Looking back, moving ahead

Nearly one year after a massive Los Angeles protest march electrified the immigrant rights movement, the original organizers gathered again at the downtown spot where they hatched their plans: the historic adobe church known as La Placita.

There was the fiery priest, the activist mothers, the Riverside graduate student. They were joined by about 50 others in a candlelight procession, featuring a banner of Our Lady of Guadalupe, to pray for migrants still suffering hardships.

Compared with the masses that surged into the streets March 25 last year, the procession snaking down Main Street earlier this week was tiny. But the activists proclaimed the legacy of last year's march enormous.

"There's no doubt that the march changed everything," said Jesse Diaz Jr., a UC Riverside graduate student who was one of the 2005 march's planners. "It engraved in the minds of the people the power they have."

As activists prepare to commemorate the march's one-year anniversary with two events Sunday -- one at the Los Angeles Sports Arena and the other at the downtown Federal Building -- many believe that time has proved its enduring impact.

They argue that the march helped attain the pro-immigrant movement's immediate goal of stopping House legislation known as HR-4377 that would have imposed tough enforcement measures, including criminalizing illegal migrants and those who aid them. Instead, the Senate passed a competing alternative of broad reform, including legalization for illegal migrants, more foreign workers and more family visas. A conference committee failed to approve a bill.

This week, two House lawmakers also embraced a comprehensive approach, introducing their chamber's first bill in many years to offer legalization to most of the nation's estimated 11 million illegal immigrants.

"Without the rallies, we would have ended up with the harshest immigration bill in our lifetime," said Frank Sharry, executive director of the Washington-based National Immigration Forum. "They changed the whole political calculus on the issue, mobilized people who came out for the election and made immigration a defining issue for the fastest-growing group of voters in the country."

The forces the marches unleashed have stayed focused on immigration reform and civic participation, helping spur tens of thousands more Latinos to register to vote and apply for citizenship in the last year.