Commnetary on the May 25 Legal Defense Groups rally for the Garden Grove 5.
Santa Ana—Last week I sat on the steps of the Santa Ana police station in vigil for five arrested protestors inside, while a group of about thirty of their exhausted and forlorn supporters chanted their support and hoped for their release into the early morning hours, alone except for a handful of police almost casually looking on. The five arrestees were facing felony charges for protesting the encroachment of the racist anti-immigrant Minuteman Project into California, at a demonstration in Garden Grove against a organizing meeting with the Project's founder, Jim Gilchrist.
Yesterday I returned to many of those same people and a hundred more marching outside the District Attorney's office in Santa Ana. The mostly young, mostly Chicano and Asian-descent protestors had pulled together the May 25 Legal Defense Group and presented a letter to the Orange Count District Attorney demanding the charges against their comrades be dropped; that charges be re-filed against the driver of a vehicle that plowed into six protestors, and that the Garden Grove police be investigated for their actions on that day. They gave the D.A. one week to answer.
Rally organizers had done their work. Signs and T-shirts echoed the demands, chants of ¿Que queremos? ¡Justicia! ¿Quando? ¡Ahora! resounded through the county government district, and three young men with cuatros riffed on the chants. Marchers paraded down the long city block and back up the other side. Half a dozen television cameras showed up, KPFK covered the rally live, suited newspaper reporters crouched on paving stones scratching out notes.
This time the mood was determined and powerful, harmonious, with a hint of righteous celebration. The group worked with the media, providing backdrop to prepared press representatives, posing with their signs, responding with both clarity and outrage to the reporters' questions. Lacking the provocation of the Minutemen or a visible police presence, the well-disciplined and peaceful protestors completed their mission and dispersed at the 6:00 pm announcement.
Two dozen marchers attended a community follow-up meeting. We briefed each other on the arrestees' situation, the Save Our State plans to return to Baldwin Park in June, the Minutemen's border plans this summer, and the May 25 Legal Defense Group's next actions. Everyone took a few minutes to speak about why they were there. Several spoke in horror at the lifetime implications of felony convictions for the Chicano brothers; a young man spoke of using Garden Grove to educate the community about the police state; una abuela told of a career of victories over school boards and police chiefs, while her granddaughter spoke of her first protest.
We had differences that should have splintered the group, across race, between genders, among generations and classes. But these young adults are of a generation that intuits that they must isolate and annihilate old white peoples' racism. Some of us had been at Garden Grove, some at Baldwin Park, and for some this rally was their beginning. But we all understood: la policía had locked up la raza and freed los racistas.
On the ride home, my mind flitted from All Power to the People! to Solidarność to ¡Ya Basta!, and even to the naive and idealistic "Make love, not war." And then I got it. Last night, I had been privileged to witness the birth of a pueblo.