Report from We Reject Racism Campaign in Arizona : Houston Indymedia

I came to Tucson this Monday to visit friends and contribute to organizing against the SB1070 law (which makes law enforcement check the immigration status of people they interact with), and have volunteered some with the work of the We Reject Racism Campaign. This campaign was initiated largely by No More Deaths, a humanitarian and activist organization trying to end the deaths of immigrants in the Sonoran desert.

This is a three-part campaign, consisting of the We Mean Business economic response, Stop Raids and Removals calling for an end to all raids and deportations and the Freedom Summer 2010 collaboration with Tierra y Libertad Organization.

On Tuesday I met up with a dozen folks volunteering with No More Deaths and we went to different parts of Tucson to talk with the businesses participating in the We Reject Racism Campaign. Myself and Andres, a volunteer from New Jersey, went to South Tucson, which is predominantly Mexican and Mexican American, and went to around 50 businesses who have expressed interest in participating in the campaign. We asked people to distribute fliers with information about the protests and vigils taking place on July 28th and July 29th, the day that some provisions of the law go into effect [a court ruling has restricted some of the most contraversial effects of the law from going into effect, but protests will go forward. ]

Almost all of the business we went to were supportive and agreed to help in the distribution of fliers to their clients. Many talked about their concerns, how they have lost business over the summer as many patrons have left Arizona or cut back on spending and trips outside their homes.

All together, 3 teams distributed more than a thousands fliers in english, and more than a thousand in spanish in South, West and North Tucson. After 4 hours of distributing the fliers, we drove to Armory Park and helped make signs and banners for the 24 hour vigil at the State building in Tucson, which begins today.

I was very impressed with the amount of work that is being done here in Tucson on a shoestring budget by locals and visiting volunteers. There are multiple meeting happening every day and large amounts of outreach for multiple events. Phoenix has gotten a lot of national press and resources, which makes sense, as lots of the madness of expanding police powers comes from Maricopa County Sheriff Arpaio, and many of the legislators who proposed and voted in SB1070 are from Central Arizona. Tucson has also done amazing work building on the history of immigrant rights and humanitarian activism to do a lot of grassroots mobilizing and raising of awareness around the barbarity and insanity of SB1070.

Arizona has become a laboratory of extreme anti-immigrant legislation and enforcement. But it is worth remembering that it is bigger that SB1070 and that the federal governement under Bush and Obama have expanded the enforcement, detention and deportation mechanisms of the federal govement by leaps and bounds, which making no progress on any type of just comprehensive immigration reform. Chapparal's article SB1070: Will Be Stopped, but Worse Will Come from Feds, proves to be an accurate prediction, and does an important job of looking for the larger context of the war being waged on immigrants by the federal government.

All energy right now is going into mobilizing for the 29th, but organizers here are aware that this is just one step of the struggle for immigrant rights and that a lot of reflection about the implications of the federal injunction will be, and what other forces are at play in how to go forward after the 29th.