ORLANDO SENTINEL

April 15, 2006

Apopka group spreads call to rally for migrant rights

 

Victor Manuel Ramos | Sentinel Staff Writer

Just days before a series of immigration rallies in cities throughout the country, a small operation of the Apopka-based farmworkers and activists decided Orlando needed to join the movement.

To get the word out, Jeannie Economos, a grant writer for the farmworkers group, sent an e-mail to several key organizations: the Catholic Diocese of Orlando, the Association of Communities for Reform Now, known as ACORN, Central Florida Jobs with Justice, Latino Leadership and a group of Hispanic evangelical churches. Those organizations, in turn, reached their members.

Latino Leadership sent out more than 4,000 e-mails.

ACORN called its supporters.

The Catholic parishes spread the message at Sunday Mass.

Supporters even started a text-messaging chain and asked construction workers to contact others about the rally.

The turnout surprised organizers. In Orlando, advocates expected a few hundred protesters, not the 2,000 to 5,000 who attended Sunday. In Fort Myers, they expected about 20,000, a conservative estimate compared with the estimated 75,000 to 95,000 who flooded the streets Monday.

Their rallies echoed a national movement that brought hundreds of thousands to the streets in places such as Chicago, New York and Los Angeles to press for an immigration-reform package that would provide guest-worker visas and steps for legalization.

"This all came together a puro pulmon; you know, with blood, sweat and tears," said Maria Rodriguez, who coordinates the Miami-based Florida Immigrant Coalition, a group of 52 advocacy organizations supporting the next Orlando rally: a statewide event planned for May 1. "The reality is, we are at a moment where people want to be part of this and want to become involved."

Tirso Moreno, general coordinator of the Farmworker Association of Florida, called on !Que Buena!, Radio Onda Mexicana and Radio La Ley -- three Mexican radio stations on Orlando's AM dial -- to promote the rally. Other AM Hispanic radio talk shows that reach mostly Puerto Rican listeners, such as those of Cadena Fantastica and La Grande, promoted the event on their own.

As the number of supporters grew, organizers realized this would not just be another small march with 200 to 300 supporters and had to rush to seek a police permit and more volunteers to manage a larger crowd.

The result Sunday: An unexpected crowd marched to the city's Barnett Park, shouting the slogan of the late farmworkers leader Cesar Chavez, who unionized many of the U.S. migrant laborers from the 1950s to 1970s:

"!Si, se puede!" they chanted. "Yes, we can!"

Ines Mendoza, an east Orlando resident who makes a living ironing clothes, cleaning houses and selling tamales, said there was no way to avoid the issue. She heard about the Orlando protest on Spanish-language radio and television news. Her friends called her. Her customers reminded her.

She went to the rally and said she will stop working for one day to attend the next one May 1 -- when several groups are calling for a statewide "Day of Respect" starting at noon in downtown Orlando. Mendoza said she is fed up with living in hiding and hearing bad things about immigrants.

"I have never been a burden to this country's government," said Mendoza, 35, in the country illegally for 15 years. "I have always worked, never stole anything, and I understand it's not this country's fault that we are here, but we are here earning our way."

The message got out to people such as Mendoza as much because of the organizers' connections to media and other community organizations as it did by the spontaneous actions of sympathizers with the immigrants' cause and the TV images of thousands on the streets in other cities.

"This is happening around the country, and this is what grass-roots mobilization is all about," Economos said. "This is not a top-down kind of thing. There are no national leaders. This is really happening from the ground up."

No one had to ask Fernando Negron, host of Quedate con Miguel, to make the rally and immigration debate a subject of daily talk on 1030 AM. Magda Ivette Torres, host of En Agenda at 1440 AM, went beyond promoting the rally to attending organizational meetings. Those shows have only a portion of the 21 percent of Hispanic radio listeners in Metro Orlando, but they reach an audience of newcomers from Puerto Rico, Mexico and the rest of Latin America.

For Los Vecinos, a Mexican talk show on the highest-rated !Que Buena! 1680 AM, immigration became a personal issue. Show hosts Eduardo Rueda, "El Cachorro" ("The Cub"), and Mariela Ruiz, "La Naranjita" ("The Small Orange"), said most of the people they know live in the country without papers and that they owe it to them to carry the message.

Rueda and Ruiz went as far as broadcasting live from the rally, asking for more people to show up. The station distributed free water and ice to marchers.

"We showed that we are united and that we can march peacefully," Rueda, 33, said. "We felt a lot of satisfaction and emotion knowing that we could help to bring our people together."

These kinds of large protests have been unheard of in Florida, said Stephanie Porta, a head organizer of ACORN, which often helps to organize rallies on behalf of low-income people. Those events typically attract anywhere from a dozen to a few hundred people.

"This is an issue that is on people's minds," Porta said. "Everyone says immigrants are scared, but for more than 2,000 people to come out in sleepy-town Orlando, it just tells you they are not scared anymore."

Catalina Mondragon, formerly an illegal immigrant who is now an advocate with the Farmworker Ministry in Polk County, said the protests have definitely given undocumented people a confidence they lacked.

In years of organizing, she said, it has been hard to get the working men and women off the fields and to rally around any cause, but she said immigrants are asking when the next protest will be.

"We have been very submissive," Mondragon said, "but that is changing, and we are ever more aware that we are the ones who put the vegetables on the table."

The next big challenge will be to turn out huge crowds for the statewide rally in Orlando on May 1, a "Day of Respect" that coincides with Latin America's Labor Day.