Though one can never know for certain what tips the scales toward protest — what single mundane horror, in a country oversaturated with mundane horrors, finally impels someone to shake loose their humdrum half-comforts and lob a rock through the window of an ICE vehicle — it seems that this time it was an arrest.
On June 6, union leader David Huerta — president of Service Employees International Union (SEIU) California — was thrown to the ground and detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in downtown Los Angeles. ICE officials claim that Huerta interfered with their raid and slapped him with the felony charge of conspiracy to impede an officer. SEIU disputes this claim and maintains that Huerta was assaulted by ICE while acting in his lawful capacity as a community observer.
Since Huerta’s arrest, protests have exploded across Los Angeles and greater California. But no single event births mass protest alone. As the late Joshua Clover writes in his book Riot.Strike.Riot, protests like those in Los Angeles may seem to suddenly erupt “in moments of shattered glass and fire,” but in reality they emerge out of larger structures of inequality “inextricable from ongoing and systemic capitalist crisis.” The wildfire is lit by a single spark, yes, but it also requires accumulations of dead timber that have gathered unnoticed for seasons.
With this in mind, it begins to make much more sense why Huerta’s arrest spurred everyday Angelenos to finally take to the streets. It is not just that ICE’s assault of Huerta was an unequivocal image of the agency’s unchecked brutality (though it was), nor simply because Huerta is a galvanizing and clear-eyed public speaker (though he is), nor even because Huerta’s personal identity feels particularly poignant in our age of mass deportation (seeing Huerta, a US citizen descended from Mexican immigrants, manhandled by masked agents leaves no doubt that Stephen Miller’s…
Auteur: Levi Vonk
