Elena Herrada
is a second generation Detroiter, daughter and granddaughter of autoworkers,
and a grassroots activist and local historian of her community's history.
She is a member of Latinos Unidos and a former president of a cafeteria
worker's local and spent several years negotiating contracts for labor
unions. She has also worked with prisoners and prisoners' advocates
in the Wayne County jail and other Michigan prisons seeking alternatives
to incarceration. She has worked with United Farm Workers and FLOC on
various campaigns to bring justice to the fields, as well as currently
working to launch the Worker Center (Centro Obrero) in southwest Detroit.

Herrada helped
produce the oral history-based documentary, "Los Repatriados: Exiles
from the Promised Land," which documents the histories of Mexican
Americans who, despite their citizenship in the U.S., were forcibly
deported from the U.S. to Mexico in the 1930s. She is mother of four
daughters. She recently presented a workshop at the Allied Media
Conference in Bowling Green, Ohio, where this interview took place.

In
your workshop, "Oral History as an Organizing Tool," you spoke
on the oral history project you started on los
repatriados, the Mexican-Americans
who were returned to Mexico against their will during the 1930s. You
mentioned that there is a link between what happened then and what is
happening in the Mexican and Mexican-American communities today. Could
you say some more about that?

Actually
there are quite a few similarities to what happened then and what is
happening now. The big difference being, of course, that we're here;
that [before] when there were deportations and attacks on our community,
there was no one who stood up for our grandparents. They had been recruited
to come here to work and were no longer welcome.

We
talked about it with our elders. They saw that there was a possibility
that this could happen again. Our elders, who had never talked about
the repatriation before, finally agreed to tell their stories because
they saw what was coming with the Patriot Act and homeland security.
They weren't willing to talk about their personal stories before that,
but once they saw what was at stake, many people then agreed to come
forward and tell these stories.

We
know that there are lots of children being born right now in Detroit.
We do not intend to stand by and watch them rounded up and deported
and taken away because their labor is no longer needed because other
people think that it is not appropriate for them to be here. They were
recruited to work. They made community here; we are the community that
was here before them and we intend to protect them in every way that
we can.

I
would like to ask people of good will to protest any deportations that
you see in your community. You can contact us: Latinos Unidos; you can
contact us on the web at www.latinosunidos.org in Detroit. There
is also another [Latinos Unidos] in Washtenaw County.

We
do know that people are being held without hearings; they are being
picked up in the middle of the night; we get calls in the middle of
the night; their families don't know where they are.

We
never dreamed of all the different ways to exploit people when they
don't have the rights of citizenship. One of the things that happens
is that when people are detained they can only call collect to their
families from the jails, which costs $10 or $15 a call.

This
is the hardest time that Mexican people have faced in this country,
by far. Our families have been here since the 20's and Mexican families
and workers are under siege right now. Anything you can offer to do
in a community, don't be shy.

The
retaliation we are seeing on the part of the government is because people
have stepped out and demanded their rights as human beings. March 27
was the big rally in Detroit and by March 28 we were getting calls that
people were fired from their jobs for attending.

As
long as Mexicans act like workers, and don't ask for any rights then
they'll be OK. But when they demand the same kinds of things that U.S.
citizens get, then there is incredible retaliation against them.

We
have a strike going on right now at an auto parts supplier called Hope
Global in Redford. UAW Local 600 is organizing the workers out there.

Often
we are concerned with people walking their own picket lines because
of immigration raids. So we ask people to proxy and stand up on behalf
of people.

In
the possibility of a raid or a deportation, what kind of contingencies
are there for people's homes, their children?

We
want to be prepared more than we were in the past where people lost
everything that they had and they had to start all over again.

This
is state-sponsored terrorism; for people to be taken from their homes,
their property confiscated, and separated from their families and deported
when they were doing nothing but going to work and coming home. We've
got to respond to it in any way that we can.

Because
if you don't it's going to happen. They'll be taken away. People will
just disappear from our community and we will have done nothing to stop
it. So whether it is protesting through the Congress, writing letters
and saying what is happening in the Mexican communities across the country;
[that it] is wrong and we're not going to stand for it just because
the economy is in a tailspin because of the war.

Is
there alternative media in Spanish that is reaching people?

El
Central is really stepping up to the plate and covering these things
a lot. Fortunately, through the Workers Center we are able to get articles
in there that regularly discuss workplace issues. We are going to start
a column in Spanish in July from the workers themselves describing various
events as they happen. We are also going to be holding public hearings
following the lead of FLOC, the Farm Labor Organizing Committee. They
held hearings in the communities and talked about who are the worst
employers and what kind of conditions people had to live through to
cross the border.

So you're going to be developing a list of employers so that we can
call out some of the worst offenders?

Absolutely!
Centro Obrero, the Workers Center, has filed its first lawsuit against
Lotus International for refusal to pay overtime to a group of workers.

In
some cases they've organized themselves into a union; in other cases
they've gone and sought legal assistance. We're doing these kind of
actions now on behalf of workers. These workers have led themselves
out. They know what's wrong; they may not know exactly what their rights
are but they know that they are entitled to better than what they're
getting. And as long as we're here, and they're willing to [organize],
then we're going to back them up.

Fred David
is an editor of Critical
Moment.