The winter sky above Point Reyes Station on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day—and inauguration day for the convicted felon president’s second tour of American carnage—was a sharp, deep solid blue, sparkling and cloudless. After days of fog and chilly gray, the winter sun shot through strong beaming rays of heat and light.
Instead of hitting the beaches or barbecues on this sunny holiday, the Point Reyes community showed up in force, a few hundred protesters gathering to stand together in a time marked by fearmongering and division.
While Trump launched his presidency surrounded by Big Tech and other corporate interests, then signed executive orders cracking down on immigrants, shredding equity and anti-discrimination protections for transgender people, and gutting climate action, hundreds of thousands protested in cities and towns across the US.
The Point Reyes Station rally, organized by West Marin Community Services, emphasized immigrant rights and community solidarity under the banner of “West Marin Standing Together—Una Comunidad Unida.”
The rally was a community affair, with the crowd seated on hay bales and folding chairs and standing in a broad semicircle after sharing breakfast burritos, pastries, fruit, and coffee donated by local restaurants and cafes, and the town grocery store. Groups supporting the rally included the Coast Miwok Tribal Council, Main Street Moms, Legal Aid of Marin, the Dance Palace, and others.
Amate Perez, founder and director of the Latinx Racial Equity Project, told the crowd that the coming attacks on immigrants must be met with broad solidarity and recognition of previous civil rights struggles. “We can’t demand immigrant rights without also demanding land back for our Indigenous brothers and sisters and reparations for our Black brothers and sisters,” Perez said. From MLK to Cesar Chavez, “our struggles are really one.”
“I know I get to exist in the US because Black people organized,” Perez added. “We must be grateful to the Black liberation movement,” she said, noting that the Black Panthers picketed Safeway to support farmworkers in the early 1970s.
Perez urged, “let’s build deep solidarity and a movement committed to advancing the rights of all of us…all of us who have been affected by colonialism, racism, and economic exploitation… Black workers, women, immigrants, and Indigenous workers continue to be oppressed… yet they rely on our labor every day”
The protest comes as President Trump promises mass deportations of undocumented immigrants, and Point Reyes area farmworkers are facing displacement and meager housing options amid a major settlement that will shut down livestock ranches in the Point Reyes National Seashore. The controversial National Park Service deal, reportedly “hammered out in secret and underwritten by The Nature Conservancy”—without any input from farmworkers—will shutter livestock ranches in the national park and leave about 90 farmworkers without a place to live.
Farmworker families are “afraid of what’s going to happen, that they’re going to lose their jobs and lose their housing,” said Alma Sanchez, program manager at West Marin Community Services.
While Latinx immigrants face discrimination and fear every day, Sanchez noted, “with an anti-immigrant administration we feel it even more. We fear that we are unwelcome in [Trump’s] eyes. We hope he recognizes how we contribute to this country, the economy, the culture.”
Sanchez said the MLK Day rally “made us more united as a community,” by bringing together immigrant families, Indigenous communities, and others.
After a few speeches and a little sing-along music, the crowd marched in silence down Point Reyes Station’s main throughfare, Route 1, then on a stone path into the Giacomini Wetland area, winding through a thick green grassy meadow, then forming a large oval of about 200 people.
Here, the group was invited to pass around a sacred bird feather and share a brief word about what they love and hope to protect in the Trump years. The moment felt powerful and important, one could sense the somber mood but also the strength and vitality of the protesters standing in this giant oval, in a wetland meadow in Point Reyes.
Here are some of the words people shared:
“Imagination.”
“Connection.”
“Families.”
“Co-existence.”
“Cooperation.”
“Generosity and reciprocity.”
“We are all in this together.”
“Love is always more powerful than fear.”
“Open hearts, open minds.”
“Courage and joyful resilience.”
“Housing is a right for all.”
“Un corazon, una familia, una comunidad.”
