Why she is marching

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Yadira Ramirez, a 27-year-old nurse’s assistant and Los Angeles resident, arrived on the corner of Olympic and Broadway by 7 a.m. with her husband, Juan Lerma, a 29-year-old janitor who is here illegally, and the eldest of the their three U.S.-born children.

Their daughter Esmerelda Diaz, 9, a shy fourth-grader from Wilshire Crest Elementary School, wore jeans, white sneakers and an oversized ‘We Are American’ red T-shirt for the march, her second one. She ‘came to participate with my family,’ she said, ‘so everyone can give us papers.’

Ramirez, who came to the U.S. illegally from Jalisco, Mexico, in 1980 with her parents and four brothers and is now here legally, attended the march to support her husband, who arrived here 16 years ago from Mexico and does not have papers. ‘If they send him to Mexico, I’m going to be by myself,’ said Ramirez, draped in an American flag. Organizers told them to bring American flags, not the flags of their native country, but Ramirez did not mind.

‘We don’t have to show a Mexican flag,’ she said. ‘You can see we’re Mexicans.’

Her husband, wearing a gray T-shirt that said ‘Si Se Puede’ and ‘To the Streets,’ waved his own American flag. ‘We really deserve amnesty,’ he said. ‘We came here to work. We’re not criminals, as some people say. We don’t come to steal jobs. We do the heavy work that nobody else does.’

-Tami Abdollah at Olympic and Broadway