We’re going to be hearing a lot about the late Luis Ramirez.
The 25-year-old father of three children died Monday from injuries he received in a Shenandoah beating Saturday night.
Ramirez hailed from Mexico.
An article in today’s Pottsville Republican Herald reported that he had been in the United States for six years.
He was undocumented.
In the language of an often heartless America, that means he was “illegal.”
Witnesses claim that the beating was racially motivated and that racial slurs were thrown as fast and as recklessly as the punches that killed Ramirez. One witness is a retired Philadelphia police officer.
She told a reporter that at the time of the beating she heard someone yell, “You tell all your Mexican friends to get out of town.”
WNEP-TV reporter Bob Reynolds reported that the same witness told him that “I heard a lot of screaming. A female saying, ‘stop beating him. Stop hitting him.’ They said, ‘you f---- b----. Tell your f--- Mexican friends if they don’t get out of Shenandoah they’re going to be laying next to him.’ ”
Police say that they are questioning students from Shenandoah Valley High School.
Ramirez’ fiancée, the mother of his three children, told Reynolds that, “The kids around here are ignorant and they’re racists. Everywhere I go with him I have to hear, ‘A spic, dirty Mexican, wetback and stuff like that and my children have to hear that.’”
Another witness is quoted in the Pottsville Republican Herald as saying she heard comments as the assailants fled.
“We saw a bunch of kids walking away and screaming things like, ‘go back to Mexico.’ ”
“Go back to Mexico” now becomes the battle cry for those who will come to the aid of the attackers.
That’s why we must remember Ramirez.
That’s why we must find out everything we can find about his life and his death.
When did he come here?
How did he come here?
Why did he stay here?
What were his dreams here?
Shenandoah is a troubled little town in a troubled part of the country with a bad history of violence, insensitivity and ruthlessness. And although the coal region has always suffered from countless hate crimes that ranged from barroom brawls to labor riots, they usually didn’t wind up as homicides.
The many deaths related to coal mining, as well as abuses wrought by ethnic and class hatreds, were technically hate crimes. The vicious robber barons engaged in hate crimes when they sent children into the mines to work, hanged the Irish Molly Maguires, and fatally shot the Slovaks at Latimer Mines near Hazleton.
Ramirez becomes the most recent immigrant fatality, a pioneer who blazed a courageous trail to Shenandoah only to die in the shadow of the past that haunts us with an unforgiving grudge against outsiders.
The irony is that America has always depended as much on outsiders as on insiders.
Immigrant peasants breathed life into Shenandoah and the other little patch towns that dot the mountainsides of Schuylkill County. They still help move it forward as they struggle, work and raise their families.
And now they have another martyr.
Maybe his death will light the way for a better day.
Maybe his death will spawn more resentment against our new neighbors.
Whatever happens, we need to know more about Ramirez and how he lived and died.
Sue Henry
