Four years ago, Christine Neumann-Ortiz took a leave of absence from her day job to devote her time and passion to Voces de la Frontera, the immigrant advocacy and worker rights organization she had founded in 2001.
And she never returned to her job.
This march also will protest the passage of Arizona’s tough new laws against illegal immigrants. “The Arizona law is a logical progression of the failure to enact immigration reform,” she said.
Former Republican state Sen. Cathy Stepp once called Neumann-Ortiz a terrorist and tried to get her prosecuted when she and three others went to Stepp’s Racine County home in 2006 to try to talk to her about her vote on a driver’s license bill that would have required proof of U.S. citizenship. The Racine County district attorney refused to prosecute Neumann-Ortiz.
State Sen. Glenn Grothman (R-West Bend) doesn’t personally know Neumann-Ortiz, but he’s heard of Voces.
“Horrible,” he called it. “The problem with Voces is that it blurs the distinction between legal and illegal immigration and that’s a very disturbing position to take.”
A self-styled organizer, Neumann-Ortiz said she learned her skills while a student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she worked on anti-racism and women’s rights campaigns while earning a degree in English. She also has a master’s degree in Chicano history from the University of Texas at Austin.
The daughter of immigrants - her father was born in Berlin, Germany, her mother in Mexico - she was born in Los Angeles but lived in Spain, Venezuela, Oregon and Alabama because her father was an engineer for UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. The family moved here when her father came to teach at UW-Milwaukee. Her mother works for Milwaukee Public Schools.
She lives in Shorewood with her 18-year-old son, who is in college, three dogs and two cats. Neumann-Ortiz’s salary at Voces is $52,000.
In 2006, Neumann-Ortiz took a leave from Milwaukee Area Technical College, where she was coordinator of GED programs for migrants, and organized the first local march to push for immigration reform called “A Day Without Latinos.”
Wow. She's a real American. Born on a stopover in LA by her globalist parents.
And best of all, she's from two countries which have no grudge against the United States whatsoever.
Right? Right. Uh huh.