They came dragging their suitcases behind them - janitors, hotel housekeepers, garment workers, farm laborers, union organizers and student leaders. There was a sea of different facial complexions and a thick stew of accents, dialects and languages.

They wore T-shirts announcing their "Million Voices for Legalization" and carried pillows, in preparation for the long journey ahead, adorned with handwritten slogans espousing justice, equality and mass mobilization.

"Are we ready?" shouted Mariaelena Durazo, a veteran labor campaigner. "Yes!" shouted the crowd. "Are we sure?" "Yes!" they yelled again.

"Vamos estar unidos!" Durazo declared. "Let us unite! We're not leaving anyone behind on this trip."

And so, in the early morning outside the County Federation of Labor building in a dog-eared corner of central Los Angeles, began the Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride.

Nearly one thousand immigrant workers and their allies are boarding buses in Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Minneapolis, Chicago, Houston, Miami and Boston and cross the United States over the next 12 days... (more)

The nationwide initiative is campaigning for immigrants' rights. Protesters want to force the federal government to recognize that "illegal" workers make crucial contributions to the economy - doing jobs nobody else is prepared to do, paying taxes and social security contributions, and generally living blameless, hard-working lives.

All they are asking in return are some basic human dignities: rights of residency and eventual citizenship, the right to have their families travel to the United States to live with them and the right to basic workplace protections.

"No human being is illegal in this nation or in the eyes of God," shouted Ms Durazo to huge cheers, and chants of the old farmworkers' slogan, "Si, se puede!" (Yes, we can), which has become the battle cry of the resurgent immigrant community.

Los Angeles is one of 10 US cities from which buses will depart over the next few days, carrying thousands of demonstrators towards New York for a mass rally on 4 October.

Along the way, participants will take their message to towns and cities in well over half of the 48 continental states. They will also hold a meeting with congressional leaders in Washington.

They will pay homage to immigrants shot dead by white vigilante groups in Arizona and Texas, campaign on behalf of rural workers regularly cheated by corrupt middlemen representing the big farming interests and demand proper accident protection for meatpackers who toil in giant hamburger factories in Nebraska and other heartland states.

The initiative is a deliberate throwback to the Freedom Rides of 1961, in which civil rights campaigners seeking to overthrow segregation laws and establish equal voting rights in the south of the United States risked life and limb by traveling in buses into the most unforgiving parts of Alabama and Mississippi and confronting angry white mobs, who readily greeted them with brutal beatings.

The stakes may not be quite so high this time, but the political symbolism is no less compelling. Indeed, some veterans of the 1961 ride are joining in again, believing that the political imperative to be just as important now as it was then.

"What we are seeing is an authoritarian assault on US society, through theocratic ideas and the power of the military," said James Lawson, a Methodist minister in Los Angeles who, 40 years ago, campaigned alongside Martin Luther King and remains a figurehead in the civil rights movement.

"This is something we did not have in this organized form in the 1960s. It is the most perilous danger America faces, especially since millions of Americans don't see the tyranny," he said.

The 2003 Freedom Riders packed into three tour buses in Los Angeles and set off in a carnival-like atmosphere - singing songs, cracking jokes and settling into long, intense conversations with one another about their experiences of immigrant life in America.

On one of the Pullman buses, a labor organizer called Angela Jamison promised teach-ins and history seminars over the following two weeks. She also issued a few rules - no alcohol or cigarettes on the bus, no firearms, no bad language and, if at all possible, no sexual adventurism.

"We are here to work," she announced, to loud guffaws and ribald asides, "so if you do meet the love of your life, please, just wait for 10 days until you get home before you, you know, go for it."

Another organizer, Monica Villanueva - sporting a US flag sticker on her right temple - explained the importance of keeping all identity documents inside luggage rather than in wallets. This would protect participants without documents who could be at risk from surprise police immigration raids. "If the INS [immigration service], or FBI, or CIA, or a UFO gets on this bus," she said, "we say nothing - nada! and start to sing 'We Shall Not Be Moved'. Does everyone know that song?"

As the smoggy outer Los Angeles suburbs slowly gave way to the crisp, clear skies of the Mojave desert, everyone gave the song a quick go, in English and in Spanish. Soon they had it down perfectly.

The bus contained well above the normal quota of extraordinary life stories. Baltasar Martinez, a student leader at a small Los Angeles community college, described how, when he and his family first came to the United States they were living, all 10 of them, in a single garage without heating or even blankets on their makeshift beds. He was on the bus ride, he said, to learn new ways to "give something back" now that he had prospered and felt empowered to help others.

He was particularly enraged by the way the Bush administration's "war on terrorism" had targeted his fellow Latinos, and denounced the way Pentagon recruiters tried to talk his fellow students into dropping their studies to join the armed forces. "The first casualty of war is immigrants," he said.

Sara Rubio, a hotel waitress, told how she fled an abusive marriage in El Salvador and was separated from her two sons for eight years until she could raise the money to bring them - at high risk and at high cost - across the Mexican border in the company of a professional people-smuggler.

Separated from them again for this trip, she recounted how her older son had a nightmare on the eve of her departure in which a police car came to take him and his brother away. Understandably, her big issue is the separation of immigrant families.

Politically, the Freedom Ride comes at a sensitive time. The immigrant movement feels that it has lost more than two years' momentum since the 11 September attacks, because the Bush administration had been considering a major policy initiative to liberalize the entry of working immigrants into the United States.

That policy was not only halted but in many respects reversed as border security tightened and all talk of guest-worker programs and regularization of undocumented workers was replaced with suspicion and paranoia about anyone deemed to be an outsider.

Cautious optimism about President Bush has given way to sharp criticism, as budget cuts - necessitated by the war in Iraq, the flailing economy and the latest round of federal tax cuts - eat into health care, education and jobs.

"Immigrants are today's slaves," thundered a banner at the first rally held on the road, in Palm Springs. To which a collective voice of defiant optimism responded: "El pueblo unido jamas sera vencido!" A people united can never be defeated. New York and Washington, here they come.

© 2003 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd

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