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Great Wall Institute: The Process of the Great Wall of Los Angeles

Prop. 187 timeline: The rise and fall of California’s anti-immigrant law

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1. 1987-90 Operation Hammer Samuel Momodu (BlackPast): “Operation Hammer, a law enforcement program by the Los Angeles Police Department that began in 1987 was ostensibly an attempt to crack down on gang violence in Los Angeles, California. Many critics, however, saw the operation as racial profiling because it targeted the city’s African American and Hispanic youth. The origin of Operation Hammer can be traced back to the 1984 Summer Olympics which were held in Los Angeles, California. Under the supervision of Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) chief Darrel Francis “Daryl” Gates, the LAPD expanded gang sweeps during the Olympics ostensibly to protect the tens of thousands of outside visitors and Los Angeles residents expected to attend the games. Many of the events were scheduled for the Los Angeles Colosseum located in South Central Los Angeles, a major area of gang activity. The main areas the LAPD targeted were South Central and East Los Angeles and the tactics used included mass arrests and detention of suspected gang members.”-
2. 1990 Justice for Janitors Article: https://www.kcet.org/shows/departures/justice-for-janitors-day-marks-25th-anniversary-in-l-a -A critical chapter in U.S. labor history - On this day, back in 1990, over 400 striking janitors, primarily Central American immigrants, members of Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 399, demonstrated peacefully in an effort to improve the living standards for their families by unionizing their employer International Service System (ISS), the contractor responsible for servicing most of L.A.'s office buildings at the time. The demonstration followed two weeks of intense organizing efforts by janitors and took place in Century City, a region in west Los Angeles that houses corporate office towers of the wealthiest businesses in the country. At first, the rally appeared to be another event in line with the organizing efforts of the strike, yet, this particular rally propelled the janitors' struggle to the national spotlight when members were confronted and injured by fifty police officers who were equipped with batons. In total, 38 janitors were injured during the incident, and many were arrested during the altercation. The violent images quickly began circulating across media outlets across the country and led to an increased public support for the janitors cause. Rather than back down after the confrontation, janitors remained on the streets and were eventually joined by over 2,500 supporters and prominent leaders, including Jesse Jackson, who publicly decried the meager wages janitors were earning at the time -- some as little at $4.50 per hour. The janitors' dedicated efforts, coupled with the widespread community support and the public outrage over the police brutality, resulted in janitors receiving an increase of wages over $2 per hour, full family health coverage, and the ratification of a union contract with ISS. "Our efforts that day and all of the efforts leading up to that action, represented a fight for dignity and respect," explained Jose Garcia, a janitor who was present at the march on June 15, 1990, and still services the industry today. "On this day we finally had a voice on the job and we were able to show the nation and the world that we were on the side of justice." Garcia further explained that prior to this victory, janitors in Los Angeles did not have any control over working conditions, low wages, and were subjected to numerous abuses by employers. Since then, unionized L.A. janitors earn between $12-$14 per hour, and form part of SEIU-United Service Workers West (USWW).
3. 1991 American Baptist Churches (ABC) Settlement Agreement
4. "Marc Chagall Comes Back to Venice Beach" by By Christina Schlesinger (1991) Located at Israel Levin Center Venice Boardwalk. The mural employs imagery from the Russian-Jewish painter Marc Chagall superimposed onto the Venice Beachfront. At the far left a rabbi is holding a torah on which is written, in Hebrew, the 5th Commandment, “Honor Thy Father and Thy Mother.” A Chagall bird leaps from the flames and leads the viewer’s eye into the main section of the mural, where various characters and images from Chagall are placed onto the Venice Beach and boardwalk. A rabbi with a small rabbi standing on top of his head, indicates the many generations of teachers in Jewish history. Next to the fiddler on the roof the viewer sees the non-Chagallian character, an angel on roller blades representing contemporary Venice beach. He stands beneath a candelabrum of seven candles, referring to the seven-branched menorah and the extensive use of light in Jewish religion and culture. At the other end of the mural is a poem about overcoming obstacles called “Roots.” It is written by 95-year-old Dora Bayrack.
5. 1991 Rodney King is seen leaving LA County Jail on March 7 On March 3, 1991, King's savage beating by Los Angeles police was caught on tape by a bystander watching from his balcony. LA had a long history of police brutality, but now we were all witnessing it first-hand on our TVs. Watching the beating was especially jarring for me because King and I had grown up in the same Pasadena-Altadena community. We'd gone to school together. We weren't close, but I knew him — who went by Glen, never Rodney — as a gentle, friendly kid. The four police — Sgt. Stacey Koon and officers Laurence Powell, Theodore Briseno, and Timothy Wind — went on trial the next year. Adding to public anger, the trial was moved from LA to Simi Valley, a predominantly white "cop town" northwest of the city.
8. "To Protect and Serve" By Noni Olabasi (1992) Located at Moe Hair Salon 3406 11th Avenue Los Angeles. This history of the Black Panther Party was originally selected as one of SPARC’s Great Wall Unlimited: Neighborhood Pride Murals. However, after opposition and political the conservative City Arts Commission, the mural was turned into an independent project and funded with private donations. The left side focuses on personal and institutional racist violence toward African-Americans. Depicted are images of the Klan and Bobby Seale bound and gaged, as he was during the Chicago 7 Trail of the late 1960s–above him is judge Julius Hoffman who presided in that case. Huey Newton and Angela Davis are also portrayed. The right side of the mural emphasizes the Panthers’ social projects, such as the Free Breakfast Program. From the mural: We want an immediate end to POLICE BRUTALITY and MURDER of Black People! We want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice and peace. All power to the people! A special thanks is offered to Hair Expressions and the community for their war and loving support.
9. 1992 LA RIOTS
11. 1992 Chinese Student Protection Act
12. "Freedom Won't Wait" by Noni Olabisi (1992)
13. "Calle De La Eternidad" By Johanna Poethig (1993) Located at BBF Broadway Building 351 South Broadway (at 4th St.) ARTIST Johanna Poethig was raised in the Philippines through high school and has lived in Chicago, San Francisco and Oakland since coming to the United States. Poethig received her BFA at the UC Santa Cruz and her MFA at Mills College (in Oakland, CA). Her public art works intervene in the urban landscape, in neighborhoods, on freeways, in parks, hospitals, schools, homeless shelters, cultural centers, advertising venues and public buildings. ABOUT THE MURAL “The architecture of the building really affected me because it’s so high off the ground and so much of the background is all those buildings reaching to the sky. Also, the whole context of being in Broadway, in a very Latino neighborhood, is so important to me. I started to look for symbols and artifacts from pre-Columbian America. The arms that are reaching to sky based on Peruvian gold work. The Aztec Calendar contains text by Octavio Paz about time and place. It’s trying to bring poetry to the idea of being at home and in exile at the same time. In the middle of a commercial LA landscape you have something that is talking about connecting us culturally and historically to our past and present.” -Johanna Poethig
14. 1993 Bill Clinton signing the National Voter Registration Act (Motor Voter Act)
15. "Breaking Bread/ Not Somewhere Else, But Here" By Daryl E.Wells (1993) Located at National Council of Jewish Women 543 N. Fairfax Ave., Los Angeles, CA West LA. This mural emphasizes the themes of community service, social actions and education that the National Council of Jewish Women of Los Angeles endorses. Wells depicts influential and prominent women of varied ethnic backgrounds building community and sharing struggles through the act of “breaking bread” together. Furthermore, it is both homage to the women it depicts and also a gesture to the community in support of multiculturalism. The women depicted from left to right are: Betty Friedan (author and activist), Barbara Boxer (senator), Hannah Senesh (poet and holocaust rescue mission fighter), Dolores Huerta (United Farm Workers Union co-founder), Lee Krasner (artist), Barbara Jordan (congresswoman and civil rights worker), Emma Goldman (anarchist and labor rights activist), young woman of the Ethiopian Jewry, Aung San Suu Kyi (elected president of Burma, was put under house arrest), Lillian Hellman (playwright), Rigoberta Menchu (Guatemalan human rights activist and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize) and Hannah Solomon (founder, National Council of Jewish Women). “Not Somewhere Else But Here” has been written about by scholars and art historians since the 1990’s. Paul Von Blum, a respected art historian, published an important article on it with the University of Wisconsin shortly after its creation.
16. "Return to the Light" By Charles Freeman (1993) Located at Carlota Park Apartments 227 East Avenue 41 Highland Park. ARTIST: Freeman is a self-taught artist. He moved to Los Angeles in 1974 while active in the Black Panther Party as an organizer. SUBJECT: The mural depicts to prevalent social ills: the senseless killing of young people and homelessness. The shaman in the center represents a healthy state of wholeness. Cesar Chavez represents vision being focused. The elderly are symbols of rich experience and wisdom. The spirits of Pancho Villa and Zapata are there to signify strength and courage. The mural’s title refers to the role of the spiritual in finding solutions.
18. 1994 Crime Bill that Fed Into the Mass Incarceration Crisis
19. 1994 VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN ACT Through the original bill, which passed in 1994, VAWA created the first U.S. federal legislation acknowledging domestic violence and sexual assault as crimes, and provided federal resources to encourage community-coordinated responses to combating violence. Up for renewal every five years, each VAWA reauthorization builds on existing protections and programs to better meet the needs of survivors. Reauthorized in 2000 it created a much-needed legal assistance program for victims and included responses to dating violence and stalking. In 2005, VAWA created new, holistic responses programs to meet the emerging needs of survivors and communities, such as prevention, landmark housing protections for survivors, funding for rape crisis centers, and culturally- and linguistically-specific services. VAWA 2013 enhanced access to safety and justice for Native American and LGBTQ survivors.
20. 1994 Proposition 187
22. 1998 Alex Sanchez founds Homies Unidos
23. 2022 Strike Law

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1. 2000s Immigrant Voices Calling for Change Immigrant electoral politics was bevvied by a number of immigrant rights organizations that combined demands for immigrant rights with gains at the workplace—often outside of a traditional union structure. They included the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles (CHIRLA), the Koreatown Immigrant Workers Association (KIWA), the National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON), the South Asian Network (SAN), and the Central American Resource Center (CARECEN). Activist groups like these made sure that immigrants were not simply providing “boots on the ground” for a newly mobilized labor movement and its electoral ambitions. Rather, their members helped shift the stance of organized labor both locally and nationally. In 1999, breaking from organized labor’s historically anti-immigrant stance, the AFL-CIO, with heavy influence from the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, officially adopted a platform supportive of immigrant rights and comprehensive immigration reform. The following year, a labor-sponsored hearing to demonstrate support for the importance of immigration reform—one of a series of forums across the nation—drew an overflow crowd of about 20,000 at the L.A. Sports Arena. “If someone had told me three or four years ago that we’d be taking this position today,” John Wilhelm (then president of HERE) told the L.A. Weekly of the AFL-CIO’s reversal on immigrant politics, “I’d have thought they were out of their minds.” Meanwhile, the immigrant rights groups themselves jumped into direct electoral work when in 2003, a statewide bill repealed the right of undocumented immigrants to obtain driver’s licenses. The next year, a new statewide multiethnic collaborative called Mobilize the Immigrant Vote (MIV) began registering, educating, and mobilizing residents to vote and became part of a larger set of efforts to encourage infrequent voters to cast their ballots. MIV’s impact extends beyond Los Angeles County. Yet the real “coming out” of immigrant organizers occurred on May 1, 2006. Across America, immigrant activists and their allies in labor, the left, and faith communities (most prominently, the Catholic Church) came together to protest the proposal of the Sensenbrenner-King bill in Congress. Among its other draconian provisions, this bill would have criminalized any assistance to undocumented immigrants. While the turnout was dramatic all over the country, the largest crowd gathered in Los Angeles: here, half a million people clogged downtown streets. And unlike in 1994, this time—and at the insistence of immigrant organizers themselves—many marchers waved American flags and encouraged one another to become citizens and to vote. Indeed, a popular chant in that May Day march was “Hoy Marchamos, Mañana Votamos” (“Today, We March; Tomorrow, We Vote”). A surge of naturalizations did occur, as lawful permanent immigrants realized the best way to defend their relatives was to show up on election day. Soon, Republican office-holders became as scarce in Los Angeles as a rainy day in August. The multiethnic nature of this organizing showed that this was a movement and not a special interest group. Groups like the Asian Pacific American Legal Center (since renamed Asian Americans Advancing Justice, a telling switch) was critical to showing that this was not a matter of Latino politics. Other organizations like the Pilipino Workers Center helped Asian immigrants engage with the labor movement, particularly since their members were (and are) low-wage, often undocumented workers in homecare and other exploited occupations. African-American politics in L.A. changed too. While the aforementioned Latinization of South Central fueled certain conflicts and fed into some nationalist impulses, the most successful organizations in the new landscape were committed to—indeed, had to be committed to—black-brown coalition building, including around issues of education, neighborhood quality of life, jobs, and immigrant rights. In return, the largely Latino (and often immigrant) SEIU deliberately organized a largely black security guard sector while a similarly Latino-dominated union, the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Union (HERE), secured provisions in new contracts to ensure outreach to and hiring of black workers who were once so prominent in the sector but had since been eclipsed by Latino numbers.
3. 1983 Carecen The Central American Resource Center (CARECEN), then called the Central American Refugee Center, was founded by Salvadoran refugees who were fleeing persecution by the military during the civil war. CARECEN was founded to secure political asylum for the refugees fleeing persecution, to defend their human rights and to offer immigration and basic social services needed by the refugees who were arriving in large numbers to Los Angeles. CARECEN received its 501 (c) (3) non-profit status.
4. 1966: The Cuban Adjustment Act The bipartisan Cuban Adjustment Act, signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson on November 2, 1966, granted work authorization permits and lawful permanent residency (green card status) to any Cuban native or citizen who settled in the United States for at least one year. The Cuban population in the United States grew from 79,000 to 439,000 between 1960 and 1970 as thousands of Cuban exiles sought asylum in the U.S. following hostilities surrounding the Cuban Revolution and termination of diplomatic relations between the two countries on January 3, 1961. Two additional events led to significant migrations from Cuba to the United States. The Mariel boatlift of 1980, which lasted six months, led 125,000 Cubans to Florida’s shores. In August of 1995 the Clinton administration’s wet foot/dry foot policy responded to Fidel Castro’s declaration that no Cuban would be confined from leaving the island by boat. This legislation enabled Cubans who successfully reached U.S. soil to apply for legal status. Those intercepted at sea were repatriated to Cuba. On January 12, 2017, the Obama administration amended diplomatic relations with Cuba, ended the wet foot/dry foot policy, and modified the Cuban Adjustment Act of 1966 to prohibit its exemption for Cuban nationals who enter the U.S. without visas. See how this thread continues into the 1980s: https://time.com/4888381/immigration-act-mariel-boatlift-history/
5. Immigrant detention system has grown since 2017 - "THE DETENTION MACHINE HAS EXPLODED" The detention machine has exploded, resulting in billions of dollars in revenue for private operators. Since 2017, 40 new detention facilities have opened. Most are run by private operators. As of January 2020, 81 percent of detained people are in facilities owned and/or operated by private companies; that number jumps to 91 percent for people who are detained in facilities that opened after 2017. For Fiscal Year 2021, the Trump administration has requested that taxpayers fund ICE at $4.1 billion, with the intent to expand ICE’s daily detention capacity to 60,000 people on any given day.
8. 1983 In Today’s Headlines, Echoes of Central America’s Proxy Wars of the 1980s deadly conflicts in crowded Central American cities and dusty hamlets during the 1980s. Their effects are still felt today. Over the decades, several million Central America migrants have sought opportunity, refuge, and stability in the United States, driven by a mix of factors including battered economies, violence, corrupt governments, and the desire to reunite with relatives who emigrated earlier or to find a family-sustaining job. While media attention in recent years has focused on the arrival of unaccompanied minors and families, primarily from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, the lion’s share of the 3.8 million Central American immigrants in the United States as of 2019 have been in the country for at least a decade. Displacement and economic instability caused by regional civil wars, in which the U.S. government had involvement, led many Central Americans to migrate in the 1980s. The wars ended, but economic instability remained—as did migration. The Central American immigrant population in the United States more than tripled between 1980 and 1990. Hurricane Mitch in 1998 and two earthquakes in 2001 were among the factors further driving migration from El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua. Similar factors have remained at work in recent years. In November 2020, Hurricanes Eta and Iota devasted the region, affecting as many as 11 million people throughout Central America. Drought also has plagued parts of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras in what is known as the “Dry Corridor.” Further, government corruption, gang activity, and high homicide rates continue to affect parts of the region, driving emigration. The total Central American-born population in the United States has grown more than tenfold since 1980, and by 24 percent since 2010. The 3.8 million Central American immigrants present in 2019 accounted for 8 percent of the U.S. foreign-born population of 44.9 million.
9. 1962 The Cuban Exiles of Echo Park For nearly two centuries Cuban émigrés have found a kind of freedom in the United States that was lacking in their beloved island.1 The ties between the Cuban community and Echo Park can be traced back more than five decades when members of the Presbyterian Church of Echo Park met the first flight of Cuban refugees in 1962. Like its more well-known counterpart in Miami, the Los Angeles neighborhood of Echo Park came to be known as "Little Havana" in the 1960s; for many émigrés it was a gathering site to protest Castro's regime and share the challenges they faced in assimilating to American culture. Prominent Cuban exiles such as sculptor Sergio López-Mesa and composer Aurelio de la Vega built distinguished careers in Los Angeles, and their artistic contributions would be memorialized and celebrated in Echo Park and throughout the city. "Los Angeles played a seminal role in providing refuge for many Cubans who sought to rebuild their lives and who were still making sense of the political upheaval. Unlike other exiles who made their way to Los Angeles, Cuban exiles received government assistance to move west. Los Angeles' Cuban entrepreneurs, businesses, and artists enriched the history and complexity of the city. Echo Park's exile community laid claim to the neighborhood, transforming its eponymous park into a site for annual celebrations and political protests. "
10. 2006 MAY Day Rally
11. 2003 Statewide bill repealed the right of undocumented immigrants to obtain driver’s licenses California Repeals Law On Licenses for Immigrants - California lawmakers gave Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R) his first legislative victory Monday by repealing a controversial law that would have granted illegal immigrants in the state the right to obtain a driver's license. In a swift and stark political reversal, the state Assembly, which is dominated by Democrats, voted 64 to 9, with seven abstentions, to abolish the measure. The state Senate took the same step late last month. The law, scheduled to take effect Jan. 1, would have granted driver's license privileges to nearly 2 million illegal immigrants, many of them working in California's vast farming fields. It has been a political priority for Latino leaders across the state. Similar laws are under debate across the country. But Schwarzenegger had demanded the law's repeal even before his resounding victory this fall in California's recall election. He said the measure, which was approved during the summer by then-Gov. Gray Davis (D), posed too many security risks in a time of heightened national concern over terrorism.
12. 2006 Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act Senator Feinstein voted in support of the “Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act” (S. 2611) when it came before the Senate for a vote (5/25/06). This bill was comprehensive immigration reform legislation that included provisions on border security, interior enforcement, unlawful employment of aliens, nonimmigrant and immigrant visa reform, backlog reduction, agricultural workers, citizenship assistance for members of the armed services, and family humanitarian relief. Reflection written in 2017: WASHINGTON — President Trump embraced a proposal on Wednesday to slash legal immigration to the United States in half within a decade by sharply curtailing the ability of American citizens and legal residents to bring family members into the country. The plan would enact the most far-reaching changes to the system of legal immigration in decades and represents the president’s latest effort to stem the flow of newcomers to the United States. Since taking office, he has barred many visitors from select Muslim-majority countries, limited the influx of refugees, increased immigration arrests and pressed to build a wall along the southern border. In asking Congress to curb legal immigration, Mr. Trump intensified a debate about national identity, economic growth, worker fairness and American values that animated his campaign last year. Critics said the proposal would undercut the fundamental vision of the United States as a haven for the poor and huddled masses, while the president and his allies said the country had taken in too many low-skilled immigrants for too long to the detriment of American workers. “This legislation will not only restore our competitive edge in the 21st century, but it will restore the sacred bonds of trust between America and its citizens,” Mr. Trump said at a White House event alongside two Republican senators sponsoring the bill. “This legislation demonstrates our compassion for struggling American families who deserve an immigration system that puts their needs first and that puts America first.”
13. 1982 Plyler v. Doe This Supreme Court case ruled that public school districts cannot constitutionally refuse admission to unauthorized immigrant children because the harmful effects to the public outweighed the cost savings. Every child deserves a fair chance to learn and thrive. That might seem an obvious statement today, but it took years of legal battles fought by MALDEF to ensure that “every” child did not exclude any child – particularly, immigrant children. After nearly five years of litigation, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1982 that all children, regardless of immigration status, have a constitutional right to a free public education from kindergarten to 12th grade. The landmark case, Plyler v. Doe, grew out of a 1977 attempt by the Tyler Independent School District in Texas to oust the children of undocumented workers – farmhands, for the most part – from the school system by imposing tuition of as much as $1,000 per student to attend what were for everyone else free public schools.
14. 2018 Korematsu, Notorious Supreme Court Ruling on Japanese Internment, Is Finally Tossed Out A Japanese internment camp in Manzanar, Calif., in 1942. In upholding President Trump’s travel ban on Tuesday, the Supreme Court also overruled the case that had allowed the World War II internments as constitutional.Credit...Bettmann Archive. WASHINGTON — In the annals of Supreme Court history, a 1944 decision upholding the forcible internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II has long stood out as a stain that is almost universally recognized as a shameful mistake. Yet that notorious precedent, Korematsu v. United States, remained law because no case gave justices a good opportunity to overrule it. But on Tuesday, when the Supreme Court’s conservative majority upheld President Trump’s ban on travel into the United States by citizens of several predominantly Muslim countries, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. also seized the moment to finally overrule Korematsu. “The forcible relocation of U.S. citizens to concentration camps, solely and explicitly on the basis of race, is objectively unlawful and outside the scope of presidential authority,” he wrote. Citing language used by then-Justice Robert H. Jackson in a dissent to the 1944 ruling, Chief Justice Roberts added, “Korematsu was gravely wrong the day it was decided, has been overruled in the court of history, and — to be clear — ‘has no place in law under the Constitution.’” In a dissent of the travel ban ruling, Justice Sonia Sotomayor offered tepid applause. While the “formal repudiation of a shameful precedent is laudable and long overdue,” she said, it failed to make the court’s decision to uphold the travel ban acceptable or right. She accused the Justice Department and the court’s majority of adopting troubling parallels between the two cases. In both cases, she wrote, the court deferred to the Trump administration’s invocation of “an ill-defined national security threat to justify an exclusionary policy of sweeping proportion,” relying on stereotypes about a particular group amid “strong evidence that impermissible hostility and animus motivated the government’s policy.” The fallacies in Korematsu were echoed in the travel ban ruling, warned Hiroshi Motomura, a University of California, Los Angeles, law professor who has written extensively about immigration. “Overruling Korematsu the way the court did in this case reduces the overruling to symbolism that is so bare that it is deeply troubling, given the parts of the reasoning behind Korematsu that live on in today’s decision: a willingness to paint with a broad brush by nationality, race or religion by claiming national security grounds,” he said. He added, “If the majority really wanted to bury Korematsu, they would have struck down the travel ban.” The Korematsu ruling, an exceedingly rare modern example in which the court explicitly upheld government discrimination against an entire category of people based upon a trait like race or ethnicity, traced back to the early days after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and the United States entered World War II.
15. 1986 Americans for Border Control
17. 2006 Los Angeles Immigrant Rights March Back in 2006, tough immigration legislation introduced by US Rep. James Sensenbrenner sparked massive protests. The legislation, the Wisconsin Republican said, was a necessary response to rampant illegal immigration. Sensenbrenner’s legislation mandated faster and easier deportations, increased fines for those employing people in the country illegally — and possibly prosecuting people if they assisted the undocumented. “It not only cracked down and tried to demonize immigrants themselves, but anyone who helped,” says Matt Barreto, a political scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who participated in the 2006 marches. “Anyone who even gave a ride, or helped in anyway, an undocumented immigrant just try to have a better life would be in violation of federal law, so it was very extreme in what it was trying to do.” After the Sensenbrenner bill passed in the House, and awaited a vote in the Senate, Latino activists began to organize. “I said we have to move,” says Armando Navarro, a professor of ethnic studies at the University of California, Riverside, and a veteran immigration rights advocate. He organized some of the first strategy sessions in Southern California to oppose the Sensenbrenner bill, sessions where big public protests were seen as the best option. “The only political avenue that we had available to us was to take to the politics of the street. We had to show our power, our capability manifested by our numbers.” And those numbers showed up to oppose the Sensenbrenner bill, starting with a 100,000 strong protest in Chicago. But the largest demonstration was held in Los Angeles on March 25th of 2006. On that day, half a million people marched in the streets of downtown Los Angeles, making it the biggest mass gathering in the city’s history. On May 1st, organizers increased pressure by staging a day “without an immigrant” demonstrations, urging undocumented workers, from nannies to janitors to cooks, to march in the streets instead of showing up at their jobs. “We combined the power of the streets with the power of the pocketbook, meaning we would organize so that our economic power was felt, not only our political power of the streets. But our economic power of denying people profit,” says Navarro. Protesters claimed victory when the Sensenbrenner bill was defeated in the Senate. But in the decade since the 2006 marches, immigration rights advocates have spent a lot of time debating the demonstrations’ legacy. Barreto says the marches were crucial in creating an opening for initiatives such as as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, which allows many undocumented individuals who were brought to the United States as minors to stay in the country.
18. 1965 Immigration Act The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 Immigration plummeted during the global depression of the 1930s and World War II (1939-1945). Between 1930 and 1950, America’s foreign-born population decreased from 14.2 to 10.3 million, or from 11.6 to 6.9 percent of the total population, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. After the war, Congress passed special legislation enabling refugees from Europe and the Soviet Union to enter the United States. Following the communist revolution in Cuba in 1959, hundreds of thousands of refugees from that island nation also gained admittance to the United States.
19. 1960-1962: Roughly 14,000 unaccompanied children flee Fidel Castro’s Cuba and come to the United States as part of a secret, anti-Communism program called Operation Peter Pan. The Second Wave: Freedom Flights By the mid to late 1960s, a swell of discontent rose in Cuba, fed by economic hardship along with the erosion and virtual disappearance of political freedoms. In particular, when Castro closed down some 55,000 small businesses in 1968, virtually eliminating all private property, more Cubans turned against the revolution. It was now the turn of the middle- and lower-middle classes, and skilled laborers. As pressure mounted, Castro opened the port of Camarioca. Relatives from Miami came to collect those left behind in Cuba. Within weeks President Lyndon Johnson inaugurated the so-called "freedom flights." By 1974, a quarter of a million Cubans had been welcomed into the United States. A small portion of the refugees arrived indirectly through countries such as Spain and Mexico.
20. 1960s Asian migrants to the United States (Stand in picture for the moment) The earliest Asian migrants to the United States were predominantly Chinese, Japanese and Filipino, but following the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which abolished a quota system that had limited immigration from non-western European countries, the Asian American population not only grew — it diversified. Prof. Ronald Takaki, who was a professor of Asian American studies at the University of California, Berkeley, wrote in “Strangers from a Different Shore” that there were one million people of Asian descent living in the U.S. in 1965. By 1985, this number jumped to five million, or two percent of the entire U.S. population. Prior to the new immigration law, 99 percent of Asian Americans were Chinese, Japanese or Filipino, but by 1985, 12 percent of Asian Americans were Vietnamese, 11 percent Korean and 10 percent Indian. The 1965 Immigration Act ended various exclusionary immigration policies. It also set up a system of preference that favored skilled workers and the families of American citizens. This landmark piece of legislation facilitated massive new waves of Asian migration. New communities arose, such as Los Angeles’ Koreatown, and the Sikh community in Yuba City, whose temple is pictured here. As Asian migrants with more capital arrived, “suburban Chinatowns” such as Monterey Park grew.