Mall fast ‘created a moment’ for immigration reform, activist says
Eliseo Medina sits in what looks from the outside like a big, white party tent on the edge of the Mall. But inside, this is an encampment for fasters, adorned with a photo of Gandhi and an ash-colored old shoe found in the Arizona desert.
The 67-year-old Mexican-American union leader and immigration activist lost 24 pounds during a 22-day fast that ended Tuesday. His gold wedding band now spins on his ring finger. His face is gaunt. His eyes, though, have an intensity as he talks about how to persuade members of the U.S. House of Representatives to follow their Senate colleagues and enact immigration legislation.
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The fast has “created a moment in which the public is focused on the problems of this broken immigration system,” says Medina, who drew visits from the president, first lady, vice president and the House minority leader. “When those moments come, you have to take advantage of them.”
Medina stepped down as secretary-treasurer of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) in October to focus his full attention on overhauling immigration laws. He says he was haunted by the feeling that reform was going nowhere.
His passion, in part, stems from his days picking grapes and strawberries in Delano, Calif., and later as a member of the movement led by civil rights activists Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta. The potency of a unified Latino political bloc, one powerful enough to pressure big business and lawmakers to act, seemed real again.
Huerta, 83, sees an unmistakable link between Medina and Chavez, who fasted in support of nonviolence and farmworkers’ rights.
“[Chavez] never called it a hunger strike,” Huerta says. “He thought it shouldn’t be coercive. It’s a spiritual offering. That’s the spirit here in D.C.”
In 1956, Medina’s family immigrated from Zacatecas, Mexico — a “dirt-poor state with a long history of sending immigrants because you can’t survive otherwise,” Medina says.
“What I remember was being driven from Tijuana to Delano at night and being pulled over by Border Patrol,” he says. “They flashed lights in our faces and asked for papers. The only reason we were pulled over was because it was a car full of Mexicans.”
Leaning into the conversation, he says he still remembers how he felt as the light shone in his face. He was 10 years old.
In Delano, Medina found himself in an insulated Spanish speaking world of farmworkers. His father was a bracero, a guest manual laborer, and at age 15 Medina worked in the fields on school vacations and weekends, making 80 cents an hour.
“There was horrible treatment and lack of respect,” he says.
By the time Medina came of age, Chavez had launched a strike in the grape fields of Medina’s home town. The goal was better wages and working conditions, such as clean water in the fields for workers to drink.
“So many people came from all over. They weren’t farmworkers. Many went to jail. They had nothing to gain from it, but they came,” Medina says. “It was a huge revelation for me about the values of this country and the belief that if you work hard it ought to be respected.”
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