A Hero from Capitalism’s Hells

autumn morning air, waiting for vans to pull to the curb, size up the muscle available, and direct a chosen few labourers to cram themselves into what space was left inside the vehicle.They would then be taken to various job sites, paid off the books a minimalist wage for a day of drudgery, hauling, heaving, hammering, and handling whatever they found themselves tasked to work with.Mike explained how these largely undocumented workers would make their way to 5:00 a.m.modern-day "shape-ups" week after week, many times returning to their cramped, unsanitary living quarters empty handed.Their thoughts were of home, knowing that families and extended kin in Mexico or Guatemala might go hungry that week for lack of a remittance.Violence was on the rise against this floating reserve army of labour, which subsisted beneath the surface relations of dominantly white, seemingly affluent, communities.Anglo youth gangs from privileged high schools had taken to randomly targeting the immigrant, largely Spanish-speaking poor, running the often bicycle-riding newcomers off the road, taunting them and pelting beleaguered human targets with beer bottles tossed from tire-squealing cars.The harassment and physical intimidation, according to Mike, was escalating: pepper-sprayings, beatings with baseball bats, even potshots with bb guns were not unusual.He told me this with anger and despair as we discussed his most recent book, Magical Urbanism: Latinos Reinvent the US City (2000).That study explored the consequences of putting the new Latin American immigrants "where they clearly belong: in the center of debate about the future of the American city."It ended with Mike's characteristic belief that class struggle and class organization could overcome the burden of oppression carried by all peoples of colour, including Suffolk County's 21st-century "tired, poor, huddled masses" of downtrodden, displaced peoples from the Global South.They would rise, he felt, as they had to, creating a "labor-Latino alliance" like the one that surfaced in Los Angeles in the late 1990s."Class organization in the workplace," Mike concluded in Magical Urbanism, was "the most powerful strategy for ensuring the representation of immigrants' socio-economic as well as cultural and linguistic rights in the new century ahead.The emerging Latino metropolis will then wear a proud union label."But Mike knew full well that Suffolk County, and much of America, was a long way from LA.As he glanced out the window at the often forlorn-looking street corners, their massed "menials" desperate for just one day of miserably remunerated work, Mike's shoulders drooped and his countenance darkened.There was in his demeanour a worried acknowledgement of what Suffolk County's Latino immigrants were up against. 1 Cause for concern was clearly warranted.As I would later learn, the inevitably inadequate official crime statistics suggested that between 2003 and 2007 anti-Latino hate crimes jumped 40 per cent across the United States.In 1.

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