bayano
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In 1886, immigrant workers marched for their rights in Chicago, helping to create what quickly became perhaps the most global of holidays, a holiday for the international working class to march together in struggle. In 2006, May Day was resurrected in its hometown, when immigrant workers marched for their rights in Chicago again, in the largest demonstration of any sort that this city had ever seen. While in nearly every major city in the world workers had come to celebrate the anniversary of the Chicago march of 1886, the celebrations had been nothing in Chicago until International Workers Day this year.
The contrasts abound, of course, but they are more style than substance. In 1886, the immigrants were Europeans, and were led by anarchists and socialists. Today, the majority of the immigrants were Latin Americans or Latinos, though thousands of Asians, Europeans, and Africans represented as well, and the politics of the marchers is far wider and generally centrist. But in 1886, immigrant workers marched for their rights, and one hundred twenty years later we marched again.
Chicago is an immigrant city, so battles for both immigration rights and workers power have been dead, but a recent assault on specifically Latin American immigrants has awoken this giant. Television news has for the past few years railed daily on an imagined ‘invasion’ of our border, successfully conjuring up a sense of war and hatred in viewers (so much for the myth of the liberal media). There has also been a clear effort to focus the debate for European-Americans onto the evidence that they will be a minority in decades to come and their culture will no longer be dominant in the country, fomenting racism amongst viewers and readers.
Source. Read the rest here
Thought this might motivate some discussion. This is just the first part, read the rest.