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Machos, my little kings, and why las mujeres have to lead the Immigrant Rights Movement

My mother, Marina, crossed the border with a second-grade education, and saw almost all eight of her children born here finish college. Big mistake: She spoiled my brothers, those little kings of hers, who worshipped her too, awed by how she raised them on her minimum-wage jobs. Now middle-aged, they struggle with their double standards, treating most women, including me, with scorn and contempt. Though they've become expert at hiding it.

It is a well-known secret that the elders of the Chicano movement, and even the late Henry B. Gonzalez himself, the great Congressman from San Antonio, father of today's Congressman Charlie Gonzalez, were, how to put this nicely, dominating men. They must've had mothers like mine. These hombres fought hard for us to be equal, but weren't very equal at home or in the office. The Immigrant Rights Movement has the potential to transform this country with a whole nation of people who know what injustice feels like, but first, we will have to educate them about a civil society.

If we don't educate immigrants, and especially the men, we are slitting our own throat. My mother, who suffered throughout her life with my father, knowing injustice after injustice, voted for President Reagan, because Reagan believed in "la familia."

But then my mother was an economic refugee, with no experience in democracy. When I challenged then-Governor George W. Bush in print some years ago, she worried that something might happen to me, shocked at the way I wrote what she said about him around the kitchen table.

But my mother would have proudly marched for immigration reform if she were alive today.

What I'm saying is that the immigrants represent a crossroads for civil rights in this country. They can make this country more democratic, or repeat what we've had in the past. And the kind of leadership we need right now isn't in the Senate. She's too busy cleaning your house.

I'm thinking of a woman like Araceli Hernandez, a housekeeper in San Antonio, who understands that immigrants like her must aim for more than being good citizens, good mothers raising los reyes, who are grateful to belong to the American empire. Who will gladly send their children to war without question. She understands, for example, that the only solution to immigration is liberating Mexico. What does that mean? It means connecting Mexican immigration with the joblessness of a post-NAFTA world, the slavery of a thousand maquiladoras, and the corporate-stepping of politicians on both sides of the border.

Araceli has figured out that globalization is the reason she had to cross the border, and that women are its object and its trash. She is a witness to rape, crime, police brutality, the sickness of pollution, obesity, over-development, the resistance to a living wage, to public education, to abortion rights, to lesbian and gay unions, she has observed, if not articulated, that the world is dominated by the powerful, by men being machos like my brothers who want their chance at being just like them. And there are many other women like her, who represent hope at a sewing machine, in the fields, butchering a chicken, or bathing a child.

I'm telling you all this as the daughter of an "illegal" immigrant whose mother voted for Ronald Reagan.

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