would be detrimental to the state. In October 1994, an estimated seventy thousand people marched in Los Angeles to protest Prop. 187 in one of the largest protests in U.S. history. The political atmosphere in California at the time, however, was extremely xenophobic, and coverage of the protest focused on the large number of Latino, Mexican, and Mexican American participants and especially expressed outrage at the presence of Mexican flags at the protest. Proposition 187 passed with 58% of the vote. Shortly after the proposition's passage, U.S. District Court Judge Mariana R. Pfaelzer in Los Angeles ruled that preventing undocumented children from attending K-12 schools was unconstitutional and prevented the implementation of most of the measure's other provisions. Proposition 187, though overturned, significantly eroded Mexican American and Latino support for the California Republican Party. In many ways, however, its basic tenets shaped the future of American debates regarding the rights of undocumented people in the U.S. Culturally, the measure also had a strong impact on the community. In Selenidad (2009), the poet Deborah Paredez connected the collective trauma of the 1995 death of Selena to the community's response to the measure's initial passage, writing, "Selena's death galvanized Latino efforts to publicly mourn collective tragedies (such as approved anti-Latino legislation in California, Proposition 187 and Proposition 229) and to envision a brighter future." Early 2000s The 2000 Census showed that the foreign-born population of the U.S. increased by 11.3 million people in the 1990s, and Mexican immigrants accounted for 43% of that growth. The region which had the fastest-growing immigrant population was the Southeast, where many Mexicans who found work in construction, as migrant agricultural laborers, and in textile mills and chicken processing plants. The Latino populations of Georgia, North and South Carolina, and Arkansas increased between 300 and 400 per cent from 1990 to 2000. A major focus of Chicano activists in the 21st century has been to advance the representation of Chicanos in all American mainstream media. Criticism of the American mainstream news media and U.S. educational institutions by Chicano activists has been particularly harsh in recent years subsequent to the massive displays of support for immigrant rights such as that seen during La Gran Marcha (The Great March) on March 25, 2006 in Los Angeles. As of today, this self-proclaimed "largest march in U.S. history" which was primarily organized by Mexican American organizations, Chicano activists, and fueled through