Immigrants and U.S. citizens filled Brook Park on July 24, defying record heat to celebrate Latin American heritage and to voice their anger over Arizona’s controversial law aimed at finding and punishing undocumented immigrants.
At the second annual Festival of Immigrants in the South Bronx’s biggest community garden between 140th and 141st Streets on Brook Avenue, over a hundred came to feast on quesadillas, see and hear Latin American music and dance, and to share their opposition to the Arizona law.
The new law would require law enforcement officers in that border state to order people they question for any reason to show proof of immigration status, a measure immigrant advocates see as racially motivated and unconstitutional. In late July a federal judge temporarily halted enforcement of the law in response to a lawsuit by the Obama administration.
Victor Toro, one of a long roster of speakers rallying opposition to the Arizona initiative, has had his own well publicized run-ins with federal immigration officials. The 68-year-old Chilean national, who has lived in Mott Haven since 1983, was pulled off a train in Buffalo by Homeland Security officials, and now faces the threat of deportation.
Toro was a union leader in rural Chile before being forced to leave his country during the dictatorship of US-backed strongman Augusto Pinochet. After enduring torture in Chilean detention centers for three years for his outspoken opposition to the regime, Toro was granted political asylum in Mexico, but says he left Mexico for the US when he found three years later that Chilean secret service agents in Mexico planned to assassinate him for his continued criticism of Pinochet’s rule.
Toro has lived in the South Bronx and traveled the US speaking out for immigrant and labor rights ever since.
“People ask me why I decided to settle in the Bronx,” reflected the silver-maned, ponytailed Toro in Spanish, sitting between the raised plant beds in the baking afternoon sun. “I always tell them it’s because it most closely resembles the Latin American third world where I’m from.”
Wearing a t-shirt saying “No human being is illegal,” Toro said he has traveled across the US on speaking engagements, but has never considered living in any other part of the country. The pastor at St. Ann’s Church on St. Ann’s Avenue allowed him to use the church basement to play music, make art and discuss politics with fellow immigrants in the 1980s, Toro says, and the neighborhood has been his home since then.
Though he has lived in the US for 27 years, Toro says it is unclear if he will be granted political asylum here because the Nixon administration helped put Pinochet in power in Chile in 1973.
“This time is killing me,” Toro said of the anxiety of waiting while the government decides what to do with him, but he added that his present efforts to advocate on behalf of other undocumented Latin Americans in the US is more important.
“I’m not doing this for myself,” he said. “There are 20 million with problems worse than mine.”
Many others at the festival faced odds as daunting as Victor Toro’s, though with less cloak-and-dagger intrigue in their stories of survival.
“I’m afraid,” said Alejandro Castillo, 35, who came to the US 14 years ago from central Mexico and now works in a restaurant to support himself, his wife and three children.
“We do the hardest work in the fields, in restaurants, in kitchens,” Castillo said, his voice rising with anger. “We come here to do the work others don’t want to do. We don’t take work away from anyone like they say.”
A Mexican dance troupe wearing indigenous costumes performed an elaborate dance routine, and Castillo stopped to marvel at them.
“I’m Mexican, but this is the first time I’ve seen this kind of dance from up close,” Castillo said, smiling.
Later, as the crowd chanted “Todos somos Arizona,” (We are all Arizona), Castillo added, “We Latinos have come to work with dignity like everyone else.”
About Post Author
