http://aztlannet-news-blog.blogspot.com/2006/10/martes-octubre-24-2006-aztlannetnews.html
<>+<>+<>+<>+<>+<>+<>+<>+<>+<>+<>+<>+<>+<>+<>+<>+<>+<>+<>+<>+<>+<>+<>
<>+<>+<>+<>+<>+<>+<>+<>+<>+<>+<>+<>+<>+<>+<>+<>+<>+<>+<>+<>+<>+<>+<>
Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzapata
http://www.alternet.org/story/43375/
Posted on October 24, 2006
Round Population Numbers Fuel the Immigration Scare
By Christopher Hayes, TheNation.com
If there's one thing the media loves, it's a nice round number. Unless you had chosen this week to play Henry Thoreau, you probably noticed that the United States population passed the 300 million mark at some point in the last few days. Local newspapers rushed to declare one of their own the 300 millionth soul and nearly every media outlet from NPR to CNN to The News Hour devoted air time to explain to the their viewers What It All Means.
All the attention brought into high relief just how absent demography is from our routine political discussions. Well, with some notable exceptions. On October 18, I got an e-mail from the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) with the subject "300 Million and Counting!" -- complete with the obligatory black-and-white photo of a crowded city street at rush hour: Hell is other people. "Can the U.S. sustain this continued increase in its population or will this growth suffocate a once thriving nation?," the e-mail asked. It wasn't really a question.
It's a strange quirk of the anti-immigration movement, that while the base is animated largely by xenophobia, the leadership, like FAIR, Numbers USA and others are driven by the far more esoteric concern of population growth. Much of this is the legacy of John Tanton, the eccentric, brilliant opthamologist from Petoskey, Michigan who founded FAIR and pretty much single-handedly started the modern anti-immigration movement. Tanton's worldview was formed at a time when demography was a major concern, thanks to Paul Ehrlich's landmark book The Population Bomb, which predicted the world was about to breed itself out of existence. As the United States' native-born birthrate leveled off in the 1960s, Tanton turned his attention to the source of the nation's continued growth, which was propelled by immigrants and their offspring. The rest is history.
So that explains why Dan Stein, head of FAIR, was everywhere last week, from MSNBC to the op-ed pages of USA Today making the case that 300 million was an ominous milestone and the culprit was our porous borders. For FAIR, the rare spotlight on population growth was a golden opportunity to make their case. "Overcrowded schools, congested highways, environmental stresses: We are a nation paving over its wildernesses while depending on our enemies for vital resources," Stein wrote in an editorial in USA Today. "Why? Because Americans have been blindsided by a government-mandated mass immigration program that's fueling this nation's runaway population growth. This growth was neither planned nor expected, but we feel the consequences every day."
Stein's partly right. There is little official policy that sets out an ideal U.S. population, but images of crowded streets and traffic jams aside, the fact remains that the US is still a very big place, and relatively sparsely populated. With thirty-two people per square kilometer, the U.S. ranks 172nd in the world in density. Amsterdam and South Korea, just to name two, are each more than ten times as dense.
But of the world's richest nations, the United States is also the only one with a robustly growing population. Most of Europe has been caught in a much-discussed population drought, a birthrate so far below replacement rates that countries like Italy and Spain could lose half their population in the next fifty years. But thanks largely to higher birth rates of America's immigrants, the U.S. faces no such problems.
Is that a good thing? There are arguments on both sides, but ultimately it's the wrong question. Some in the anti-immigration movement point out the environmental effects of the increased resource consumption come from increased population, but if that's your concern, there's no reason to wall off the United States and let, say, Mexico slide into environmental ruin. And while it's true that once people come to the US they burn a lot more carbon, that logic would also imply that it's a good idea to keep the rest of the world poor, which doesn't quite seem fair. The fact is that population growth isn't really a problem for the US. As one environmentalist told me, "It's not that we have too many people -- we have too many cars."
Of course, you can't very well win elections or raise much money demonizing cars. Groups like FAIR figured that out long ago.
Christopher Hayes is a contributing editor of In These Times and the Chicago editor of Just Cause magazine.
Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzapata
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Border01/message/3385
October 24, 2006
English Only Ordinance Talking points from NCLR
Flavia Jimenez / National Council of La Raza fjimenez@...
Advocates, attached, please find materials on English only proposals at the local level.
Thanks.
http://www.immigrantsolidarity.org/Documents/EnglishonlyFactCheckPDF/EnglishOnlyTalkingPointsPDF.pdf
http://www.immigrantsolidarity.org/Documents/EnglishonlyFactCheckPDF/EnglishonlyFactCheckPDF.pdf
Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzapata
http://www.pslweb.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=5903&news_iv_ctrl=1030
Tuesday, October 24, 2006
Immigrant rights forum in Washington Heights
By: Osiris Flores
New York City: Not even a cold, windy night could keep Washington Heights community members and activists from gathering at the Dominican Culturarte Foundation for an immigrant rights forum sponsored by the Party for Socialism and Liberation. Speakers at the Oct. 20 forum included Karina Garcia, leader of the anti-Minutemen Columbia protest, and Juan José Gutiérrez , national director of the immigrant rights organization Latino Movement USA.
PSL member William Guerrero opened the forum by affirming the importance of the immigrant rights struggle. Radhames Perez, an organizer in Washington Heights, followed with a very confident outlook on the struggle since the success of the May 1 demonstrations and what many deemed "the birth of a new civil rights movement." He went on to praise the Party for Socialism and Liberation and ANSWER on their initiative to do work in the Washington Heights community.
The PSL showed footage of the Oct. 4 anti-Minutemen protest at Columbia University to shed light on the media’s misrepresentation of the anti-racist protesters. The footage showed one of the Minutemen attacking a student protestor, Martin Lopez, which shocked the audience at the forum. Karina Garcia began her talk explaining the significance of the demonstration.
"On very short notice nearly 500 people came out to demonstrate in the rain outside in front of Columbia University," she said. "They came to show these racists and fascists that their violence would not come about without a militant and tactical demonstration."
Garcia went on to make the connections between the Minutemen and other racist groups, like the Ku Klux Klan, noting that these hate groups are funded by corporations and supported by the U.S. government. She also emphasized the importance of the struggle against these groups, "The Minutemen actually constitute a very real threat in our communities and to simply ignore them and think that they’ll go away would be making a very tragic mistake."
After a thunderous applause from the audience, Juan José Gutiérrez took the stage. He gave a very in depth account on the history of the immigrant rights struggle, which started with two simple lines at the U.S.-Mexican border. The first line represented those immigrants who wanted to enter the United States as citizens, they would be charged a quarter. The other line represented those who wanted to enter as legal residents, which would have cost them a dime.
Gutierrez connected all of the current anti-immigrant laws as just another attack on the workers of this country. Gutierrez said, "Where there is political challenge, there is political opportunity." His words rang clearly in the ears of those who strive to unite the workers of this country to fight against injustice.
Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzapata
http://www.elpasotimes.com/news/ci_4540233
Article Launched:10/24/2006 12:00:00 AM MDT
Former Border Patrol agent accused in molestation
By Louie Gilot / El Paso Times
Email= lgilot@elpasotimes.com ; 546-6131.
A former El Paso Border Patrol agent has been accused of molesting the underage daughter of another agent eight years ago, court documents and the agent's lawyer said.
Luis Estrella, 42, who was teaching at the Border Patrol Academy in Artesia, N.M., was arrested at his workplace last Friday by Eddy County sheriff's deputies.
His attorney, Gary Weiser, said the charges against his client are "unfounded."
"This is an allegation based on an outcry from the alleged victim who is the daughter of another Border Patrol officer that had made threats against my client eight years ago," Weiser said.
The charges against Estrella are aggravated sexual assault of a child and indecency with a child, according to court documents. The charges are first-degree felonies and carry a maximum sentence of life in prison and up to $10,000 in fines.
According to the indictment, Estrella's accuser was younger than 14 in 1998 when Estrella, then an El Paso Border Patrol agent, allegedly performed oral sex on her and touched her genitals.
Estrella is currently based in the Miami Border Patrol sector but had been teaching at the Border Patrol Academy in Artesia. Clark Messer, the Border Patrol spokesman in Artesia, said that Estrella was a "temporary instructor."
Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzapata
http://www.kobtv.com/index.cfm?viewer=storyviewer&id=28490&cat=NMTOPSTORIES
Update: 10/24/2006 11:44:30 AM
Mexico drafts resolution criticizing proposed US border fence
By: Associated Press
MEXICO CITY (AP) - The Mexican government is drafting a resolution for the United Nations Human Rights Council criticizing US plans to build hundreds of miles of fencing on its southern border.
Mexican Ambassador Luis Alfonso de Alba, president of the 47-member council, says the resolution will denounce the fence for violating human rights and driving undocumented migrants to cross the border in more remote and dangerous areas.
The United States is an observer but not a member of the council. Last month, the US Senate approved the bill to build 700 miles of border fencing and President Bush has said he will sign it into law—despite pleas from the Mexican government for a veto.
Mexican President Vicente Fox has called the plans “shameful.” There are an estimated 11 million Mexicans living in the US, about half of whom are illegal.
Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzapata
http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20061024/NEWS07/610240353/1009
October 24, 2006
Bill to secure U.S. border seen as election-year ploy
Bush gets it weeks after its passage
BY MIKE MADDEN / GANNETT NEWS SERVICE
WASHINGTON -- A bill to build a 700-mile fence along the U.S.-Mexican border is poised to become law just in time for next month's elections. Weeks after the bill passed the House and Senate, Republican leaders sent it to the White House on Monday. President George W. Bush must sign it within 10 days or it will be automatically vetoed and sent back to Congress.
The delay will let Republicans talk about border security and illegal immigration in the last days of campaign season, as the GOP tries to hold on to slim majorities in the House and Senate. By not sending the proposal to Bush immediately after it passed, Republicans got the chance to try to build a second wave of publicity around it.
"The American people demand a secure border," House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., said in a joint statement Monday.
"Unfortunately, the House and Senate Democrat leaders voted against the Secure Fence Act. The Democrat immigration plan would fail the American people, allow dangerous criminals into our country and would set our homeland security back to pre-9/11 levels."
When Congress took the measure up late last month, Democratic leaders called the bill a political stunt. Still, 64 House Democrats and 26 Senate Democrats voted for it.
Value of the fence unclear: Whether the fence will help stop undocumented immigrants is unclear. Congress has paid for only about 150 miles of fencing in separate legislation Bush has already signed. The fence can also be replaced by cameras and sensors if the Department of Homeland Security decides that makes more sense.
Building the entire fence could cost more than $6 billion, lawmakers' estimate.
"The whole Secure Fence Act was an election-year gimmick," said Michele Waslin, director of immigration policy research at the National Council of La Raza, the largest Latino civil rights group in the country. "It's an attempt to look tough without really doing anything."
Sides don't agree on policy: The House and Senate were unable to agree on broader changes to immigration policy or border security, even though both chambers passed their own bills.
The Border Trade Alliance, a group based in Phoenix that represents businesses in the United States and Mexico, opposed the bill. The Mexican government protested it, too.
"All they're doing is finally sending a bill they've been sitting on for a couple weeks," said Jim Manley, a spokesman for Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev. "It highlights their willingness to pay lip service to the need to protect our borders without doing anything to do so."
Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzapata
http://lonestartimes.com/2006/10/24/border-fence-bill-to-be-signed-in-a-public-ceremony/
Tuesday, October 24, 2006
Border Fence Bill To Be Signed in a Public Ceremony
by Ree-C Murphey
It turns out the bill to build the fence on the border was not a “pocket veto”. Congress sent the bill to President Bush only yesterday:
Congress yesterday sent the bill to build 700 miles of fencing on the U.S.-Mexico border to President Bush, who will sign it in a ceremony Thursday morning in the White House Roosevelt Room.
The decision to have a public ceremony is a reversal for the Bush administration, which had appeared reluctant to tie itself so publicly to the enforcement-only measure. Although Mr. Bush had committed to signing the bill, aides had said consistently over the past few weeks there would not be a signing ceremony.
But Republicans in Congress had demanded a public signing, with leaders saying the bill is a major accomplishment that will help their re-election prospects.
“The American people demand a secure border, and this Republican Congress has responded to the American people’s demand for a secure border by increasing the physical barriers and infrastructure along the border and by providing state of the art monitoring technology,” House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert, Illinois Republican, and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, Tennessee Republican, said in a joint statement trumpeting the bill’s official transmission yesterday morning.
They had held onto the bill in order to guarantee Mr. Bush’s signature closer to the election, when it would have the biggest impact. Aides said they were also holding out for a signing ceremony, to use the presidential pulpit for maximum attention.
By yesterday evening, several congressional offices said they received invitations to a signing ceremony on Thursday at the White House, and House Republicans said the bill signing is vindication for their enforcement-only approach.
“For all those people who spoke disparagingly of the hearings that were held over the summer on border security, this bill represents a victory — both a grass-roots victory and a public relations victory — for the Congress,” said one House Republican leadership aide.
Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzapata
http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2006/10/24/america/NA_GEN_US_Mexicantown_Detroit.php
October 24, 2006
Detroit's Mexicantown center takes shape at U.S.-Canadian border
DETROIT While motorists crossing the Ambassador Bridge technically head north into Michigan from Ontario, they might soon think they have crossed south of the border.
The Mexican border, that is.
Officials are planning a ribbon-cutting on Thursday for a $17 million (€13.54 million), 45,000 square-foot (4,050 square-meter) Mexicantown International Welcome Center and Mercado at the foot of the international span. The goal is to grow the southwest Detroit neighborhood into a regional cultural destination with locally run businesses and an outdoor plaza.
"Instead of a freeway, you are in the middle of this great, vibrant district that is all about welcoming you," Margaret Garry, a vice president with the Mexicantown Community Development Corp., told The Detroit News.
The idea for a welcome center first was pitched in the mid-1970s. The facility is being built with a mix of federal loans, grants and corporate gifts.
++++++++++
On the Net:
Mexicantown Community Development Corp.: http://www.mexicantown.org
Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzapata
http://jurist.law.pitt.edu/paperchase/2006/10/border-fence-legislation-sent-to-white.php
Tuesday, October 24, 2006
Border fence legislation sent to White House for approval
Holly Manges Jones at 8:35 AM ET
[JURIST] The Secure Fence Act of 2006 [PDF text; HR 6061 summary], the second portion of a two-part plan to tackle illegal immigration [JURIST news archive] in the US, was sent to President George Bush Monday for his signature. The bill allows the US Secretary of Homeland Security [official website] to begin using $1.2 billion earmarked for the construction of a border control fence [JURIST news archive] to prevent illegal aliens from entering the US and outlines when and how the building project will get underway. Bush has already signed the first half of the legislation, which creates a $34.8 fund for tackling immigration issues, including the money to build the 700-mile fence, which will cover areas of the border in California and Arizona. President Bush has 10 days to sign the border fence legislation in order for it to become law.
In a statement [text] Monday, US Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-TN) [official website] and US Speaker of the House J. Dennis Hastert (R-IL) [official website] called the legislation "a key component to keeping America safe and stemming the tide of illegal immigration." US Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) [official website], chairman of the Immigration, Border Security and Citizenship subcommittee [official website], has expressed concern, however, that the government has not budgeted nearly enough to combat the immigration issue, and has lobbied for the use of technological means as well as the fence to prevent illegal immigration. WorldNetDaily has more.
Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzapata
http://newsblogs.chicagotribune.com/news_theswamp/2006/10/gop_congress_ge.html
Originally posted: October 23, 2006
GOP Congress gets off (border) fence
Posted by Frank James at 3:09 pm and updated at 8:10 pm CDT
The Congress and the White House haven’t been on the same wavelength when it comes to how and when President Bush should sign the legislation to authorize the 700-mile fence on the nation’s border with Mexico, a barrier meant to slow down illegal immigration.
Passing the border-fence legislation was one of Congress’s last, much ballyhooed acts before it adjourned to allow members to return to their states and districts to campaign.
House Republicans especially saw the border-fence measure as excellent proof to voters that Republicans are serious about cracking down on illegal immigration. So they wanted some pomp and circumstance surrounding the bill-signing.
But Bush, who is holding out for "comprehensive immigration reform'' that acknowledges the millions of undocumented immigrants already living in the United States, plans to sign the fence bill in a relatively low-key ceremony in the Roosevelt Room on Thursday morning.
According to a recent Washington Times story, House Republicans have been hoping to showcase the legislation with a grand White House signing ceremony close enough to Election Day to energize enough voters to make a difference.
To that end, the W. Times story says, congressional Republicans held onto the legislation, declining to send it to President Bush until they felt the timing was right.
Meanwhile, the White House just wanted congressional Republicans to send them the bill so the president could sign it, preferably privately and without fanfare. The following passage from the W. Times story captured the White House mood.
"Send us the damn bill. We'd like to autograph it," said a senior administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to allow for more freedom to discuss politics and policy.
"Our object was to sign it last week so we can have port security and border security together and herald an effort to control all of the borders of the United States. We even had ways to talk about what we were doing at the airports," the official said.
The president had made it clear for years that he preferred comprehensive immigration-reform legislation, not the piecemeal approach represented by the fence bill.
Also, the fence didn’t exactly send the right message to many Hispanic voters he had worked so diligently to court in recent years.
Well, the time must’ve been right today because congressional Republicans finally sent the bill to the White House for Bush to sign.
House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) issued a joint statement announcing that the bill had been sent over to the White House and, oh, by the way that Democrats had voted against it.
“Today we are transmitting H.R. 6061, Secure Fence Act of 2006, to the President. This legislation is a key component to keeping America safe and stemming the tide of illegal immigration. The American people demand a secure border, and this Republican Congress has responded to the American people's demand for a secure border by increasing the physical barriers and infrastructure along the border, and by providing state of the art monitoring technology. We look forward to the President's signature of this legislation.
"Unfortunately, the House and Senate Democrat Leaders voted against the Secure Fence Act. The Democrat immigration plan would fail the American people, allow dangerous criminals into our country and would set our homeland security back to pre-9/11 levels."
Given the weeks the White House waited for the bill to be slow walked down Pennsylvania Ave., you'd think Bush would have his pen poised. You would be wrong.
This is from today’s White House media briefing by White House Press Secretary Tony Snow.
REPORTER: When does the president intend to sign the Secure Fence Act, which Congress passed?
SNOW: That's a good question, and that's still being worked out, but it's going to be soon.
Tonight, the White House finally scheduled the bill-signing: A Tuesday morning ceremony in the Roosevelt Room of the West Wing on Thursday, with the president appearing before a pool of reporters for the signing -- hardly the high-profile signing that the president gives the bills that matter most. Bush is likely saving that ceremony for the "comprehensive immigration reform'' that he says he still is intent on winning.
Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzapata
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/metropolitan/4282329.html
Oct. 23, 2006, 10:46PM
Jail escapee surrenders at border / Associated Press
BROWNSVILLE - One of the five illegal immigrants who escaped from a privately run South Texas jail along with a former police officer surrendered to federal agents at a border checkpoint, officials said Monday.
Joel Armando Mata-Castro, a 31-year-old Mexican citizen, walked up to the checkpoint Sunday night and identified himself to Customs and Border Protection officers, who identified him as a fugitive on federal escape charges, CBP spokesman Felix Garza said. Mata-Castro was being held at the Cameron County Jail. He's the only inmate captured after they escaped from the East Hidalgo Detention Center in La Villa on Sept. 19 by overpowering a guard with a homemade knife and gaining access to several exit doors.
Authorities have said they suspected the men had crossed the border into Mexico, about 20 miles away.
The five illegal immigrants are alleged members of the drug gang Raza Unida. Former McAllen police officer Francisco Meza-Rojas, the supposed ringleader of the escapees, was two weeks away from trial on drug-trafficking charges.
Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzapata
http://www.blackagendareport.com/001a-cover-gf_black_latino_future.html
October 23, 2006
The Black-Latino Future: Finding a Way to Solidarity
by Glen Ford, BAR Executive Editor
Email= Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com
When as many as two million immigrants and their supporters, most of them Latino, turned out for demonstrations against draconian undocumented worker legislation in cities across the nation this spring, everywhere the question was raised: Is this the new civil rights movement? By all appearances, some kind of great awakening had indeed occurred which, if sustained, would transform the participants and, eventually, the society at-large.
However, Black opinion was decidedly mixed. Traditional and progressive African American organizations generally supported the explosion of Latino activism, and marveled at the coordination and sheer size of the rallies in Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, Dallas, Houston, Seattle – at least two dozen cities, nationwide. Luminaries such as Rev. Jesse Jackson, Rev. Al Sharpton, NAACP chairman Julian Bond, the SCLC’s Rev. Joseph Lowrey, and numerous Black congresspersons were quick to make a positive connection to the struggles of the Sixties.
“Among some Black circles, the mass Latino political actions were met with a sullenness often deeply tinged with envy, and even outright hostility drenched in vicious vitriol and willful ignorance.”
Yet among other Black circles, the mass Latino political actions were met with a sullenness often deeply tinged with envy, and even outright hostility drenched in vicious vitriol and willful ignorance. Black one-man bands like Claud Anderson’s Washington-based Harvest Institute lashed out at mobilized Latinos, blurring the distinction between undocumented and legal immigrants (just as do white racist-led groups), and blaming the entirety of African American economic slippage over almost two generations on immigrant influx. Mary Mitchell, an incredibly shallow Black columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times, expressed her “disgust” with undocumented Mexican immigrant Elvira Arellano, who along with her young U.S. citizen son sought sanctuary in a Chicago church. Arellano, said Mitchell, “is pimping the system” and should “return to Mexico,” “brush up on black history” and then thank African Americans “for [their] sacrifices" over the centuries in North America.
Anderson’s and Mitchell’s rants are deliberately insulting to their mainly Latino targets, and range from intellectual dishonesty (Anderson) to just plain stupid-mean (Mitchell).
Unfortunately, these shrill and wrong-headed voices find echoes in the perceptions of a highly ambivalent African American citizenry whose sense of social space has been thrown into turmoil by the largest migration on U.S. soil since the “Great Migration” of Blacks to northern and western cities – a trek that slowed and began to reverse itself about the same time as the Latino (non-Puerto Rican) migration began rolling in earnest, around 1970.
This column, the first of many BAR articles that will address the extremely complex and history-shaping subject of African American-Latino relations, deals with the “meanness” factor in Black discourse around (mainly Latino) immigration – the invective from the African American side of the argument that threatens to poison the prospects of unified action among Black and Latino progressives against white supremacy and corporate rule in the United States.
Insults Born of Ignorance
First, it must be said that African Americans have been conditioned to be much more “Anglo” in their perceptions of Latino political assertiveness than most of us are willing to admit. Having been raised under the same Black-White paradigm as Euro-Americans, we often share with most whites a profound ignorance, not only of global historical and social realities, but of the conditions that have shaped the societies of our Latin American neighbors. Despite constant lip service to racial solidarity, few African Americans grasp the social complexities of the African Diaspora in its Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking manifestations in the Caribbean and Central and South America.
“To describe Hispanics as ‘non-Anglo Saxon Whites speaking Spanish’ is to deny Latinos their racial and national legacies.”
African Americans are confident that we know what “Black” is, here, but we know next to nothing about what “not white” is, “over there” – places where there exist more flavors of racial admixture than Campbell had soups or Howard Johnson had ice creams, each with its own group label and all under the jackboot of “whites” (or near-whites) who proudly trace their lineage to Europe. Racism is a daily experience among darker mestizos in Mexico and the non-white majority of Venezuela, for example. To generally describe Hispanics as “non-Anglo Saxon Whites speaking Spanish,” as does the book-promoting fog-blower Claud Anderson, is to deny Latinos their racial and national legacies. It is the ultimate insult, of the kind African Americans would never accept if we were referred to as simply darker-skinned, English-speaking white people.
Such degradations of whole peoples and their distinct national, racial and cultural subgroups seem to flow freely from the mouths of African Americans like Anderson – in putrid streams that mimic the rhetoric of the rightwing white sources he relies on to “document” his pseudo-academic diatribes. In his polemic “Immigration Harms Black America,” Anderson declares, baldly, that “immigrant population increases in the last 30 years have made Blacks third-class citizens in America after they were second-class citizens for hundreds of years,” and that “immigration has erased the 10% income gains that native Blacks made between 1956 and 1966, the years of the civil rights movement.”
So it is the immigrants who have done the foul deed – not the native white American racists who created the paradigm that calls for Blacks to be perpetually on the bottom, and who continue to enforce that formula in the present; not the de-industrialization process that was coterminous with the immigrant influx, a deliberate corporate policy that resulted in Blacks suffering 55 percent of the union jobs lost in 2004; not the general white backlash that followed immediately upon the victories of the Black Freedom Movement of the Sixties, ushering in a national policy of mass Black incarceration that has devastated every aspect of African American society.
No, the immigrants are the root of all things evil done to Black folk in the last 30 years. Anderson, who undoubtedly considers himself a “Race Man,” has in fact crossed over to the White Right. He infers that Latinos are out to make a separate peace with white racism in return for (some future) favored status in the United States. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy, rooted in an ignorance and protean fear that prevents many long-isolated and besieged African Americans from making common cause with “others.” Ultimately, Anderson and other faux nationalists turn to the historical enemy – white racists – for theoretical verification and political support.
Apparently, Anderson wants to make a deal with racists before the Hispanics do. He calls for a total shutdown of immigration to the U.S., to “close the nation’s doors until policies are in place that redirect resources to native Blacks to correct the inequalities of slavery and Jim Crow semi-slavery.”
“We sulk or rant in our longstanding impotence – a function of the death of our own movement, a generation and a half ago.”
It’s about 30-plus years too late for that, the “diversity” deal having been consummated by the remnants of the Civil Rights Movement and various “minority” and “women’s” organizations long ago, and written in stone by the U.S. Supreme Court in its affirmative action decision of 2003. Anderson’s spiel may play well in Black barber shops and beauty parlors, but it ignores the reality outside: the Latinos are here; they outnumber African Americans and will grow larger; they are the majority in LA’s Watts and countless other formerly “Black” communities; they are predicted to outnumber Blacks in Georgia by as early as 2010; and they are on the move, politically.
Who is not on the move? African Americans. Instead, we sulk or rant in our longstanding impotence – a function of the death of our own movement, a generation and a half ago – while the worst of us importune white racists to rescue Blacks from the historical trap whites have created and fought desperately to preserve. What madness!
Movement-Envy
Ill-concealed envy is the saddest – and ugliest – aspect of some of what passes for Black political critique of the evolving Latino/immigrant movement. The Chicago Sun-Times’ Mary Mitchell, after getting her “mean on” by expressing “disgust” with sanctuary-seeking undocumented immigrant Elvira Arellano for “pimping the system,” demands that Latinos thank Blacks “for paving the way” before they dare mount a movement for social change. “The benefits that so many other groups – women included – now enjoy were purchased with black blood, sweat and tears,” wrote Mitchell – as if Arellano and her fellow Latino activists have not consistently cited the Black Freedom Movement as a cherished model.
But Mitchell is caught in a contradiction, made worse by the green glaze of envy at Latino activism and her shocking misunderstanding of the same African American history that she demands immigrant learn before they get uppity on U.S. soil. In comments to reporters, Ms. Arellano paid homage to a civil rights icon. "I'm strong, I've learned from Rosa Parks – I'm not going to the back of the bus. The law is wrong," she said.
“Mary Mitchell doesn’t know much about politics or history, and her moral position is hopelessly contorted by meanness and jealous resentment against ‘newcomers’ who are building a movement.”
Rather than accept the sincerity of Arellano’s remarks, Mitchell spewed abuse – and displayed both cheeks of her own phenomenal ignorance. Arellano had no right to invoke the name of Rosa Parks. “I even doubt that Arellano has any idea who Parks really was,” said Mitchell, who then proceeded to reveal that it is she who fails to comprehend the act of civil disobedience that put Parks in the history books.
“Parks didn't refuse to go to the back of the bus. She refused to give up her seat to a white man who couldn't find a seat in the so-called "white section." As onerous as the Jim Crow laws were, Parks didn't break them. That's why she could calmly go to the police station and sit in jail until her husband came to bail her out.
“Because Parks wasn't a lawbreaker, the local NAACP decided to use her as a test case to challenge the Jim Crow laws. Her righteous cause drew widespread support and launched the civil rights movement in earnest.”
Of course, Rosa Parks did break the law – on purpose and according to a plan hatched in advance by the local NAACP, of which she was Secretary – because the law was “wrong,” just as Arellano maintains U.S. immigration laws are wrong. Alabama law specifically required Blacks to relinquish their seats to whites when the “white” section was full. Parks was convicted of failing to heed the directions of the bus driver, thus setting the stage for the Montgomery bus boycott and creating the “test case” sought by civil rights activists.
Civil disobedience – the breaking of unjust laws – became the primary tactic deployed by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., a 26-year-old Montgomery minister at the time of Ms. Parks’ arrest. To claim that “Parks wasn't a lawbreaker” is to strip her action of all political, moral and historical meaning. But Mary Mitchell doesn’t know much about politics or history, and her moral position is hopelessly contorted by meanness and jealous resentment against “newcomers” who are building a movement while African Americans sit on the sidelines with no national movement worthy of the name.
Katrina Told It All
If there were any doubt, the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina proved that the Black Freedom Movement is, indeed, dead and gone – in need of resurrection, not mere resuscitation.
Soon after the catastrophic exile of most Black New Orleanians, University of Chicago political scientist Michael Dawson declared: “Katrina could very well shape this generation of young people in the same way that the assassinations of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King shaped our generation.” Dawson is in his early fifties.
According to Rev. Lennox Yearwood, the 36-year-old head of the Washington, DC-based Hip Hop Caucus, “New Orleans is our Gettysburg. If we lose there, we lose all the marbles.”
If Dr. Dawson is right, then the emerging African American generation’s formative political experience – Katrina – has been one of defeat. And if Rev. Yearwood is correct in his belief that Katrina is the equivalent of the Battle of Gettysburg, then Black folks have suffered a monumental loss.
“Black America did not – could not – come together in a mighty cascade of demonstrations and confrontations with the powerful perpetrators who are attempting to erase a major Black city.”
Yearwood says he’s seeing young Fannie Lou Hamer types among a new crop of activists, and was heartened by the surge of student involvement in Katrina organizing and relief work. Indeed, the waves of volunteers journeying to New Orleans were reminiscent of the Mississippi Freedom summer of two generations ago. It is also true that many thousands of churches, big and small, responded to the Katrina disaster with a wide range of programs. Katrina has seared into the collective Black consciousness – a kind of African American 9/11. There is no question but that Katrina has radicalized a new cohort of youth, and re-radicalized many of their elders.
However, it is these very facts – of radicalization, of universal Black horror and revulsion, of the thousands of localized responses to Katrina – that so dramatically illuminate the strategic defeat of the Black polity in the Battle of Katrina. Black America did not – could not – come together in a mighty cascade of demonstrations and confrontations with the powerful perpetrators who are attempting to erase a major Black city. Katrina showed definitively that the Movement, as we once knew it, is dead. The failure of the Black polity to set millions of bodies in motion revealed the utter impotence and disarray of the national Black political infrastructure.
(The October, 2005, “Millions More Rally” on Washington’s Capitol Mall was coincidental to Katrina, having been scheduled long in advance by the Nation of Islam and other organizers. The rally produced a laundry list of wide-ranging demands, most unrelated to the catastrophe. There was nothing like a follow-up “Millions to the Front in the Battle for New Orleans” rally.)
If the national Black political infrastructure, such as it is, could not set masses in motion after Katrina, when African Americans were as one in their concentrated anger and collective will to do something, then what currently passes for leadership will never effectively mobilize Black folks for anything. They have lost the tools and desire to fight, and cannot function as leaders even when the people cry out for common action.
Had Black people been called out en masse, they would have come – but the historical moment has slipped away, wasted. In a few years, a new generation of Black activists will deploy themselves in structures of radical resistance, their world views shaped by the multiple crimes of Katrina. But in the near term, it must be recognized that not only have African Americans been numerically overtaken by Hispanics, we have been eclipsed in mass organizing, as well.
No Victory Without Latinos
Mary Mitchell’s Chicago has actually witnessed some of the most notable examples of Black-Latino solidarity – not that she seems to have noticed. The late Harold Washington was elected Chicago’s first Black mayor in 1983 after forging strong alliances with the growing Hispanic community, which now amounts to 27 percent of the city (Blacks make up 36 percent of the population). After Washington’s untimely death in 1987, the coalition fell apart, leading to the election of the current white mayor, Richard Daley, Jr.
In the run-up to 1992 elections activists registered 130,000 new voters. Chicago Latino voters put Carolyn Moseley-Braun over the top in the Democratic primary for U.S. Senate; she became the first Black woman to hold a seat in the upper chamber of the U.S. legislature.
The lesson is: when Blacks and Hispanics fail to unite in Chicago, progressive Blacks lose in city- and state-wide races.
“The Chicago experience puts the lie to those who maintain that Latinos favor a sub-living wage structure.”
However, there is another side to that coin: Black Chicago politicians as a body, having a longer history of collaboration with corrupt white machines, turn out to be demonstrably less progressive than their Latino counterparts. This political truth was brought home in the recent battle to impose living wage legislation on Wal-Mart and other “big box” retailers. After years of organizing, unions and community and church groups succeeded in assembling a veto-proof super-majority in the city council – 35 of 50 members – mandating that the big boxes pay at least $10 an hour and $3.00 in benefits for the privilege of doing business in Chicago. All ten Hispanic members of the council initially voted on the progressive side of the issue, compared to only half of the 18 Black aldermen.
Under intense pressure from Mayor Daley, and in face of threats by Wal-Mart, Target and Home Depot to withhold further investment from the city, four aldermen later switched their votes: two Latinos and two Blacks. But the Chicago experience puts the lie to those who maintain that Latinos favor a sub-living wage structure. At least in the Windy City, it is easily corruptible Black politicians who are the problem. These elements are joined by Black business groupings, that care more about a potential contract with Wal-Mart than whether workers earn a living wage (and who may have no intention of paying a living wage to their own employees – a trait they share with employers of all ethnicities).
Chicago, like many other urban centers, will continue to become more Latino – unless gentrification reverses the process, which will also inevitably diminish the Black proportion of the population, as well. In Manhattan, both Black and Latino populations have declined under gentrifying assault. Black majorities are in danger of collapsing in numerous “chocolate cities” across the nation – most because of gentrification rather than Latino influx. Claud Anderson may want to strike a deal to stabilize Black numbers in the cities, but Big Capital is not cooperating, and never will. Only a Black-Latino urban alliance can withstand the onslaught and preserve the political power of both groups.
The Penalty for Arrogance
Latino organizers don’t need permission from African Americans to assert their demands; no human group is obligated to bow and scrape to another. Their primary duty is to turn out the numbers, in what they believe to be a just cause. African American insistence on Latino obeisance – to the extent it exists – is backhanded, hostile, mean-spirited, sulking, the product of bewilderment, jealousy and impotence. Certainly, Latinos should not dignify the wild ravings of Claud Anderson, who blames immigrants for every economic, political and social setback that Black folks have been unable to prevent since 1970. And Mary Mitchell, the people-insulting Chicago columnist, has nothing to say worth hearing by anyone of any ethnicity.
Rather, it is Black folk’s obligation – the duty of future Black leaders at every level – to give political direction based on analysis of the world as it actually exists.
There is no room for gratuitous insult in the dialogue between Latinos and African Americans that must occur in earnest if both groups are to escape eviction from the cities by encroaching capital in the form of gentrification.
“Hispanics are second only to Blacks in eagerness to join a union.”
There will be no living wage for anyone if corrupt African American politicians insist on making common cause with oppressive employers like Wal-Mart, all the while subscribing to the canard that Latino immigrants want to work for sub-standard wages.
There is no solution to a two- or three-tier wage system, except a one-tier wage system – which requires the closest collaboration among those who work or want to work, whatever their social background. Hispanics are second only to Blacks in eagerness to join a union. (The order of union-friendliness is Black women, first, followed by Black men, Hispanic women, Hispanic men, white women, with white men dead last.)
Hispanics are overwhelmingly supportive of public schools and affordable health care. They oppose racial profiling, to which Latinos have been subjected by immigration authorities as well as police for generations. The police state, immigrant-hunt regime that would descend on the nation if Claud Anderson and his white supremacist allies get their way, combined with anti-terrorist hysteria, would inevitably erase every civil liberties gain of the past four decades, most severely impacting the state-criminalized Black ghetto poor, as usual.
The Reality Quotient
Blacks were as surprised as whites when more than half-a-million mostly Latino demonstrators rallied in Los Angeles in late March of this year. Where did the crowds come from? How did they pull off such a gargantuan gathering? African Americans had less excuse than white Anglos for not knowing what was up. After all, Watts is 62 percent Latino, Compton is three-fifths – African Americans and Latinos live in proximity throughout much of the mega-city. But, as radio broadcaster and Hip Hop guru Davey D told me, “KKBT-FM [the top-rated Black-oriented radio station] completely ignored one million people in the streets.” It was “similar to the Million Man March right on their doorstep,” yet to KKBT and its listeners, the huge outpouring of humanity “didn’t exist.” The same applied for the rest of English-speaking commercial media.
Spanish-language media, particularly radio, were key to the massive turnouts in Los Angeles, Chicago (another half-million) and more than a score other cities. Radio personalities talked up the demonstrations, creating the kind of community-wide consciousness that once surrounded major Black political actions, two generations ago. However, it would be wrong to credit the corporate (and often, non-Latino) owners of Spanish-language media with some special sensitivity to the political aspirations of their audiences. Rather, Spanish-language outlets were compelled to respond to what they recognized as a groundswell of community organizing for immigrant rights. In other words, Hispanic media got on the right side of the movement.
“Latinos have fielded the beginnings of a powerful movement, while a coherent national Black movement is just a memory – for now.”
No such movement exists in Black America, and therefore Black-oriented mass media see no need to diverge from their news-less menu of celebrity gossip and assorted nonsense. Had African American “leadership” infrastructures been willing and able to put out a credible call for massive Katrina-related turnouts, Black-oriented media would have responded as readily as their corporate Hispanic counterparts. They are the same bottom line-feeding animals. The difference lay in the levels of community organization – Latinos had their act together, while African Americans languished in political paralysis.
“Hispanic media collaborated on their march,” said Davey D. “We could have had a million people in the streets about Katrina – ‘Where are the kids?’ But Black media were absent. All this contributes to the disintegration of political organization in our communities.”
It is senseless for African Americans to squabble over whether Latino mass activism represents the “new Civil Rights Movement” or not. The fact is, Latinos have fielded the beginnings of a powerful movement, while a coherent national Black movement is just a memory – for now.
The Black polity is the unique product of the strivings of a singular people, whose institutions and shared consciousness were forged in enforced intimacy over hundreds of years. It is not so fragile as to fade into permanent inconsequentiality simply because a bad crop of leadership was allowed to demobilize the Black Freedom Movement, over 30 years ago. Katrina has already awakened the organizers of the future. However, that future will be shared with Latinos. For the sake of our common interests, Black progressives are obligated to do everything possible to cleanse the African American dialogue of parochialism, insults against other ethnicities, useless nostalgia that keeps us fixed in a past time and – most importantly – the nativism inherited from our historical oppressors.
We are a raise-up people, not a speak-down-to people. Let’s act like it.
BAR Executive Editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford(at)BlackAgendaReport.com. When sending email you must replace the "(at)" with the character "@".
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Response: IRN: The Black Agenda Report "The Black-Latino Future:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Aztlannet_News/message/25704
Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzapata
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/23/AR2006102300766.html
Tuesday, October 24, 2006
Independent Voters Favor Democrats by 2 to 1 in Poll
Iraq War Cited Most Often As Top Issue for Elections
By Dan Balz and Jon Cohen / Washington Post Staff Writers
Two weeks before the midterm elections, Republicans are losing the battle for independent voters, who now strongly favor Democrats on Iraq and other major issues facing the country and overwhelmingly prefer to see them take over the House in November, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.
The new poll underscores how much of a drag the war threatens to be on Republican candidates in competitive races. With debate underway in Washington about possible course changes in Iraq, Americans cite the war as the most important issue in determining their vote next month more often than any other issue, and those who do favor Democrats over Republicans by 76 percent to 21 percent.
Independents are poised to play a pivotal role in next month's elections because Democrats and Republicans are basically united behind candidates of their own parties. Ninety-five percent of Democrats said they will support Democratic candidates for the House, while slightly fewer Republicans, 88 percent, said they plan to vote for their party's candidates.
The independent voters surveyed said they plan to support Democratic candidates over Republicans by roughly 2 to 1 -- 59 percent to 31 percent -- the largest margin in any Post-ABC News poll this year. Forty-five percent said it would be good if Democrats recaptured the House majority, while 10 percent said it would not be. The rest said it would not matter.
The poll also found that independents are highly pessimistic about the Iraq war and the overall state of the country. Just 23 percent said the country is heading in the right direction, compared with 75 percent who said things have gotten off track. Only a quarter of independents approve of the job Congress has done this year. Only a third say the Iraq war is worth fighting. A month before the 2004 election, independents were almost evenly split on that question.
Independent voters may strongly favor Democrats, but their vote appears motivated more by dissatisfaction with Republicans than by enthusiasm for the opposition party. About half of those independents who said they plan to vote Democratic in their district said they are doing so primarily to vote against the Republican candidate rather than to affirmatively support the Democratic candidate. Just 22 percent of independents voting for Democrats are doing so "very enthusiastically."
Among the electorate as a whole, the poll highlighted how the political climate continues to favor Democrats. President Bush's approval rating among all Americans stood at 37 percent. Two weeks ago he was at 39 percent, and in September he was at 42 percent. By more than 2 to 1, Americans disapprove of the way Congress has been doing its job.
The generic vote for the House -- a question that asks people which party they favor in their district but that does not match actual candidates against one another -- remained strongly in the Democrats' favor, 54 percent to 41 percent.
These national numbers do not translate directly into predictions of whether Democrats will gain the 15 House seats or six Senate seats they need to take control of those chambers. But an analysis of the findings sheds light on why Republicans are now deeply worried about losing their House majority and why the Senate is in play as well.
The poll showed that Democrats not only have a significant advantage in blue states -- those won in the 2004 presidential race by Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) -- but also have a narrow advantage in Bush-backing red states, which helps to explain why the number of GOP-held seats that appear competitive has increased recently.
Iraq is cited most frequently as the most important issue in the midterm elections. Two weeks ago, 26 percent of those surveyed cited the war as the single most important issue determining their vote in November, compared with 23 percent who cited the economy and 14 percent who said terrorism. In the new poll, 27 percent said Iraq, 19 percent cited the economy and 14 percent said terrorism.
Independents are almost as likely as Democrats to cite Iraq as the single most important issue in the campaign. Both groups are twice as likely as Republicans to single out the war when asked about the election's top issues.
Independents do not limit their criticism of the war's handling to the president. Fifty-five percent of independents said congressional Republicans deserve a "great deal" or a "good amount" of the blame for problems in Iraq. Fewer, 36 percent, give congressional Republicans credit for helping prevent terrorist attacks against the United States since Sept. 11, 2001.
Bush agreed last week with a commentator's suggestion that a recent surge in violence in Iraq could be equivalent to the 1968 Tet Offensive, which marked a turning point in U.S. public support for the Vietnam War. But the percentage of Americans who believe that Iraq could be another Vietnam is no higher, at 45 percent, than it was in June.
Four in 10 Americans said the war is not worth fighting, and three in four said the war has damaged the United States' image in the rest of the world. Not quite half of those surveyed said that overall, the war has helped to improve the lives of the Iraqi people, a sharp decline since June, when roughly seven in 10 believed it had.
The small decline in the economy's ranking as a top voting issue comes at a time when Americans are increasingly upbeat about the state of the national economy. Fifty-five percent of those surveyed said the economy is "good" or "excellent," a sharp jump over the past two weeks and the highest since Bush took office.
But Republicans appear to be getting little tangible benefit from the growing economic optimism, which has come amid declining gasoline prices and a record high in the Dow Jones industrial average. Those who cite the economy as the most important issue favor Democrats by 18 percentage points, 57 percent to 39 percent.
One reason is that only a quarter of those surveyed said they are getting ahead financially. About the same number said they are falling behind. Most, however, said they are just able to maintain their standard of living. Republicans have an advantage only among those who say their financial condition is improving.
Among those voting primarily on Iraq, Democrats hold a sizable lead, 76 percent to 21 percent, in voting intentions. Democrats also are favored by voters who cite health care as their most important issue, while those voting on terrorism or immigration strongly favor Republicans.
Voters also continue to trust Democrats more than Republicans to deal with the war, the economy, North Korea and ethics in government. On terrorism, the two parties are at parity.
But independents, the key swing voter group, strongly trust the Democrats on all of those issues by margins ranging from 14 percentage points on terrorism to 23 points on Iraq and North Korea and 26 points on ethics in government.
The growing independent support for Democratic House candidates represents a significant shift in attitudes since the 2004 election, when Democrats held only a slim advantage. In winning reelection, Bush narrowly lost the independent vote, 50 percent to 48 percent, and in the vote for the House, independents split 50 to 46 for Democratic candidates.
One important question that will affect the outcome of the elections is who shows up to vote. More Democrats than Republicans, 32 percent vs. 24 percent, said they are "very closely" following the campaign, and Democrats are more likely to be very enthusiastic about voting. Independents show less enthusiasm about this election than do Democrats or Republicans.
Almost three in five respondents said this congressional election is more important than past congressional elections. A higher percentage of Democrats said this election has more significance than did Republicans or independents.
Both parties are making extraordinary efforts to turn out their voters in November. Twenty-nine percent of registered voters said they had been contacted by one party or the other for their votes, and three in 10 of those said they had been contacted by advocates for both parties.
Republicans appear to be doing a better job of contacting independents. In the poll, 45 percent of those independents who said they had been contacted said they were urged to vote for Republicans, while 17 percent said they were urged to vote for Democrats. The rest said they were contacted by both sides.
The Post-ABC News poll findings are based on telephone interviews with 1,200 adults conducted Thursday through Sunday. The margin of sampling error is plus or minus three percentage points. Database editor Dan Keating contributed to this report.
Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzapata
http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2006/10/23/18322682.php
Monday Oct 23rd, 2006 2:10 PM
Brown Berets with EZLN Subcomandante in Tijuana
by Yovanna Bravo (and Narco News)
Note: See Pictures at Websource!
About a dozen Watsonville Brown Berets enforce security at La Otra Campaña with La Otro del Otro Lado and Subcomandante Marcos in Tiujana, BC. Memebers of the community on Tijuana spoke about thier struggle in the Maquiladoras while Marcos listened and took notes to help them come together and organize themselves. Marcos responded to the people with, "La Union Hace La Fuerza." Members of the Brown Berets spoke on the current Immigration Issues and Military Recuitment in schools.
Marcos in Tijuana Speaks a Little English: “So… Let’s Talk About Walls”
The Other Campaign Hits the US-Mexico Border, Where the Indigenous Are Called “Migrants” and Roots Run Deep
By Al Giordano
The Other Journalism with the Other Campaign in Baja California
October 20, 2006
TIJUANA, BAJA CALIFORNIA, MEXICO: Everybody talks about how many millions of Mexicans made it into the United States. Baja California, on the Mexican side of the border, is where millions who were kicked out or turned back ended up.
Northbound along this peninsula, the terrain turns from desert scrub forest to populated zones. Along the roadside: shops and diners named for the places from which the people came… Restaurante El Poblano, no doubt opened by immigrants from the state of Puebla… Llantería El Michoacano, someone from Michoacán who fixes flat tires… the Acambáro General store, named for a town in Guanajuato… Indigenous women cross the highway wearing the huipil blouses that disclose their origins in Chiapas, Oaxaca, Guerrero, Jalisco… They come from every part of Mexico where “free trade” killed the family farm and other dignified work. The former farmer and worker had to move out and look for work elsewhere. Unable to enter (or after entering, expelled from) the United States, he and she settled here along the border, on the Mexican side.
They are called immigrants in their own country. They work the sixteen-hour shifts in maquila sweatshops for Sony, Samsung, Nabisco, Kodak and other foreign companies that pay them 60 to 100 pesos (six to ten bucks) a day and where, without a shred of regulatory protection, many have lost fingers or entire hands – some, their lives – handling dangerous assembly-line machinery. They work dawn to sundown, for even less, picking tomatoes and other crops for big agribusiness companies.
Outside the urban centers of San Quintin and Ensenada, they live in block housing and shacks up dirt streets lacking drainage and any other basic service. Particularly evident here are people from Mexico’s only majority indigenous state of Oaxaca, bastion of repression and poverty imposed by capitalism: entire colonies of Triquis, Mixtecos, Zapotecos, Mixes and other displaced peoples regrouped here, who found each other far from home much as Italians once regrouped in Little Italy and Chinese still land in Chinatown. They toil at the same hard labors that Mexicans in the United States do. Here, as well, they are met with mistreatment, discrimination, violence and racism at the hands of government, police, businessmen and criminals protected by them.
“Baja California,” concluded Subcomandante Marcos after listening to their testimonies, “treats the indigenous worse than any other state in the Mexican Republic.”
How do Mexicans in the United States endure the heaps of hardship and discrimination upon them? The truth is that many had plenty of practice before arriving: they were already treated badly before they crossed over.
The perverted irony in which the native peoples of América are classified as outsiders has permeated the Other Campaign meetings of recent days here. Subcomandante Marcos, in his role as Delegate Zero, heard from Baja Californians on Tuesday and Wednesday. On Thursday, he held a euphoric meeting with Mexicans and Chicanos from “the Other Side” who traveled down from Los Angeles and other parts of the United States to take their place in the Other Campaign.
On Wednesday, he heard twice (because sweatshop workers slave in shifts) from maquila workers who staff the factories of US, Japanese and other foreign electronics, food product and other companies on the Mexican side of the border that exploit cheap labor and regulatory impunity (see Murielle Coppin’s upcoming story for more details on how more than two million sweatshop workers live and work a golf ball’s throw from California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas).
Prior to Thursday’s meeting with those from the Other Side, none of the dozens of Other Media reporters or militants in political organizations that travel with the Other Campaign caravan knew what to expect. Would the vices of gringo-style “activism” where talkers talk, sectors compete in a hierarchy of victimization, and more energy is often devoted to telling others what they can’t do or say than helping each other do what they can, come to blows with the “listen first” doctrine of the Other Campaign in Mexico? Such fears turned out to be unfounded. The Raza from the Other Side, much like the adherents from Tijuana and the Mexican side of the border, turned out to be among the best organized, and better listeners to each others’ diverse testimonies, that have been seen and heard along most of the Other Campaign trail to date. The events in Tijuana, in fact, may mark a new model for local organizing of the struggle against the capitalist system that the Other Campaign foments. Other political movements in the United States have a lot to learn by listening to them, as occurred here on Thursday.
After a silent pit stop to leave his signature – in urine – along the fence that separates Tijuana from San Isidro, California, the military commander and spokesman of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN, in its Spanish initials) rolled into downtown Tijuana Wednesday morning for two days of events in the Multi-Kulti cinema (a theater without a roof) along Constitución Avenue downtown amidst the tourist bars, discos, discount pharmacies and topless joints of the neon lit downtown. Tijuana, the permanent Spring Break for gringos, where 300 very young and poorly treated prostitutes are put out at night like mannequins on a single city block and guys hawk tourists – “Hey guy! Tittie bar! What you want?” – in English. Welcome to Tijuana! Tequila! Sexo! Marijuana! But under the façade, here as elsewhere, it is the workers and parents, elders and children who do the cleaning and building and producing on both sides of the wall.
The Word No Wall Can Stop
The Seven Billion Dollar border wall approved last month by the US Congress, although yet to be constructed (inquiring minds want to know: who are they gonna get to build it?), already casts a shadow over both countries and all aspects of bi-national affairs. The reality is that “The Wall” exists already, layer upon layer: fences, high-technology surveillance equipment, an army of Border Patrol, Immigration, Customs and other agents, National Guardsmen and women, the new Ku Klux Klan that calls itself “Minutemen” (ignorant fucks who don’t seem to grasp that the original North American Minutemen of 1776 were guerrilla fighters more akin to the insurgents of the Zapatista army than with those weekend warriors who are an international disgrace), and the political and cultural rifts exacerbated by “The Wall” simply make it bigger than life even before it exists.
All this money and effort to stop descendants of the original Americans from walking where their ancestors freely traveled before others, who really were immigrants, decided to place a border here to keep the natives out.
When hundreds of Mexicans and Chicanos who live and work in the United States crossed back into Mexico this week to meet with the Other Campaign, they brought stories of other barriers.
Representatives of the Union del Barrio in Los Angeles testified that, “the US penal system maintains capitalism. We have many prisoners on the Other Side. They have to be part of a mass movement together with us.”
From Watsonville, California came a well-organized banda in attractive brown uniforms (their organization is called The Brown Berets) that conducts a “Migra Watch” in its neighborhoods, under siege by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) of the US Department of Homeland Security and its frequent raids hunting for “illegals.” Ramiro, of this organization, told the assembled, “La Pinche Migra detained 24,000 last year in the United States. 6,800 were deported. Where are the other 17,000 being imprisoned?”
There were voices of experience like Graciela García who provided an emotional historic memory of the battles by the United Farmworkers Union and its leader César Chávez in the sixties and seventies for better working conditions for the migrants who put food on North American tables. And ex-braceros testified as to the hardships and robbery they faced on the Other Side over the past seven decades. But the overwhelming majority of those who came south to Tijuana for this meeting were young people, hundreds that ardently believe in “another way of doing politics,” the Zapatista way.
Students from UCLA and California State University at Northridge (CSUN) among other schools came to Tijuana to say that since the higher education systems don’t tell their history well or at all, they’ve had to begin to do it themselves. “We promote culture and the true history,” said Juan Villalobos, who like various others delivered his statement in English. “The Community Colleges are merely a funnel to channel us into menial labor.”
Laura Palomares came from California to testify that students in the state higher education system of California who do not count with a Social Security number (that is, US citizenship) must pay three times the tuition as “out of state” students. She urged passage of a bill now before the State Assembly (AB540) to eliminate this discriminatory policy. “It is a given that money is the one thing we don’t have,” she said. “And still they want more of it from us.”
Maria Federico and Consuelo Aguilar came from Tuscon, Arizona where they work in the schools. “It is the only US school district that teaches Chicano studies,” noted Maria. And it was one of the many where students walked out of classes last May 1 during the Great American Boycott – the first General Strike in the US since the 1930s – in protest against repressive immigration laws.
Sandino Gómez, also of the Brown Berets, spoke of how the War in Iraq falls heavier upon Chicano youths. “There are more military recruiters than guidance counselors in our area,” he noted.
Compañeros Nelson and Mario of the Instituto de Educación Popular explained the difficult lives of the jornaleros – day laborers, from California to New York Island – who wait on street corners each morning for contractors to hire them in a pinch to do construction, or pick crops, or other manual labors. “The jornaleros wait under very boring conditions,” said Patricia Nuño of the International Workers of the World (IWW, or the Wobblies, the “one big union” of the twenties and thirties born anew in 21st Century América). “They have no food, no water, the police harass them. They have to put up with everything.” She added, proudly, “I am the daughter of a jornalero.”
Many Walls, Seen and Unseen
A single mother from the Other Side spoke: “I have to be in the house caring for my children. Thank you very much: we don’t get paid. Here, at this meeting, it is also the women cooking. Please thank them.”
Other women spoke of confronting machismo and sexism within their communities and also in political movements. “Being a feminist is nothing against the men,” said a compañera, Rosalba. Another, Alicia, spoke of domestic violence. “The worst problem is that of the defenseless victims, the children, witnesses to the violence by their fathers against their mothers.”
Representatives of the growing sector of the Other Campaign that struggles under the banner of “Other Loves” testified about the discrimination they face. “The lesbians are called gringadas and the gay men joto-maricones… Enough already with the discrimination!” A straight Chicano man read a letter from Angel Cruz, a Oaxacan on the Other Side, saying “I am a gay queer… and I am a Zapatista.”
The farmers from South Central Farm in Los Angeles came and told their story of being evicted by police earlier this year. Later, via live video hook-up, others who could not cross back into Mexico without risking their lives and work up north spoke directly to Delegate Zero and the assembled: About how military recruiters threaten young Chicanos with deportation if they don’t enlist in the US Armed Forces; about the violent attacks by the ignorantly-named “Minutemen”; about the high suicide rate among gay Chicano teens and how the disrespect toward gays and lesbians extends to “movements that call themselves progressive”; about how immigrant communities often must live alongside garbage dumps or other areas of high contamination and danger, and how the anguish of “being illegal” adds stress upon other health problems; about the struggle to learn to work collectively in a society that doesn’t offer any reference for it; about proposed and actual laws to deny rental housing to anyone without a US Social Security number….
“The Wall” said Marcos, summarizing all these testimonies and more, “is not just along the border.” They are put up, he said, against Chicanos, against those who speak in “Spanglish,” against women, gays, lesbians, elders, children… “The Wall goes reproducing itself in each part of each home, in the street, and it is not just erected by those above. We build them ourselves.”
Speaking of the lessons learned by the indigenous Zapatistas of Chiapas from others persecuted for being different, he said: “It is not true that there are only men and women. There is something else, too. And it’s not true that there are only North Americans and Mexicans. There is something else, too.”
Recalling that various speakers during the day commented self-referentially “I’m short” when adjusting the microphone lower to be able to speak, he remembered Zapatista Comandanta Ramona, who passed away last January 6 as the Other Campaign had just begun. A Tzotzil-speaking indigenous woman from the Chiapas highlands, “she was so short that she had to stand on a seat to reach the microphone. But she was an indigenous military commander. What I am hearing here is about all the walls one faces if one is a woman, and also Chicano, and also a punk, maybe a ‘dark’ who dresses goth, and beyond that, a lesbian.”
The Other Campaign, he stressed, doesn’t recognize the wall along the international border. “The adherents here from the Other Side are not part of the Intergalactic sector (of foreigners with the Other Campaign),” he said. “They are part of the Other Campaign of Mexico.”
And so the Zapatista Other Campaign, organized in 31 states and in the Federal District of Mexico City, officially welcomed the adherents from the Other Side: not as visitors, but as part and parcel of the “something else” being built. The national rebellion against the capitalist economic system has crossed the border where it has cultivated its roots all along. It lives, works, and organizes on territory that official maps say is inside the United States. And judging from the energy, creativity, innovation, conscience and spirit of the Other Campaigners from the Other Side that took their place alongside all the Mexican adherent organizations and individuals on Thursday, the political horizon inside the United States has just made a paradigm shift as well. Zapatismo, as never before, has just crossed the border. The walls were powerless to stop it. To be continued…
* http://narconews.com/Issue43/article2199.html
* http://www.brownberets.info
Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzapata
http://www.nclr.org/content/publications/detail/42686/
Date: Oct 19, 2006
Redefining HIV/AIDS for Latinos: A Promising New Paradigm for Addressing HIV/AIDS in the Hispanic Community
Author: Britt Rios-Ellis, Ph.D.,
Adobe Acrobat (PDF) Download (321 KB)
http://www.nclr.org/content/publications/download/42686
Related
Topic: Health and Family Support
http://www.nclr.org/content/topics/detail/481/
Programs: Institute for Hispanic Health,
http://www.nclr.org/content/programs/detail/1452/
The NCLR/CSULB Center for Latino Community Health, Evaluation, and Leadership Training
http://www.nclr.org/content/programs/detail/33531/
Summary
The National Council of La Raza-California State University, Long Beach Center for Latino Community Health, Evaluation, and Leadership Training (NCLR-CSULB Center for Latino Health) released this report which discusses the growing HIV/AIDS crisis in the Latino community and outlines a new paradigm for addressing HIV/AIDS. Hispanics make up 14% of the U.S. population but account for one of every five people currently living with HIV/AIDS in the country, including a disproportionate number of women and youth. While much has been done to make this chronic disease more manageable for other communities, Hispanics – in particular Latinas in monogamous relationships – are more likely to die from the disease and less likely to receive quality medical care. The report combines the Center's own extensive research and a review of the existing academic literature on the issue.
NCLR Headquarters Office
Raul Yzaguirre Building
1126 16th Street, NW
Washington, DC 20036
Tel. (202) 785-1670
Fax (202) 776-1792
Email= comments@nclr.org
Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzapata
http://www.somosprimos.com/sp2006/spoct06/spoct06.htm
Somos Primos Newsletter= October 2006 / Editor: Mimi Lozano
Dedicated to Hispanic Heritage and Diversity Issues
Society of Hispanic Historical and Ancestral Research
Celebrating 20th Anniversary 1986-2006
Podhi Yahoo Group=
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/podhi/
Main Group located at=
http://NuestraFamiliaUnida.com
Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzapata
<>+<>+<>+<>+<>THE END/ EL FIN<>+<>+<>+<>+<>
Liberation Now!!!
Peter S. Lopez ~aka Peta de Aztlan
Email= sacranative@yahoo.com
Sacramento, California, Amerika
Key Web Links=
* http://www.immigrantsolidarity.org/
* http://hispanictips.com/index.php
* http://www.laprensa-sandiego.org/
* http://www.latinamericanstudies.org/home.html
* http://www.mylatinonews.com/
* http://www.nclr.org/
* http://www.vidaenelvalle.com/front/v-english/
<>+<>+<>+<>+<>+<>+<>+<>+<>+<>+<>+<>+<>+<>+<>
JOIN UP! Aztlannet_News Yahoo Group
COMMENT!
Aztlannet_News Blog
CLICK!
Aztlannet Website
No comments:
Post a Comment
Be for real! Love La Raza Cosmca! Venceremos!