Bus tour takes on Big Apple
Fed up with the way immigrants are treated in the United States, a handful of Santa Monica activists will join a rally in New York on Saturday that is expected to attract close to 100,000 people.
The rally is the final stop in the Immigrant Worker Freedom Ride, a national bus tour modeled after the freedom rides of the civil rights movement and designed to raise awareness of the plight of immigrant workers in the U.S.
Four local hotel workers and a living wage organizer were aboard one of three buses that departed from Los Angeles on Sept. 22. Since then, the group has stopped in various cities across the country, holding rallies in such stops as Palm Springs, El Paso and Memphis, among others.
“The spirit is wonderful,” said Mar Preston, an organizer for Santa Monicans Allied for Responsible Tourism, a nonprofit group that protects worker rights. “It’s been a relentless pace.”
Preston said the group has slept in church basements and crammed up to six people into hotel rooms as they made their way across the country, most recently stopping Wednesday in Washington, D.C., where the group lobbied politicians.
“All along the way we’ve met with large crowds and much enthusiasm,” Preston said Thursday from in front of Rep. Henry Waxman’s office.
Along for the trip with Preston are Flora Andrade, a housekeeper from the Doubletree Guest Suites, German Casillas, a steward at the Fairmont Miramar Hotel, and Edith Garcia, a housekeeper at Loews Santa Monica Beach Hotel.
More than 900 people on 18 buses are heading for New York, where tens of thousands of other immigrants and activists are expected to join them. Following the rally, the group plans to fly back to L.A.
The goal of the entire trip is to ease the hardships faced by immigrant workers, according to organizers.
5B4,“... today’s Freedom Ride will expose the injustice of current policies toward immigrants. Immigrant workers, living and paying taxes in the United States, want to get on a path to citizenship, reunite with their families, have a voice on the job and be treated fairly,” said Kurt Petersen, organizing director of the local hotel and restaurant workers’ union, in a press release.
The union has been a major supporter of the battle for a living wage in Santa Monica. Most recently called “Measure JJ” on the November ballot, the proposed living wage would have required businesses downtown that gross more than $5 million in revenue annually, mainly hotels and restaurants, to pay workers between $10.50 and $12.25 per hour, depending on whether they also received health benefits.
Unionized businesses would have been exempt under the proposed living wage ordinance. Four of Santa Monica’s large hotels already have a union presence and Petersen said organizers will not rest until the other six do as well.
Preston described the Freedom Ride as like “flowing along a river of love,” but said the cross-country trek also has been marked by turbulent emotions and terrible stories of oppression and discrimination. She said one stop, near where dozens of white crosses marked graveyards in the desert near the Mexican border, was etched into her memory.
“This is a really big story that needs to be told,” she said. “It’s time to start talking about a fix.”
Mar Preston
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Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on October 3, 2003. Read the original PDF.