Immigrants celebrate ‘this historic moment’

Timothy Pratt and Ed Koch

Wednesday, May 3, 2006 | 7:39 a.m.

As May Day's marches and boycotts folded into Tuesday morning, many Las Vegas immigrants and their supporters spoke of an exhilarating sense of feeling less invisible than they were the day before.

Spanish-language radio DJs blustered about "this historic moment."

For many people who had been there, the very act of marching down the Strip was symbolic. A large crowd of mostly hourly workers, mostly Hispanic, had closed down part of one of the most moneyed streets on the planet, marching past the palaces many of them help operate.

That act also might well put the march in the books, as it was "probably the largest political march down the Las Vegas Strip in history," according to Gene Moehring, chairman of UNLV's history department.

Not only that, the size of the crowd itself may have been much larger than estimates released afterward - 8,000 (Metro Police) to 12,000 (marchers).

Experts consulted by the Sun said the march may have been from 18,000 to 79,000 people, with a safe estimate being somewhere between 35,000 and 50,000.

Surprisingly, the numbers, whatever they may have been, were reached with no visible leadership and without a permit - apparently in violation of Clark County ordinances.

County and Metro Police officials said no one associated with the event had sought a permit, although county ordinances say that a permit wouldn't ordinarily be given for a march down that part of the Strip after 9 p.m. Normally, the county would give a permit to a march covered by ordinances - say, before 9 p.m. - and Metro would then sign off on the permit.

So, a leaderless, apparently illegal, grass-roots gathering makes Las Vegas history. What to do for an encore?

That's the question, said Yazel Navarrete, a political science student at UNLV and president of Student Organization of Latinos, who was the driving force behing about 200 of her fellow students attending the march.

She was impressed by the "power" she felt on the street, but skeptical about whether those thousands of marchers would sign up for the sustained lobbying that may be needed to achieve the comprehensive immigration reform that she sees as the pot at the end of the rainbow.

"It's easy to join a crowd and shout slogans ... (and) it's great to have your picture taken and be in the newspaper - but if your senator doesn't know that you even exist," then the effort is in vain, she said.

Pilar Weiss, political director of the Culinary Union, many of whose members were in the march, said the event may have been "wonderful from the personal point of view" for many.

"But then you have to get back to, 'It's May 2 and how do you get a bill passed in Congress?'

"It's such an emotional issue for many, and we don't know if it (the march) will translate into action," Weiss said.

By "action" she means such efforts as targeting members of Congress. The Culinary Union announced Tuesday that 40,000 people had signed a petition seeking a comprehensive immigration bill, and hoped for more signatures before Tuesday , when workers are expected to take the petition to Washington.

Still, Weiss allowed that the march's numbers might be "the beginning of a wave of change" in Las Vegas. Even if it's not known what those numbers were, given the varied estimates.

Monday's march wouldn't be the first time differing numbers were offered for the size of such an event.

Perhaps the most controversial dust-up on crowd sizes happened in 1995, when the National Park Service came under fire for estimating the Million Man March in Washington at 400,000.

Boston University's Center for Remote Sensing, using digitalized aerial images to count heads, came up with a total of 837,000 people at that event.

The center supported its crowd counts with a formula of one person per two square feet for a tightly packed group.

During the Las Vegas march, some estimates placed the length of the crowd, including stragglers, at one mile along the Strip.

Using the Center for Remote Sensing formula, if the march was just half a mile long and the road was only 60 feet wide - the smallest width of the southbound lanes of the Strip from Sahara Avenue to New York-New York - about 79,000 people marched down the Strip on Monday night.

UNLV mathematics professor William Speer said that without looking at photographs, he couldn't accurately estimate the crowd size. But he said if the march was stretched out for a mile, police estimates could be accurate if the marchers were "really spaced out."

Using a standard, but conservative, formula - two to three people per square yard over only half a mile - Speer said the crowd would be between 35,000 and 52,000. He said even if there were only one person per square yard, the march would still be roughly 18,000 people.

Officer Eric Roberson, a Metro spokesman, said police numbers were determined by the on-scene commander talking with officers along the route and pilots in helicopters. Then they apply previous experience with crowds and come up with what Roberson called "our best guesstimate."

In the coming weeks, in the Las Vegas Valley and across the nation, the key issue will not be how many people are marching, but whether their voices are reaching the halls of Congress.