About 200 members came to DC 37 Oct. 28 and saw "Echando Raices/Taking Root," a new video highlighting the uphill struggle of undocumented workers in the United States. The film examines the growth of the immigrants' rights movement among farm workers in California, home of the richest agricultural land in the world, and day laborers in Houston, the fourth largest city in the United States.

In the lush fields of California, where workers from Mexico have traditionally picked fruit for substandard wages, the labor force has changed drastically. New workers include those from Laos and the indigenous Mixteco people from Mexico, who are exposed to even more exploitation from their bosses because they do not speak Spanish.

At a Houston factory, management assigned Mexican workers the worst paying and most difficult jobs and left Vietnamese immigrants relatively better off. "It was a classic case of divide and conquer," said Linda Morales of the Sheet Metal Workers Union. Rather than accept their fate, the Mexican workers reached out to the union, which filed a lawsuit for them.

When a 1996 change in federal immigration law endangered the residency of 400,000 people—many of them already established workers with children born in the U.S.—the Mexican community organized feverishly. Immigrant workers in Houston launched the Association for Residency and Citizenship in America. With labor and other allies, they got President Clinton to sign an amnesty law.

"The ARCA case represents something amazing," says University of Houston professor Daniel Rodriguez. "A marginalized people who are undocumented organize a movement that reaches Washington. That's difficult for U.S. citizens to do."

A panel discussion after the video included Sylvia Ash, Chief Counsel of DC 37's Immigration Program, Artemio Guerra from the NYC Civic Participation Project, Bill Granfield, President of HERE Local 100 and Ester Chavez from the Immigration Rights Project. Ms. Ash pointed out that DC 37's Immigration Program has helped as many as 8,000 people become American citizens.

The program was co-sponsored by the Authors' Talk Committee of the DC 37 Education Fund and many other groups, including the American Friends Service Committee, which produced the video.

"Echando Raices" is available at the DC 37 Education Fund library.

—Alfredo Alvarado