On September 27 a conference called the First Latino Civil Rights Forum is also scheduled to take place here, and will help build the actions two days later. Muñoz is involved in building all three events, as are many others.

Organizers of the Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride have embraced these two events and are building them, along with a whole week’s worth of activities leading up to the arrival of the Freedom Ride buses. A Direct Action Committee to organize the march for drivers’ licenses is one of the committees of the local Freedom Ride coalition.

The Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride takes its name from the freedom rides of the civil rights movement, but it is above all based on struggles by immigrant workers that have intensified over the last half decade to organize unions and against deportations and discrimination. Immigrant workers and their allies will be setting out September 20 from nine U.S. cities—Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Houston, Miami, Boston, Chicago, and Minneapolis—and crossing the country in buses. They will converge on Washington, D.C., October 1-2. They will gather again the next day at Liberty State Park in New Jersey, and meet in New York for a mass rally on Saturday, October 4. National sponsors include the AFL-CIO, the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists, the garment and textile workers union UNITE, National Council of La Raza, and the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW).

The First Latino Civil Rights Forum is organized by the Coordinating Council of Latino Community Leaders (Coordinadora). This one-day conference will be held at Morehouse College, a historical Black college. Workshops on education, health, consumer, and legal rights are planned. Important questions that affect immigrants such not being able to get driver’s licenses will be discussed.

At a June press conference, Adelina Nicholls, Coordinadora’s vice president, said that one of the goals of the conference was to exchange experiences with a broad range of organizations and individuals, whether immigrant or not, that Coordinadora can work with in the future.

Builders of the Freedom Ride have been meeting weekly at the offices of the Central Labor Council. Representatives of UNITE, Service Employees International Union, and Amalgamated Transit Union attend the meetings. Community organizations—a number of which are African, such as Women Watch Afrika, Inc.—are also taking part. Individual workers like Hoa Vo, a 20-year-old sewing machine operator who works in a nonunion shop, are there too.

“We want people to know that we work and want the same respect as others,” Vo said in an interview. “We want employee rights, we want benefits. It’s important that we work together as one group, say what we believe, and stand together.”

Among the week’s events are a showing of a segment of the public TV documentary Eyes on the Prize on the freedom rides of the civil rights movement in the 1960s; teach-ins on campuses; a showing of Los Trabajadores, a film about day laborers who organize themselves; and an international day. One of the work committees of the coalition, the student committee, is planning to send speakers to various campuses to build the events.

Plans for the September 29 actions include arriving at the Martin Luther King Center, receiving proclamations at City Hall from political figures, the march for driver’s licenses, and a town hall meeting at the United Auto Workers Local 10 union hall in Doraville, Georgia.

A leaflet to build these events will be printed in as many languages as there are volunteer translators. The town hall meeting will also be set up for translation to different languages. More information on the Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride can be found on the coalition’s website at www.iwfr.org  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home