“There are people here who I’ve never been in a meeting with before,” a long-time Latino youth worker said to the Anglo church leader who had just introduced himself.
They were attending a meeting of the Justice Coalition for Andy Lopez in the small city of Santa Rosa, the heart of California’s “wine country.”
But what had brought them together was more than the killing of the 13-year-old by a sheriff’s deputy.
For many years, Latinos in Santa Rosa have suffered from Anglo racism, direct and indirect. But that may be changing.
Over the last decade, the federal government’s divide-and-conquer attack on undocumented immigrants had brought morally outraged Anglos, many of them from the churches, into a largely Latino local human-rights movement.
Then just two years ago, the government’s taxpayer-paid bailout of the biggest banks — while homeowners found themselves foreclosed and evicted — had brought outraged Latinos into the streets as part of a largely Anglo local Occupy movement.
What underlaid both — uniting Anglos and Latinos alike as the “99 percent” — is the ongoing economic crisis and, perhaps, the shadow of the nearly jobless future it has cast across all youth — Anglo and Latino alike.
The Anglo activist had found that every member of his intensely “middle-class” congregation has been touched by the crisis one way or another — loss of jobs, homes, health care, retirement savings.
Their children and grandchildren were being hit hardest — with many recent college graduates at best finding part-time, low-wage work in the area’s hotels and restaurants.
The Latino activist was seeing the youth he worked with organizing to take their rage to the streets, arm in arm with their Anglo schoolmates.
It was clear that their rage was as much directed at a future that was no future as it was to the killing of yet another youth by the increasingly militarized police.
A unity of the 99 percent is growing in Sonoma County, called into being by an economic crisis that places Anglo and Latino objectively shoulder to shoulder. And when the tinder is dry, a single spark can start a prairie fire.
In Sonoma County, the tragic death of Andy Lopez may have been that spark. If so, Anglos have a lot of bad habits to drop, and Latinos need to accept new allies “warts and all.”
