One would have to be inhuman and bereft of a sense of solidarity and compassion not to condemn the attack in Boston with two dead and hundreds of injured people.

But that does not excuse us from being critical.

There are many such terrorist attacks in the world, especially in Afghanistan and Iraq, in plain site of U.S. and allied troops. This includes many dead and hundreds injured.

But almost no one minds this. In fact it seems natural.

Many think, well, these are terrorists, or people close to them. They can die. But let’s face it, they are human beings just like those in Boston. It’s just that measuring stick is different.

We need to be aware of how the Boston bombing has become a kind of political and ideological theater, a way to divert world attention from more fundamental problems.

The first is the state of terror that the U.S. State imposes on both its citizens and the world. It is a betrayal of the best that the U.S. has to offer—the defense of fundamental human rights.

The U.S. has not closed Guantanamo, nor has it ratified important international accords, such as the Treaty of Rome, the International Penal Code, nor the American Convention on Human Rights (the so called Costa Rica Pact).

The U.S. does not want its violations of human rights and the attacks its agents perpetuate throughout the whole world to maintain its empire brought before these tribunals.

By means of the constant drumbeat of the world media on the Boston bombings, the masters of the world want to divert attention from the main issue—that they can do away with everyone and everything and bring about the end of the human species.

These gentlemen have devastated the planet for centuries to the point that it cannot even recover its own sustainability. Then, in an effort to accumulate unlimited resources and completely dominate humanity, they have built a death machine, along with ecological calamities that threaten life on Earth and may end up the terminating the human race.

Noted scientists and theorists have drawn attention to this threat. Nobody knows exactly when it may occur, but if the current logic continues, the outcome will be fatal.

Michel Serres, a renowned French philosopher of ecology, said after Hiroshima, Nagasaki and now Fukushima, that mankind has discovered a new kind of death: the death of the species.

Just as Gorbachev never tires of repeating, we can destroy all mankind without leaving any witnesses, with chemical, biological and nuclear weapons that we have already built and stored.

Security? It is never absolute. Remember Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima.

Therefore, our species has shown itself to be the Satan of the Earth: it has learned to be a murderer (killing fellow human beings), ethnocide (how many peoples have been exterminated?) Ecocide (it has devastated entire ecosystems) and next it will be speciescide (leading to the suicide of the species).

The imperial system thrives on looking for scapegoats (previously it was the communists, afterwards the rebels, now the terrorists, immigrants, and who else?) A sense of collective revenge hangs over all these people.

And so there is a sense of self-exemption from all blame, faults and errors. But mostly this system does everything it can to prevent this lethal threat to the human species from being perceived as a conscious collective danger.

Nobody passively accepts a verdict of death. We will fight to protect our lives and our common future. This should be the goal of global governance that requires the renunciation of the imperial will that thinks only of its perpetuation, rather than the common good of Mother Earth and Humanity.

In so far as the Boston bombings are manipulated by the media, how long will the powerful hide the dramatic cloud that hangs over us all?

Let’s all wake up, because we do not want to die, but to live and radiate joy and happiness.

Leonardo Boff, of Brazil, is one of Latin America’s leading liberation theologians, known for his support of the poor and the excluded. This column is used with permission of Servicios Koinonia. Translated by Mark Day.

In the name of protecting us from hackers, computer viruses and cyber-terrorists, the House of Representatives has passed a bill that would make it easier for sites like Facebook and Twitter and Internet service providers like Comcast and Time-Warner to share users’ private messages and files with government agencies.

The House on April 25 passed the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, or CISPA. The act aims to make it easier for the government and online businesses to exchange information about computer and network security risks so they can more effectively respond to hackers, digital espionage and computer viruses. Yet to achieve this end, it allows private companies to share with any government agency all information they deem relevant to a so-called “cyber threat,” defined broadly and vaguely as “a vulnerability” of a computer system or network — and protects these companies from liability for handing over user information even if doing so explicitly violates their own stated privacy policies. That means a company like Google could legally give the government a user’s search history, emails, files stored on cloud service, even videos uploaded to the company’s YouTube site, if that material is shared for cyber security purposes.

The bill does specify that the government must reject any inappropriate personal information it receives from a business. But if this happens, the user whose privacy is violated is never directly notified — only the company is. Moreover, under the terms of the bill, once a user’s private data are in the government’s hands, there is no way for that person to know who is using it or if in fact it is being used properly because the information the government obtains from the private sector would not be subject to transparency laws like the Freedom of Information Act.

Also worth noting is the fact that CISPA sets no limits to how long the government may retain the personal information it is given. So, theoretically, the CIA or FBI could keep a user’s private data forever.

While advocates insist this sort of sweeping government surveillance is needed to keep us safe online, critics correctly point out that CISPA would essentially negate all existing state and federal privacy laws, including laws originally created to prevent invasive wiretaps. The ACLU calls the bill “a privacy disaster.” Tim Berners-Lee, the man credited with inventing the World Wide Web, said the cyber security act “is threatening the rights of people in America, and effectively rights everywhere, because what happens in America tends to affect people all over the world.”

Fortunately, the bill appears to have run into a wall of opposition. President Obama has threatened to veto the legislation unless it is amended to require companies to take reasonable steps to remove irrelevant personal information when sending data to the government. After the House vote, a coalition of 34 civil liberties groups and high-tech companies vowed to redouble its fight against CISPA’s attack on online privacy.

No doubt because of this resistance, the Senate will reportedly shelve CISPA and work on its own alternative cyber security legislation instead. Still, there is a possibility that the bill ultimately drafted by the Senate will incorporate some of CISPA’s objectionable provisions. And whatever the Senate comes up with would have to be reconciled with CISPA in conference committee.

Internet security threats are a growing concern in the computer-mediated world we live in. But CISPA as written would undermine our Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable government search and seizure. The Senate is right to scrap it and start over. Any new bill offered in its place should define with precision what constitutes a “cyber threat,” should only permit companies to report “threat data” to civilian agencies — as proposed in an amendment to CISPA authored by Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) — and should require companies to remove identifying personal information from any data they pass along. But just as important, any new bill ought to preserve the individual’s right to sue for damages when businesses give authorities their personal online information without just cause.

Whatever form the legislation ultimately takes, it should not sacrifice our privacy on the altar of cyber security.

Macek is an Associate Professor of Speech Communication at North Central College in Naperville, IL and a founding member of Chicago Media Action.

New moms often get frilly, even funny cards and e-greetings for their first Mothers Day. But this Sunday, the first Mothers Day after Newtown, twenty Connecticut mothers will get no sweet, hand-lettered card or chalky clay handprints from a much-beloved young son or daughter. Instead, it will simply be another day to put on a brave face for family and friends, to live through the daily heartache of unbearable loss.

One bleak, wintry Friday evening, when I was in my early thirties, I felt the smooth, cold barrel of a gun, first on the small of my back, then at my left temple, for the longest twenty minutes of my life. My mother was lucky. The call she got was from me, many days later, telling her and my father that a story I’d written about this dangerous encounter—which I hadn’t told them about until then—would run the next day in their local paper. Clearly shaken, my mother was luckier this time than that other day, years earlier, when she and my father began a lifetime of surviving the death of their only child, a firstborn, infant son whose death, from that day forward, shadowed their lives and then mine.

When death takes both your parents, you are an orphan. When it claims a spouse, the survivor is known as a widow or a widower. We have no word for a mother whose child has died. She is left bereft, her child forever gone, but with no name for the source of her sorrow.

Adding insult to injury, last month Congress robbed the mothers of Newtown—and every mother whose child has died of gunshot wounds—of their one remaining cold comfort. Never again will they see that child walk through the door or hear that child’s voice.

We cannot, of course, bring these children back from the dead. But for a brief time last month, there was a chance that this time, all this loss would bring forth a new law, to begin to protect other parents and children from this cruel fate. For the moment, that, too, seems gone.

But here’s why I cannot believe that it is gone for good.

Having survived an encounter with a coward armed with a gun years ago, and as the mother now of a young adult son, if I could say three things to every elected official who just did, or will someday have the chance to cast a vote to prevent gun violence, my first would be: May you never get a phone call informing you that a child of yours was in the wrong place at the wrong time and died of a gunshot wound.

The second? May the brokenhearted mothers and others who loved each child in this country who has died of gun shot wounds haunt your dreams for as long as you live.

And the third? Know that legions of women voters will track your position on gun violence prevention. We know who you are. And when we cast our votes, we will not forget where you stand.

Rochelle Lefkowitz is a communications strategist living in the San Francisco Bay area.

By many accounts, the economy is prospering again and the housing market is on the road to recovery. But, reality is nowhere near as comforting as fiction, and the facts point to a very different reality faced by working families and minority communities, especially in the barrios.

The Great Recession pushed millions of willing workers off the labor force, put many others in lower paying or multiple jobs, and communities are still reeling from assets lost. At a time when we should be discussing how to stimulate our economy and job growth, many policymakers seem to only want to discuss how to mimic European austerity measures.

The regressive nature of our economic recovery has not gone unnoticed in our communities. We hear it every day from friends and family members, and in Washington D.C. we see it in reports like the one issued by Joseph A. Smith, who heads the Office of Mortgage Settlement Oversight. Mr. Smith oversees the agreement between 49 state attorneys general and the nation’s largest lenders to provide up to $25 billion in relief to borrowers who lost their homes to foreclosure. Yet, his report shows that many lenders are instead pushing homeowners to sell, resolving subordinated debt entanglements to drive owners toward short sales, and avoiding principal modifications at all costs.

More recently, attorneys general detailed how lenders grossly underreported the extent of their fraud and misdealing. There is no shortage of scathing reviews that show lenders dragging their feet on modifying mortgages, and regulators fumbling their responsibilities while trusting those very same lenders to police themselves.

The fact is that housing is hot again and investors want inventory. Which inventory exactly? Those would be the homes that were previously or are currently owned by modest wage families and across many communities of color. There is also a big investor driven effort to commercialize renting. If you think that’s a good idea, ask working families in Providence, Rhode Island where it is all too common for families to spend, at a minimum, fifty percent of their take home pay on rent.

There’s no doubt that banks are working hard to settle liabilities to process more foreclosures, and many more homeowners that may yet lose their home as the allure of profits take hold. What is so frustrating is that there is so much the government could do to provide relief, like utilizing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac for principal reductions and modifications, but holdovers of the Bush Administration refuse to act.

Indeed, regulators and agencies on the front lines of housing finance have so little diversity within their ranks that it is not even clear that they genuinely understand the plight of ordinary citizens, and especially minorities. That can be seen in proposed changes that would benefit Wall Street over Main Street, raise down payments and make it more difficult for anyone except the wealthiest to own a home. From policies that have already been approved like the Qualified Residential Mortgage rule to ideas like privatizing Fannie and Freddie, these all undermine the American Dream of homeownership that is so important to working wage families.

We need positive solutions, and increasing the inventory of affordable rental housing is absolutely important, but it should complement the policies that allow families to own a home, build roots in their community and depend on those assets for their children’s education, starting a business and retirement.

There are too many private interests actively lobbying to privatize the GSEs and therefore carve out the most profitable pieces, like multifamily, for themselves. At the same time, they want to shift the government guarantee from GSEs to instead guaranteeing large too-big-to-fail financial institutions.

We cannot allow the laws that helped build the post-WWII middle class, in part through homeownership, to disappear. Or worse, to turn the institutions and laws that help average and minority families own a home into yet another subsidy for Wall Street. It is too easy to forget that many of these laws and institutions that would be upended helped tear down redlining and the obstacles that prevented minorities from owning homes, and promoted community reinvestment and home mortgage disclosures that helped working families with little access to credit.

Now, those that would undo a generation’s worth of progress are cynically claiming that their efforts are meant to help minorities, but we know better.

Latino families are deeply interested in this discussion. And, while Treasury may have few officials that understand the plight of our community, we will continue to demand more accountability. Because we will not allow the aspirations of working wage and Latino families on credit access and homeownership to take a back seat to moneyed interests angling for a good return on investment. We simply cannot allow that to happen, again.

Brent Wilkes is Executive Director of the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC). America’s Wire is an independent, nonprofit news service run by the Maynard Institute for Journalism Education, www.americaswire.org .

According to U.S. estimates, each year as many as 100,000 victims, both adults and minors, are illegally trafficked to United States from abroad. In 2012, The Violence against Women Act authorization passed in the U.S. Senate, but was rejected by the Republican-dominated House, partly due to its increase in U-visas (from 10,000 to 15,000 annually), which some claimed might be fraudulently attained. U-visas applies to immigrants, including undocumented immigrants, who are the victims of certain serious crimes and who have cooperated with authorities in the prosecution of the perpetrator. An immigrant granted a U Visa or I-360 Petition will subsequently be given legal status to reside and work in the United States. The Senate approved a revised bill eliminating the increase in U-visas, but Senator Leahy (D-VT) vowed to fold this omitted increase into upcoming immigration reform.

The Senate’s bipartisan VAWA reauthorization passed on February 28, 2013, but stripped of its proposed increase in U-visas. A new immigration reform bill is being discussed in Congress, but the legislation has not yet been drafted. Last year, there were twice as many applicants as available U-visas; human trafficking crimes keep growing, especially in California with its international ports and a large population of migrant workers. Increasing U-visas and clarifying the process for eligibility is necessary to ensure that the visa provides a pathway out of abuse for immigrant victims of violence.

Every fiscal year 10,000 U-visas are given out to crime victims who have suffered physical or mental abuse. Victims of the following crimes are eligible to apply for a U-visa: domestic violence, blackmail, human trafficking, slave trade, rape, prostitution, sexual exploitation, sexual assault, abusive sexual contact, being held hostage, torture, female genital mutilation, involuntary servitude, kidnapping, manslaughter, murder, and other related crimes. The majority of U-visa recipients are women from Latin America. U-visa applicants have predominantly experienced domestic violence, elder, or child abuse (46%), sexual assault and trafficking (29%), felonious assault, torture, and murder (11%), or kidnapping and false imprisonment (8%). In 2010, 10,742 people applied for the program; in 2011, the number of applicants increased to 16,768, and in 2012, there were 24,788 applicants – over twice the number of visas available.

An increase U-visas (by 5,000) was proposed in the Violence Against Women Act Reauthorization of 2013 to encourage undocumented immigrants to report abuse and cooperate with law enforcement officials in prosecuting the perpetrator. By providing temporary legal status to undocumented victims, the same improvements seen after VAWA was enacted could occur in the large communities of undocumented immigrants in our country. Most importantly, the increase in U-visas would have protected 5,000 more victims of abuse by allowing them to report the abuse and leave the violent situation without fearing deportation. Additionally, the increase in U-visas would also have aided in the prosecution of 5,000 more abusive criminals that otherwise continue to live and abuse in the community.

Not only do U-visas assist with punishing offenders, but they also allow police to establish a more positive relationship with the members of their community, particularly undocumented immigrants. When law enforcement has legislation that allows them to protect the (non)residents in the community, rather than prosecute their illegal statuses, a healthier and more-trusting relationship can be formed. A better relationship allows for more effective prevention and investigation of crimes, therefore making communities safer.

Law enforcement contributes to a victims’ difficulty in applying for and obtaining U-visas; they often fail to provide the required certification, due to lack of training and/or prejudice toward undocumented individuals, showing that a crime occurred and that the victim cooperated with law enforcement. The victims need these certifications from law enforcement on their U-visa application in order for the application to be granted. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, not law enforcement, is the agency that decides if the victim suffered substantial harm during the crime according to the U-visa guide. Many times, law enforcement does not provide certifications when it does not believe the victim has suffered substantial harm; however, this is not their role. The Department of Families and Children is another county agency that is denying these certifications to juvenile U-visa victims due to complications involving confidentiality. Los Angeles County Board of Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, has been lobbied about the U-Visa concern and expressed interest to make an impact with the County Law Enforcement agency and the Department of Families and Children.

Juan Mundo is a Social Work Student at the University of Southern California.

Most voters agree that big corporations and the wealthy should start paying their fair share in taxes. But of course big corporations and the wealthy don’t want to do that. They want to pay less, and they are used to getting their way. So what do you do?

Some people in Washington think the answer is a “Grand Bargain.” In a “Grand Bargain,” Republicans agree to stop protecting millionaires from having to pay a single penny more in taxes. In return, Democrats agree to cut Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare benefits.

That doesn’t sound like a bargain to me. It sounds more like working people getting ripped off. Of course big corporations and the wealthy need to start paying their fair share—but cutting benefits is not the answer.

Let’s not forget how we got here. The richest Americans have been getting richer for decades, while the wages of working people have barely kept up with inflation. Then tax cuts for Wall Street and the wealthy threw the economy even more out of balance. Now economic inequality is the highest it has been since the Great Depression and the tax burden has shifted more and more to working people.

Even worse, some of the tax breaks enjoyed by Wall Street are doing real harm to our economy. Take the tax subsidy for sending jobs overseas, for example. Right now, corporations can lower their tax bill by moving factories to lower-tax countries. That’s not right.

Eliminating the tax subsidy for offshoring would raise $583 billion over 10 years. That’s not chump change. That’s money that could be used to invest in education and infrastructure, put people back to work, and lay the groundwork for long-term economic prosperity.

Right now, this idea is not taken seriously in Washington because Wall Street doesn’t like it. But the American people are overwhelmingly in favor. Surely that should count for something in a democracy.

Asking Wall Street and the wealthy to pay their fair share is not only the fair thing to do, it is also necessary to fix the economy. It would reduce inequality, which has been acting as a drag on economic growth. Reinvesting these revenues the right way could also put more buying power in the hands of the middle class, which was once the secret of America’s economic success.

By contrast, the Grand Bargain takes us in the opposite direction. Cutting Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare benefits would increase inequality and undermine consumer buying power.

Some people tell us we don’t need to worry about any “Grand Bargain.” They say that Republicans’ refusal to tax millionaires and big corporations means there will never be a “Grand Bargain” that cuts benefits.

But think about what this means. It means big corporations and the wealthy will never have to pay their fair share of taxes. Or it means our only hope of getting them to pay their fair share is to cut benefits eventually.

Let’s face it: the “Grand Bargain” is a dead end.

If we want to rebuild our economy, raise wages, put America back to work, and rebuild the middle class, we need to set a different course—sooner rather than later.

Richard Trumka is President of the AFL-CIO.

The other day I gave a presentation to teachers in Moorpark. Like always you can predict the question and answer period. More often than not you get friends in the audience who don’t ask questions but give speeches instead of questions.

Everyone wants to be a presenter, and activists feel more entitled than most to promote their point of view.

Moorpark was no exception, and an old time friend from the San Fernando Valley was chomping at the bit to promote his cause and his perspective. My friend is a cheerleader, so I settled back realizing that this is a very important function of the Left. We get so few spaces to reach out to people outside our orbit.

You also learn a lot from the speeches, such as what tendencies or lines different groups are pushing. In this case my friend asked or better still stated that the Latino critics of the immigration bill were jeopardizing the passage of an immigration reform bill. I was taken aback because this is the kind of rhetoric usually used by the Right to silence the Left.

I shot back that I was a critic of what was coming out of Washington on immigration reform. I have not played the game of follow-the-leader since childhood – quickly rattling off what was wrong with the proposals: no quick and just pathway to citizenship, a jingoist and racist border security policy, and a neo-bracero program.

I emphasized that in this instance I did not trust President Obama, Senator Marco Rubio or for that matter the Latino leadership on the question of immigration reform. Further, I did not trust the knowledge of our so-called Latino leaders to bring about a fair and just immigration bill.

History shows that the wrongheaded logic of a half a loaf of bread is better than none results in none.

I realize that I am getting old (but not senile), but since when is losing winning?

Last Saturday we had a reunion of Chicana/o studies alumni at California State University Northridge where we screened “Unrest” – the story of the founding of the department. With only a little over a month to organize and zero funds, we were surprised when over 300 attended (not enough food).

In the documentary I was asked why it was so important that I had a PhD and a quick path to tenure. I replied because I had to be secure that I could tell administrators and white faculty to go to hell. The decision to play it fast and furious was very important to the success of the CSUN Chicana/o Studies department which offers five to ten times as many classes as the next most populated programs.

Of course, in order to do this it was essential to have united students that the administration feared. It was the only power that Chicanas/os had at the time that prevented the administration from eliminating us.

My feeling was that I did not take the leadership in a program to lose. A department had to have a full complement of courses and the teachers to teach them. Anyone who stood in our way had to be taken on.

I always felt that if we could not be the best then I should not take the job or sell out and go into a traditional department in a prestigious university where my pension would have been much higher than at a state college. Besides if money was the issue, I could have made much more money in sales than in education.

Looking back at the students that have gone through the department and the Education Opportunities Program, they have done so much more collectively than I could have done as an individual. I was never good looking enough to be a movie star.

This brings me back to the game of Follow-the-Leader. The purpose of education is to produce leaders. To produce leaders who think and are not copycats. Issues such as the current immigration bill are too important for us to settle for a half loaf of bread; for us to compromise even before a vote is taken.

We should learn from history. Ask questions such as why other programs are not as large as the CSUN Chicana/o Studies department? We should ask if our leaders have led? Looking at my former students on April 27, 2013, I realized that it was because of them that we have had a measure of success. They were too raw, too idealistic to accept that losing was winning.

Dr. Rivera

Commentary:
By Dr. Lily Rivera

Forget all the articles you’ve ever read that purport to explain why we celebrate Cinco de Mayo in the United States. They’ve got it all wrong.

It’s not about celebrating a victory in a battle on the Fifth of May in 1862, in the City of Puebla, in the country of Mexico. It’s not about honoring poor and untrained peasants who, though far out-numbered, defeated soldiers from what was then the greatest military force in the world, the French army.

No, it is not about that, and it is not about recent immigrants, either. It is about those of us who were born here, whose parents, grandparents, and great grandparents came to this country long, long ago. It is about us as American citizens who have been marginalized socially and economically, a people who have had to wrench their rights and privileges from an unwilling populace through the force of law. It is about those of us who, until only the most recent of times, were not included in this country’s history books.

We celebrate the Cinco de Mayo, not in recognition of a battle in another nation, but to battle for recognition in this nation—recognition that we are equal to all others in intellect and goodness, that we represent a positive element in American Society. We seek recognition so that our children’s potential will be allowed to flourish, that we will be given equal opportunity in the workforce and leadership of this nation, goals that statistics confirm we have not yet achieved. Finally, we connect to a battle in the history of our forefathers because we need appreciation for the contribution we have made to this country.

For example, when we celebrated the 25th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War, our local newspaper observed that day by publishing four full pages of stories about men who served in Vietnam. I read names like Kimball, White, Stenzler, Russell, Kaufman, Lockwood. I didn’t find a single Sanchez, Lopez, Gonzales.

We are all familiar with the Vietnam War Statistics, that nearly 60,000 men and women lost their lives in the battlefields of that country, that nearly one in every five of those combatants was a Hispanic soldier. Recognition of the Hispanic contribution to the Vietnam War would have taken nothing from the recognition given to other war heroes. Yet, not one, not one Garcia, Rodriguez, or Nuñez was mentioned in our local newspaper’s four pages of coverage.

This matters. What is reported in today’s press is significant because today’s newspaper article is tomorrow’s historical document. If today’s periodicals mention only the crimes Hispanics commit and the failures they experience, that is all that the world will know about us. If our deeds are not applauded, if our achievements are not celebrated, if our contribution to this nation is not lauded today, our grandchildren will have nothing to honor about us tomorrow.

We celebrate Cinco de Mayo because we have a need for heroes, not just because heroes do great and glorious things, but because we see them as people like us. In finding commonalties with them, we draw courage, inspiration, and a belief in ourselves as worthy human beings. So, we reach back a century and a half. We reach south 2,000 miles, south to the heroes of another nation, of another time. We connect to the weak and the brave in a place far away in a moment long ago, for we see in their struggle and in their victory something within us, the potential for victory against great odds, the potential to contribute historically, significantly to this nation.

Our battle for recognition is not easy. There are those who suggest that Hispanics are unpatriotic, that we are not loyal Americans because on this day, we wave a flag from another country. Such people must be reminded that there is no disloyalty to this nation in honoring our roots in the same way Irish Americans do on St. Patrick’s Day and that German Americans do during Oktoberfest. All Americans must recognize that what makes this nation great is that it is, and we are, red, white, blue—and brown, and that no group’s loyalty to this country is minimized by celebrating its heritage.

Part of the battle for recognition involves the fact that to many people in this nation, we are not “real” Americans. It is a sad fact that while many of us are generations removed from being immigrants, too many Hispanics are still generations away from being seen as “real” Americans.

My family, like yours, exemplifies this. My husband, Tom Rivera, was born 73 years ago. In the same house in which his father was born. In Colton. In California. In the United States. Yet, to many of our neighbors, we are and always will be their “Mexican”’ neighbors. I ask, and we should all ask, how many generations must we produce in order for our people to be considered real, full Americans? As long as we are not viewed as such, we will neither be the neighbor of choice nor the coveted employee.

If Hispanics are to achieve recognition in this nation, I believe that we must achieve three goals.

First, we must learn to like ourselves. People who do not like themselves, who have no respect for their own kind, allow themselves to be trampled. America has a history of giving disenfranchised people equal treatment only as a result of being forced to do so by this nation’s courts. Unless we respect ourselves enough to speak up for ourselves, we will not fully enjoy the fruits of American citizenship.

Self-love begins by touching our past. We should learn how our forefathers came to this nation, the struggles they endured, the sacrifices they made. We would be wise to visit the land of our ancestors, plant our feet where they once walked, bathe in the rivers that watered their crops. We should stand before the pyramids built by the Aztecs and the temples created by the Mayans and marvel at their spectacular engineering feats. It is through the touching of our past that we acquire the knowledge that leads to self-esteem.

Secondly, we must pledge to move ourselves beyond the “firsts.” We take great pride in having a first Hispanic doctor, a first Hispanic mayor, a first Hispanic congressman. These are commendable achievements. I agree. But, we should also be ashamed. Our forefathers founded this entire region and many of the major cities in California more than 200 years ago. Yet, it is only in the very recent past that we have been able to celebrate the first mayor, the first… We should be ashamed that we have not worked harder to improve our lot, have not pushed ourselves to greater achievements.

In our push for progress, we must be prepared to make sacrifices, just as our forefathers did. We, too, must risk. We must get involved in the social, educational and political processes of this nation, no matter how much failure and resentment we encounter. We may not succeed, but our failure, our experience, will become a stepping stone for the path that others can follow.

Thirdly, if we are to gain recognition and assure our full participation in this land, we must speak out against injustice and inequality. When people are arrested, they are reminded that they have the right to remain silent. But the American Civil Liberties Union reminds us of a far greater right—the right not to remain silent. We must exercise that right and not hesitate to address loudly and frequently the issues that prohibit us from developing our full potential and sharing our talents with this great nation.

One hundred fifty-one years ago, at the end of what we now call the Cinco do Mayo battle, its leader, General Ignacio Zaragoza, wrote to the Minister of Defense in Mexico City to report his soldiers’ victory. He wrote:

“Las armas nacionales se han cubierto de gloria…puedo afirmar con orgullo que ni un momento volvió la espalda al enemigo el ejercito mexicano.”

“I delight,” he wrote, “in informing you that the armies of this country have covered themselves in glory. I can confirm with pride that not for one second did any soldier retreat; not for a moment did our military turn its back to the enemy to run away in defeat.” And neither must we … whether the enemy is ourselves or an unjust system.

True victory in this battle for recognition lies not just in our personal academic and financial success. A minority of successful Hispanics is not proof that we have achieved parity as a people. The battle will only be won when Hispanics no longer remain at the top of the dropout list, the prison population, and the unemployment lines. We must continue to celebrate Cinco de Mayo without apologies until the day when Hispanic Americans stand truly equal to all other Americans.

Dr. Lily Rivera, a retired educator was born in San Jose, California and now lives in Grand Terrace, California. Text of speech revised in 2011 to reflect her husband’s (Dr. Tom Rivera) current age and the number of years since the Battle of Puebla. Speech first given May 3, 2001 San Bernardino Hispanic Employees Alliance. Lilyrivera1@yahoo.com.

There has been another raging discussion taking place over the past couple months, that of the school-to-prison pipeline. How many different ways can we say that the absence of investment in America’s intellectual capital causes – even promotes – devastating social consequences? And how many different ways can we assess the racial consequences of misapplied forms of social control? No, there are no more “whites only” or “colored only” signs, which causes society to suggest that we are a more racially homogenous society. Yes, we do come together on some levels today. But the most common way in which we come together is on anti-intellectual levels.

If it’s dumb, stupid, ill-informed, not well thought out in the 21st Century, it’s most likely to be American. America’s divestiture of its public education system, in the late 20th Century, is beginning to pay extremely negative dividends in the 21st Century. Mostly in that we have people speaking for us that don’t have a clue, much less the capacity to find a clue. We see it every day, all around us. We have anti-intellectual (so-called) leaders. We even had an anti-intellectual President. Marginalized education and irreverent attitudes toward learning are the primary causes of mass anti-intellectualism. We can’t it escape now. Neither can we escape the industrialization of mass incarceration that has seen the nation’s prison population triple in two generations, since the 1970s. In a time of prison realignment, suddenly studies have come up with the source.

School dropouts. Oh really? What a surprise. How long did it take for someone to figure that one out? The ignorant and untrained have always led the pathway to prison. What hasn’t always been so obvious were the reasons students dropped out of schools. Lack of opportunity and economic hardships have always been barriers to access to quality public education. Once access was improved with the deconstruction of segregation, we discovered that conflicts of teaching and learning culture also proved to be barriers to learning. Society has gone through several iterations of “why children of color” can’t learn. It’s not that they can’t learn. It’s that society refuses to try to teach most of them. We try to intellectualize this travesty, and blame the children.

It’s not them, it’s us. It comes through the promotion of policies that undermine their education.

We’ve gone through the psychological assessments, the “ADD” and Ritalin solutions to what was termed, “hyper-activity” in some children, and “behavior disorders” in other children. You don’t have to guess which children were just “hyper” and which ones were behavior “problems.” In the end, it was just another way to implement systemic applications that promote “race disparities.” There’s a different angle now. More recent studies suggest that some children are even forced out of schools.

This new public discourse around the “school-to-prison pipeline” is really not new at all. It was a predictable outcome of social control planning where the prison industrial complex started forecasting how many prison beds would be needed based on fourth grade test scores two decades ago. Progressive societies forecast job projections and industry shifts. Regressive societies project incarceration rates. The thing about projecting goals is the motivation to fulfill those goals. Thus, the pathway to goal fulfillment is borne.

So, why are we, society, so surprised that incarceration goals have been fulfilled? In fact, they have been superseded as systemic mechanisms to insure that recidivism remains high among certain populations. Some people make a career of returning to jail. Some people have it down to a science. Seventy-five percent of all incarcerates return, at least once. Over half, return twice or more. The only reason we’re having this conversation is because some states, like California, have over-incarcerated, meaning minimal offenses to society are “rewarded” with jail time. Well, where did it all start?

It started in the public schools, as certain students are targeted – or forced – out of the public school system, generally for minor offenses. The common theme of the more recent studies suggest that once a student is “sent home” (suspended or expelled), they never return to school. Their next “stop” in society? That’s right: prison.

Now this is where we get to the “new racism.”

Nationwide studies show that 70% of prison inmates were school dropouts. California suspends 700,000 students a year, almost half (42%) for minor offenses–termed “willful defiance,” disruptive behavior that frustrates teachers who use suspension as a form of socially controlling students in overcrowded classrooms.

A statewide survey last year, suggested that most teachers don’t even know what the term means but they know it’s a “catch-all” term to get kids out of classrooms. Now here’s the rub that draws an ugly parallel; the policy is misapplied based on race. Minority students are five times more likely to be suspended than their white counterparts. They are also five times more likely to be directed into the juvenile criminal system than their white counterparts, who are diverted away from the criminal justice system.

The nation’s largest school district, Los Angeles Unified, was exposed last year when several of its schools divulged that black students, who represented less than ten percent of its student population, represented more than fifty percent of its suspensions and expulsions. Latinos, which represent the largest population, were second. Blacks and Latinos currently represent more than 70% of the state’s prison population. What a coincidence. Or is it?

The bigger coincidence is that political and educational leaders fail to recognize these parallels as problematic, and see them more as a function of a broken system than as a function of student behavior. More than half the state’s prison population is incarcerated for non-violent offenses.

How long do we allow the school system to be the feeder for the prison industrial complex? The “pathway” from schools to prison has now become quite clear. The means of breaking up that pathway are still quite fuzzy.

Education can’t continue to prepare more people for prison than for the labor force. But education is a privilege, not a right. A privilege that has become highly subjective. And prison has become a “right of passage” for many students, based on their race, and they have public education to thank for it. The real question now is: when does it stop?
Or do we need another study for that?

Dr. Anthony Asadullah Samad is an author, scholar and the co-founder, Managing Director and host of the Urban Issues Forum. He blogs at blackcommentator.com and at AnthonySamad.com. This article was originally published at L.A. Progressive.

After decades of inaction, the unveiling of the Senate’s “Gang of Eight” immigration proposal suggests that Congress may finally be prepared to reform our immigration system. It is of no surprise that this renewed vigor comes on the heals of a presidential election where an overwhelming majority of Hispanic voters rejected the Republican solution was self-deportation.

Yet, despite this crucial and potentially transformative moment, Republican leaders, such as Senator John McCain, one of the Group of Eight, has continued to use of ‘illegal immigrant’ when addressing the subjects of reform. He and many other Republicans who oppose immigration reform continue to use the more provocative yet inaccurate term – “illegal alien”(a term still used by the federal immigration agency, ICE).

Conservative Senator Jeff Sessions for his part derided the Gang of Eight’s efforts as “making nearly impossible for ICE officials to distinguish between ‘illegal immigrants’ eligible for legal status and those simply asserting they are amnesty eligible.”

Notwithstanding the insistence to label human beings as “illegal” merely because they have committed what under federal law is a misdemeanor, other important avenues of communication and education are beginning to change the heretofore tone of the debate. Just over a week ago the Associated Press (AP) came to a decision that has gone virtually unnoticed in legal and political circles. Yet the decision was profound. The AP “no longer sanctions the term ‘illegal immigrant’ or the use of ‘illegal’ to describe a person. Instead, it tells users that “illegal” should describe only an action, such as living in or immigrating to a country illegally.”

A week later, USA Today made a similar decision to refrain from using the term, concluding that: “the term illegal immigration is acceptable, but do not label people as illegal immigrants, except in direct quotes. Undocumented immigrant, undocumented worker and unauthorized immigrant are acceptable terms — depending on accuracy, clarity and context… Do not use illegal or illegals as a noun. It is considered pejorative by most immigrants.”

While Fox News subsequently accused the AP of trying to influence immigration debate, the fact is the AP and the USA Today decisions were sound on several fronts, not the least of which is the accurate use of the English language as well as the legal and social impact of a discrediting imprecise term such as “illegal immigrant.”

Legal scholars have long recognized the inappropriateness of the use of the term. University of California, at Davis, Dean Kevin Johnson, for instance, observes: The most damning terminology for noncitizens is “illegal alien…‘Illegal aliens’ is a pejorative term that implies criminality, thereby suggesting that the persons who fall in this category deserve punishment, not legal protection.” Johnson further notes, “The illegal alien label…suffers from inaccuracies and inadequacies at several levels. [In fact,] many nuances of immigration law make it extremely difficult to distinguish between an “illegal” and a “legal” alien.”

Leading linguists agree, and last year a group of 24 scholars criticized the Associated Press’ previous assertion that the term “illegal immigrant” was accurate and neutral. These experts noted: “This misleading construction of illegality is tied to the circulation of troublesome stereotypes about the migration status of different ethnoracial groups. Specifically, assessments of illegality are often associated with unreliable signs of one’s migration status, such as language, religion, and physical appearance. These presumptions lead not only to law enforcers’ regular misidentification of people’s migration status based on wrongful assumptions about ethnolinguistic markers, but also to the broader public stigmatization of those markers.”

As the leading law dictionary, Black’s makes clear, no person, including an alien, is “illegal.” The word “illegal” is an adjective, or “a word … typically serving as a modifier of a noun to denote a quality of the thing named. Thus, no person, including an alien, is illegal. Accordingly, an alien is “a person resident in one country, but owing allegiance to another.”
In other words, our laws regulate the legality of the “conduct” of persons, but do not attempt to classify human beings in such a manner. We do not, for instance, classify a seven year old that steals something as an “illegal child.” Such a label would not only be deemed absurd, but also morally bankrupt. Our laws have never gone as far as to make the persons involved “illegal.”

The idea that a person might be “illegal” is thus not only inhumane; it is also grammatically inaccurate, as well as legally incoherent. There are simply no laws adequately governing the issue of “illegal personhood.” As Johnson points out, although “alien” appears repeatedly in the Immigration and Nationality Act, the term “illegal alien” is not once defined.
In sum, substances and other objects can be illegal, and conduct can be illegal–but a person cannot. As Nobel Laureate and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel’ aptly noted years ago, “No human being is illegal.”

The AP’s decision is couched in bedrock ethical and professional concerns about accuracy in reporting. As AP’s Kathleen Carroll explains… “Will the new guidance make it harder for writers? Perhaps just a bit at first. But while labels may be more facile, they are not accurate.”

Social justice and civil rights advocates have long fought similar battles over truth and accuracy, which is not an easy battle when facility makes ignorance so appealing. As the AP now calls for: Specify wherever possible how someone entered the country illegally and from where. Crossed the border? Overstayed a visa? What nationality?

In other words: do your homework, and describe the action or conduct that is illegal.

The decision is the only fit response to critics who dismiss this issue as “political correctness” or “censorship.” The aim evidently was not to “censor” ideas or speech, but to be critical of terms that bury a great deal of important information. In almost any context, these questions are not only significant for reporting, but legally significant. People’s rights are in the balance.

As a federal court recently observed in U.S. v. Cruz-Padilla, where the court held that the defendant was entitled to a new trial because the prosecution relied on the term “illegal alien” in their closing arguments in front of a jury. Citing the Supreme Court’s earlier decisions (holding that the Constitution’s “due process” clause prohibits the use of “racially biased prosecutorial arguments”), the Cruz-Padilla Court characterized the “improper” use of the term “illegal alien” as a “foul.”

Law and psychology experts likewise have long recognized, markers or labels, especially politically loaded negative labels, have the ability to shape public policy and laws. Such labels help shape what is described as implicit bias, or mental shortcuts that allow us to make negative associations of groups that are undeserving of such negative categorizations. Stereotypes, for instance, allow society to use mental shortcuts, or schema, to associate individuals with a discrediting quality. These discrediting qualities in turn make it easier for policy makers to enact laws that seek to protect us from those with such qualities.

Sadly, history is replete with such efforts. For instance, one of the first and easiest ways for the Third Reich to enact its laws and policies was to stigmatize the Jewish community with similar discrediting qualities. These efforts paved the way to pass laws and enact horrific policies to allegedly protect society from these dangerous contagions.

The use of the label illegal alien has a similar social effect. It has labeled a group of persons, who under our criminal and immigration laws have committed typically nothing more than a misdemeanor, as a group of hardened criminals that we should fear and exclude. As more and more Americans are realizing, and opinion polls reflect such realization, this label conflicts with reality.

With the recent announcements by the AP and the USA Today, we hopefully begin a path of engaging in narratives based on accurate depictions, and not stigmatizing labels. No longer is it ethical or responsible to use the discrediting marker “an illegal human being”—if indeed it ever was.

Professor Ediberto Román is a nationally-acclaimed scholar and an award-winning educator with broad teaching interests and an extensive scholarship portfolio. Bobby Joe Bracy is a law student at Florida International University and an immigrant rights advocate. He is currently a research assistant for Ediberto Román, and the President of the National Lawyers Guild at FIU Law.

Sal Castro . . . Presente!

Thoughts on Sal Castro

By Roberto Dr. Cintli Rodriguez

It feels like we have entered an era of turbulence.

On a personal level, my thoughts are about life-long LA educator, Sal Castro. He passed away a few days ago. How do you explain who he was to someone who never knew him? In a way, he was like LA Times journalist Ruben Salazar – the journalist that was killed in 1970 in ELA. Castro had a similar impact, but he did not die. He inspired a generation.

Most people know of him through the movie “Walkout!” But if that’s how they know him, then in a sense they only know about six months of his life. Sal never stopped crusading for what some people call educational reform. We he really did was commence a campaign against educational apartheid. And that battle never ended.

In Tucson, we’ve been battling for seven years and Sal was well aware of the struggle there, in Arizona. He wanted to speak in Tucson when TUSD and the state decided that what he stood for was not welcome in this backward state. Still we invited him, but his health was already not in the best of shape.

Two years ago, one of his brightest students, Paula Crrisostomo, came in his place. And she was banned from speaking not by one, but two schools in Tucson (Tucson High and Cholla). Still she spoke to my students at the University of Arizona. Her presence was powerful that year.

After speaking to my students she went to one of the most chaotic school board meetings in Tucson’s history. The entire school board, the building and its surroundings were heavily militarized… And she was there in the middle of it all… 40 years after having taking part in a historic battle with thousands of students throughout LA schools, she was right in the middle of another historic battle, this time, in defense of Raza Studies.

Sal was the essence of what it means to be a teacher. In some societies a teacher is the highest example of what it means to be a good human being. A teacher imparts knowledge, imparts wisdom and sets an example.

Soon, I will feel compelled to write about him. A little more about him. At the moment, I am like many, attempting to digest the significance, the impact, of his life and his death.

We Mourn the Passing of Sal Castro, a Great Civil Rights Leader

By Mónica García, Board President
Los Angeles Unified School District

It is with great respect and gratitude that we express our heartfelt feelings of loss to the family of civil rights leader Sal Castro. He will be remembered as a teacher, counselor, leader and courageous adult who stood with students in the 1968 Walkouts and ever since dedicated his life to learning and leadership. Sal Castro’s courage and conviction will continue to be inspirational to future generation of students and educators.

Sal Castro, born on October 25, 1933 was a Mexican-American educator and activist. Mr. Castro was most known for his role in the 1968 East Los Angeles high school walkouts, a series of protests against unequal education conditions in Los Angeles Unified School District. During this time, students demanded a culturally relevant curriculum, new schools, and an end to corporal punishment among other demands.

For his part in the demonstrations, Mr. Castro was arrested and charged with 15 counts of conspiracy to disrupt public schools and 15 counts of conspiracy to disturb the peace. Four years later, the charges were dropped-but not before he and thousands of students persevered until their concerns could no longer be ignored.

Since then, Castro continued educating and pressing for educational reform in Los Angeles-area schools.

On October 13, 2009, the Los Angeles Board of Education voted to name a new Middle School located on the campus of Belmont High School, Sal Castro Middle School.

Thank you Sal Castro, on behalf of all the hundreds of thousands of students who benefited from your life’s work.
You taught students to stand up for their rights and that it was beautiful to be Chicano.

Que Viva Sal Castro!

Commentary:
By Jaime Dominguez

What do a Pope, Pepsi campaign and American presidential election have in common?

Because Latinos have been directly involved in each one of these significant moves in the arena of religion, pop culture and politics, there appears to be universal acknowledgment that Latinos have pierced the mainstream bubbles of representation. But it is a mirage.

Yes, Latinos are now the majority minority group in the United States with 16 percent of the nations’ population: 51.1 million. But you would not know that by their absence from mainstream American media.

Pope Francis, the first ever papal representation from Latin America, is said to be the genuine voice of millions of Latino Catholics in America and across the world. Last week, the ABC TV’s Golden Globe-winning sitcom “Modern Family” carried the largest audience and was most viewed live and on DVD. It features Sofia Vergara, who also stars in PepsiCo commercials and has her own line of clothing at Kmart Corp, the No 3 discount retailer in the US where supposedly she represents American Latinas.

On the political front, 31 Latinos are now members of US Congress: three Republican Latino/Latina governors are Susana Martinez of New Mexico, Brian Sandoval of Nevada and Luis Fortuno of Puerto Rico. We have the first-ever Latina Supreme Court Justice in Sonia Sotomayor with her memoir, My Beloved World, selling in both Spanish and English.

Very few anchors and hosts

But earlier this week, the Republican National Committee revealed in the “Growth and Opportunity Project” report that only 1 percent of its $1bn presidential campaign fund in 2012 was spent trying to woo Hispanic voters. This came just days after Luis Miranda, the director of Hispanic Media for the White House, resigned from his post to become a communications consultant in the private sector.

So, those who say symbolic representation does not matter are clearly not paying attention. Perception reinforces reality. The ethnicity and/or gender of the individual in a high profile position, delivering the news or messaging matter greatly. It is about credibility.

Do people assume that just because Latinos are present they will be heard? The logical expectation is that the power of numbers will eventually follow in the media. But Latinos are virtually invisible as anchors, hosts and journalists in American broadcast, text and digital outlets.

Sports Illustrated released a list of 10 most powerful people in sports media that included no Latinos: of the 10 men, eight are white and two are journalists of colour. The Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport also recently released its 2012 study of minorities and women covering sports in American’s news outlets. Unfortunately, nothing but the date has changed since its first report in 2006. The findings revealed that 90 percent of sports editors are white and suggested that minorities and women face incessant obstacles in the world of sports writing.

This is definitely a matter of great concern from symbolic, framing and substantive perspectives. The lack of diversity can and does have implications.

In the February 25 cover of Bloomberg’s Business Week -”The Great American Housing Rebound?” – Latinos and other racial minorities are portrayed as moochers, culprits and greedy benefactors of the housing crisis. Not only is this irresponsible, but is also flat out wrong. Latino and black homeowners and borrowers were more likely to be the victims of unscrupulous practices by banks and lending companies such as Wells Fargo and Bank of America/Countrywide.

This kind of insensitivity can almost surely be traced to the lack of concern over the thought process by news management. In his recent book, Juan in a Hundred: The Representation of Latinos on Network News, University of California-Los Angeles Professor Otto Santa Ana shows how fewer than 1 percent of the evening news coverage on ABC, CBS, NBC and CNN focus on Latinos; and, when they do, not much of the content or tone of the stories are positive.

Even when a Latino talking head is merited on news shows for commentary, he/she is not there. For example, shortly following the 2012 election, as English-language television networks were touting the performance and power of the Latino vote, most, if not all of the TV pundits talking about “their arrival,” were non-Latinos.

This is not merely episodic. Of the 23 MSNBC anchors and hosts listed on the website, only one is Latino. As for CNN, of the 21 anchors or hosts, only two are Latinas: Soledad O’Brien and Zoraida Sambolin.

Need diversification

And even those numbers will be cut in half to one. O’Brien is leaving the network to launch her own production company – Starfish Media Group. She was the driving force behind the launching of “In America” series, a move credited with diversifying the network’s coverage of issues affecting communities of colour and the LGBT community. But just last week, Alina Machado was hired as a reporter based in Atlanta for CNN, CNN en Espanol and CNN Latino.

At PBS, another influential figure in expanding the voice and presence of the Latino collectivity in the media is Maria Hinojosa. Her pilot “America By The Numbers” will debut eight new episodes on PBS in fall 2013. As anchor and managing editor of NPR’s Latino USA, Hinojosa has received two Emmy awards for broadcast and reporting. In the last decade, she was named one of the “100 Most Influential Latinos in the United States” by Hispanic Business Magazine. But she may be the exception.

In digital and print outlets, so far in 2013, there are no Latino/Latina columnists. Maria Burns Ortiz – the National Association of Hispanic Journalists Sports Task Force chair – penned an ESPN social media column, but was recently told that her column was being suspended indefinitely.

A September 2012 study by FAIR revealed that less than half of one percent of op-ed bylines over a two-month period in the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and New York Times were from Latinos.

Some will point to the creation of CNN en Espanol, ESPN Deportes, Fox News Latino and NBC Latino as progress. But in the eyes of mainstream media, these outlets are viewed as separate entities and therefore different, targeted to a specific demographic subset.

When this occurs, there is the unintended consequence of promoting the myth that Latinos are not interested in embracing the English-language media. This by default reinforces the idea that Latinos do not want to assimilate to American ideas and values. Such perceptions can lead to irresponsible behaviours. We have already seen this kind of view infecting the immigration reform dialogue.

It is clear that the American news media still lacks the necessary Latino voices to reflect the heterogeneity of this collectivity. Diversification must come to all facets of the media industry: news anchors, on-air journalists, editors, producers, reporters, commentators, subjects and more.

My question is: if Latinos are so large a group, why so silent? I believe it is time for the traditional voices and faces in American media that are mostly white and male to make room for the fair representation of Latino men and women. When I tune in, click on or turn the page, I no longer want to have to answer the question of “dónde están los Latinos?”

Dr. Jaime Dominguez is a faculty in the Department of Political Science and the Latino/a Studies Program at Northwestern University. This story originally appeared in Al Jazeera (http://www.aljazeera.com/).

When the National Rifle Association announced that it would unveil a plan in the wake of the Sandy Hook Elementary school tragedy last December, there were some who predicted that, at last, the trigger-happy set would get real about gun safety. I was not one of them.

Still, when the NRA finally revealed its grand idea on April 2, the magnitude of its absurdity made me gasp in horror! Surely, this was a spoof, a spoof of an Onion spoof of how the NRA would react to an event that was caused by the availability of lots of guns and ammo. But, no. It was all too real, and the “plan” has now consumed many column inches and air time in news media and has set one parameter on the far right for debate about gun control and school safety.

The NRA calls its solution the National School Shield, and it proposes putting more guns in schools-in the hands of police, security guards or simply the school staff. How it would be paid for wasn’t explained, but no doubt supporters of this silver-bullet strategy would find ways to trim school funding. Who needs guidance counselors? Or sports programs?

While it’s unlikely the Shield is ever going to become national policy, the truth is that police-armed and unarmed—are an ever-growing presence in our public schools. And it is often to the detriment, not the benefit, of students and the creation of a safe learning environment. The NRA and its Second Amendment cultists may be promoting armed policing in schools as a way to protect students, but the reality is that increased policing has meant a soaring rate of student detentions, fines and arrests in states around the country.

Take New York City’s school police force, put under the control of the NYPD by Rudy Giuliani. It is larger than the police departments of many small cities, with about 5,000 officers. They have the power to arrest, and they use it vigorously. Data analyzed by the NY Civil Liberties Union for the 2011 school year showed that school police arrested or gave tickets to 14 students a day, and about 94 percent were black or Latino, and 75 percent were male.

Far from making these students feel safe, police in many school districts represent an obstacle to staying in school and out of the juvenile justice system. It’s not just in New York. In Los Angeles, the Community Rights Campaign has been organizing to halt indiscriminate ticketing of students for truancy and other minor violations. In a three-year period, the LA school police issued more than 33,000 tickets requiring an appearance in court and a fine of over $200. And as in New York, more than 90 percent of students snared by police are Latino or black. Latinos are 64 percent and blacks 9 percent of all LA public school students, while whites are 15 percent and Asians 11 percent.

Now, it’s important to be clear about race and class when talking about policing and school safety, even if some people are squeamish about such things. Sandy Hook Elementary was a predominantly white public school in an extremely affluent, primarily white community. And the kind of headline-grabbing school shootings that seem like regular occurrences over the last couple of decades actually are most likely to occur in such white, middle-class or affluent communities, and perpetrated by young, disaffected white males. Public school shootings, like Columbine, were the products of very disturbed, alienated white boys in the main. In fact, there never has been a mass shooting at a public school in a large city. So why put more armed police in those schools?

Policing in our schools, especially in communities with large black and Latino populations, is part of the larger problem of an education system whose failures put kids at risk of falling into the criminal justice system. It’s a component of what education activists and student advocates call the school-to-prison pipeline. So when the NRA, and even well-meaning liberals like Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) call for more cops in our schools, think of the Trojan horse. The reality is that more guns in schools, no matter who is wielding them, means more danger for all and the further degradation of public education.

Annette Fuentes is an investigative journalist and author of “Lockdown High: When the Schoolhouse Becomes a Jailhouse” (Verso 2011). She can be reached at afuentes123@gmail.com

Rank and file Democrats are desperate for a turnaround of their political fortunes, and an end of the Robber Baron era — so much so that they see the recent elections as their deliverance. For them, the last presidential election was a sign that the country is turning to the left, and that Democrats will be able to keep the presidency for eternity. They believe that obstructionism of Republicans will be drowned by the growing numbers of youth, minority, homosexual and Latino voters. Their hope is that the changes will put them on the road to a more communitarian and humane society.

Pundit after pundit predicts that the entrance of large numbers gay and Latino voters will end the culture wars that divide the country. There is only one problem — progressives forget that the “Young Grow Old.”

It is easy to get caught up in the euphoria of the moment. I remember demonstrations in the 1960s, and thinking that we had entered a new era. I did not fully appreciate the seductive power of capital in negating any communitarian or humane transformation. I also underestimated the ability of the ruling class to twist the words of sociologists, and blame the victim with phrases such as the “culture of poverty.”

Nor did I take into account the self-interest of many of the demonstrators who opposed the war; they remained interested for only as long as they were personally threatened. Poverty and injustice was only visible for as long as the young remained young. They became invisible once more as the baby boomers grew old, and took on mortgages. They then distanced themselves from poverty, which again became a non-priority.

Before we enter the World of Oz once more, we should remember that age will not make us wiser; it will not make us more humane. Our system of governing has been taken captive by billionaires who have always been old and count on the young growing old. They count on the individual and the community being disconnected. They have purposely disconnected the family unit from the community, and destroyed any sense of shared history. In this environment poverty and injustice become invisible.

We are blinded by temporary victories and the glitter of that huge flag pin dangling from our lapels.

Tax breaks for the rich are softened by senior citizens discounts. Daily we play the game of bargains. Every day my family receives more advertisements from Macy’s than it does from St. Jude’s.

The tactics differ; St. Jude tries to jar us with photos of pelones, bald children who have gone through chemotherapy. Macy’s plays more to our self-interest, and like society seduces us. It sends us coupons. Items that cost $99.99 are marked down to $79.99, and then as a preferred customer you get an additional 20% off, and if you have a Macy’s Bank of America card, you get an additional 20%. By the time you get through with the sale you have saved over 50%. That is a deal!

The cost of being taken (exploited) becomes invisible. Penney’s recently started a marketing strategy where it posted the true price. No coupons. However, it was such a disaster that the new CEO came under attack and was fired. The truth be told, we have reached the point where young and old want to be taken.

As Latinos and gays get older and discrimination is hidden by the coupon game they will forget that at one time Latinos did not have green cards, and gays could not marry. None of us are immune to seduction. We just turn the other way.

Latinos and blacks today tolerate reactionary voices among them, although it is obvious that these voices conflict with their interests.

As in the movie “Soylent Green,” (1973) we’ll take the green wafer which is advertised to contain “high-energy plankton.” Foods that we remember will fade from memory as we grow old.

Coming off my high horse, it does not have to be like this. Our minds can stay young, and we should remember that at one time most people could afford a home. I bought my first home at 21 – no down payment, total cost $8500. I could qualify for it on my janitor’s salary. Today that same house costs $500,000; $100,000 down. And I am sure I could not qualify for it on a teacher’s salary. You do not get coupons to buy a home unless they plan to take it away.

The Left is complicit in the aging of our memory. Their journals and their activities include little material to politically educate and integrate Latinos. The Nation rarely includes articles on Latinos west of Chicago. Tellingly, most turned the other way as Mexican American history, books and culture were banned in Arizona.

If Democrats want to keep Mexican Americans and youth young, they are going to have to invest in their political education. They must integrate Mexican American and Latino history into the fabric of the progressive history of the United States. The Left is going to have to respect Mexican Americans and support their causes and know who they are.

Recently there was an exchange between so-called socialists; a Mexican American member (a true activist) criticized the body for its white chauvinism. He criticized the members’ lack of knowledge of Latino history. A pedant answered the criticism with a long winded response naming many African-American members of the Communist Party.

What was revealing was that the respondent named only Latin Americans living south of the United States as communist. It was as if Mexican Americans or Latinos in this country did not exist.

If progressives really want a communitarian society they will support Mexican American and other Latino issues. They will integrate these causes into the progressive agenda, work to achieve them instead of just handing out coupons. A sign of respect for the masses is remembering their names even when they are not considered part of the vanguard.

I must admit it is nice to get a senior citizens discount even though there are others who cannot afford to watch the movie. You know, the people cannot afford Obamacare because of the cost of medical insurance. In order to have a humane and communitarian society, we have to go beyond, “Don’t touch my Medicare!” and stop hoarding it as if it were only for the old.

When it comes to immigration, the political environment has a sense of déjà vu about it. It seems, we have been down this road before. A possible immigration reform deal that could have changed the legal status for many including my own was close at hand. 2001 seemed to be the year that would see legislation granting permanent residency to undocumented youth, or DREAMers as we know them today. During the months of April through August, bills in both the House and the Senate were introduced and Congress was set to reach a milestone in immigration reform since its last major overhaul enacted in 1986.

But one major event changed every-thing. September 11, 2001.

The long-term repercussions of such a tragic event were many and in a particular way, felt by the immigrant community.

A post 9/11 America searched for safety and security reflected in the Patriot Act of 2001 which essentially blocked any immigration reform efforts under the grounds of terrorism. The young DREAMers would only see the doors closed to the possibility of being embraced as legal residents because we were now seen as a possible threat to national security.

Over the last decade, border enforcement receiving federal record budget allocations, reaching  $18 million in 2012, has been the guiding principle driving immigration policies.  Add to that the drastic changes in immigration laws that expand ground for inadmissibility and deportation, and what do we have as a result? The growth of a system of expulsion which is today the Department of Homeland Security.

We would like to think that the intention of these measures, increasing national security, is what America was really after. But in fact, it has only served to justify the forced exodus of immigrants that are far from being terrorists. President Obama, who to-date holds the record for deportation levels, continuously states that enforcement immigration agencies are solely focusing on high-priority, criminal and dangerous, immigrants. This could not be further from the truth.

I think of the hundreds of immigrants that daily are forced out to exit through the US-Mexico border as I did four years ago, and on the contrary, the vast majority of deportees are not much different from me. How many terrorist posing real threats to national security have been captured due to the militarization of the Mexico-U.S. border? Yet, it is still deemed as “not secure” by legislators who would like to make immigration reform conditional on achieving unclear levels of security.

It is now 2013 and we are here again. Will the outcome be different this time or are we going to hear more excuses preventing a deal on comprehensive immigration reform?

Nancy Landa is a deported honors graduate and former student President of California State University, Northridge (CSUN). You can follow Nancy on her blog at mundocitizen.com

March 31 was Cesar Chavez Day in California and seven other states, but the New York Times, Washington Post and most other national media again ignored honoring the Latino and farmworker icon. While Google included Chavez’s face in its doodle, the national print media has failed to recognize Cesar Chavez Day even, as in 2009, after the nation elected a President urging “Yes We Can” (borrowed from the UFW’s “Si Se Puede”), and who won the White House using grassroots outreach strategies Chavez and the UFW pioneered. This national snubbing of Cesar Chavez is no April Fool’s joke. While the New Yorker and NY Times profile figures with far less impact and contemporary relevance —including Calvin Coolidge (!)—they and other traditional national media are trying to relegate Cesar Chavez and the farmworkers movement to the dustbin of history. In the process, they are ignoring how the Chavez and UFW legacy still shapes the struggles for immigration reform, Latino political power, and the drive for greater social justice in the United States.

When I was on the East Coast on Cesar Chavez Day in 2009 promoting my new book on the ongoing legacy of Cesar Chavez and the farmworkers movement (which also highlights the UFW’s historic role as an activist incubator), I was disappointed that neither the NY Times nor Washington Post had a word about the holiday. I soon discovered that this was typical of the traditional national media, which, unlike millions of Latinos, labor union members and grassroots activists, wrongly sees Chavez as a 1960’s-era relic whose achievements should be confined to history museums.

The Snubbing of Cesar Chavez

After my book, Beyond the Fields: Cesar Chavez, the UFW and the Struggle for Justice in the 21st Century, was published by UC Press in the fall of 2008, two other critical assessments of Chavez and the farmworkers movement soon followed: former Los Angeles Times reporter Miriam Pawel’s sobering account of Chavez’s and the UFW’s decline (“The Union of Their Dreams”), and former UFW Organizing Director Marshall Ganz’s Why David Sometimes Wins: Leadership, Organization, and Strategy in the California Farm Worker Movement.

Since Ganz had drawn national attention for helping to design candidate Obama’s grassroots outreach campaign, the media could have used a review of his book to connect the new President to Chavez and the UFW’s legacy. But neither the NY Times, New Yorker, New York Review of Books nor other leading national media considered Ganz’s work. Nor did they review any of the subsequent Chavez/UFW books, including Frank Bardacke’s mammoth, 848-page 2012 work, Trampling Out the Vintage: Cesar Chavez and the Two Souls of the United Farm Workers.

The media’s ignoring all of these books at a time of growing Latino political clout reflects misguided priorities. The media has long been covering a campaign for comprehensive immigration reform that is using historic UFW organizing strategies and has farmworker alumni like SEIU’s Eliseo Medina playing leading roles, yet has no interest in books examining these connections.

While the national media ignores books on Cesar Chavez, it promotes less relevant historical figures. For example—and this is not an April Fool’s joke—both the NY Times and the New Yorker have recently provided ample coverage of a new book on Calvin Coolidge.

Amity Shlaes’ “Coolidge” got a six-page review (!) in the March 11, 2013 New Yorker, despite its author being a trustee of the Calvin Coolidge Memorial Foundation whose stated mission was to elevate Coolidge’s stature; her prior book was a free-market attack on the New Deal (perhaps these facts helped it get reviewed). The Coolidge bio also got a long February 14, 2013 New York Times review which concluded that Coolidge’s record shows that he “was an extraordinarily blinkered and foolish and complacent leader.”

Why did national media see this Coolidge biography—praised by Paul Ryan as a “welcome new biography of a great American president” —as offering greater interest to readers than any of the serious assessments of the foremost Latino leader in the history of the United States?

I’d love to hear editors at both the New Yorker and the Times explain their prioritizing Calvin Coolidge over Cesar Chavez. This question has particular potency in the current era. Latino political power has been widely acknowledged to have shaped if not decided the past two presidential elections. Coolidge-type economic policies have been soundly rejected. Yet the traditional national media ignores—not only in book reviews, but in all of its coverage— Cesar Chavez and the UFW’s influence on today’s Latino politics, and on the future of the United States.

March 31 should have been a day when the traditional media helps Americans rediscover Cesar Chavez. Its ignoring of Chavez on holiday memorialized by eight states, combined with its daily elevation of far less significant white figure, Calvin Coolidge, reflects the ongoing bias against Latinos in the traditional media that has not changed since Chavez’s death in 1993.

It would be great if the national media’s greater interest in Calvin Coolidge over Cesar Chavez were an April Fool’s joke, but it is all too true.

In a week’s time the wide range of what was once considered routine GOP bigotry was on full display. Dave Agema, a former West Michigan state representative, and Republican National Committeeman called gays “filthy homosexuals. Next, Alaska Rep. Don Young blurted out the epitaph “wetbacks” in discussing the immigration issue. Then 23 members of the so-called White Student Union attended the Conservative Political Action Conference where its leader tacitly endorsed segregation and even slavery.

In times past, the silence from the GOP officials and rank and file would have been deafening. It would have reconfirmed the standard knock against the GOP as a party of Kooks, cranks misanthropes, and, of course, bigots. But in each of the three cases, there was an outcry from local GOP officials, bloggers, and GOP campus groups. They publicly denounced the bigotry, and in the case of Young, House Speaker John Boehner, Arizona and Texas Senators John McCain, and John Cornyn, and Republican National Committee Chair Reince Priebus blasted Young’s remarks.

At first glance, this seems a signal that the GOP recognizes that it’s widely considered the party of bigotry, and that it’s willing to do something about it. But the sea change may be much less than meets the eye. Many top GOP officials are still mute on its party’s bigots. The official record still stands that no top GOP official aggressively and consistently denounces the bigoted remarks or acts by a GOP operative, representative, or senator.

The RNC in its near 100 page blueprint for reaching out to minorities, gays and young people did raise faint hope that the GOP may indeed have finally woke up that America is changing, and it can’t win national offices anymore solely with conservative white male Heartland and Deep South voters, or through the use of the crude race baiting. But this hope ignores the GOP’s horrible history of dealing with its blatant bigots and bigotry. The pattern was on ugly display in 2002 when then-Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott touched off a furor seemingly touting the one time pro-segregation battles fought by South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond. It took nearly a week for then President George W. Bush to make a stumbling, tepid disavowal of Lott.

In the next decade, a legion of Republican state and local officials, conservative talk show jocks and even some Republican bigwigs made foot-in-mouth racist cracks that invariably got them in hot water. Their response when called on the carpet was always the same: They make a duck and dodge denial, claim that they were misquoted or issue a weak, half-hearted apology. Each time, the response from top Republicans was either silence, or if the firestorm was great enough, to give the offender a much-delayed mild verbal hand slap. Lott was dumped from his Senate Majority Leader post, but soon got a top post back as Senate Minority Whip after a kind of, sort of mea culpa.

The bigger dilemma for the GOP when the bigots of their party pop off is that they remain prisoners of their party’s racist past. It’s a past in which Republican presidents set the tone with their own verbal race bashing. President Eisenhower never got out of the Old South habit of calling blacks “nigras.”

In an infamous and well-documented outburst at a White House dinner party in 1954, Ike winked, nodded and whispered to Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren that he understood why white Southerners wouldn’t want to “see their sweet little girls required to sit in school alongside some big black buck.”

President Nixon routinely peppered his talks with his confidants with derogatory quips about blacks. He enshrined in popular language racially tinged code words such as, “law and order, “permissive society,” “welfare cheats,” “crime in the streets,” “subculture of violence,” “subculture of poverty,” “culturally deprived” and “lack of family values.” And President Reagan once told a black reporter how he would treat black leaders, saying, “I said to hell with ‘em.”

In 1988, President Bush, Sr. made escaped black convict Willie Horton the poster boy for black crime and violence and turned the presidential campaign against his Democrat opponent, Michael Dukakis into a rout. He branded a bill by Senator Ted Kennedy to make it easier to bring employment discrimination suits a “quotas bill” and vetoed it.

The sentiment that underlay the casual, and sometimes blatant, racist trash talk of top Republicans, even Republican presidents, inevitably percolated down to the troops. If GOP minor players feel that they can say whatever they want about blacks, Latinos, gays and women and get away with it, it’s because other Republicans have done the same, and there were no real consequences for their vile remarks.

There are many Republicans who don’t utter racist or homophobic epithets, use code speak, or publicly denigrate minorities, gays and women. Yet Colin Powell recently took much heat from many Republicans when he called the GOP racist. This still makes it a good bet that the next public official or personality hammered for a bigoted outburst will be a Republican. It’s also an equally good bet that few top Republicans will immediately rush to condemn their GOP compatriot for it.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is a weekly co-host of the Al Sharpton Show on American Urban Radio Network. He is the author of How Obama Governed: The Year of Crisis and Challenge. He is an associate editor of New America Media. He is the host of the weekly Hutchinson Report on KTYM 1460 AM Radio Los Angeles and KPFK-Radio and the Pacifica Network.

What price diversity? That’s the question I now ask myself when watching the popular TV show The Big Bang Theory.
Frequent viewing of this highly rated CBS show—now in its sixth season—has previously begged a more fundamental question: How can a show set in Southern California (Pasadena to be more precise) refuse to feature any Latino characters?

Each week I have tuned into the show expecting to see a Latino character, and each week I have been disappointed. But upon careful consideration, I have more recently concluded this may actually be a situation where the familiar saying “Be careful what you ask for, because you just might get it” comes into play, for the truth is we might not really want Latino characters featured on this particular show. In the interest of promoting a positive image of Latinos, I say it is far better we ignore this instance of Hollywood inequity and pursue a modification of the age old dictum “let sleeping nerds lie.”

The Big Bang Theory’s premise revolves around four socially awkward computer nerds who work at the California Institute of Technology. Their social awkwardness is astoundingly humorous, not to mention cringe-inducing. Though possessing impressive advanced degrees, they nevertheless struggle with such matters as obsessive compulsive behavior, athletic ineptness, emotional insecurities, and freakish personal attire habits. And with the exception of the character Penny (the stereotypical dumb blonde), all the other characters in the show are similarly portrayed as stereotypical nerds. One of the four male character leads is indeed brown-skinned; Raj is an immigrant from India, but that’s all the diversity Hollywood allows on this show.

In the past I have railed against Holly-wood’s habit of casting so few Latino actors/characters in prime time TV shows. But now I am coming to the unusual conclusion that The Big Bang Theory is not the proper venue for pursuing the elimination of this historic inequity. The truth is, the more I watch this show the more I am convinced Latinos will do themselves no favors by being cast as stereotypical pathetic geeky nerds. Yes, Hollywood needs to abandon such stereotypical Latino roles as macho gang bangers, but going to the other extreme end of the character spectrum might be too high a price to pay for Hollywood diversity.

Some people might say true diversity will not be achieved until Latinos, too, are portrayed as socially awkward computer nerd losers. They will propose such roles signal the proper acceptance of Latinos in U.S. pop culture. In this vein, perhaps true diversity eventually means watching Latino T.V characters on a show like The Big Bang Theory exhibit unhealthy obsessions with Star Trek/Star Wars memorabilia, or maybe taking pride in Latino characters that spend their lonesome Friday nights lingering at comic book stores.

But as for me, I’d be more willing to settle for some sort of compromise on a Latino TV character, such as a confident, sharply dressed, but morally ambiguous Harvard MBA-type Wall Street bond trader named Alejandro or Alejandra. In other words, better cool, well-attired, high finance greedy, than neurotic, freakishly attired high tech nerdy!

Rodriguez is an English teacher in the Sweetwater Union High School District. Email: srodriguez2@san.rr.com

By Eduardo Stanley

Congressional representatives in charge of putting together an immigration reform bill are considering a so-called “path to citizenship,” the process by which undocumented immigrants living in the country may become legal residents and later citizens. But this path will include a long wait for those who qualify.

After the November 2012 electoral defeat, Republicans changed their stance on immigration reform, hoping that it will translate to some level of acceptance — and votes— from Latinos. With this change, and with the White House on the offensive, a reform is a real possibility. At this point the question is, why will there be a wait and how long it will be?

To answer this question let’s first clarify that legally immigrating to the USA isn’t easy. Don Riding, former director US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS, www.uscis.gov/portal/site/uscis), explained how a person can do it: (1) marry an American, (2) have a needed job skill (e.g., engineering, medicine — farming is not included), (3) be a close relative of someone who has immigrated, (4) come as a refugee, or (5) win the green card lottery. Each of these ways represents a different bureaucratic process, with a different amount of time on a waiting list.

While direct family members of US citizens (spouses, parents, and children) wait a short period of time, others have to wait a very long time to receive the “green card.”

According to Riding, “No country can use more than 7% of the preference category visas. As a result, India and China have longer waits for employment visas. Mexico and the Philippines dominate in the family preference categories.” (http://www.fresnobee.com/2013/03/03/3197341/don-riding-immigrations-endless.html)

This means that currently the longest waiting time for employment visas is 10 years for skilled workers from India, while the longest waiting time in the family preference system is 23 years for brothers or sisters from the Philippines.

President Obama has said the future “path to citizenship” will mean going to the back of the waiting line. One wonders which line he is talking about: the 10 years or the 23 years?

There is a huge contradiction between the number of people allowed to immigrate legally and the powerful demand for labor in the USA. Because of this unresolved conflict, hundreds of thousands of people come and stay without proper residence documentation. They are “illegals.”

The US economy benefits to a great degree from this labor and, in some areas like agriculture, it’s essential. The agriculture lobby is pushing for an immigration reform that allows for the easy influx of workers, mainly from Mexico, to guarantee the cheap labor it relies on. This means providing legal entrance for these workers — with many strings attached.

This is an indication that laws should be modified according to social, political, and economic needs. To keep millions under the status of illegality is, pure and simple, political and economical abuse. It is political abuse because the name “illegal,” based on the technicality of being without proper documentation, allows the US society to single out a certain class of people and justify having them marginalized. It is economical abuse because, while most of them work, they can’t receive basic benefits such as unemployment — which they pay for. Undocumented workers can’t even collect Social Security despite paying for it for years!

And, of course, such a status obligates these workers to work under the pressure of being deported if they complain about low salaries or bad working conditions or, even worse, if they want to get organized.

Keeping millions of workers as “illegals” is beneficial for the US economy. However, new social conditions and pressure from above — remember the immigrants’ marches of 2006 and 2007 and the de facto Latino-Obama alliance— make immigration reform a must.

But in a society obsessed with guilt and punishment, the bill in process will surely include a long wait and penalties as punishment for being “illegal,” without consideration or self-criticism of why such status was created.

This should be a great and unique opportunity for Congress and the White House to overhaul the current immigration law, making it clear and dynamic, for those already here without immigration documents and for future immigrant workers who will continue coming — responding to the call of an economy that needs them badly. Clear and dynamic means recognizing workers’ rights and benefits. As they work and pay taxes, they are entitled to receive Social Security and other benefits they pay for.

In 1994, millions of California voters voted for an amateurishly written unconstitutional hysterical piece of legal offal named Proposition 187. It would have forced hospitals to turn away American citizen child patients if both parents couldn’t prove their legal residency; it would have expelled American citizen children from school if BOTH parents weren’t in-country legally and would have done so without legal hearings, appeals or even lawsuits and civil injunctions against witch hunting school clerks that were empowered to decide who was or wasn’t legal.

Proposition 187 won by a margin of a million votes.

It didn’t win one vote that counted, however. Federal District Judge Marianna Pfaelzer threw out all the immigration sections of the voter-approved “law” because it created a “state scheme of immigration” control that violated the United States Constitution.

That defeat started a long string of legal defeats for other attempts to hijack immigration enforcement or even definition written by lawyers for the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) principal among them, a paid hack of the country’s biggest and most notorious bigot, John Tanton; the paid hack’s name: Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach.

The most famous court defeat so far, of course, is the mighty legal squash by the U.S. Supreme Court of Arizona’s SB 1070, another Kobach masterpiece.

The 1994 victory of the racist and illegal Proposition 187 has been thrown up as a true reflection of how Americans feel about illegal immigration. Until now, that is.

The Los Angeles Times published a new California poll – the USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times poll that turns what happened in 1994 on its head. In fact, illegal alien opponents have used the 94 election results several times to try and resurrect new propositions – “Sons of 187” along the same line but have never been able to get them on the ballot for lack of signatures and now we know why thanks to the USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times poll.

Two thirds of Californians polled think the present immigration system is broken. One in five – 19% — think that illegally present people should have to return home, only one in five. Two thirds of respondents think there should be a path to citizenship for those here today. Ten percent think they should be allowed to stay but not have a path to citizenship. 75% support the proposal by the Senate’s “Gang of Eight” that preempted President Obama’s so-called “proposal.”

The Los Angeles Times: “”There’s really not much of a debate in California about immigration anymore, and there may not even be a national debate,” said Drew Lieberman of Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research, a Democratic firm that conducted the poll with the Republican firm American Viewpoint. “It’s no longer a partisan or racial issue for Californians.”

In a profound display of change in attitude among Republicans who now support immigration reform, Dan Schnur, director of the Jesse M. Unruh Institute of Politics at USC, with whom this writer debated the subject of illegal immigration when he was Governor Pete Wilson’s (Mr. 187) Press Secretary, told the Times “that California Republicans live in a much more multicultural society than party members elsewhere, ‘so the lives they live every day and the people they see are probably the main reason that their feelings are different than their national counterparts.”

An important percentage of those polled – 73% — support a guest worker program.

81% “White” voters support a path to citizenship as do 86% of Latino voters. 88% of Democrats support a path to citizenship as do 76% of Republicans and 83% of Independents.

For immigration reform supporters, there is only one word to describe the poll’s results: WOW!

This poll shows a 180-degree sea change in California public opinion. Whites, Blacks and Asians join the 40% of California that is Hispanic in supporting immigration reform with a path to citizenship for those here “without papers,” as the saying goes, as well as a guest worker program that by itself will solve the border problem.

Now, if only Congress will lay an immigration reform bill on the President’s desk.

Contreras’ new book, COMPREHENSIVE IMMIGRATION REFORM – 2013 is available at amazon.com