The L.A. "Protests" Are About 1% As Big As in 2006

Estimates of March 25, 2006's "Gran Marcha" range from 500,000 to 1,000,000.

This photo is of “La Gran Marcha” in 2006 in Los Angeles backing the amnesty bill that passed the U.S. Senate two weeks later, but then failed in the House. Estimates of the crowd size range from 500,000 to 1,000,000, about one hundred times larger than the highest estimates for any single day of protests in Los Angeles over the last weekend.

Advocates of “La Gran Marcha” assert 1,250,000 to 1,500,000 participants.

Strikingly, this vast throng 19 years ago was much better behaved than the less than 10,000 that turned out last Sunday in downtown Los Angeles. I don’t see a single car on fire in this picture. Immigration skeptic Mickey Kaus attended La Gran Marcha in 2006 and reports that he didn’t see any violence or property crime.

Earlier marches that year had seen large numbers of Mexican and Central American flags waved, but the word was out by March 25 to only bring American flags this time.

The enormous marches of 2006 and 2007 are often labeled “protests,” but they were more in support of American political elites like George W. Bush, Ted Kennedy, and John McCain pushing amnesty.

Still, who successfully instigated this colossal 2006 turnout remained a mystery in the English language press for quite some time, with much speculation but little insight.

Eventually, it turned out …

Paywall here.

that the chief promoters were a dozen funny L.A. Spanish-language drive time disk jockeys, led by Eddie "Piolín" Sotelo.

The belatedness of this revelation pointed out that Los Angeles’s sizable media elite pays almost zero attention to whom Los Angeles’s Spanish speakers are paying attention. Apparently nobody who was anybody in Santa Monica to Silver Lake in 2006 had ever heard of Eddie "Piolín" Sotelo, much less listened to him.

I attended one of these marches in suburban Van Nuys. Nobody outside of the San Fernando Valley ever heard about it, but it looked like about 10,000 marchers, more than in the current upheavals in downtown Los Angeles.

What I was struck by then was how short the marchers were.

These were not the American-born Chicanos I had grown up with in the San Fernando Valley, who averaged a few inches shorter than whites, but who were still moderately tall by global standards. Back then, Los Angeles’s American-born Chicanos (a word you don’t hear much anymore) tended to be descended from northern Mexico, and were blends of Spaniards and the bigger Indians, and had grown up on a diet of cheeseburgers and milk. For instance, the #1 professional tennis player in the world from 1954 to 1962 was 6’3” Pancho Gonzales, who was born in the Los Angeles barrio in 1928.

In contrast, these tiny marchers had obviously only recently arrived from southern Mexico or Central America.

My vague impression is that my generation’s Chicanos tended to be more of a handful than the smaller, more timid recent immigrants.

Speculatively, I wouldn’t be surprised if 2025’s rioters were the opposite, coming more from L.A.’s declining Chicano population.