MAYWOOD, CA, 12 November 2006--Maywood has a problem, and it isn't the minutemen who invaded the small city outside of Los Angeles yesterday. Maywood has a police problem. The minutemen at yesterday's protest were penned in behind wooden sawhorse barricades and fronted by a hundred or more aggressive police, guarding the minutemen from two hundred and fifty peaceful Maywood residents and supporters.
Save Our State, a group that routinely contributes their time and resources to hassling day laborers, joined with leaders of the California Coalition for Immigration Reform, Minuteman Project, and the Crispus Attucks Brigade, all area anti-immigrant groups. Together they managed to pull together seventy or so supporters to protest Maywood's resolution to be a sanctuary city, refusing federal funds to aid in immigrant roundups.
They were led into Maywood with a police escort, and the police spent the day serving as shock troops for the racist agenda.
After some minutemen cars were vandalized at a September protest in Maywood, Save Our State arranged with Maywood police to protect their vehicles. The cop escort led the minutemen into a gated parking lot off Slauson. Apparently they appropriated the parking lot without notifying the owner, who later in the day called a towing service to haul the vehicles away. The cops turned the tow truck away.
Pro-Maywood counterprotestors were kept a hundred feet away, mostly behind heavy metal barricades across Slauson Boulevard, while police, at times with rifles drawn, surrounded the city's residents in the street and from rooftops on the remaining three sides.
It didn't take ten minutes after the minutemen showed up when the cops, an "emergency response" force from area law enforcement, were wrestling to rescue a piñata of a Ku Klux Klansman tied by Maywood supporters to a traffic light behind the Maywood crowd.
Twenty minutes later, at 10:30 a.m., a minuteman was allowed to leave the pen and stroll through the Maywood crowd handing out Mexican flags with an orange S.O.S mark on them, presumably to set up a photo-op for the minutemen. He finally threw them on the ground when they were refused. A few people chased him out and, as he crossed to barricade into "no-man's land" between the minutemen and the protestors, the cops stopped him. When he flashed his wallet at the cops, he got an escort across the zone between the two groups. Meanwhile, one of the protestors dogging him crossed a couple of steps beyond the barricade and was thrown down, handcuffed, and led away. It was only after another protestor complained to the Maywood mayor that Sam Zislman, attorney at law and professor at Irvine University, was plucked from the minutemen cohort and taken off to jail. Both protestors were released a few hours later.
Reportedly, another counterprotestor, perhaps two, were arrested later in the day, and one was shot with a rubber bullet. The cops pulled one arrestee's shirt over his face and led him, on their way to the cop car, through a gauntlet of minutemen shouting abuse. Some counterprotestors managed to lob eggs at the minutemen from a rooftop.
While Maywoodians chanted, "Desde Oaxaca a Maywood, los obreros vercerón," the minutemen replied by blaring an unrecognizable cowboy song and bullhorned, "Speak English--we don't understand you."
When one protestor touched a barricade, Sgt. Barajas, holding a tear gas gun, warned the protestor that he would "light 'em up" if he touched the barricade again. The minutemen called out, "Who's streets? Our streets!" The irony wasn't lost on those who had counted on their police to protect and serve them.
Along Slauson Boulevard a dozen county sheriff's deputies, assisting the Maywood police, faced the people, while three faced the invaders. Cops, often without badges displayed, from Maywood, Whittier, Southgate, Bell Gardens (at least one masked without a nametag), Downey, and Bellwood manned barricades along the side streets. They lined up practically shoulder-to-shoulder against the counterprotestors, as a sheriff's helicopter occasionally circled overhead.
"We are indigenous. We will never leave!" "The citizens of Maywood order you to leave!" demanded the counterprotestors. They began a chant of "Smallpox infested squatters!" aimed at the mostly European-descent minutemen. The minuteman cranked up "Yankee Doodle Dandy" on their PA system.
By noon, many of the Maywood supporters gone to another event, leaving mostly Maywood residents and the Mexica Movement, who arrived at 6:00 a.m. and remained until the end.
By about 1:00 p.m. the minutemen began to orchestrate their exit. They began by walking in a circle with their flags. Then they blared Bruce Springsteen's "Born in the USA," a peculiar choice given its despondent outlook on the condition of those born here.
Meanwhile, on Fishburn Avenue, twenty cops drew their batons and shoved thirty protestors backwards, including a women carrying a baby, to move them down the street from one of the parking lot gates. With police cover, the minutemen taunted the counterprotestors from behind the parking lot's cast-iron fence. One protestor, after some disagreement, held up a small U.S. flag, asked the cops if it was illegal to burn it, and proceeded to do so. The police held off a handful of remaining protestors for twenty minutes after the minuteman cars had exited, until they withdrew to the intersection of Fishburn and Slauson and the counterprotestors followed.
Officer Ruiz called one counterprotestor who asked him a question a "b*tch." A few minutes later, a minutewoman had moved west to the barricade on Slauson and Fishburn, and was photographing the counterprotestors. When this reporter asked Officer Acosta to move to the minutemen's barricade fifty feet down east on Slauson to photograph the few remaining minutemen, Acosta said no. When asked who was in charge, Acosta answered, "No one's in charge." He quickly revised that when it was noted and said to talk to City Hall. When a counterprotestor asked who the officer in charge was, Acosta repeated "Talk to City Hall" over and over.
Left on Fishburn and Slauson was Ted Hayes, organizer of the Crispus Attucks
Brigade and fresh from unsuccessfully trying to mobilize Chicago's
African-American community against immigrant sanctuary-seeker Elvira
Maywood has an unpleasant history with its cops, who, until a year ago, routinely used traffic stops to confiscate immigrants' vehicles so that the local tow-truck company could sell them. That prompted the election of a predominantly Chicano city council, which promptly denounced HR4437, the heinous Sensenbrenner anti-immigrant bill and declared Maywood a sanctuary for immigrants, free from police harassment. After today's event the city's cops were in more trouble, as residents planned to address the cops' behavior at the protest at Tuesday night's city council meeting. It seems that the minutemen have inadvertently solidified the community against the cops, and confirmed the city council as residents' haven.
After the protest, Save Our State report in two threads that they went to the Citadel Mall in the City of Commerce, where they taunted, air horned, and ultimately pepper sprayed and tazered shoppers. One shopper responded by punching one of the minuteman's car window. The manager of Rudy's Diner refused to seat the white bangers at the restaurant and insisted they take their food to go.
