Video maker Esaú Meléndez had been documenting the local immigration reform movement for six months already when his real story emerged: on August 15, 2006, the Mexican activist and undocumented worker Elvira Arellano announced that she would defy a deportation order from the Department of Homeland Security and take sanctuary inside the Adalberto United Methodist Church in Humboldt Park.
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Elvira Arellano had been one of the organizers of the Union Park protest, and when she holed up at Adalberto United Methodist, her compatriots invited Meléndez to the press conference. She called for Congress to halt any further deportations until the system could be reformed to allow undocumented immigrants a path to citizenship and prevent undocumented parents from being separated from their U.S.-born children. Less than two weeks later, President Bush authorized the border fence by signing into law the Secure Fence Act of 2006. (The remaining provisions of the Sensenbrenner bill died in committee.)
At first, says Meléndez, Arellano and her advisers didn’t take him seriously. “I was just one guy with a video camera,” he says. But when the news trucks packed up and left, he stuck around, recording events inside the church as Arellano became an international symbol of the immigration debate, and eventually followed her to Mexico. The resulting documentary, Immigrant Nation! The Battle for the Dream, will make its Chicago premiere as part of the 26th Chicago Latino Film Festival (see movie listings for more on the fest, which runs through 4/29).
In August 2007, after a year at the church, Arellano left to travel to California and lobby Nancy Pelosi, the new speaker of the House, and Zoe Lofgren, chair of the House judiciary committee’s immigration subcommittee. Arellano and her son were sitting in a car outside a Los Angeles church when they were surrounded by 15 immigration agents with weapons drawn. They arrested Arellano, who left the boy with a friend who was in the car.
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