November 5, 2009 9:26 AM
Over the last year, I have been one of a dozen or so people spearheading the push for justice for Marcelo Lucero. Luis Valenzuela, and Isabell Sepulveda, Nadia Marin, and Sandra Dunn, Mike O'Neil, Andrea Callen, Maryann Slutsky and the four or five others who have poured hundreds of hours into this cause each have their own story and their own motivations, but I wanted to tell you a little about mine.
I think that I was the first person in the Long Island Immigrant Alliance (LIIA) to learn of the hate killing of Marcelo Lucero. He was murdered late on a Saturday night and some word of the murder was on the air by Sunday afternoon. But it wasn't until dinner time Sunday that it became apparent what had happened.
I was driving home from watching a Buffalo Bills game up in Foxboro, Mass. The Bills had lost, and I was heading down I-95 to my favorite pizza pie in New Haven. Around Providence, I began to pick up WCBS radio from New York City. The announcer said something about an earlier reported killing in Patchogue being classified as a hate crime. I remember thinking, "I hope it is not true".
Suffolk immigrants had already gone through a tough year in 2008. The legislature had made them the scapegoats for everything that was wrong with the county and there were rumors that the county exec hoped to run for governor on his "tough on immigrants" record. I had been one of a group of advocates who showed up at the legislature in September and told the lawmakers that their policies were driving immigrants into the shadows, alienating the Latino community from the police, and empowering young people to act on their parents' prejudices by violently attacking immigrants. I knew the violence had already begun, but I had no idea how extensive it already was.
As details began to seep out of my radio, I decided my pizza would be take-out. I figured my time would be better spent calling everyone I could reach in Long Island's immigrant rights movement. Sunday night was getting older and only about half the people I called were home. None of them had heard the news. They were occupied with the normal family activities of a fall weekend and didn't know that hatred had extinguished a life a few miles from their homes. All agreed to meet the next day to set a plan for our work together.
I remember feeling a profound sense of shame and failure as more information came over the radio. An immigrant murdered in his own neighborhood, not by a lone lunatic, but by a group of teens who probably looked no different from my son and his friends. I had worked 25 years to forestall this and had failed.
I recall being stunned the next day when the police commissioner's press conference on the killing led off by touting the unbelievable notion that only one hate crime against Latinos had been committed in the previous year. I knew that before Steve Levy had become county executive, the number of such crimes had averaged a dozen per year. I also knew that the Levy administration had not brought greater tolerance for immigrants, but just the opposite. The numbers weren't down because there was less hate violence, that was for sure.
That week I also learned more about the actual killing of Lucero, how he was selected just because of how he looked. How his murderers had turned a man who worked, dreamed, and supported his family, into a "beaner". They even denied him his past, calling the Ecuadoran immigrant a "Mexican".
The politicians in Suffolk, lately so hateful to people like Lucero, lined up to denounce the crime. They didn't denounce the climate of fear they had helped to foster, just the actual killing. Steve Levy called the young killers white supremacists, and blamed their parents and the schools. He even compared the killing to Kristalnacht, not remembering perhaps, that Kristalnacht had been set in motion by politicians who afterwards denied responsibility for the attacks that night on the Jews.
More and more came out about the killing. The young men had attacked before. They went out a dozen times or more over a year hunting Latinos, harassing them, shooting them with pellets, beating them.
All their other victims had survived. Why had Marcelo Lucero died? When they attacked him, he did not play the role assigned to him. Most of the prior victims had submitted to the beating, considering it the foreseen fate of a Latino confronted by white youths in Suffolk. Others had run away.
But Marcelo Lucero had fought back. And that is why he had been killed.
He had not learned the lesson that your skin color may earn you pain and humiliation, but that the price of resistance is death.
I thought of this working man, this churchgoer, this loving son and brother, on his way to relax at the end of a long work week. Thousands of miles from home in a place that had become increasingly hostile to people like him.
Tired, hoping for the reward of rest in front of a TV, in the company of a friend, he was set upon by young men who heard from parents and politicians that immigrants were "invaders" and "low-level terrorists". Marcelo Lucero's companion was able to escape. But Marcelo, being hit by the type of young men who only fight when the odds are overwhelmingly in their favor, took off his belt to avoid the humiliation of submission, to fend off the fists and kicks of youths with nothing better to do, on what to Marcelo was a work day, than drink and hunt humans.
Latinos have learned the lesson of Marcelo Lucero. He died a lonely death amid the taunts of those who killed him. He may have called out for his mother in his last moment, but he heard in reply not her soothing voice but the rude curses of ignorant teenagers.
A horrible fate. But was it a meaningless death after all?
Marcelo Lucero fought back. If he had not, his assailants would have left him brutalized and gone on to their next dozen targets. The county would have continued ignoring hate crimes against Latinos, and its political class would have more deeply entrenched the line of racial division.
Since I learned the full facts of Marcelo Lucero's decision to not run away or accept his beating, but to struggle to control his own destiny by standing up to his attackers, I have thought of him not just as a victim, but as a hero.
When our struggle for justice seems impossible, I think of Marcelo and his belt.
Surrounded. Cursed. Bleeding.
But still defiant.
Click here for information about the "Remember Marcelo" blog campaign, here for info about Saturday's vigil in Patchogue, and here for a link to our call for comprehensive immigration reform to help stop violence against immigrants.
Thanks for everyone who Remembered Marcelo on their blogs, websites, and facebook pages.
By Pat Young November 6, 2009 02:00 PM