Phoenix, Ariz. – It’s May 29, the day I join 30,000 people in Arizona’s largest demonstration ever against the state’s latest attack on brown-skinned folks.

On my way here, driving through the hot, bright Sonoran desert, I looked right, up the shallow gully, then left, toward a mountain of broken boulders. “Where are they?” I asked myself out loud. If I could find their bleached bones, three young people might find closure, and I could distance myself a little more from complicity in my government’s tragic War on Immigrants.

As a boy the desert’s unar landscape delighted me. I spent weekends and summers in three-wheeler races and on long, mustang horse rides though its sandy dunes and washes. Now it only represents the nightmares, the horror and the grief of my friend Carlos and his two little sisters whose parents perished here.

Carlos told me how they’d left him and his sisters with a neighbor to go north, “por otra lado,” desperate for work to support their starving family. Carlos had worked the streets, near the Zocalo Plaza, in Mexico City as a male prostitute to put himself through university and support his siblings. They lived in an abandoned, earthquake-damaged building, and the little girls prayed to their mother and father each night before bed, making up stories about what they looked like and crying themselves to sleep.

None of them had seen their parents again. Last seen near San Luis de Colorado, they had never made it to their cousin’s house in Fresno. Three years later, when they hadn’t returned or sent word, Carlos could only conclude they had been lost in the blistering desert south of Yuma.

It’s Latino families like Carlos’ who gather at the demonstration – from grandmothers to infants, along with gays, and all opposed to Bill 1070, which forces law enforcement to target Latinos for proper documentation as to legal status and criminalizes officers who do not harass or detain law abiding citizens who have no proof of citizenship. Introduced on April 23, Bill 1070 is the most recent move by rich, white, Arizona Republican politicians to advance the federal government’s already obscene War on Migrants. Their assault has killed nearly 10,000 since Operation Gatekeeper began in 1994, and it has created an ethnic jihad, a kind of cultural genocide (culturocide?) against Latinos, particularly Mexicans. Its passage, on July 29,would make Arizona a sort of large, newly minted Warsaw ghetto, where a group of people, based on their skin color rather than their religion, would have to show papers for their right to exist.

Several years ago, my friend and I (we are Portuguese and Italian, respectively) were on the 15 Freeway when two border agents in a jeep began following us, flashing their lights for me to pull over. I drove on for several miles, getting madder by the minute, my friend panicking, screaming (he had never been arrested) finally got me to drive on to the shoulder. I got out, shouting that I was not near any border crossing and that San Diego was a sanctuary city and they could not pull me over based on our skin color. The officer stopped so abruptly he almost tripped. He flashed crimson and told me rather sheepishly that he had wanted to tell me I had a low tire. Yeh, right.

Border Patrol racial profiling is nothing new. In San Diego, agents troll trolley stations, swap meets and even schools as people pick up their children. Arizona’s profiling law simply legalizes a formerly illegal practice. The Attorney General of the United States, Eric Holder has called the law unconstitutional, and his Arizona counterpart, state Attorney General Terry Goodard, has also criticized the new law.

At the march, Goodard, who is running for governor in the next election, stands on a street corner alone, looking energetic and holding a hand-written sign that says, “I oppose this law.” Around him, farm workers lug signs and water bottles from the Metro Station, and huge buses bring Union members and their families from all over the Southwest, including a large contingent from Los Angeles. They began descending on Steele Indian School Park for the five-mile march to the state Capitol building early Saturday morning. Over a hundred of us from San Diego, including members of the Zapatista Collectivo and the South Bay Unitarian Church, caravanned to the march Friday evening, leaving Chicano Park around 6 p.m., to sleep in a donated warehouse or our cars. (At least 10,000 young people, from kindergarteners to high school students, accompanied their parents to protest another clearly racist law, HB2281, which makes it unlawful to teach ethnic studies. Even though the United Nations Humans Rights Commission formally opposed the bill on the basis that any ethnic group has the inherent right to learn their own history, Gov. Brewer signed it into law saying that ethnic solidarity undermines society and leads to diversity rather than “American culture and language.”)

Marching in bright colors, led by indigenous dancers and musicians, we take two hours to reach the Capitol building. Thumping drums, rumbling gourds, Mexican trumpets, clanging cymbals, Andean flutes, tambourines and other instruments give voice to the visual splendor of our march. Catholic Priests walk alongside GLBT activists, groups of long-haired students and balding union members, various civil rights organization members and local churchgoers carry banners, and everywhere fly brightly colored flags –stars and stripes, a few Mexican flags, state flags, school colors, even the Marine Corps flag. The marchers carry slick posters: “Undocumented and Unafraid,” they proclaim. “Stop the Hate.” Both young and old sport T-shirts declaring: “Legalize Arizona” or “Arizona: The Show Me Your Papers State.” Other marchers carry hand-made signs, from the angry and gross “Chinga la Migra” to “Standing in the State of Love with Immigrant Families.” And hundreds of students wear bandanas asking “How Brown is Brown?” and “What Does Illegal Look Like?”

Katharine Ferguson, 10, opens the rally speeches. I’m here to support my 12-year-old Latina friend, she says, relating her the girl’s experiences in 2009 when her parents were arrested and held three months in jail until they could prove their legal status. Blasting the climate of fear that Arizona’s immigration enforcement law has created, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka tells the crowd, “Immigrants are not the cause of America’s problems; the new law “is not the answer.”

Old timers in Phoenix note how apposite the setting for this march is, beginning at a park built on the land of the former Phoenix Indian School, opened in 1891 where “Americanization” systematically stripped generations of indigenous children, 900 boarding students a year at its peak in 1935, of their culture, language and heritage. Today, it is another culture under attack; legal weapons aimed at either marginalization or homogenization.

Ten cities across the nation also held rallies on Saturday, May 29 against Bill 1070. In San Francisco, about 500 people gathered Saturday night outside AT&T Park, where the Giants were playing the Arizona Diamondbacks. Leaders of the rally said they organized it to help push for a boycott against Arizona. Thousands gathered in Seattle, 500 in Austin, Texas, while nearly 1,000 people rallied at the Orange Dome in Winter Haven, Fla., to begin the Day for Prayer and Walk against the Arizona legislation. Other cities held demonstrations. In Mexico City, 300 people surrounded the U.S. Embassy and listened as Elvira Arellano, who was deported in 2007 without her U.S. citizen son, called on President Obama “to sign an executive order stopping deportations until the U.S. Congress passes comprehensive immigration reform.”