# ACTIVISM
Resistance took many shapes this year, from hashtag activism to symbolic gestures to old-fashioned protests, peaceful or not. Here’s a look at some of the causes that got us riled up this year — at universities, online and in the streets,
# bodyshaming # aftermetoo # HeretoStay # fearlessgirl # indigenous # MeAt14 # whitehouseboycott # ShePersisted
WASHINGTON— Yuridia Loera, at four-foot-11the smallest person at the rally across the street from the White House, brought a megaphone to amplify her voice.
Without it, she would have still been the loudest person there.
When the DREAMers chanted their chants, calling on the president and Congress to pass a law, “now,” to give them permanent legal status in the United States, her cry rang out a beat longer than her fellow activists’, her tone a little rawer, as if she was convinced that Trump himself might hear her. “Clean DREAM Act . . . ” She leaned back, her eyes closed in concentration. “Now!” It was genuine emotion. It was also a calculated decision.
Loera has decided to be loud, she said later, because of all the times she has been silenced.
There was the time she was sexually assaulted, then afraid to report the crime because of her immigration status. There was the time she realized she couldn’t get a job because of that status, even though she has lived in the United States since she was 2. There was the insecurity that comes with extreme poverty, her parents scraping together just $20,000 a year for seven children, as her dad struggled with his mental health.
Now, after all that, there is this: the likelihood, in her view, that she will end up getting deported to Mexico, where her family lived in a cardboard house.
In 2012, Barack Obama created a program that protected many of the DREAMers, people who were brought to the U.S. illegally as children. As Obama did not get approval from Congress, many Republicans believed the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program was unconstitutional. Despite Trump’s previous promise that DREAMers could “rest easy,” he rescinded the program in September.
He followed that decision with more words of praise, suggesting he was eager to sign a lasting law protecting the DREAMers. But then he backtracked. With the program set to vanish in March under Trump’s deadline, there is no deal in sight.
And so Loera, like thousands of her peers, has gone back to the streets and the halls of Congress.
She has pestered legislators, delivered fiery speeches, helped to fill a silent Senate office building with chants of “here to stay.” In September, the 22-year-old consumed nothing but water and Gatorade for four days, fasting at a Washington church while also visiting congressional offices.
If Trump and his party are going to kick her out, she said in an interview, “I want to know that I gave everything. Every last ounce of energy that I have. All that indignation.”
Her mom, active in the labour movement, started taking her to protests at age 6. A natural “rebel,” she was hooked. Eventually, she wants to be a college graduate and a doctor. For now, this is her life’s work.
“You’re your best advocate,” she said. “And I think if the immigrant rights movement and the undocumented rights movement has shown me anything, it is that even if you are undocumented, you still have agency.
“You still have loud opinions, loud voices, and if that’s all you have, that’s all you have: you join the movement and you give
what you can.” The DREAMer movement, just over a decade old, has, until now, been a remarkable success. A ragtag bunch of college students, sometimes meeting in semi-secret to avoid attracting the attention of the authorities, grew into a national network of out-and-proud, confrontational activists — the “shock troops of the immigrant rights movement,” in the words of scholar Chris Zepeda-Millan.
“Undocumented and unafraid,” the DREAMers confronted Obama until he did something for them. Obama’s program gave 800,000 people renewable two-year work permits and a promise of no deportation.
The newfound security emboldened thousands more people to join the activist push for a path to citizenship. Telling their stories of growing up as de facto Americans, they earned admiration from even conservatives hostile to other unauthorized immigrants. Polls taken after Trump rescinded the program indicated that more than 80 per cent of Americans wanted them to get permission to stay.
But on immigration, like guns, policy does not always follow public opinion. The DREAMers find themselves in an odd place: they are never more popular, perhaps never so endangered.
And it is not at all obvious that their usual tactics will be much use in the Trump era.
Unlike Obama, who set a record for deportations but still wanted to court the Latino vote, Trump has shown interest only in his white political base. Much of that base appears hostile to people of colour, perhaps especially when they are making aggressive demands.
DREAMers have ramped up their civil disobedience again in December, getting themselves arrested in congressional buildings and on the Capitol steps.
“These in-your-face, overt, radical tactics that they used (with Obama) . . . that tactic now is completely closed. It is not working,” said Zepeda-Milan, University of California, Berkeley ethnic studies professor and author of the recent book Latino Mass Mobilization: Immigration, Racialization, and Activism.
“The idea of putting activist pressure on a completely Republican-controlled federal government? It’s showing you the limits, right now, of that strategy. They kind of have to take a step back to reflect on what is going to be our strategy right now.”
The DREAMers’ tough choices involve not just what tactics to use but what to try to achieve.
At this rally, held by the youth-led DREAMer group United We Dream, for which Loera is an organizer, the demand was a “clean” DREAM Act: the passage of a no-strings-attached law giving DREAMers a path to citizenship without any concessions to the right, such as additional spending on border security or deportation enforcement. Some key allies, such as big businesses, believe more compromise is necessary.
Loera said it would be unreasonable for DREAMers to advocate for a resolution that helped them but put their parents at greater risk of arrest. And she rejected the suggestion that the moment requires any softening.
“We’ve consistently been told that: ‘Be more humble,’ ” she said. “But that’s how they have subjected us to this quiet, silent, second-class status. And the time is now to empower the millions of people who have been told that consistently throughout their lives. We disregard these politicians and how they think we should do this and how we should act.
“We know that it works, and it has worked, and we’re going to continue to demand. Not ask.”
This moment, she said, is about their dignity.
“You still have loud opinions, loud voices.” YURIDIA LOERA ON THE FIGHT FOR STATUS