Monday morning, May 1, rolls around and endless rows of aging lettuce heads near Salinas need picking. But not a single “illegal” soul can be seen bending his or her back to pick them.

Dozens of hungry tourists stroll along Cannery Row, aching for a fancy, memorable lunch by the sea. But scores of cooks, busboys and waiters fail to show up for work, leaving tourists scratching their heads and hesitating over their next move.

Jose Rivera’s boss needs strong bodies to lay some concrete. But when he calls Rivera, a construction worker and contractor who is undocumented, Rivera passes up on the gig.

“Today’s the immigrant boycott,” Rivera, 30, flatly tells his boss via his cell phone while he watches his 8-year-old son play in the front yard of their Seaside home. “Didn’t you know that?”

Most people knew it, debated it and watched it unfold before their eyes as Monterey County chugged along on about half its usual cylinders. Restaurants shut down early, opened late, or didn’t open at all. Agriculture fields were empty as far as the eye could see. Hotels operated understaffed. Day laborer hot spots sat eerily quiet.

Why? For Rivera, as for scores more who backed the boycott by skipping work or attending pro-immigrant marches, the reason was clear. “We are a peaceful people,” said Rivera, wearing a baseball cap, cowboy boots, blue jeans and a tucked-in white T-shirt. “But if you poke us again and again, sooner or later you are going to get a reaction out of us.”

The “poking” started in 1993 when state legislators prevented undocumented immigrants from  obtaining driver’s licenses. The following year—still in the midst of an economic recession—state voters attempted to punish immigrants with Proposition 187, which would have obliged school principals to literally boot tens of thousands of undocumented children onto the streets.

The final straw for many came last December, when the House passed a punitive immigration bill—the outcome of years of bitter anti-immigration rhetoric—that would have transformed about 11 million undocumented immigrants into felons.

“That’s what gets us the most, that they want to criminalize us,” Rivera said. “That boils my blood because it’s so unjust.”

And so on May 1, after 13 years living and working in California, Rivera missed work when they really needed him and participated in his first-ever political rally. He wasn’t alone. During the national immigrant boycott, millions of mostly Spanish-speaking immigrants from coast to coast upped the ante in the nation’s immigration-reform debate, which will continue to play out in the halls of Congress as a new immigration law is hammered out.

Students, which played a key role in sparking the movement with massive walkouts two months ago, were again close to the center of action. Schools like Harden Middle School in Salinas saw more than 25 percent of its student body not show up for class, a pattern reflected across the county.

But at Harden, teachers cooked something special up for a core group of politically active students. While tens of thousands of immigrants marched in Salinas, dressed in white to evoke the peaceful nature of the still-growing pro-immigrant movement nationwide, dozens of students organized an on-campus rally at lunchtime at Harden in a show of solidarity.

The students, carrying banners and signs, walked and chanted throughout the campus and then assembled at the library, where teachers were standing by, ready to seize on the “teachable moment.“

“History is being made and you are a part of it,” said Alicia Garcia-Gozbekian, a teacher who spearheaded the action as a means to give politically active students a reason to come to school. After going over six key steps to building a lasting movement (these included knowing your rights, voicing an opinion, writing government officials and contacting the media), students were allowed to sound off.

All denounced the US House-approved bill that would make felons out of undocumented immigrants, and all favored the legalization of the nation’s approximately 11 million undocumented immigrants.

One girl, Ashley Estrada, vowed to fight on no matter what kind of bill Congress decides to pass in the coming weeks. “They’re going to listen to us because our voice will only grow louder,” said Estrada, who has undocumented family members living with her. “We are going to keep going no matter what.”

After a few minutes, Garcia-Gozbekian acknowledged that the bell signaling the end of lunch was about to go off. “I know you haven’t eaten lunch yet,” she told the students. “But sometimes you have to make sacrifices for what you believe.”

William Lara didn’t have to sacrifice anything on May 1. While born in Mexico, he is already a US citizen and works for a resort in Pebble Beach. At 3pm Monday, Lara joined about 5,000 white shirts moving up Fremont Avenue in Seaside in a procession that a times looked a little like a Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca.

People who’d been absent from work all day all suddenly emerged en masse from side streets and attached themselves to the thick snake of people heading to Seaside City Hall.

“I know what it’s like to be illegal,” said Lara, who wore a farmer’s hat, smoked a cigar and sported a shirt adorned in a US flag motif. “I know what they are feeling, to live in fear and feel like the authorities can grab you anytime they want.”

After describing the euphoria of participating in his first political march, Lara said that the marches, the boycott and the national show of solidarity would have never happened if not for the growing clout of anti-immigrant activists and ideas in recent years.

“It’s ironic in a way, because it’s totally backfiring on them,” Lara said, his blue eyes and round face expressing humor and disbelief at the same time. ‘These people here today, they know they aren’t criminals.”

In the midst of the Seaside rally, as one speaker after another gave rousing talks, and as hundreds of flags—mostly American flags—fluttered in the cool ocean breeze, a list of names lay on the floor in the middle of the commotion.

The list bore names of the 5,000 men, women and children who died attempting to cross the US-Mexican border since US policy in the mid-1990s became to push would-be illegal immigrants to desert border areas.

As the names lay silently on the floor, Seaside City Councilman Tom Mancini pointed out a sign floating above the crowd.

“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, yearning to be free,” Mancini read as he spoke into the microphone. “That there is what it’s all about.”