Here is a humorous, and inspiring, e-mail (reprinted with permission) from a friend of mine in Chicago, to took Monday off to see what the May Day demonstrations were all about:
I went. (Shockingly enough, I still have a job!)
As for the rally itself, it was very interesting. I arrived at Union Park (the pre-march gathering place) about an hour before the march started. There didn't seem to be THAT many people, yet there were too many to get a view of the speakers. As I meandered around trying to get a view, people began to arrive en masse--a busload of SEIU workers in purple t-shirts, families (ranging from the elderly to babies in strollers) and groups of teenagers, and, finally, two "feeder" marches converging from the north and south. (This I didn't know until I saw the news later.)
Suddenly there was this enormous group of people, and instead of being able to meander at will, I could only navigate within subcurrents of the crowd as it pressed toward intersection where the march would began. We stood there for what seemed like an hour while police and organizers channeled the first marchers onto Randolph Street. By the time my section of the throng started moving, I could BARELY see where the ranks began ahead of me and could not see any end behind.
The crowd was predominantly Mexican (Mexican flags outnumbered U.S. about 3-2), but there was also a healthy smattering of Poles and others. White, black, and Latino union workers (mostly SEIU and UNITE HERE, although UFCW and Teamsters and Carpenters were also there) added to the mix. One of the more moving moments for me was when my section of the march paused at the intersection of Randolph and Racine. I wondered what the issue was when a cheer went up and, practically sprinting down Racine to converge with the parade, came a contingent of demonstrators wearing green shirts and waving Irish flags (they even brought bagpipes).
By the time we got Downtown, the march was (lame metaphor coming) a seemingly endless river echoing chants and slogans through the canyons of skyscrapers. Bystanders looked on from sidewalks and out of windows; the expressions on their faces suggested a range of attitudes from happy support to idle curiosity to resentful, uh, resentment.
The vibe I got from most of the marchers was, shall I say, simultaneously assertive and jovial. Chants of "Si se puede" and "El pueblo unido no mas sera vencido" rose up with serious force and conviction. At the same time, people were joking around and having fun. I don't know for sure, but probably for a lot of the workers there (especially the undocumented) there was a combination of class and cultural and regional (e.g., Chijuajuan) and national pride, AND the sort of giddy feeling you get from playing hooky.
Police say 400,000 people marched. Organizers say 700,000. So I figure it must have been half a million. Nobody was arrested, nor were there significant disruptions to traffic or commerce.
As for me, I went there alone, I walked in silence, and I left a few blocks shy of the Grant Park rally after the march. Someone handed me a sign that said NO HUMAN BEING IS ILLEGAL, so I carried that. (When examined closely, these signs had originally spelled BEING as BEIGN, which means that thousands of "NG"s had been pasted over the typos.) Although I was really more "in" than "of" the crowd, I'm glad I went because I think that it was the right thing to do.
Two final notes on the politics of the event:
(1) As you may have noted, the unions present were largely those that have split from the AFL-CIO to pursue a strategy of mass organization instead of fundraising and money politics. Good for them.
(2) After I left the parade, I watched a group of communists go by. They seemed to be mostly young, white, and, I presume, grounded more in the campus than the shop floor or the barrio. They chanted ideological slogans about worker exploitation and racism (you know, the ones that begin "Hey hey, ho ho..."). Interestingly, I didn't hear any of the immigrants take up their chants. By contrast, when a smiling Chinese-American bystander started calling out "Si se puede," the marchers gladly resumed their chorus.
Long story short, I don't think that the march was ultimately about politics--or rather, it was not really about ideology. It was about politics at a more concrete level: "I don't want my father and brother to be deported." "After working here for ten years, I don't understand why I should have to hide." "Gee, Poles and Mexicans and Palestinians are in the same boat in a lot of ways." "Having a lot of the workforce underground and underpaid isn't good for anybody who works for a living."
HR 4437 is a stupid and evil bill that should damn well be defeated. The nativist right, despite their disproportionate political power relative to the overall population, may have messed up on this one.
That said, one of my favorite moments was during the wait before the march. A middle-aged professional-looking guy near me was goofing around with his family. In the wake of some si-se-puedes, the guy was like, "Geez, I'm really hungry. I could use a pizza." And in the same cadence as the chant he went, "Pep-pe-roni! Pep-pe-roni!"
Or as I later overheard as the march surged into downtown, "Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, that's a lot of people!"