Herndon, Virginia Pro-Illegal Rally

As of the late afternoon, the Post is reporting limited local impact of today's May Day "Day without immigrants" protest. What I saw around the Herndon-Sterling area supports this.

There was a bit of excitement from 4:00 - 6:00 pm: Below are photos from Elden Street in Herndon this afternoon (May 1, 2006). I counted about 300 "protesters" - max - and maybe another 40 or 50 gawkers who happened to be Hispanic.

That's a pretty slim turnout for that section of Herndon. I bet over 20,000 Hispanic people live within a mile of the protest site. [Editors note: I've since learned this guess is way off - but the point remains there is a much larger Latino population than might be discerned from the numbers at the protest]. Presumably, most of them were at work, fixing dinner, or otherwise occupied with more sensible activity, such as sitting on the couch watching Oprah.

Click on the photos for larger versions.

The theme "please don't separate our family" with a child's drawing of a "frown face" appeared on a number of the signs in different versions (although each one appeared to have been drawn by the same "child" - poor little thing must have been drawing signs for hours!)

A guy with a bullhorn coordinated chants of "USA! USA!" interspersed with other stuff in Spanish (lo siento, no comprendo nada), and judging by that last photo I'd guess he was with these guys, identified on their Web site as follows:

Tenants’ and Workers’ Support Committee/Comité de Apoyo de Inquilinos y Trabajodores (TWSC/ CAIT) is "a democratically-controlled, grassroots organization committed to winning social and economic justice and power for the people of Northern Virginia – Latinos/as, African Americans, tenants, immigrants, workers, women, youth and low-income people."

More about TWSC here.

In related news, if you happened to be looking for businesses to boycott in the DC area, a good place to start might be the Daily Grill locations in Tysons Corner, Washington D.C. and Georgetown.

In other related news, Two Conservatives has the translation of the Spanish "national anthem" - check it out.

UPDATE: A good round up of today's May Day events is up at Hot Air, here. Also, here.

UPDATE II: The other part of what they were chanting might have been "Si se puede" - that's what they were saying on TV anyway. No puedo oír mucho, apparently.