Latino anti-war leader ties immigration surge to Iraq message

By MARC HELLER
Hispanic Link
Friday, November 23, 2007

As director of Latinos Against the War, Carlos Montes plans demonstrations against U.S. military involvement in Iraq. So why is he talking about immigration?

"A lot of people don't see the link," Montes explains. Making the connection between the Iraq war and the mass movement of people is one way he is trying to stir the Hispanic community to speak out against the conflict, he says.

The Latino anti-war movement could use more spark. On that point organizers like Montes as well as those running non-Hispanic anti-war groups agreed. The Hispanic appetite for war protests is not as great as it was during the Vietnam era, when the National Chicano Moratorium march in East Los Angeles made headlines. Journalist Ruben Salazar was killed by police while covering that event for KMEX-TV.

Montes makes this link between immigration and war:

U.S. foreign policy, whether it's war or free trade or other matters, leads to globalization, which leads to poverty and unemployment in other countries, which results in mass migration and more undocumented immigrants coming to the United States.

It's not that Latinos are absent from the war debate, Montes says. His own group played a part in a Sept. 15 march in Washington against the war. It also organized an anti-war encampment at the Westwood Federal Office Building in Los Angeles that same month.

In addition, Latinos Against the War has helped organize protests against U.S. immigration policies.

"Every anti-war demonstration I go to in Los Angeles, I see hundreds of Hispanics," Montes says. "I always see lots of Latinos marching."

But he acknowledges that the sight of Hispanics marching may not indicate Hispanic participation in leading roles: "Some anti-war groups don't have leadership among Hispanics, or blacks for that matter, and we've brought that concern up."

Several anti-war groups contacted by Hispanic Link struggled to name Latinos or Latinas in leadership positions, saying they had few or none. Of more than 1,400 groups in the coalition called United for Peace and Justice, only a small percentage of them are Latino-oriented, and the 29-member steering committee has no Latinos, concedes Leslie Cagan, its national coordinator.

"There should be. That's a weakness on our part," Cagan says. "The history of anti-war work is that a lot of organizations are white or predominantly white, and we're struggling to be more multiracial."

One reason for the low representation may be the military's success in recruiting Hispanics, says Rafael Sencion, a lead organizer of Latinos and Latinas for Peace and Justice, in New York City. Some Hispanic youths see the Army as a quick way out of rough neighborhoods, he suggests.

Latinos Against the War highlights that issue on its Web site, bashing the government for "affirmative-action programs that heavily and discriminatorily recruit our youth into the military."

Neighborhoods themselves might even discourage young Latinos from protesting the war, Sencion says, if young Hispanics don't see the bigger picture outside their own communities. Language barriers may also keep them from joining non-Hispanic anti-war groups, he observes.

But, Sencion is quick to add, "Participation is very alive and I think that the Latino community in New York is very much against the war."

(Marc Heller, based in Washington, D.C., is a contributing columnist with Hispanic Link News Service. Contact him in care of editor(at)hispaniclink.org.)