As is so often the case, politics played in its own theater of irony this spring.

While hundreds of thousands of Latinos marched to protest proposed federal legislation that would define as felons both unauthorized immigrants and those who rendered them assistance, Texas legislators convened to debate public school funding in a state with a two-tier system of education.

Governor Rick Perry compelled them once again to address in special session the inequity of state support to public schools. The schools on the short-shrift side are mostly attended by Hispanic and black students in inner cities, in south Texas, and youngsters in rural areas.

This funding conflict continues even though more than 40 years ago the Texas Supreme Court ruled, in Edgewood v. the State of Texas, that the state's educational resource distribution was unconstitutional. In 1993, when representatives took the first timid move to comply with the courts, the press labeled that effort the “Robin Hood Act,” thus eliminating any acknowledgment of civic responsibility and generating animosity between neighborhood school zones.

The long legacy of intellectually impoverishing Hispanic and black youngsters is not restricted to Texas. As Jonathan Kozol wrote so eloquently in Harper's magazine last September, these youngsters are trapped – “deeply isolated in the poorest, most segregated schools.” He documented a pervasive national nightmare: black and Hispanic youth make up 96 percent of Detroit's schools; 94 percent in D.C., 89 percent in Baltimore, 87 percent in Chicago, 84 percent in Los Angeles, 82 percent in St. Louis, 79 percent in Cleveland and 75 percent in New York City.

But so far no national Latino demonstrations are organized to demand better schools, even though so many of these young people are cheated of a solid start, eliminating the path to opportunities they now march to ensure.

Here in Texas – like in California where non-Hispanic whites are now a minority population – live the largest number of uninsured youngsters in the nation. No need to describe which youngsters are most affected. The highest concentration is among Mexican Americans.

For the most part, poor black children and first- and second-generation Latino children face severe health care inequities across the nation. In 2003, 35.7 percent of Latinos and 20.8 percent of African-Americans were uninsured.

But no similar organized marchers demand health-care justice.

Criminals, as defined by some of our elected representatives, are the unauthorized immigrants and all who would assist them in any way to survive in the United States for meager wages without benefits or protections.

What's the appropriate label for those who profit from this modern form of slavery? Migrants who crossed our border submitted to such servility in the interest of a better future for themselves and their families?

Even for those who might attain guest-worker status or citizenship, there remain entrenched institutional chasms on the road to prosperity.

As a demonstrator of the 1960s, I am pleased to see Latinos turn out on behalf of humane treatment for unauthorized immigrants upon whom so much of our economy relies.

Needed next are similar efforts for better social conditions than those under which Hispanic and other youngsters of color are presently subjugated.