For weeks at the end of 2014 in cities and towns throughout the United States the Black Lives Matter movement focused attention on police killings of black men, often unarmed men. Now attention has shifted to police killings of Latinos after officers in Pasco, Washington shot and killed a Mexican immigrant apple picker armed only with stones. The police shooting, captured on cell phone videos and posted on YouTube immediately became a national and international issue.
The shooting immediately brought comparisons to the police killings of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri and of Eric Garner in New York that led to the nationwide protests involving tens of thousands that became the Black Lives Matter movement.
In Pasco a complaint filed with the U.S. Attorney General by the Consejo Latino (Latin Council), a local Hispanic business organization described what happened:
“At approximately 5:00 p.m. on Tuesday, February 10, 2015, Mr. Antonio Zambrano, a Mexican national, age 35, who may have suffered from mental illness and some substance abuse, was observed throwing rocks at cars at [a busy intersection] in downtown Pasco. The police were called and upon arrival, confronted him, issuing commands in English, which was not Mr. Zambrano’s native language.”
“Mr. Zambrano, after a brief scuffle, disengaged and ran across Lewis Street. The police, who had drawn their pistols, fired an initial volley at him and pursued….After running approximately 50 feet, Mr. Zambrano stopped, turned and attempted to raise his arms in the air. At that moment, the officers fired their second volley into Mr. Zambrano, effectively executing him.”
Ironically, Zambrano was an immigrant from the State of Michoacán, Mexico, one of the country’s most violent. In 2005, the year he migrated to Pasco, Washington with this wife and two small daughters, there were approximately 500 killing, 17 decapitations, and many other bloody confrontations in Michoacán. Altogether since 2006 over 100,000 have been killed 20,000 disappeared in the drug wars in Mexico.
With no confidence in the local police department or state authorities to handle the Pasco shooting, the Consejo Latino, asked the U.S. Department of Justice to intervene, writing, “the lethal force applied by these police officers was excessive in the extreme and, as such, it constituted a violation of Mr. Zambrano’s constitutional rights.”
The killing of Zambrano led to a protest demonstration of 500 people on February 14 at a local park where people chanted “We Want Justice!” and held up signs in Spanish and English reading “Use Your Training, Not Your Guns” and “Protection Not Intimidation.”
Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto told the media that there had been “a disproportionate use of lethal force” and he called the shooting “regrettable and outrageous.” ADD TRANSITION. Peña Nieto’s government has been accused of being both malicious and incompetent in its handling of the September 26 killing of six, wounding of 25, and forced disappearance of 43 in the city of Iguala, Guerrero, where police are believed to have been involved.
Pasco, located in central Washington State, about 85 miles east of the city of Yakima, Pasco has a population of 68,000, 56 percent of which is Latino, most of those immigrants from Mexico though some also come from Central America. It lies in an agricultural region where many people work in fields and orchards or food processing plants.
The United States has 54 million Latinos who make up 17 percent of the total population, larger than the African American population of 45 million or 14 percent of the total population. Both suffer from an inordinate number of police killings. According to the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, law enforcement kills African Americans at 2.8 times the rate of white non-Latinos, and 4.3 times the rate of Asians. Latinos are victims of police killings at 1.9 times the rate of White, non-Latinos.
Yet, despite this incident and the disturbing statistics, the Pasco shooting has not led—at least so far—to the sort of mass protest that took place after the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri on August 9, 2014. Why is that?
First, Pasco, Washington, is a small city in an agricultural and largely rural region, unconnected to the major centers of Latino population in such cities as Los Angeles, Chicago, Miami, and New York. The largely immigrant population there does not have the confidence of larger communities with deeper roots.
Second, undocumented immigrants make up a significant percentage of the immigrant Latino population, and people without papers often hesitate to speak up and protest for fear of being deported. Moreover, a community of people fighting for immigrant rights may not want to focus on a case involving a mentally ill man taking drugs and engaging in the violent act of stoning passing cars.
Third, unlike African Americans who have a long history in the United States and often think of themselves as a people, Hispanics—a category created by the U.S. Census Bureau, are divided by nationality and ethnicity into many separate groups each with a different sort of relationship to the U.S. government and to American society. Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens. Cubans have a special immigration status, readily granted residence and quickly becoming citizens. Some Central Americans whose countries have suffered natural disasters may also have special visas.
Most other Latin American immigrants can be divided into those with documents and those without documents, while often their children in both cases come to consider themselves Americans. Some guest workers in agriculture and manufacturing live in isolated communities near their worksite and may have little interaction with either their own national communities or Americans in the United States. There is also the class question. The South American legal immigrant who is a professional—and who may see him- or herself as white—may feel no identification with Mexican or Central American peasants who immigrate and do farm or factory work.
The various Latino immigrant nationalities from Mexicans to Salvadorans and from Ecuadorians to Colombians do not necessarily feel any identity with other Hispanics. And even with in national groups such as the Mexicans there may be great differences. Indigenous people from the states of Chiapas or Oaxaca may feel little connection to mestizo Mexicans from other states.
Still, if such a shooting were to occur in Los Angeles or Chicago, almost surely there would be a larger and more militant response. Latinos in the United States have a long history of organizing for their rights and to improve their conditions. In the 1960s, César Chávez led the struggle of the United Farm Workers to win union contracts with higher wages, and better working conditions for Mexican American agricultural laborers in California. During the same decade Corky González in Colorado, Reies López Tijerina in New Mexico, and José Ángel Gutiérrez in Texas led struggles for democratic rights, land, and political power for Mexican Americas in the Southwest. Similarly in that same period Puerto Ricans in Chicago and New York organized the Young Lords Party to fight for better conditions, right and political power for Puerto Rico’s working class communities.
While those movements later either disappeared or became institutionalized as civil rights organizations aligned with the Democratic Party, still struggles for Latino workers’ rights continued in the 1980s and 1990s as workers—often neglected or rejected by labor unions—created Latino workers centers to organize themselves and improve their conditions on the jobs. A major struggle for these workers was for rights for undocumented immigrants, leading to the creation of several immigrant rights organizations.
When U.S. President George W. Bush proposed legalizing undocumented workers in 2004, the movement exploded in size and in 2006 immigrants organized the largest demonstrations in American history, with over one million in the streets in Los Angeles and Chicago, carrying the flags of their homelands together with that of the United State. That movement, however, was defeated and no immigration legislation has been passed since then.
Today the Dreamers movement, young Latino immigrants brought to the country by their parents as infant or small children, but unable in some cases either to attend college or to receive scholarships, continue to fight for those rights. Right now there are protests taking place against a court ruling which voided President Barack Obama’s executive action that would give legal status to some Latino immigrants.
Even if the Latino movement did not take up the Pasco killing it may take up the next case of injustice, and when it does it has the organization and strength to makes its voice heard.
Dan La Botz