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Organizing: Network of Latino Radio, Churches, Union Helped Fuel Rally
By Omar Medina
The groundswell that led this past Sunday to one of the largest protest marches in Sonoma County in decades started in the United Farm Workers office on Corby Avenue, where the event was seen as a way to honor union founder Cesar Chavez.A diverse group of people outside the union also played key roles in pushing toward what many consider a high-water mark of Latino activism in Sonoma County.
They included a retired Sonoma County farmworker, an auto parts shop owner, a machinist from Roseland, a Santa Rosa immigration attorney and a Dominican-born priest.
They also were united in a belief that most undocumented immigrants have earned the right to be U.S. citizens.
``I don't see that we are rewarding them with something special,'' Salvador Mendoza, 58, said through an interpreter. A Michoacán native, the Santa Rosa resident started working in Sonoma County vineyards in 1974 and helped open the Corby Avenue UFW office in 1994.
``They have earned that right to be legal, sacrificing with their work, working for the economy of this country,'' said Mendoza, who co-hosts the daily KBBF morning program, ``Hour of the Farmworker.''
As March 26 approached, at least 1,000 people, many of them fieldworkers, truck drivers, landscapers and garbagemen who are KBBF's early morning audience, called the station for details about the march, said KBBF board member Jesus Lozano, 46, who owns a Santa Rosa auto parts shop.
``They were calling from Healdsburg, Napa, Calistoga, Petaluma, all over,'' said Jose Gonzalez, 53, a Roseland resident and former machinist who co-hosts ``Hour of the Farmworker.'' People were ``asking us to give more information so that other people could get motivated,'' he said.
The station devoted hours of airtime to broadcasting news about both the protest and HR4437, which the House adopted in December, sparking heated debate over illegal immigration and workers' rights.
``KBBF was enormously important in getting the word out, and to an extent, the other Spanish-language stations,'' said Richard Coshnear, a Santa Rosa immigration attorney active in immigration issues since 1985.
``We've never seen anything like what we saw on the twenty-sixth,'' said Coshnear, who in the weeks before the march helped start the Committee for Immigrant Rights of Sonoma County, an umbrella of groups opposing the legislation.
An estimated 3,700 to 5,000 people flooded Old Courthouse Square at the end of the march. Two weeks earlier, Coshnear helped run a forum on immigration law. More than 300 people attended Our Lady of Guadalupe Church in Windsor, and they said they wanted to make themselves heard, he said.
``They were eager to do something, to take some action, to show our representatives ... that this is wrong,'' Coshnear said.
``It was all workers,'' said Davin Cardenas, 25, site coordinator of the Graton Day Labor Center, who helped stage the event. ``They were leading the way. It was beautiful.''
The forum produced a telephone and e-mail list that Cardenas -- who hosts KBBF talk show ``Aztlan en Vivo'' -- and others used to urge people to show up March 26.
As the date approached, news came in of huge protests around the nation in cities such as Chicago, Phoenix and Los Angeles.
``You see your own people out there on the streets and you say, `When's our turn?''' said Cardenas, an Orange County native who graduated from Sonoma State University.
Word was spread at churches, in announcements after Mass and with fliers passed out to parishioners afterward.
``The church must always be willing to help needy people anywhere in the world, and I think that is our role,'' said Ramon Pons, a pastor at Our Lady of Guadalupe, who also spoke at the March 26 rally.
``It is a way to express their presence here in the United States,'' Pons said of the immigrants -- illegal and legal -- who marched Sunday. ``It is like they are behind a fence, nobody sees them, it is like they are invisible.''
The energy and emotions that filled Santa Rosa's streets a week ago will not fade soon, said Lozano, who crossed from Mexico illegally in 1980, went to work as a dishwasher in San Francisco and became a permanent resident in 1983.
``It takes us, the Hispanics, a while to wake up,'' he said. ``But once we wake up, you know, we plan to stay that way.''
Mendoza recited a phrase many at the march grew up hearing, and that suggests how long and bitter the fight over illegal immigration may yet become.
``Nosotros nunca cruzamos la frontera, la frontera nos cruzó -- ``We never crossed the border, the border crossed us.''
You can reach Staff Writer Jeremy Hay at 521-5212 or jhay@pressdemocrat.com.
Published on April 1, 2006
© 2006- The Press Democrat
BYLINE: JEREMY HAY
THE PRESS DEMOCRAT
PAGE: A1
PHOTO: 2 by KENT PORTER / The Press Democrat
1: Xochilt Martinez, 13, a student at Santa Rosa Middle School, demonstrates Friday near Santa Rosa Junior College.
2: Bilingual radio station KBBF played a key role in getting the word out about Sunday's protest march in Santa Rosa. Here, Salvador Mendoza, left, interviews Roberto Montes of Santa Rosa on Friday at the Roseland station. In the background is Abelino Bamaca.
