Picketing Drywallers Crossed Line Into Mainstream U.S.

The modern history of Orange County is being seared onto the page right before our eyes.

A large part of that history is, of course, the continuing Latino immigration into the county, a saga that doesn’t need to be nearly as unsettling as some people make it out to be.

Indeed, if I were a spin doctor I’d suggest that the protest at the courthouse in Santa Ana last week by a few hundred striking Latino drywall hangers and their families--a protest no doubt disturbing to many of the Anglo citizenry--could easily be seen as one of the most reassuring demonstrations in recent memory.

Let me back up. In fielding phone calls from people concerned about immigration and its social impact, I hear a lot of apprehension and anger from segments of the Anglo community. They fear that foreigners with different values and interests will recast the heritage of this country.

Recent events suggest otherwise.

Simply put, the courthouse protest was about as American as you can get. Rather than remain “hidden” workers, plying their craft in a residential drywall industry that is exclusively Latino these days, the strikers invited public attention. They even brought their wives and kids.

I read that as a signal that these men want to assimilate into the society, not remain outside of it. A group of people worried about deportation or about blowing their status as cheap laborers wouldn’t do something as public as massing at the courthouse and calling out the county’s most powerful figures.

It was a carefully thought-out step out of the shadows and into the mainstream.

Latino activist Nativo Lopez, credited by some observers for a key role in keeping the demonstration orderly, told me Friday that the strikers are trying to frame their arguments in peaceful “family-oriented” terms. He said activists have learned they have a better chance to “win over the American public by maintaining that kind of posture. And I’m convinced they’ll continue to move in that direction.”

Lopez, co-national director of the Latino rights group Hermandad Mexicana Nacional, has been characterized in the past as controversial and confrontational. Lopez said he was joking about that very thing with his wife the other day. “In the last four or five years, I’ve tried working with school boards, city councils, the Board of Supervisors--to try to prod, to advocate in this or that direction,” Lopez said. “Some folks say, ‘Gee, you’re getting so mainstream.’ ”

Someone even called him a yuppie the other day, Lopez said.

Amin David, another longtime Orange County Latino activist, also sees the drywall strike and subsequent protest as historically significant.

“In my 25 years in Orange County, I’ve never seen or experienced a movement of such depth and scope as this one,” David said. “It has captured and precipitated a high degree of emotion and sentiment, and I don’t recall a movement . . . that feels so right and so just.”

David said he thinks the strikers are “good, decent people” who represent the preponderance of immigrants. “They’re truly the work-ethic standard of what we’re talking about, the family-unit standard,” David said.

Lopez said the strike and public show of solidarity happened now because “they (strikers) feel more comfortable, because they have more equity. Their kids are U.S.-born, their wives are here, they may or may not be legalized but they have a stake, and they’re being motivated by other Latinos, who are here legalized and are middle-level (union) leaders.”

Needless to say, a few well-chosen words won’t solve the anxieties over immigration, illegal or otherwise.

A lot of two-way talking needs to happen. Anglos need to see that Latinos are hard workers (a generalization impressed upon me this week by Anglo contractors who phoned) who are trying to provide for their families.

Latinos must quit reading racism or xenophobia into every Anglo outcry against the immigration influx, when much of it is an understandable reaction to laborers who they see taking some of their jobs away.

American history shows that anxiety over immigration knows no color boundaries--earlier generations of Americans hated the Irish, Germans and Russians too, when they came over and competed for jobs.

All of which is to say, I guess, that we’re on a familiar continuum. You know as well as I that history has shown fairly uniformly in America that immigration has helped, not hurt.

Which isn’t to say that it isn’t painful.

But the pain recedes in direct proportion to the quickness with which we realize how more alike we are than different.