Some say that we still are in an era of unequality of human rights; but we have made progress and I don’t want to see that lost. We still have a long way to go but we don’t need setbacks right now.

Get over the mindset that every immigrant, undocumented or documented, is a criminal, or a terrorist, or will be a burden on society. Give them a chance to prove themselves – to work, achieve an education, earn a place for themselves, and contribute to our culture.

We need immigration legislation, based on fairness, reasonableness, and compassion. Get out of the box and look at your family history – How did your family ever get to this country. I am glad that my Jewish grandfather who came to this country in the hold of a ship, wasn’t deported and sent back to Europe.

The people you call “illegals,” had been freely moving in the region of what’s now the Southwest US for centuries before the Mexican War, and the Latino people fought bitterly to ensure that their rights in this region were guaranteed by the legal agreements that concluded the Mexican War. The Anglos have repeatedly broken these agreements, just as they did against the Cherokee and the Sioux people that they couldn’t defeat militarily, while denying African-Americans their own most basic rights.

The Anglo bigots, the forerunners of today’s Minutemen, harassed the Latino people in the Southwest, seized our property and ranches, denied us our rights to celebrate our culture and language, arbitrarily shut down and ruined our businesses, even capped off the insults by forcing numerous mass deportations against us, culminating in the ethnic cleansing of the 1930’s. Every one of these a violation of both the letter and the spirit of the good-faith agreements negotiated between the Anglos and the Latino people after the Mexican War.

Well now, this crap is over– we are now strong enough to assert and demand our rights. And we won’t back down. Elvira like Rosa Parks broke a manifestly unjust and disgusting law, that is itself rooted in the much greater and more egregious violations of laws perpetrated by the Anglos for centuries. It’s called civil disobedience, and she has every right to assert herself in this way.

You Anglos should take heed now. We are still not organized enough to have a great effect on events in 2008, but by 2010 and 2012, you will be feeling the force of an angry sleeping giant that has been awakened by injustice, aka the Latino people, and we will be making our presence on the political scene felt so strongly that you will think twice before ever trying to insult us and our people again.

Ojalá que Uds. se ajusten a este futuro, pues podemos coexistir en paz. Pero exigimos el respecto y el reconocer de los derechos que los Anglos desde mucho han tratado negarnos, una cosa que no aguantaremos ni un día más!

Before going back to India, Gandhi first employed his ideas of peaceful civil disobedience in the Indian community’s struggle for civil rights in South Africa. He advocated his fellow Indians to defy every “European” only law. This plan was adopted, leading to a seven-year struggle in which thousands of Indians were jailed (including Gandhi), flogged, or even shot, for striking, refusing to register, burning their registration cards, or engaging in other forms of non-violent resistance.

Would you call MLK or Rosa Parks delusional for breaking the segregation laws that were in line place in the South. Laws that existed for over a century?

It is sad to see the ugly reality of how hate and prejudice can warp good men and women and turn victims to the catchwords of prejudice and the slogans of hate.

Ms. Arellano is delusional. She is a disaster for immigration
reform who is likely to do even more damage before she accepts
that she cannot return to the United States.

People have been comparing Elvira to Rosa Parks– whomever the comparison is with, she’s clearly ignited and electrified our people against this hatred and racism as few have done since Chavez.

I definitely wouldn’t look at her deportation as a setback. These fights are never easy– it certainly wasn’t easy for American Blacks, look at the hatred, up to murder of children, that they had to endure from hateful Anglos– and hatred and racism from Anglo bigots are nothing new, it just gets amplified in the Blogosphere these days.

Hatred and bigotry among the Anglos shouldn’t discourage us, it should unite us and re-confirm our solidarity.

“We need to find an effective way to raise the political consciousness of our community to understand that ultimately, the dismantling of homeland security apparatuses is necessary to addressing our collective problem.”

An excellent point. The Patriot Act has been perverted from a tool to fight terrorists, to something used to spy on and humiliate hard-working Latinos who are declared guilty by presumption.

Another key to this, is we have to raise more collective consciousness among our people here about our true history, and the long historical association of our people and culture with the Southwest, and with Florida– as recognized directly also in the laws and treaties that followed the Mexican War. A lot of combating the bigotry of the Anglos is merely demanding the rights that are guaranteed to us by the treaties.

These treaties recognize our rights in the Southwestern states (and Florida) including our rights to property, to celebrate our culture, to use español for public purposes on an equal status with English (en las oficinas, en las escuelas, bibliotecas, votaciónes y otras lugares) and in general to have our customs and people respected. Our ancestors were roaming through California and Arizona for generations before the Mexican War– we are not illegals, it’s the bigoted Anglos who are illegal for disregarding the rights to which we are guaranteed.

It does bother me that many Latinos are trapped in states such as Arkansas, Wisconsin, Georgia, Ohio, Virginia, Minnesota, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Iowa, Missouri and other states where we have little power and, both demographically and politically, are easy targets for the Anglo haters. They work our people to death there, then try to deny us our culture and our basic rights for us and our children. By contrast in our historic homelands in the Southwest, we have the demographic, social and political strength to stand together and fight back against the Minutemen and the other bigots.

The key state for us is Arizona. Among the Southwestern states, it’s the one where the Anglo bigots still have the most power, but it’s also the one with the most rapid demographic and political changes and where, in 5 years, we will be in power, strong enough to shut up the Minutemen and other racists who harass us.

Arizona in 2007 is much like California in 1994, when Prop. 187 was passed, and the Anglo haters seemed in the ascendancy. A few short years later with continued demographic changes and political developments, we gained power, and now– despite the presence of bigots still there– we have such strength in California that no one would try to perpetrate this crap anymore.

Soon it will be the same in Arizona. The racist sheriff of Maricopa County is trying to persecute us there, and the arrogance of the Minutemen is felt in full force. But Arizona is following in California’s lead. Arizona is one of the places where we are not only strong and growing as it is, but where Latinos persecuted in states like those mentioned above– Arkansas, Ohio, Wisconsin for example, where we are too weak and dispersed– are migrating back to. We will soon have the political and demographic power to fight back effectively against the Anglo haters.

Our education is also critical. American public schools (the traditional English-only ones at least) are an absolute disaster– unsafe, violent, unable to teach anything to our kids. The reason is simply that Anglo adults hate the idea of paying tax dollars to educate children of color. So Latino children grow up unable to function in society, another way we’re kept down.

Unless we can get our kids enrolled in one of the Spanish-English double media immersion schools (which are much better in general), home-schooling is one of our best options. We can teach our kids in a safe environment, provide a healthy diet, good peer interactions without the violence and drugs, and most of all provide our kids with an actual education– parcialmente en español (good textbooks from many places in Latin America) which employers among others require– so that they can function and assert themselves here.

We should patronize Latino businesses as much possible, and provide entrepreneurial start-up funds for other Latino enterprises. We should of course, stand up for each other, and support the other Elvira Arellanos around here.

Hay muchas razones tener confidencia en el futuro para nuestra gente, porque para la primera vez en más de 150 años — desde 1848– tenemos la oportunidad para reclamar y exigir nuestros derechos!