La Gran Marcha: Anti-Racism and Immigrants Rights in Southern California Jenna M. Loyd1 Department of Geography, Syracuse University 144 Eggers Hall, Syracuse, NY 13244-1020 USA Email:
[email protected] Andrew Burridge Department of Geography, University of Southern California, 416 Kaprielian Hall, Los Angeles, CA 90089-0255 USA Email:
[email protected] Abstract Millions of people across the United States took to the streets in spring 2006 to protest repressive immigration legislation, demand just immigration reform, and seek justice in daily life. This article has two aims. First, we seek to intervene in the popular immigration debate, which denies racism and claims to be concerned only with law-and-order. Second, we analyze (im)migration politics in relation to national racial formations. That is, racialized immigration policies do not exist apart from a racially stratified citizenry. We rely on the concept of social death to trace state policies of immigration and criminalization as key sites of interracial and transnational struggles against racism and for justice and liberation. Thus, we seek to elucidate possibilities for anti-racist alliances and social change. We conclude with a discussion of the ways in which we see the immigrants rights movement connecting with other struggles for social justice, and the implications that 1 © Jenna M. Loyd and Andrew Burridge, 2007 La Gran Marcha: Anti-Racism and Immigrants Rights in Southern California 2 concepts of national racial formation and social death have for the movement against global apartheid. KEY WORDS: immigrants rights, racism, national racial formation, social death, criminalization, militarization, United States “Immigration politics also surfaced in California’s gubernatorial race … with Gov.