Today Latino activists and the consultants that make a profit from undocumented workers are calling for more immigration marches.
Of course, this seems to be the predictable action for a group of self-declared leaders who have no big ideas on how to connect with the American political system.
Hearing them, the only tool for Latinos to effect political change is another march.
Now it's clear that these never ending rounds of marches are good business. The consultants take donations, the radio comedians drive up their ratings -- and our mediocre Latino political class lines up for yet another round of hyperbolic speeches that faintly echo the great orators from the 1960's.
At the same time, one is forced to ask -- what have the marches accomplished? Certainly they have not led to immigration reform. They have, in short, failed in their stated objective -- over and over again.
There is an argument to be made that the rounds of marches have actually galvanized opposition to immigration reform. The video and pictures of undocumented people in the streets chanting slogans and brandishing Latin American flags does not play well in most parts of the United States.
I suspect that the march organizers know that today's march will also fail to reach the objective. Just last night, President Barack Obama basically declared that immigration reform will not be on the agenda before the election.
The obsession with marches obeys a certain logic. The profiting from undocumented workers is a good business only as long as immigration reform actually does not happen. The marches are a way to simultaneously show "action" to the crowd without running the risk that they will result in actual legislation.
Okay, that sounds perverse, but how else to explain the perpetual calls to the streets when these tactics have repeatedly failed to deliver an actual reform bill?
Why isn't the activist community going after the very low hanging fruit -- low Latino participation in elections?
Every political analyst worth a dime will tell you that voter participation, organized and directed towards a purpose, is the way that the American system responds and changes.
Elected officials want votes -- and Latinos have millions of them that they do not bother to cast.
We know, for example, that the National Rifle Association is hugely successful in lobbying Congress and getting their legislative agenda enacted.
How do they do it? They engage Congress with lobbyists and sophisticated media campaigns in targeted Congressional districts. They work the phones, communicate with persuadable voters -- and they mobilize people on election day to vote for NRA candidates.
Not exactly rocket science, but it actually works.
Meanwhile, the self-anointed leadership of the Latino community is stuck in a time warp.
Unable to distinguish between the objective conditions of the 1960's and our current reality, they seek to time-travel to the civil rights battles of 50 years ago as if one more flowery speech before a crowd will move the Congress to enact comprehensive immigration reform.
The fact that 2010 is not 1960, and that Martin Luther King Jr.'s battle was on behalf of disenfranchised American citizens -- not people trying to gain legal status -- is willfully ignored. It's as if history does not matter.
These so-called leaders inhabit an alternative universe of political action where failure is accepted as further example that Latinos don't have a voice in the United States and therefore require more marches to "be heard".
This cynical manipulation of peoples' emotions, dreams and hopes, neither serves the cause of the Latino community nor America as a whole.
Until we come to grips with the reality of the situation -- we don't vote anywhere near the levels of whites and African Americans -- our relative power in Congress will always be weak.
Not facing this reality is a self-actualization of political impotence.
It's time for a new generation of Latino leaders to take-over. It's time for Americans of Latino descent to come to the fore with rational ideas to engage with the political system -- and show demonstrable success, not in marching, but in enacting legislation.
In short, it's time that we stop following people who have led us into a cycle of perpetual failure. We can do much better. And for the good of America, we must succeed.