This Sunday, January 29th, will mark the one hundredth anniversary of the death of Anna LoPizzo, an Italian immigrant textile worker who was shot dead by police during the famous Bread and Roses strike of 1912 in Lawrence, Massachusetts. She was thirty-four years old. The strike was a watershed in the history of organized labour in America, and the striking women of Lawrence inspired the 1911 poem “Bread and Roses” by James Oppenheim, later famously set to music by Mimi Farina.
Anna LoPizzo lived in a world of horrific exploitation; a world where a population of immigrant textile workers, most of them women, worked long hours in the Lawrence mills for low pay in appalling conditions; a world where organizing a union or standing up for one’s rights was a dangerous business. The world of 2012 is very different from that of 1912, and we might hope and imagine that, in the subsequent hundred years, we might have made some progress in the field of justice for immigrant workers.
But we have made far too little progress. Today, in addition to the burden of poverty in a society where wealth is concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, America’s migrant workers have to contend with an unreasonable and inhumane system of restrictive immigration laws – enforced increasingly harshly by measures such as Arizona’s SB 1070, Alabama’s HB 56, raids on workplaces by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the federal government’s badly-misnamed “Secure Communities” program, and a multi-million-dollar immigration detention industry. I wrote recently in some detail about the suffering and exploitation engendered by America’s immigration laws, a subject on which I intend to write more soon. And there seems to be no political will to repair the injustice: the DREAM Act, a moderate measure which would provide a route to legal permanent residence for undocumented migrants who arrived in this country as children and who graduate from high school, has been repeatedly rejected by Congress and is opposed by all the current leading Republican presidential candidates.
In this post, a member of the Boston New Sanctuary Movement, an interfaith initiative which works for immigrant equality and immigration justice, visits immigration detainees at the Suffolk County House of Correction:
Next we read the names of the hundred and some people who have died in detention centers nationwide in the past few years. We read their names as a litany; recalling each person as an individual. The last individual on this long list was Pedro Tavarez. Pedro’s story ended here, in Boston. He was jailed at the Suffolk County House of Corrections during his legal proceedings. During his confinement he came down with an infection that the in-house infirmary failed to sufficiently treat, and by the time he was finally moved to a hospital he was too sick to survive. He died of a heart attack brought on by massive sepsis. As I heard this story, I raised my eyes to the concrete building before me, sitting comfortably in the nook of an on ramp, nestled in the heart of our city. ‘My tax dollars pay for this.’ I thought.
After the litany of the names we began our march. Walking down the sidewalk adjacent to the House of Corrections we chanted, ‘End Detentions Now!’ and ‘Stop The Deportations Now!’ As we marched, detainees came to the windows. From a hundred feet away, through chain-link that surrounded the structure, I locked eyes with these men, young and old, and I raised my hand in a wave or fist-pump of support. They waved back, held signs to the windows, or pounded the plexiglass in solidarity. As we continued on, the building was obscured by a 20 foot cement wall, but our view was restored as we mounted the stairs up to the overpass. From this height we engaged with others who were in the cells behind the wall. Many signs were too small to read, but a couple I could see said, ‘Love my Mom’ and ‘Have wife and kids’. Short stories, but they said a lot.
I reflected then on why these people were trapped inside of concrete rooms with plexiglass windows and iron bars. Not the why of wondering whether they had been arrested for jaywalking or for theft, but the deeper why of what separated them from my own parents when they were stopped for speeding and had left their license at home. It struck me that these people have been imprisoned for being free. We, you and I, the citizens of America, the very land of the free, have imprisoned people for trying to be free. It struck me that the individuals behind those bars had upheld some of our highest ideals. They left behind dangerous homelands and crossed unfamiliar country in the pursuit of a better life. They faced the odds in order to feed their families and educate their children. Did they disregard the laws of the United States? Yes. Would I do the same thing for my own family? I can only hope that I would have the courage.
Nor is this just an American problem. I would urge everyone to read this post at Tiger Beatdown about the horrors of life in the immigration detention camps run by contractors like G4S and Serco, from Britain to Australia to the Netherlands, where asylum-seekers and undocumented migrants are abused and dehumanized for the profit of private corporations. I’ve written before about the long and shameful history of abuse at the Campsfield House and Yarl’s Wood detention centres (the latter of which holds children as well as adults). The immigration enforcement industry, the guards and the guns and the detention camps, exists to police the boundary of our walled world: it feels sometimes as though we are all living in Omelas.
This is a feminist issue, too. Women are victimized disproportionately by the injustice of immigration laws. Just as Anna LoPizzo and the women textile workers of Lawrence went on strike to protest appalling conditions, so, too, did the women detained at the Yarl’s Wood detention camp, many of them asylum-seekers who had experienced rape and torture in their home countries. The contractors who run the detention centre responded by locking the women in an airless corridor for eight hours with no access to food, water, toilet facilities or medical care.
One hundred years after Anna LoPizzo’s murder, we have not overcome injustice; we have not moved beyond the time when migrant workers face exploitation by employers and the constant threat of violence at the hands of the state. I intend in the next few days to blog about the racist history of immigration laws. But for now, I’ll leave you with Oppenheim’s poem, as powerful and resonant today as in 1911.
As we come marching, marching in the beauty of the day,
A million darkened kitchens, a thousand mill lofts gray,
Are touched with all the radiance that a sudden sun discloses,
For the people hear us singing: “Bread and roses! Bread and roses!”
As we come marching, marching, we battle too for men,
For they are women’s children, and we mother them again.
Our lives shall not be sweated from birth until life closes;
Hearts starve as well as bodies; give us bread, but give us roses!As we come marching, marching, unnumbered women dead
Go crying through our singing their ancient cry for bread.
Small art and love and beauty their drudging spirits knew.
Yes, it is bread we fight for – but we fight for roses, too!As we come marching, marching, we bring the greater days.
The rising of the women means the rising of the race.
No more the drudge and idler – ten that toil where one reposes,
But a sharing of life’s glories: Bread and roses! Bread and roses!