by Rocío Maya Dozens of South East L.A community members gathered on Tuesday, April 11th at the Ricardo F. Icaza Workers’ Center in Huntington Park for the southern California premiere of The Long Ride , a documentary film on the 12-day journey taken by a group of 106 riders from Northern California to the nation’s capital in 2003. Produced and directed by Valerie Lapin Ganley, the 77-minute, Spanish subtitled documentary details the caravan more than 900 immigrants and allies embarked upon from various states and cities across the country. Traveling by bus, the solidarity riders concluded their bold trek with a march onto the steps of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. where they demanded that immigrant labor be treated with dignity.  The cohort of activists known as the Immigrant Workers Freedom Riders (IWFR) sought to spark the birth of a new Civil Rights Movement for immigrant workers in response to the anti-immigrant sentiment that sprang from the 9/11 terrorist attack...

 by Abel M. Salas Dr. Sandra Salazar, up for re-election as a member of the Cerritos College Board of Trustees, didn’t grow up on the Eastside. But as a resident of Norwalk, a mother of two young children, a physician who practices family medicine and an advocate for education, she is committed to creating pathways to success for students from South East Los Angeles. Raised near Culver City and Venice, Salazar is one of two girls born to a father from Zacatecas who worked as a gardener and a mother from Guatemala who cleaned houses in Malibu. “My father passed away when I was 12, so I was raised by a single mother,” said Salazar. Eventually, she recalled, her mother saved enough  to put a down payment on a small home in South Central Los Angeles. “That was really the only area where she could afford to buy in,” Salazar continued. Reluctant to take her and her little sister out of schools they were already attending, Salazar’s mother drove them to class every morning on ...