Posted on 09/24/2003 9:58:29 PM PDT by JustPiper
Heads up Idaho, they will be by you today!
Beginning at age 8, Gloria Lara spent her summers working alongside her father and 10 brothers and sisters in the fields. Beginning Thursday, Lara, now 53 and living in Burley, will work to highlight the struggles of immigrant workers in the United States.
“I want to be the voice of the people who have been in the shadows and haven´t been able to come out,” Lara said.
The Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride began this week with buses of activists from throughout the country that will converge on Washington, D.C., and New York to promote immigrant civil rights. Events will wrap up with an Oct. 4 rally in Queens, N.Y.
Two Freedom Ride buses will make two stops today in the Treasure Valley — at 1 p.m. at the Idaho Anne Frank Human Rights Memorial in Boise and an overnight stop at Caldwell´s Farmway Village.
Lara will board a Freedom Ride bus Thursday in Rupert.
Lara said she´s going on the trip to share her account of life as a daughter of undocumented farmworkers and to help lobby for changes so that immigrants can become U.S. citizens more easily.
“The Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride is a historic initiative. It´s the biggest immigrant mobilization in history,” said Sam Blair, community organizer for the Idaho Community Action Network. The network advocates for low-income Idahoans and is one of the agencies coordinating events for the Freedom Ride stop in Idaho.
“We in Idaho are privileged to be a part of it,” Blair said.
Lara´s parents migrated from Mexico to Texas before she was born in 1948 in Alamo, she said. The family moved to Rupert soon after she was born. Her parents became U.S. citizens when she was 11.
In the summers, while most of her classmates played and took vacations, Lara and her siblings worked the fields. Their mother tended to household duties.
“We never knew that in the summer you were supposed to go on vacation or to Disneyland,” Lara said.
The family would pick cotton in Arizona, fruit in Oregon, and beets and asparagus in Washington, she said.
Lara remembers hoeing beets on her knees when she was 8, and reaching above her head to pick cotton when she was 11.
“It was long, hard, hot hours,” she said.
Lara began taking business and clerical classes at the College of Southern Idaho in 1989 and has worked for a variety of community advocacy groups in the past decade. She continued farm work until the mid-1990s.
She said the Idaho Community Action Network in the Burley area selected her to serve as a representative on the Freedom Ride.
“It makes me very proud, happy and excited,” she said. “To me, this is something so precious, to be able to speak for my people.”
Her father died about 15 years ago, but Lara´s 83-year-old mother is proud of the work her daughter will do on the Freedom Ride, Lara said.
“She said, ´My daughter, God bless you. I hope you can accomplish something for my people.´ ”
What's so bad about the guest worker and immigration programs we have in place now?
To date, I haven't seen a single coherent argument against entering the U.S. legally.
Okay...
Sounds like these folks did it the "legal" way...parents worked towards legal US citizenship (as they should have) and it was granted
Lara's born here, she's a citizen.
What "civil rights" were violated? What's her beef? They were "legal" immigrants, based on the info she gives. How was she and "her people" wronged?
Something doesn't smell right here with her story. What am I missing?
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And you won't Imal, because in Mehico they are probably telling them we 'owe' them, besides they are too lazy to do it the legal way!
I've spent a few hours a day at FAIR.
Also, there are counter protests greeting the illegals at their stops, mine is here in Chicago Saturday.
And this one is the best!
Get Off Your Ass!
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