In a Home Depot parking lot beside a freeway on-ramp in this city northeast of Los Angeles, a woman sang to a small crowd in Spanish over her band’s rocking cumbia rhythm, “How I love my people, for being more than brave.”
Across the interstate ramp, under peach-colored clouds, a collection of tiny crosses memorialized the spot where Carlos Roberto Montoya Valdez, a day laborer who used to come to the Home Depot to find work, was struck and killed by an SUV as he ran from US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.
The crowd had come 40 days after Montoya’s death for an October 10 vigil. Pablo Alvarado, co-executive director of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, spoke about his childhood memories of the impact of Catholic Archbishop Óscar Romero’s role as the “moral voice” of El Salvador during the country’s military dictatorship and civil war. Romero, who was assassinated while celebrating mass in 1980, became a Catholic saint in 2018.
