Despite the hopes engendered by the fall of the Berlin Wall at the end of the 20th century, as many have remarked, the 21st century has seen walls and borders erected throughout the world, from San Diego in the US to Western Europe to Israel/Palestine. A global apartheid replete with a constant war against the migrant and refugees is one of the quintessential hallmarks of our era and thus a critical terrain for social justice advocates and activists. Western Europe of course has long been a front line, as has the United States.
In February of this year, activist-scholars and community scholars, activists, artists and poets in the US came together to kick off a series of events, “Deportation Nation: Literary Migrations.” These gatherings, held in San Diego, California, the epicenter of the new nativism and the resistance to the message of fear of the New Right, brought together poets, artists and activists putting forward a message of hope, of love and care for the stranger and those in our midst, workers, the poor, the undocumented over the politics of fear, hatred and the growing movement aiming to criminalize undocumented immigrants. This short piece is meant to introduce a number of pieces that were presented as part of this series of events: a) a work by scholar-activist Gail Perez, English & Ethnic Studies, University of San Diego, entitled: “We Need Imagine Nation, Not Deportation Nation”; b) and a piece “Together We Marched” by the visionary poet and prose artist Olga Garcia Echeverria.
Deportation/Nation
by Gail Perez
--For the migrants, First Peoples, asylum seekers, international workers, and activists in San Diego who have taught me everything I know.
In a formal dining room in the University of San Diego’s Peace and Justice Center, Leslie Munoz told the story of her parents’ deportation to a gathering of activists, orchestrated by the San Diego ACLU. Leslie was sixteen when her parents were detained. Her mother came to the US in the 90’s on a humanitarian visa for a dangerous pregnancy. The family stayed, bought a house, and were living the American dream. All of the children thrived and one attended the prestigious Preuss School in La Jolla; the family had sought legal advice and thought they were regularizing their status. But their lawyer gave bad advice, they lost the case, and in February of 2006, ICE blocked off their street and detained her father. The children were not allowed to say goodbye.
Since the deportation of both parents, the children have had serious health issues, are not doing well in school, and Leslie has been responsible for keeping the home rented and her siblings cared for. The alternative for the children would have been to follow the parents to Tijuana. I met one such child at a mass at Friendship Park, the last bit of Cyclone fencing by the ocean where people in Tijuana can freely speak to those on the US side. Through her tears, a girl of sixteen told us in perfect English that she was a US citizen and that what had happened to her and her parents “was not right.” Another man shouted, “Tell them we are not terrorists.” This past week, Friendship Park, an historical site inaugurated by Pat Nixon, has been permanently closed. The wall that allegedly protects “us” can be more aptly described as sealing us off from the suffering and violation of civil and human rights that the current enforcement only immigration policy has perpetuated. Out of sight, out of mind.
The dramatic increase in immigration raids—4,077 in 2007 vs. 445 in 2003—has not only caused fear and family trauma not seen since the 1950’s, but has also caused us to ask who we are as a people. Are such raids about some immigration “emergency,” or has deportation long been essential to nation building in the US. For people of color, the ties between national identity and racial exclusion, removal, and colonization are obvious. The US is a settler nation, founded on war and the ethnic cleansing of its first peoples. Indigenous peoples became “foreign nations,” and a caste/slave system created both a free and unfree labor force. In addition, the Naturalization Law of 1790 mandated that only “white” immigrants could be naturalized as US citizens. Thus the national body was explicitly imagined as white. As Kevin Johnson argues, the struggle of non- white persons in the US for civil rights has been one against caste and “foreignness”: these categories also mark the struggle for immigrant rights to this day. He contends that current immigration policy cannot be understood without reference to the struggles of US people of color.
Today, “race and immigrant status neatly…coincide”(The “Huddled Masses” Myth). After national quotas for immigrants were removed in 1965, we have an immigrant flow today of 80 to 90% people of color. Thus, the brutal treatment of Haitian migrants in 1990’s must be tied to attitudes towards African Americans, and the current Mexican hysteria is rooted in the conquest of Mexican lands, the disenfranchisement of Mexican Americans, and the mass deportations of citizens and non-citizens alike in the 1930’s and in 1954.
Therefore, when nativist Ron Prince lectured his flock in 1994 that “You are the posse..and Prop 187 is the rope,” the link between lynching and immigration law did not surprise many black and brown people. As commentators like Roberto Lovato point out, both Jim Crow and the recently flurry of anti-immigrant measures are intended to discipline today’s working caste.
Only by linking the battle over the definition of “American” with the color/caste lines that have been the engine of our history, can we begin to understand the cruelty of the recent war against immigrant workers, and the indifference with which it is met. The Shadow Report by the Los Angeles Alliance of Indigenous Peoples (2008) presented to the United Nations makes the point. After the end of slavery in 1865, there was a need to “create a sector …that would work without rights and under fear, new legal conventions were devised to perpetuate such a model, one of which was the creation of immigration laws.” The raids, deportations, the detention of children, the 5200 deaths at the border would all be intolerable if these were people of European extraction. It has taken almost 400 years of repression to thoroughly rob us of our humanity.
It was not an easy process. As Bill Ong Hing has argued in Deporting Our Souls, the current wave of deportations that can send lifelong residents back to countries they do not remember for committing petty crimes requires an intensive education in dehumanization. Hate mongers like Lou Dobbs and Pat Buchanan have had an unprecedented media platform for teaching us that immigrants are infecting us with leprosy (Dobbs 2005), or that “If we do not get control of our borders, by 2050 Americans of European descent will be a minority in the nation their ancestors created and built. No nation has ever undergone so radical a demographic transformation and survived” (Buchanan, State of Emergency).
The demagogues ignore the labor question and the insatiable corporate desire for disenfranchised labor. Instead, they have criminalized legal and undocumented immigrants, just as recent legislation has sought to do. Buchanan would have us believe that all immigrant youth will become Mara Salvatruchas, and federal law itself has increasingly criminalized workers, accusing them of identity theft. Their simple presence in the US would have been a felony if Congress had passed HR 4437. This legal and social death has led to their actual deaths. Aside from the thousands dead at the border, I have before me as I write this a notice about a housekeeper from El Salvador who hung herself in detention. But as an illegal, a criminal, the public is taught to believe that she simply got what she deserved.
Since the benefits of immigrant labor, both legal and not, have been well-established, the present enforcement only policies seem profoundly irrational. David Bacon argues in Illegal People that repression will discourage the voluntary flow and increase the possibility of expanded guest worker programs. This is ideal for corporate America since it promises a vulnerable, “flexible,” and non-unionized workforce. Recent gains by people of color and immigrants within the national body have already threatened conservatives with a revived labor movement, and with new voters who will demand health care, a living wage, and education. In other words, these are middle class demands that would improve the lives of the majority of people and threaten the 1% who now control 25% of our wealth. Since such immigrant gains would benefit non-immigrants, one begins to understand how racism is now dividing people who have similar class issues. In this way, immigrant hating fits into the larger picture of the general rollback of civil rights and civil society participation.
Repression and detention are also part of the prison industrial complex that has similar functions of incarceration and disenfranchisement. One of the weirdest developments in social control was the 2004 National Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act that mandated the future construction of 40,000 new beds for the “foreign born” to be located at four undisclosed locations. Domestic detention is not new; besides the Japanese internment, striking workers in Georgia were interned in 1934. Federal representatives claim these new centers will be for some “immigration emergency,” perhaps the one Buchanan’s book warned us about. An anonymous insider from the Army Corp of Engineers said, “Don’t wait until the cattle cars pull up. Nip this in the
bud.”
Detention is also driven by the privatization of war and disaster made infamous by Halliburton contracts in Iraq and later in New Orleans in the wake of hurricane Katrina. While our economy is tanking, private prison companies like CCA (Corrections Corporate of America) that were losing money in 2000 are in the black in 2008 now that they are in the immigrant detention business. CCA, for instance, had a 33.6 million increase this year and Wackenhut, now GEO, saw earnings jump 29%. The immediate cause of detention was the end of “catch and release” which had allowed immigrants to await their hearings on the outside. Even though undocumented immigration has declined, executives assure investors that the 12 million undocumented persons currently in the US will provide a future market that is being “consistently funded.” The depersonalization of immigrants into units of corporate profits is perhaps most brutal in the family detention centers. Congress in 2005 objected to such centers and recommended the use of monitoring bracelets and caseworkers instead (at a cost of about 12$ per day); this did not stop DHS from housing families in a private Hutto facility in Texas (for 61$ per day per person). The ACLU later successfully sued Hutto for inhumane treatment of children, resulting in new regulations, but the incarceration of children continues. A pro-Hutto official explained, “The parents broke the law” and children “have to suffer with the sins of the parents” (“The Lost Children,” Margaret Talbot, New Yorker, March 3, 2008).
The current deployment of raids, detention and deportation are part of an over arching ICE document called Operation Endgame. While recently removed from the ICE website, Endgame promises to “detain and deport” all “removable aliens” by 2012 and eliminate the backlog of unexecuted removal cases. One might even view Endgame as part of a larger global strategy including the war on terror, the war on drugs, and the war on immigrants. All three discipline the 180 million international migrant workers, which is surely the point. Eerily reminiscent of 19th C vagrancy laws that targeted African Americans and indigenous peoples, current measures imply that if a migrant isn’t working, he or she must be a criminal or terrorist. Since 1996 the criminalization of immigrants and the increasing intersection between the federal prison system and the federal immigration system has been striking, especially when compared to expenditures on programs that assist or settle immigrants.
Indeed, immigration enforcement is the fastest growing segment of federal law enforcement. Added to raids, checkpoints, no match letters and the like, must be the draconian provisions of the 1996 immigration law, IIRAIRA. This law radically increased “criminal” deportations of permanent legal residents who could be deported from crimes they had served time for that occurred prior to 1996. In addition, these deportations were mandatory and eliminated almost all waivers that had existed prior to 1996. There was no day in court for these residents and no way to show how such deportations might be cataclysmic for children, spouses, etc. If this sounds Orwellian-- in other words, people who had paid their debt to society were now punished for a second time (possibly violating the eighth amendment against cruel and unusual punishment) with deportation-- it gets worse. Deportation and detention are handled in civil and not criminal proceedings. Thus detainees in “camps” are not considered incarcerated persons and thus have no right to a lawyer, phones, and all the rights an actual prisoner has. A detainee from Guyana, for instance, who is transported from New York to Oakdale, Louisiana, one of the largest centers in the nation, and is in a cell, is not a prisoner.
Equally shocking, as a Families for Freedom activists note, even if all immigration were stopped today, deportations would grow since the grounds for deportation are being extended. The 1996 law delegalizes permanent residents who would previously have never been deported. It increased the number of crimes considered “aggravated felonies” which might include petty theft or urinating in public, causing damage to individuals and families in a way reminiscent of Three Strikes laws. This delegalization process is called Immigrant Apartheid, a term resisted by some who do not wish to come to terms with the Third World character of immigration since 1965 to the present. We are now confronting not only a divide between legal/illegal but also simply foreign and native born, where “legal” and “foreign” become code for of color. Increased persecution of those without papers has also limited previous rights like getting a driver’s license. Increased use of checkpoints, document checking on public transportation, and harassment by vigilantes have limited basic freedom of movement. While the undocumented have their human rights violated, legal immigrants are becoming second class persons, the target of sanctions that would be considered unconstitutional if directed against a citizen.
This race to detain, incarcerate, and deport yields grim statistics:
--the US detains about 280,000 people a year at a cost of 1.2 billion in over 400 facilities.
--1.6 million adults and children have been separated by deportation, including citizens and legal residents.
--from 1997-2007 672.593 there were criminal deportations (including those swept up in 1996 laws). In 2005, 64% of those deported were for non-violent crimes.
--being in the US in violation of immigration laws is not a crime; it is a civil offense. Immigrants are being incarcerated at up to $95 per day, at the taxpayers expense, who have no criminal charges and have not been convicted of a crime.
--DHS operates its own centers, but also “buys” space in county and city prisons where detainees mix with those with criminal convictions. Detention Watch).
Also disturbing has been the tacit federal approval of local and state efforts to control immigration when the federal government “won’t.” Over 1000 of these noxious bills have been proposed. Some deputize local police to be ICE agents, restrict medical care, restrict driver’s licenses, or like Hazleton Pennsylvania, require tenants to get occupancy permits before they can rent. The handmaidens of these local efforts are fear and hate. This was all too evident in San Diego when FAIR and the Minutemen rallied around the Escondido City Council for trying to pass rental restrictions like those in Hazelton. Later, Escondido tried to pass a “race neutral” parking law that would
restrict residents to two parking spots on public streets and only target certain neighborhoods. While these restrictions, like California’s infamous Prop 187, were obviously unconstitutional, that wasn’t the point. What is operating here in this vicious dance of racism and local legislation is what Roberto Lovato calls Juan Crow: “ the matrix of laws, social customs, economic institutions and
symbolic systems enabling the physical and psychic isolation needed to control and exploit undocumented immigrants”(The Nation May 8, 2008). He finds an exact parallel in Georgia where Federal laws that allowed locals to pursue fugitive slaves in the 19th C. were the model for Bush’s ACCESS program that allowed state law enforcement to deputize law enforcement to arrest the undocumented. The strategy here is to make the lives of migrants so miserable that they leave certain towns, becoming internal deportees in the US. To fill these centers, the past two years have seen unprecedented workplace raids: 1,282 arrested in six Swift packing plants in 2006, 361 in packing plants in New Bedford in 2007, 600 in an electrical factory in Laurel, MS, and perhaps most famously, 390 in Postville, Iowa.
Agriprocesser, the most important Kosher meat plant in the nation, was under investigation for violating child labor laws and atrocious work conditions. As what occurred in Postville becomes clear, the sheer irrationality of the use of force, unless the goal was to carry out massive and spectacular raids as “deterrence,” is impressive. The ICE raid ended the investigation of abuse and any possibility for workers to organize. It caused untold fear and suffering for locals and undocumented workers alike as the major industry of the town shut down. Few news reports revealed who exactly many of these workers were—3 Israelis, 4 Ukrainians, 93 Mexicans and 290 Indigenous Maya from Guatemala, many with only rudimentary Spanish. Only when a brave federal interpreter, Dr. Camayd Freixes, came forward did the extent of the violation of the workers’ rights become clear. They were charged with identity theft, implying that they intended to defraud those persons whose numbers they used. These “kangaroo courts” in the words of one reporter were held in a trailer; groups of 10 entered in shackles and were offered a plea that would give them 5 months in prison and deportation vs. two years in prison if convicted. Many did not understand the charges and in their efforts to go home, took the plea. These workers are in detention as I write this, awaiting deportation at taxpayers’ expense. We are talking about meat packers here, about economic refugees, some of whom suffered violence or remembered violence against indigenous communities in Guatemala. Postville, as a Kansas City Star reporter said, went from being a meat processing town to “a judicial assembly line where meat packers were mass processed,” a procedure ICE has dubbed Operation Streamline.
It is striking that the indigenous identity of so many victims of these raids has been erased. As Dr. Freixes noted, “they too were Native Americans in shackles.” Months later, Nobel Prize winner Rigoberta Menchu went to Postville and spoke; she also attended mass at St Bridget’s church, an important advocate for the victims of the raids. Later, some of the women formed a weaving cooperative in order to generate income. Church members, translators and many close to the workers commented on the nightmarish feeling that “this can’t happen here.” Sister Kathy Thill was driving donations back to Postville
and found herself suddenly afraid. What punishment might she face for this act? “I suddenly felt,” she said, “like I was in a strange country.” Bill Chandler of MIRA expressed similar emotions after the workplace raids in Laurel MS, “It’s a real contradiction between our proclaimed values of hard work and the actions of ICE. I think it’s a real affront to our values. They’re creating their own terrorism by going after workers.” Since it is not possible to raid all US workplaces, Chandler invites us to speculate on which sites are targeted. In his view, the Laurel raids were prompted by the fears of some Mississippi residents of a new non-white voting block, especially if Latinos were to unite with African Americans and organize for worker rights.
A final consequence of using fear and hate as immigration policy has been the rise in hate crimes against Latinos—up by 40%—and actual assaults and murders of migrants, often by youth. The blowback of nativism has struck the children of the haters. This year, teens have committed racially motivated murders of Latinos in Pennsylvania and Long Island. The young killers of Marcello Lucero in Long Island stated, “Let’s go find some Mexicans to fuck up” (CNN November 2008). One Latino activist blamed the parents of such youth: “Those that hate us allow us to cut their lawns, build their homes, cook for them, serve their children—and yet they teach them hate.” San Diego has had its own infamous cases. In 1999, Irineo Soto was stoned to death in Lakeside and swastikas were spray painted in the culvert where he was found. Seven teens in 2000 assaulted and shot elderly, and legal, migrant workers in Rancho Penasquitos. Ironically, they were indicted as adults under Proposition 21, a law that was heralded as a weapon against “gang members” who could more easily be tried as adults.
There is one more meaning for Deportation Nation that is equally sinister. It refers to the “invisible archipelago” of prisons that create a nation within a nation. Aside from the moral argument that the founding of our nation on disenfranchised “others” is an ethical and legal problem yet to be resolved, we should understand that deportation nation stands ready to delegalize ordinary citizens. Three acts illustrate this: 1) An executive order in 2007, “Blocking Property of Certain Persons who Threaten Stabilization Efforts in Iraq,” which would allow confiscating the property of peace activists, 2) the new Constitution Free Zone consisting of a hundred mile perimeter around the entire US and including two thirds of the US population, and 3) the Military Commissions Act of 2006 that could subject citizens to the status of “enemy combatants,” suspending habeas corpus for anyone who “aids an enemy of the United States.” This law also facilitates “militarized police roundups of protestors, so called illegal aliens, potential terrorists, and other undesirables for detention in facilities already under construction” (Project Censored 2008 #2). In other words, the majority of Americans have lost some degree of constitutional protection.
In this January of 2009, as an African American president invites us to imagine a more inclusive definition of nationhood, we can understand why many people of color have said that this is the first time they felt like this was their country. The repression of immigrants will always mean the repression of US racial/ethnic minorities and the erosion of the average citizen’s rights. Operation Endgame, oddly enough, targets the year 2012, a year also significant in indigenous prophecies for a change in consciousness. While some New Agers might await this transformation on their yoga mats, the true meaning might be for us to actively challenge the dichotomies of self and other, legal/illegal, foreign/native that have legitimized US imperialism and not US democracy. What this requires is an act of will and vision that requires the mainstream to envision a different relationship with immigrant, Muslim, brown/black, gay/lesbian, dissident others. Not the “other,” but as the prophecy says, “Tu eres mi otro yo,” the other as the self. The true soul work is to incorporate migrants/minorities into the national body, to pursue just economic policies rather than disasters like NAFTA, to dismantle the shadow world of incarceration, understanding that the shadow we project on others is the profound capacity for violence we fear in ourselves. We need Imagine/Nation and not Deportation/Nation.
Together We Marched
Olga García Echeverría
My sister Gladys and I were eating a tlayuda covered in black beans and Oaxacan cheese when we first heard about Senator Sensenbrenner and his immigration bill on Univisión. I almost choked when I heard the senator from Wisconsin wanted to get rid of all the “illegals aliens.” What would he think of me? Would he see America in my face? My hair is black. My skin is cacao-colored. I have my great grandmother’s Zapotec eyes, slanted slightly at the edges.
My family is originally from San Pedro Cajonos, a small pueblo in the mountains of Oaxaca, Mexico, where I visit once a year. Even though I was born in Southern California, in the city of Huntington Park, San Pedro is always with me. It is the land where my parents and sister were born, where my grandmothers, aunts, uncles, and cousins live. San Pedro is a town full of colorful houses on steep slopes. In San Pedro windows have no screens, children wearing thick huaraches wander free, and toasted corn tortillas are as big as pizzas. The people in San Pedro always know when someone is coming or going because there’s only one main road, and dust clouds rise like smoke signals with each moving car. When you meet adults in San Pedro, they say things like, “Oh, yes, I know you. You are the daughter of so-and-so.”
On Univisión, the newscaster explained how the Sensenbrenner bill would build a fence at the border, all the way from California to Texas to keep undocumented immigrants out of the country. “Don’t you have better ways to spend our tax dollars?” my sister asked the TV. Gladys always talks back to the TV when things upset her.
The fence was only the beginning. The Sensenbrenner bill would make crossing the border without papers a felony and punish anyone who helped or sheltered the undocumented. This meant a lot of people would go to jail. I thought of Yolanda who lives with us and my throat tightened up like it does when I want to cry. Yolanda doesn’t have papers. She cleans houses fives days a week and takes English classes at night. The Sensenbrenner bill would make her and my family criminals.
Then I thought of my friend Marta at school. She doesn’t have papers either. Her parents brought her to the United States when she was just a little kid. Nobody ever asked her if she wanted to cross the border. Huntington Park is her home now. This is where she grew up, where she goes to school and where she has all her friends. Would she be deported? My sister must have seen the look on my face because she leaned over and hugged me tightly. “Don’t worry, Leo,” she said. “A bill isn’t a law. This is wrong and we’re going to fight this Sensenbrenner!”
But how do you fight a bill? I went to bed that night imagining my loved ones in prison. I had to do something. I remembered how back in San Pedro, before I was born, my mother was a school teacher. She taught us that education is the most important thing. “Inform yourself,” my mother always says. That night I made a plan. I would ask my parents, my sister, and my teachers questions. I would read the paper, listen to the radio, surf the web, and watch the news.
During the following weeks, I learned that the immigration bill had many names: H.R. 4437, Sensenbrenner, and The Border Protection, Antiterrorism, and Illegal Immigration Control Act of 2005. I had a hard time pronouncing Sensenbrenner, so I looked up the name on the internet. I found out it originally came from Germany. Maybe Senator Sensenbrenner and I had something in common. His ancestors had once crossed the Atlantic. They were immigrants too.
I also learned that the Sensenbrenner bill was passed by the House of Representatives on December 16, 2005 by a vote of 239 to 182, but it hadn’t yet been passed by the Senate. People across the country were speaking out against the bill to prevent it from becoming law. My sister and I tuned in daily to El Piolin’s radio show because he gave updates on what was happening with the immigration bill. Through El Piolin we learned that in February, nearly 2,000 demonstrators marched in Philadelphia in support of immigrants, and in early March, about 100,000 people protested H.R. 4437 in Chicago.
At Gage, my junior high school, everyone was talking about the Sensenbrenner bill. Students throughout Los Angeles were planning walk-outs for the following week. School administrators scared us with suspensions and sent us home with warnings for our parents. But the student organizers said we needed to send a message to the politicians, even though we weren’t old enough to vote. “Write to your Senators! Write to your representatives!” They passed out flyers for a big demonstration on Saturday, March 25th. I went home with the flyer in my hand, eager to share the news with my family. Although my parents forbade me to walk-out, I didn’t have to convince them to participate in the demonstration. They were outraged at the Sensenbrenner bill just like I was.
On March 25th, my family and I joined hundreds of Oaxacans on the corner of Normandie and Pico in Los Angeles. We carried huge “¡OAXACA PRESENTE!” banners and made our way towards the demonstration. I had never participated in a demonstration, but I had been following the news and I knew Los Angeles was only one of many cities speaking out against Sensenbrenner. Two days before, 15,000 people marched in Milwaukee, and on March 24th, 20,000 marched in Phoenix.
I knew something incredible was happening as we approached downtown. At every block our numbers grew. By the time we reached the Staples Center, we were surrounded by a sea of people. U.S. flags flapped alongside those of Mexico, El Salvador, Colombia, Ecuador, and many other countries. Thousands united on this day to protest the Sensenbrenner bill. Latinos, African Americans, Koreans, Chinese, Whites, and Middle Eastern people carried signs that said:
NO HUMAN BEING IS ILLEGAL.
IMMIGRANTS ARE NOT CRIMINALS.
WE ARE A NATION OF IMMIGRANTS AND WE ARE PROUD OF IT!
I marched with my family, my heart swelling with pride as the three of us chanted as loud as we could: “El pueblo unido jamas sera vencido! The people united will never be divided!” I thought of the people of San Pedro, of Yolanda, of Marta, of my parents’ and sister’s journey to this country. I thought of Martin Luther King and Cesar Chavez. They had given their lives for civil rights. I knew in my heart if they were alive, they would be marching with us. I didn’t know yet that we would never make it to city hall that day because 500,000 protesters jammed the streets. I didn’t know that on that same day 50,000 were also marching in Denver, Colorado and hundreds more in Cleveland, Ohio. Or that in the following months demonstrations would spread to more than 100 cities throughout the nation: San Francisco, New York, Chicago, Boston, Seattle, Las Vegas, Charleston, Oklahoma, Indianapolis, Washington, Memphis, and even cities I had never heard of, like Pensacola, Florida and Grand Junction, Colorado. I didn’t know that these national demonstrations would later defeat the Sensenbrenner bill. But already there was a feeling of triumph as we marched and raised our voices. We were making history.
