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Four immigrants leading the fight

• From cleaning houses to director of day laborers

When her mother from Mexico showed up at the door, Maria Marroquin knew she had made the right decision. She was cleaning houses for a living, helping out at a day-labor center and sharing a small house with her son and 16 other illegal immigrants.

``I was sitting on the floor eating a bowl of cereal when my mother saw me,'' Marroquin remembered. Her room had little furniture. ``My mother stood there at the door, and she started crying.''

The educated daughter who had taught public school in Mexico City had joined the poorest of the poor in the United States.

``I got up and hugged her, and then I explained to her that I was going to do the work I really wanted to do.''

It wasn't the cleaning jobs but the volunteer work that would lead to her present job -- director of the Worker Center at Calvary Church in Mountain View, the only hiring hall on the Peninsula for jornaleros, or day laborers.

Back in Mexico City, Marroquin always thought the day workers who milled around looking for work were lazy bums. ``That was the stupid thing in my head.''

Then she found herself widowed in her early 20s and with a young son. Suddenly, a teacher's salary didn't offer much promise in Mexico's stagnant economy. She decided to visit a brother in Redwood City in 1997.

``As soon as I got here, I knew I wanted to stay.''

She overstayed her visitor's visa, studied English and worked preparing food for an airline concessionaire until an immigration raid ended that job. At a day worker center in Los Altos she signed up to clean houses. In her spare time, she helped social workers interview other workers and gradually took on more duties. When the center moved to a Lutheran Church in Mountain View, she became director.

Today the tireless 48-year-old has become a forceful member of the San Jose Coalition for Immigrant Rights. She has since remarried and become a legal resident.

When the question of job walkouts today divided the new movement, Marroquin said, she asked the jornaleros to decide. If they walked out, they might further offend local residents already opposed to the day worker center. They voted not to work and will join a march Marroquin helped organize in Mountain View.

She has acquired a bit of American political savvy. When asked if she considers herself a top leader in the new movement, she said, ``Everyone's a leader.''

Somehow, it's more believable coming from her.

Salvador Bustamante
• Call to action from behind bars

His epiphany came during three months locked in a Salinas jail cell. Salvador ``Chava'' Bustamante landed there after pleading no contest to possession of materials for an incendiary device.

``When you're out on strike that long, and you see what the police are doing, and you see how the whole system is stacked against you, you get frustrated and . . . ''

Then the vice-president of the 27,000 member Service Employees International Union leaned back and let out a sigh of regret.

``I'm a felon,'' he continued. ``I was young. It was a good thing in the end, because it reminded me of my roots in non-violence. I decided to dedicate my life to helping people to realize their inner power to help themselves.''

That was in 1979. Eleven years earlier, high schooler Bustamante left Mexicali to became another lettuce picker with a green card in one hand and a harvesting hoe in the other.

``I had my dream car, a 1959 Cadillac Coupe de Ville,'' he recalled, ``and I thought I was making good money, about $7,000 a year.''

But when Cesar Chavez brought his United Farm Workers union to Salinas and Watsonville, Bustamante gradually changed from a self-centered youth to peaceful striker -- except for that one lapse toward violence he would regret forever.

Tired of the fields, he left the UFW, married, moved to San Jose and worked a string of immigration and social work jobs. He joined the SEIU's Local 1877 in 1988 and helped launch the successful Justice for Janitors campaign in Silicon Valley. Today, he's one of the most articulate and recognized immigrant-rights leaders. His desire: To ``clear HR 4437 completely off the table.'' That House of Representatives bill proposes to make illegal immigrants into felons and it offers no amnesty.

``The larger goal,'' Bustamante said, ``is for immigrants to become bigger players in the political and social life of California'' and the nation.

Hong-An Tran
• Mobilizing old, young generations

If this movement is to include immigrants from all over the world and not just Mexico, it will need organizers like Hong-An Tran. She leads a six-person team at Services, Immigrant Rights and Education Network (SIREN) in San Jose.

She works with Muslim, Korean, Iranian, Vietnamese, West African and Latino immigrants. In much of Tran's work she faces the daunting task of mobilizing both the older, anti-communist generation and the more liberal, U.S-born and Americanized second generation.

Even though she's 23, she may be the perfect person for the job. Born in Vietnam and raised in white suburbia, Tran possesses the soul of the refugee and the can-do spirit of the American-born.

She credits her attraction to social work to her parents' sacrifices.

Her father was a South Vietnamese marine who spent five years in a harsh re-education camp after the fall of Saigon. Her mother taught school and waited for his release. They married, had two children and applied for refugee visas to enter the United States. The family wound up in affluent Centerville, Ohio, where Tran and her brother cultivated a dual cultural identity.

``At home, my parents forced us to speak only Vietnamese. I had to write letters to grandma in Vietnamese,'' Tran said. ``In school, it was another world, a lily white world.''

Her parents worked odd jobs while attending college and spent most of their time and money on the children, including piano lessons for Tran. ``He'd wait for me and sleep in the car,'' she said of her father who took her to her lessons. ``It was the only time he'd sleep.''

Soon after entering the University of California-Berkeley, Tran abandoned pre-med for sociology and quickly acquired a lawyer's skeptical sense of social progress.

``You have to play a part not in making it better,'' she said, ``just not making it worse.''

In the fall she plans to enter law school at the University of California-Los Angeles and hopes to work in public-interest law.

Meanwhile, she will continue to try to convince a variety of immigrants to support the immigrant-rights movement.

How many Vietnamese does she expect to show up today?

``I'll be there,'' she said, ``so that means at least one!''

Martha Campos
• Inspired by protest for driver's licenses

In a black business suit, Martha Campos looks like a banker, which she was before the collapse of the peso drove her north from Mexico.

``I know lawyers and bankers who are driving taxis in Mexico City,'' she said. Unable to find a banking or comparable job, and with a mother to care for, she bought a one-way airline ticket to visit a brother in the Bay Area and quickly found work as a janitor. That was in 1995.

``You cannot imagine the change from what I was educated and trained to do in Mexico,'' Campos said, ``but you come to understand that even the lowest jobs are dignified and honorable.''

A year later she met and married Mario Campos, a Salvadoran immigrant. They settled in East San Jose. She volunteered at Our Lady of Guadalupe Catholic church and at a neighborhood center. She also studied English and took leadership classes.

Against the advice of church leaders, she joined a small march of about 2,500 people to demand driver's licenses for illegal immigrants.

``That was the moment for me,'' said Campos, who believes that hard-fought but doomed campaign changed her life forever. Impressed by her drive, intelligence and public speaking, SIREN offered her a job. Today she is the organization's director of education and leadership programs.

Last month, she was one of only a few immigrant-rights leaders who met with San Jose police and won approval for a march and rally that attracted 25,000 people -- 10 times larger than the march that inspired her a few years earlier.


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