further than it ever has before, passing the House on a close vote. But on the eighteenth, the Act is filibustered by Senate Republicans, effectively killing the bill for yet another Congressional session.
There will be more discord in the movement. “In tears, rage, and love,” Raul Al-qaraz Ochoa will withdraw his support for the DREAM Act over its military service requirement, and the way that politicians use it to justify border militarization and demonize DREAMers’ parents. United We Dream will splinter over tactics, funding, and ideology. The militant DREAMers will be told by the reformers, You are being selfish. You are not thinking of your families, your communities.
But they have also confirmed the wisdom of Lorde’s and Milk’s lessons: Your silence will not protect you. You must come out. Mohammad begins telling activists, If you organize you are safe.
As states like Georgia, Indiana, and Alabama pass copycat SB 1070 laws, a new generation of activists committed to civil disobedience emerges. Protests in Atlanta, Indianapolis, and Montgomery, result in hundreds of arrests of undocumented youths.
The Obama administration gradually eases deportation enforcement against some groups, including DREAM Act–eligible youths, those convicted of minor offenses or traffic violations, and victims of domestic violence and human trafficking. It also allows officials the discretion to consider factors such as “the person’s ties and contributions to the community, including family relationships,” and “whether the person or the person’s spouse suffers from severe mental or physical illness.” In the summer of 2012, activists start to test the gap between federal policy and practice. They follow through on their original idea by getting arrested and infiltrating immigrant detention centers.
The singular image of caps and gowns has become a flood of new images: T-shirts that say “Undocumented Unafraid Unapologetic”; a picket sign that mocks the authorities: “Jail the Worst You Have? Because Our Organizing Starts in Jail!”; posters of all kinds of faces and bodies that simply state “I Exist”; a butterfly with the words “Migration Is Beautiful.”22
On June 4, 2012, two activists walk into an Obama campaign office in Denver—in the heart of a swing state with a big cultural generation gap—and begin a hunger strike. They will leave, they say, when the president agrees to stop deportations. The Undoccupations, as they are called, spread to Obama campaign offices in Los Angeles, Cincinnati, Oakland, and Dearborn.
At the same moment, in New York City, the journalist Jose Antonio Vargas has completed a cover story for Time magazine, a deeply personal piece on the absurdity of the immigration system. His life has been defined by two big secrets. The first he had long reconciled. He had come out as gay in a high school history class. The second threatened to unravel his promising career. The year before, inspired by the youth movement, he had come out as undocumented in a New York Times Magazine article.
His immigration lawyers had worried over the consequences of that article. They counseled him not to reveal so much, that he was committing “legal suicide.” But Jose felt freed. He had shed all his illusions. He had told the truth. He announced that he was forming a nonprofit organization called “Define American” to help other undocumented immigrants tell their story as well. “When we ‘come out,’ we not only liberate ourselves. We ask you to imagine yourselves in our shoes,” he said. “It’s a question of empathy.”
Now the Time staff is asking him about a cover image. They want a portrait of him. He demurs. Why not do a photo, he asks them, that represents the 11.5 million? The staff looks at him dumbfounded. Where are they? they ask. Can we even find any of them? Jose laughs.
National Coming Out Of The Shadows Day, Chicago. March 10, 2011. Immigrant Youth Justice League. Photo by Peter Holderness.
On the cover he is surrounded by thirty-five young undocumented immigrants from fifteen countries, including South Korea, Brazil, Israel, Nige
ria, Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Germany, and Peru, the faces of colorized America. They are all in low light. They seem to be coming out of the shadows. The cover line reads:
WE ARE AMERICANS
It is midnight the day the story is posted online. Jose had begun the week editing round-the-clock, helping organize the photo shoot, and doing media rollout. He has interviews scheduled the entire weekend. He is exhausted. But his phone is ringing. One of his close friends from the Beltway is calling. He says,
Jose, I have good news and bad news for you. Which do you want first?
The good news.
Obama has decided to defer action on the deportation of 800,000 to 1.4 million DREAMers.
Jose processes what his friend is telling him. Through presidential directive Obama has done exactly what the DREAMers had asked he do, exactly what Congress had failed to do. It is not a pathway to citizenship. But perhaps it is a start.
What’s the bad news?
You don’t qualify.
Obama’s directive makes thirty the cutoff. Jose had turned thirty-one four months earlier.
He puts down the phone and punches the wall. He cries tears of anger. He slumps into his couch.
His eyes catch the stack of magazines fresh from the printer. He picks one up and starts counting the faces. Thirty-two of the thirty-five people will qualify for deportation relief and a temporary work permit. He sits back.
Through his tears, he smiles.
III
On a cold morning in Washington, DC, the Capitol dome gleams bright in the winter sun. School buses pull up to the National Gallery of Art’s East Building. Inside the museum, a visitor turns a corner to face a black-and-white Norman Lewis painting called Untitled (Alabama). He stares.
Three fields of solid black give the painting shape—a band stretching across the top, a triangle in the left corner, and a square with a slightly tilted top in the right one. From the left middle of the canvas, Lewis has filled a cone with geometric shapes of rigorous strokes. The cone stretches across the canvas, terminating just right of the center in a dramatic vertical line dropping off the bottom of the painting. Toward the middle, the strokes begin to cohere: a Klansman’s hood, a horse’s head, abstractions of threat. Where the cone ends, a narrower band begins—civil rights marchers, action/reaction—its arrowlike strokes pulling in from the right edge of the canvas.
Who We Be : The Colorization of America (9781466854659) Page 41