In a major victory, the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco ruled Monday, April 11 to uphold a Phoenix federal judge’s decision overturning key portions of Arizona’s 2010 anti-immigrant law, SB 1070. It’s uncertain where the case goes now. The law’s author, Republican state Sen. Russell K. Pearce, vowed to defend the hateful statute, citing "a state’s right to enforce the laws of this land." Pearce reminds us of Southern politicians in the 1950s and ’60s who vowed to defend racial prejudice at all costs. Regardless of how the Obama administration’s challenge of the Arizona law turns out, we take hope from Cesar Chavez’s words in his landmark 1984 address to the Commonwealth Club, also in San Francisco:
"Once social change begins, it cannot be reversed. You cannot uneducate the person who has learned to read. You cannot humiliate the person who feels pride. You cannot oppress the people who are not afraid anymore…Like the other immigrant groups, the day will come when we win the economic and political rewards that are in keeping with our numbers in society. The day will come when the politicians do the right thing by our people out of political necessity and not out of charity or idealism…And when that day comes, we shall see the fulfillment of that passage from the Gospel of Matthew in the New Testament, that "the last shall be first and the first shall be last."
Arturo S. Rodriguez, President
United Farm Workers of America