Posted on 04/20/2005 8:59:28 AM PDT by NormsRevenge
SAN PABLO - On the fourth night of her front yard hunger strike, Diana Ponce lay delirious under the carport, fighting off the chill under a fuzzy blanket emblazoned with the Mexican flag.
Neighbors sat clustered around her on white plastic lawn chairs. Children smacked at a yellow volleyball in the street. Toddlers tricycled past fence-strung banners that read "Tenemos Que Unirnos" -- We have to unite.
Outraged by recent news accounts of vigilante Mexican border hawks, the 32-year-old San Pablo woman took to the streets -- really, her driveway -- on two lawn chairs pushed together. Ponce, a diabetic, is fasting there for a week.
"How dare they call us terrorists," she said.
She refused not only food, but also water for the first two days of her fast, which ends Thursday.
Worried friends and family finally convinced her to drink fluids. Now she's sipping a kind of children's Gatorade that her husband, Feliberto Diaz, serves her before he leaves in the morning for his gardening job.
Ponce can be stubborn, relatives say.
"Once she gets into a certain cause, she really goes all the way," said her sister, Christina Gastelum.
Earlier this month, Ponce read a newspaper account of the Minuteman Project, a loose band of armed volunteers gathered in Arizona this month to catch illegal immigrants crossing the Mexican border.
President Bush has called them vigilantes, but the administration has taken no action. The group is slated to speak in front of the Congressional Immigration Reform Caucus next week, according to the Associated Press.
"How can the government in 2005 allow this, let people take the law into their own hands?" said Ponce, whose father came from Michoacan. "Why do they need to be armed?"
Ponce discussed a protest with her husband and her three children.
"I told him, I need to do something," Ponce said.
She considered a demonstration at the border, but then took a cue from March4Education, a Bay Area activist group. Besides walking 70 miles to Sacramento last year to protest school budget cuts, members starved themselves in Oakland and Sacramento.
Ponce marched with them, but missed the hunger strike. This time, she saw her chance, she said.
She took a week off as a manager at Century Theatres in Pleasant Hill. At home, she built her lawn chair platform, piling it with red plaid and denim comforters.
Each night at dusk she holds candlelight vigils, occasionally filmed by a TV crew. She sleeps outside on the improvised divan, in a spot usually reserved for her 1953 Fordomatic, the barbecue or, on really hot days, her free-standing pool.
She knows there are more conspicuous places for a protest.
But Ponce said she wanted news cameras to show the world her neighborhood -- a tightknit Mexican-American enclave of families with children, all of them with inalienable rights.
"And I figured the government can't get involved if it's my own property," she said.
To her right, a statue of Guadelupe clasps her hands in prayer, wooden rosary beads dripping from her plastic digits. Fatima beams in a gilt white robe, a trio of doves at her feet. A bust of Jesus flashes Ponce the peace sign.
About 8 p.m. Monday, as Ponce lay weak, the mini-congregation lit long white tapers, saucered by red plastic cups to catch the wax.
Friend Lisa Ramirez began the prayer:
"Our father, who art in heaven ..."
They repeated the prayer a second time in Spanish.
Ponce gripped a pink teddy bear, the tag dangling from its left ear. Someone turned on the TV to watch the news, but there was only the mustache of Dr. Phil.
Ponce drifted in and out of sleep. Soon, her husband would light a fire and let out her dog, Vega, a pit bull-German shepherd mix, to guard her.
Through her homebound protest, Ponce is following not only her conscience, but the stars, she said.
The day she read about the Minutemen, her Gemini horoscope (after warning her of troubles with strangers, authority figures and traveling) ended with an edict:
"Help a cause you believe in."
I would stand on the sidewalk in front of her house eating a BigMac waiving goodby to her.
If she is illegal I wish she would continue her protest on the proper side of the border..... Be nice if our government would enforce that.
Presumably she's adult onset diabetes, not Type 1 (juvenile, the more serious version that requires shots...which, incidentally, is what I have), so her problem is probably caused by obesity. Hence, I imagine she could stand to go on a hunger strike without causing too much trouble--her doctors might even approve of the measure.
Perhaps she'll lose a ton of weight and market this as a new diet? Call it the "Border Protest Diet."
Hey Ponce, if you're not going to eat that burrito, may I have it?
Let her starve herself to death. One less stupid person in the world to deal with.
These are not vigilantes as this woman and the MSM are want to call American citizens doing their duties as citizens…they are doing just what they should be doing when their government does not do the job of protecting the Homeland and they are doing it very well in spite of the ACLU appearing along with all the reporters, trying to tweak many members into confrontations.
Is everybody an idiot? I fast 7 days every spring and have done so for 20 years. The only thing it will do is make her feel better and might cure her diabeties. In addition I fast each monday which off sets the weekend binges. It takes 90% of your total energy just to digest what people stuff in their mouth. You would be suprised how good you feel when all this energy goes to repairing your body. If she was writhing around delusional in a lawn chair there was something else wrong. I suggest she be checked for iligallities or liberallities.
I may be wrong on my post re: her diabetes, I don't know. I don't really know about adult onset diabetes---
I just know about Type 1 diabetes, which DOES require carbohydrates or the person would go into coma....
Sorry if I misrepresented what this person may be doing to herself---
Hmmmm - sounds to me like she's running a little late to join Jim Jones at Guyana. But, that's the beauty of the Darwin Awards - the nominee doesn't have to be a moron during any particular time frame.
"Why do they need to be armed?"
Soon, her husband would light a fire and let out her dog, Vega, a pit bull-German shepherd mix, to guard her.
We can only hope AHHHHHrnold means what he said about closing the border.
I doubt it though. It will be up to citizens like the Minutemen to continue the fight or this country will look like the junkpile called Tijuana in a lot of places in a few years. Many cities already do!!
I see FOX showed a map of states planning citizen border patrols. Basically it included all our southern border states and a few here on the northern border.
Feels kinda like Alice in Wonderland. Who would have thought that book would be prophetic.....
susie
PS: my wife keeps encouraging me to go on a 90 day hunger strike. Doesn't care what the cause.
IGAF.
that's not completely true--type 1 diabetics require insulin, or they'll go into a coma from high blood sugar. (A friend of mine died in high school from this.) A lack of carbs, combined with too much insulin, will cause blood sugar to plummet, which causes an insulin reaction (also called insulin shock). So it's dangerous on both ends, but only a lack of insulin will send a person into a coma.
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