I went with my family, immigrants from the Dominican Republic, to LOVE Park, where we joined friends and neighbors to march. Most of my memories from that 2006 day have faded but one lives on. Locking arms with my mother, a newly minted permanent resident at the time, and my aunt who is an undocumented immigrant, while shouting “¡El pueblo unido jamás será vencido!”
It’s been 15 years since those historic immigration reform protests and Philadelphia’s Latino communities are bigger than ever. The United States Census Bureau estimates that over 60 million U.S. residents are Latino — that’s 18.5% of the country’s population. Of those 60 million, nearly a quarter of a million live in Philadelphia — 15.2% of the city’s population.