A couple of weeks ago the San Diego County Board of Su-pervisors came one step closer to changing the way the Supervisors re-draw their districts every ten years. Couple this with the recently voter-passed term limits placed on the Board of Supervisors and change is inevitable.

For decades the County Board of Supervisors has been one of the last good old boy bastions in local politics. The Board has been a place where White Republicans have held forth, with the exception of Leon Williams in the 80s. The current roster of Supervisors have served on the Board since the mid 90s, often times their re-elections are mere formalities. This in part has been due to the fact that the County Board has had the responsibility of re-drawing their own districts every ten years in such a manner that they have been able to confirm their safe seats.

For minority communities, the supervisors’ race has been a constant frustration. With the exception of Williams, no minority has served on this Board. In addition, no Democrat has come close to winning a seat. Democrats consider it a small victory when they are able to force a run-off.

It is with this backdrop and the threat of a Voting Rights lawsuit that Supervisor Greg Cox put forth a plan to change the way future re-districting is done. The first step in taking this responsibility out of the hands of the Supervisors is to change the state election code that would allow the County to establish an independent redistricting commission. Current state law requires county supervisors to draw the electoral districts.

On a 4-1 vote, naturally the only dissent vote was from Supervisor Bill Horn, the first step toward legislative change was taken that would allow the County to establish an Independent Redistricting Commission. For this, Greg Cox and and his colleagues on the Board of Supervisors, with the exception of Horn, deserve kudos for doing the right thing!!!

José Díaz-Balart, chief political analyst for Telemundo, had one important task during the September 7, 2011, Republican debate—to ask the candidates about immigration. Díaz-Balart asked his question, got his answer and was dismissed from the stage. The stereotype was fulfilled; a Latino asked one question and the one question was about immigration. With that box checked, the moderators and candidates were able to return to “non-Latino” issues.

The problem is, the issues that keep Latinos up at night—like double-digit unemployment rates, living at the poverty end of the wealth gap and having the highest high school dropout rates in the country—go well beyond immigration. Herein lies the challenge for President Obama. He must recast his connection with Latino voters beyond a narrow focus on immigration and engage Latinos as the multi-issue electorate they are.

It’s easy to see why Latinos have been typecast within the narrow frame of immigration. The vast majority are immigrants or the children or grandchildren of immigrants. In 2008 then-candidate Barack Obama used the issue to connect with Latinos by highlighting the importance of immigration reform. This strategy was wildly successful and netted him close to 70 percent of the Latino vote. Today that strategy is counterproductive. Latino voters are keenly aware that “La Promesa de Obama”—as his campaign pledge for comprehensive immigration reform became known—was not fulfilled. And now they have other priorities: according to the latest impreMedia-Latino Decisions tracking polls, economics have eclipsed immigration as their top concern. For Latinos, the economy and the related issue of education have come to demand the same level of attention that President Obama once gave immigration.

Since 2009 minority unemployment has been in the double digits. At its height in 2010, Latino unemployment was at 13.9 percent; today it’s 11 percent. Latinos have been the hardest hit in the recession, and they have the steepest climb to recovery. According to the Pew Hispanic Center, Latino median wealth plummeted 66 percent between 2005 and 2009. The decrease in wealth nationally was the most acute among Latinos, leaving one-third of the community either with debt or no assets.

Latinos are losing not only their jobs, benefits and homes but their hard-earned position in the middle class. Within one generation families have gone from working class to middle class and back to working class again. The wealth gap between minorities and non-minorities is the largest since the Census Bureau began providing this information in 1984. The white-to-Latino ratio of median wealth in 2009 stood at 18 to 1, more than twice the ratio before the recession. The gap between rich and poor has also become a serious problem within the Latino community, with their wealth disparity the greatest of any group.

In addition to having experienced the steepest decrease in wealth, Latinos have the highest birthrates and the lowest levels of education. Latino dropout rates are triple those of whites and double those of African-Americans. Education is particularly important to Latinos because more than one-third are under 18. In 2008–09, in the two largest public school districts, New York City and Los Angeles, Latino children made up 41 percent and 74 percent, respectively, of incoming first graders.

At first glance it would seem that because of the magnitude of their economic losses and their grim educational position, Latinos would be the most punishing of the president’s policies. But the data suggest that Latinos want more government involvement, not less, making them unreceptive to the message of the GOP and particularly the Tea Party. During last summer’s debt debate, an impreMedia-Latino Decisions poll showed that(83 percent of Latino voters supported some sort of tax increase in the debt reduction plan. Forty-five percent supported a taxes-only route. Even a majority of Latino Republicans preferred some taxation over a cuts-only approach to the deficit. For Latinos, economic well-being is intimately tied to the economic recovery of the nation; they are progressives who support a robust federal government. The proposal to create a National Infrastructure Bank to bring about job creation is exactly the type of policy that resonates with them.

The GOP has also failed to win the support of Latinos on education. The impreMedia-Latino Decisions polls show that 57 percent of Latino voters support President Obama and the Democrats’ education policy, which has emphasized early childhood education, school reforms and developing community partnerships. Republicans were seen as the better option by 20 percent and a disillusioned 14 percent lacked confidence in both parties.

Indeed, the Latino community’s most tangible achievements under the Obama administration are in the realm of education. The education gap between Latinos and non-Latinos shows clear signs of shrinkage. Dropout rates are decreasing, and from 2009 to 2010 Latino college enrollment grew 24 percent, an increase of 5 percent over the previous year.

And yet, despite recent comments by Jim Messina, President Obama’s 2012 campaign manager, Latino support is not a given for the president. In a December 2011 impreMedia-Latino Decisions poll, 54 percent of registered Latinos said they were certain to vote for Obama. This is a long way from the 70 percent of 2008. Tangible disillusionment was also apparent in the decreased rate of turnout among Latino voters in the 2010 midterm elections, the Pew Hispanic Center reported. In 2011 the president’s approval ratings among Latinos hovered in the 60 percent range. However, this aggregate figure combines “Strongly Approve” and “Somewhat Approve,” obscuring the fact that more than half of his approval is from the lukewarm “Somewhat Approve” category. The implication is grave, since participation is fueled by enthusiastic voters who have strong feelings about their candidate.

If the president is to get past his failed immigration pledge and reconnect with Latino voters, he must do two things: highlight the natural ideological affinities between himself and Latinos, and showcase the economic and educational programs he has implemented and will continue to promote. Simple electoral math puts Latinos at the forefront of the president’s re-election strategy in the 2012 election. Latino voters make up at least 15 percent of the population in half of the top swing states—Colorado, Florida, New Mexico and Nevada. They are a crucial part of the electoral formula necessary to prevent President Obama from being the third Democratic president in history not to get a second term in office—and they deserve to have the full range of their concerns understood.

Dr. Victoria M. DeFrancesco Soto, a fellow at the Center for Politics and Governance at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas, is the director of communications for Latino Decisions. Follow Dr. DeFrancesco Soto on Twitter: @DrVMDS

For the past six years or so I have heard constant threats from Arizona Attorney General Tom Horne (Canada) and Superintendent of Schools John Huppenthal (Indiana) that they were going to ban, destroy and wipe out Mexican American Studies, as well as Occupied America. Now after disregarding a $177,000 report that refutes their charges that the program and the book are racist and un-American, the nativists carry out their threats. They destroy MAS and snatch the books from on looking students. Their stupidity exposed them, so they now say it wasn’t so.

The problem is that witnesses saw Tucson Unified School District Superintendent John Pedicone’s (Illinois) swaggering thugs “remove” the books from MAS classes as students looked on.

Their cowardly behavior reached new lows when blogger Jeff Biggers wrote that the books had been “banned.” They protested that they were not “banned” but only “removed.”

Let me see if I understand: If the books would have been put on a prohibited list of readings they would have been banned, or better still censored. But, because they were already there and ripped from the sight of students, they were removed.

I have been visiting Tucson for the better part of my life. I could always understand white folk there, although I did not always agree with them. For example, Barry Goldwater was my ideological opposite, but he had an affinity for Arizona that few of the carpetbaggers such as Pedicone have today. He knew many of my relatives, and recognized that you better talk the talk.

Not so with the Arizona carpetbaggers (as distinguished from those of the 1860s who had a purpose). This recent bunch has moved there for the sun and the cash. They do not respect the environment, its traditions or the people. Witness the systematic destruction of Mexican American barrios. What is Old Town Tucson but a pseudo replica of Disney Land?

It is difficult to dumb down language to the level of the locust. So to start with, censorship is thought control. The First Amendment reads,

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances…

Thomas Jefferson and James Madison argued that this freedom was critical to a free society.

What is happening in Tucson is a political act designed to control what students and the community read and think. It is not a question of good taste or what is true or not. It was the intentional use of naked political power to suppress a particular people.

Huppenthal was elected on the platform of “stopping La Raza [the people].”

On May 12, 2010 Horne said, “The bill [HB2281] was written to target the Chicano, or Mexican American, studies program in the Tucson school system.” According to the Los Angeles Times, “He singled out one history book used in some classes, ‘Occupied America: A History of Chicanos,’ by Rodolfo Acuna, a professor and founder of the Chicano studies program at Cal State Northridge.”

Horne continued, “To begin with, the title of the book implies to the kids that they live in occupied America, or occupied Mexico.” Horne’s language was pretty clear. He did not say remove but targeted the book and MAS.

As with Horne, others have labeled the book Marxist. A prominent scholar of European history labeled Occupied America, a Marxist book. When pressed on what he based this assumption, he fumbled around and finally said in a deposition that I used the term “hegemony” several times in the text.

In Horne’s case, he did not like the title because, according to him, it “implies” that the United States invaded Mexico – a historical fact. Evidentially, Horne has not read the autobiography of Ulysses S. Grant or Abraham Lincoln’s take on the war.

The truth be told, Occupied America does not refer to occupied Mexico; it refers to occupied America. If Horne had a grasp of Latin American history or geography, he would know that Argentines, Peruvians, Cubans, Central Americans and Mexicans are Americans. Indeed, U.S. secretaries of state have exploited the notion of Pan Americanism for economic advantage. Thus the occupation began in 1492 not 1836 or 1848.

The touted Cambium Audit, which Horne’s successor Huppenthal ordered and the citizens of Arizona paid for, said, Occupied America: A History of Chicanos is an unbiased, factual textbook designed to accommodate the growing number of Mexican-Americans or Chicano History courses. It is the most comprehensive text in this market according to Amazon. The Fifth Edition of Occupied America has been revised to make the text more user-friendly and student-oriented., while maintain its passionate voice. This text provides a comprehensive, in-depth analysis of the major historical experiences of Chicanos that invokes critical thinking and intellectual discussion.

The curriculum auditing team refutes the following allegations made by other individuals and organizations. Quotes have been taken out of context. Therefore, the ‘controversial’ aspects are indicated in italics to demonstrate the claims made by concerned constituents.

Thus the nativists’ hypocrisy gives opportunism a bad name. They care nothing about the truth, they care nothing about Latino students, what they care about is controlling thought by “removing” books and killing a highly successful program.

They want to specifically suppress the thought of Latinos. The reason that they have not targeted Native, African and Asian Americans is that these groups are smaller and consequently more manageable. Latino public school students comprise 43 percent of the public schools, and they want to genetically engineer them.

Everyone in this country should be concerned about the removing or banning of books. They are euphemisms for censorship. What happened in Tucson constitutes an attack and constraint on everyone’s freedom.

The locust have a history of trying to control Mexican American Studies through prior restraint. When this did not work, they demolished the program and banned the books. This banning will have a chilling effect on the publication of future books. Usually, there is the opportunity to dispute the charge in court. This has not happened in Arizona – there was no trial.

Aside from Occupied America, Critical Race Theory by Richard Delgado, 500 Years of Chicano History in Pictures edited by Elizabeth Martinez, Message to Aztlan by Rodolfo Corky Gonzales, Chicano! The History of the Mexican Civil Rights Movement by Arturo Rosales. Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire, Rethinking Columbus: The Next 500 Years edited by Bill Bigelow and Bob Peterson, William Shakespeare, The Tempest, more than a dozen other books have been banned.

The charges of censorship have shaken the administration. After acting brazenly they are drawing the distinction between “banned” and “removed.” However, the record is the record. The banning of the books did not occur in a vacuum.

I have personally never experienced this level of hypocrisy in over fifty years of activism. It seems as if the locust and I do not speak the same language. It is also frustrating because up to now no one seemed to be listening. How do you deal with people who lie with such impunity?

As for me, it is a badge of honor to appear on the same list as the other banned authors. But what I resent is the draft dodgers, Pedicone, Horne and Huppenthal questioning my patriotism. I volunteered draft during the Korean War although I had a student draft deferment. They should check the records; they will learn that Mexican Americans served at a much higher ratio than any group in Tucson.

So my advice to them is not be so be opportunistic and hypocritical. The Tucson cabal is giving these words a bad name. Horne said that 2281 targeted Mexicans and specified which books it was going to get rid of. Huppenthal has not listened to facts and pressured the TUSD to ban MAS and the books. As for Pedicone, he is the bagman.

De vez en cuando los medios de comunicación se meten en el ojo del huracán. El aprieto mediático tiene raíz en diversas esferas de la cultura norteamericana, pero en general su crisis tiene principio y fin en la política.

A pocos meses de las elecciones presidenciales, los medios de comunicación tratan de pisar con delicadeza el camino sinuoso de la política. La prensa escrita, las cadenas de televisión y algunas difusoras radiales hacen lo posible en mostrarnos un semblante apolítico, sin tendencias ni corrientes filosóficas.

Es decir, nos dicen, a través de sus propios medios de difusión, que no mantienen inclinaciones políticas, ni son proclives a aferrarse a las ideas de algún partido político. En otras palabras, tratan de convencernos de que sus voces provienen de la objetividad, la neutralidad y el equilibrio.

A pesar de que encaran con sumo cuidado el trayecto de sus pasos, algunas veces los medios de comunicación se tropiezan y caen en el espacio nebuloso de la política. En el suelo no simplemente son presa fácil de los mercenarios de la política, sino también hacen notar sus tendencias reales e intereses de todo tipo.

“La destructiva, viciosa y naturaleza negativa de los medios de comunicación dificulta la tarea de gobernar este país, no permite la tarea de encontrar gente interesada en el gobierno…”, subrayó Newt Gingrich, candidato republicano a presidencia durante un debate en South Carolina.

El ex jefe de la Cámara de Representantes no simplemente supuso, sino que también expuso explícitamente que las cadenas de CBS, NBC y CNN están en contra del idealismo conservador del Partido Republicano.

A pesar de que no mencionó a los medios de comunicación en español, seguramente la etiqueta de “liberal” también se los otorga a cadena de Telemundo, Univisión y al periódico La Opinión.

La queja de los líderes republicanos sobre el semblante liberal de los medios de comunicación no es una noticia nueva. Por el contrario, se ha convertido en una estrategia oportuna y frecuente de sus candidatos y políticos para crear efervescencia y lograr el apoyo de sus bases.

Sin embargo, los medios de comunicación, a pesar de las quejas de los líderes republicanos, son entidades “conservadoras” del sistema político norteamericano, propiamente de la ideología liberal.

Los medios de comunicación, como entidades del estado “liberal” norteamericano, defienden su constitución política, la realización de elecciones libres, los derechos humanos, el sistema económico capitalista, un Estado laico o división del Estado y religión.

Así, Newt Gingrich puede estar gritando a los cuatro vientos la existencia de un complot liberal mediático. Empero, tanto él cómo sus correligionarios conservadores y libertarios, son tan liberales como los demócratas y los medios de comunicación.

Humberto Caspa, Ph.D., es profesor e investigador de Ecomonics On The Move. E-mail: hcletters@yahoo.com

Scott Peters who is running for congress scored a coupe when he received the support of several Latinos including Lorena Gonzalez of the AFL-CIO, Assemblyman Ben Huseo, candidate Mary Salas, CV councilman Steve Castaneda, and the Chicano Democratic Association…. the only thing is we don’t remember Peters ever doing anything for the Hispanic community when he was SD city council person… hell we went on his web site and we didn’t see him mention Hispanic community once… we wonder what the criteria was to earn those endorsements….

Lori Saldana, who is in the same race as Peters, is Hispanic and supportive of the Hispanic community when she served in the assembly, seemingly this wasn’t good enough…

Mateo Camarillo who is half Filipino and Mexican, has decided to run for the district 9 seat. This is the district that he carved out that is supposed to a Hispanic power house… unfortunately no Hispanic saw it this way and none file to run… Mateo is out to prove them all wrong…..

Bob Castaneda, older brother of CV city councilman Steve Castaneda, has taken out papers to run the CV city council, running for the seat held by Pamela Bensoussan…

The Arizona Supreme Court recently ended the political career of Alejandrina Cabrera who wanted to run for city council in the border town of San Luis, AZ, because she no habla English good enough. Then again most of the residents of San Luis no habla English…. Still you have got to know English if you are going to run for office…

For football fans this is a great weekend. The Super Bowl, in all its glory, features the New England Patriots versus the New York Giants. We continue to lament the fact that our San Diego Chargers didn’t even make the playoffs. But wait till next year!

For political junkies the Republican presidential primaries have been entertaining to say the least. From Herman Cain’s plan to electrify the border fence to the front runner Mitt Romney who earns more interest money in one year, over $20 million, than most earn in their whole lifetimes, and the lives of their descendants. To Newt Gingrich who has so much baggage that the Obama people are hoping he wins.

The Republican primary has been fascinating as we have watched the wannabe winners come and go, and the contenders tear at each other. Gingrich, the quintessential bulldog prototype politician is the darling of the extreme right wing and seen as having the aptitude to go after President Obama. Romney is seen as soft, but this too is changing as he has allowed himself to fall to the level of Gingrich as they attack each other, making for good television. That and outrageous amounts of money being spent by these political PACs, mostly on behalf of the Romney campaign. And the Supreme Court, criticized for their decision which allowed PACs to raise and spend without transparency.

Then there is the Sweetwater High School District scandal that has recently exploded. Sweetwater has been a bastion of bad news for quite some time now and with each passing day, as the media frenzy works overtime, more and more bad news keeps coming out.

The latest news was the release of Vega report. After the long delay of its release, it confirmed the feelings of many in the community that illegal political back room deals were being made at the expense of the taxpayer. What will come of this we are anxiously awaiting to see.

The other piece of good news was that a group called ‘Occupy Sweetwater’ attempted to serve the school board members with recall papers. We see this as a good next step. It is time for a clean sweep and a clean board. This board has so many issues and miscues over the years that community confidence in this board is gone.

There are times in life when you need to wash the board clean and start over, this is one of those times. It is time for a fresh start.

Welcome to Black History Month.

The idea originated with historian Carter G. Woodson, best remembered for having published “The Mis-Education of the Negro” in 1933. In it, Woodson argued, “The so-called modern education does others so much more good than it does the Negro, because it has been worked out in conformity with the needs of those who have oppressed weaker people.” Woodson initiated a “Negro History Week” each February, which in 1976 officially became Black History Month.

Woodson chose this month because it includes the birthdays of both Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass. By celebrating black history, Woodson believed we would move closer to our nation’s motto of “E Pluribus Unum.”

We’re getting there, but we’re not there yet.

A few months ago I was on a cross-country train ride. I was seated in the observation car alongside several college freshmen. It was a multiracial group, and all the young people were excited by school and the latest fads, music and television shows. One among the gaggle was a young African-American woman.

When the train briefly stopped in Harpers Ferry, W.Va., I rushed to the window because I had to catch a glimpse of the historic site. So did the African-American college freshman. But her friends were less than wowed.

“This is Harpers Ferry,” she explained. “You know, where John Brown … The raid.”

Her friends wore blank expressions.

“You’re kidding,” she finally said with a sigh.

Ignorant of a moment in history they had never been taught — or which they had covered cursorily and then forgotten — the others could only shrug.

These young people were united in many ways, but they had not inherited a common history.

Woodson would not have been happy.

In his vision, the students would all have a modicum of knowledge of the American Revolution, the Constitutional Convention, Presidents Washington and Lincoln, Gens. Grant and Lee, Thomas Edison, World Wars I and II. But they would also share in equal parts knowledge of the Middle Passage, the stories of Olaudah Equiano, Benjamin Banneker, Sojourner Truth, John Brown, Reconstruction, the Buffalo Soldiers, James Weldon Johnson, the Great Migration, Emmett Till and the many heroes of the struggle for civil rights who preceded Martin Luther King.

Yes, today, we have a president who is a black American, and de jure segregation is a thing of the past. But we don’t yet have a shared history of who we are as a nation.

That’s why Black History Month is so important.

Many public libraries will post a Black History Month reading list. Please make use of the recommended titles.

Many schools will offer special programs or assemblies on the month. Please encourage your children or grandchildren to attend.

Black History Month is intended to escort us toward an honorable goal.

Let’s reach it together.

Darryl Lorenzo Wellington is a poet and journalist living in Santa Fe, N.M. He can be reached at pmproj@progressive.org. Reprinted from The Progressive (http://www.progressive.org/)

Commentary:
By Juan Cartagena

During the very first week of the new year of 2012 came news of the loss of Robert Carter and Gordon Hirabayashi, two giants in this country’s civil rights movement and two beacons of light for the Latino community. They died only one day apart.

Gordon Hirabayashi is one of three fearless Japanese American leaders who used the courts to resist the nation’s misguided and racist round up and detention of citizens of Japanese ancestry during World War II. In separate prosecutions, Hirabayashi, along with Fred Koretmatsu and Minoru Yasui, stood up to a federal executive apparatus that used the threat of national security to deliberately engage in the purposeful detention of persons because of their race with no individualized determination of disloyalty.

Hirabayahsi, an American born citizen, was studying in Washington State. He refused to register with the federal authorities, refused to obey the curfews imposed upon the Japanese, and was eventually jailed and convicted. In effect, he engaged in that quintessential American act: he dissented. Decades later, his conviction was overruled and the country paid him and other Japanese Americans reparations for the country’s acts during war time.

Latinos also know firsthand the direct effects of being corralled in the name of national interests. During the Great Depression of 1929, half a million people of Mexican descent, from Los Angeles, Chicago, Detroit and Denver, nearly half of them citizens of the U.S., were detained and deported to Mexico as a way to increase jobs for other Americans.

In 1954 another one million persons of Mexican heritage were detained as part of a quasi-military offensive called Operation Wetback aimed at ridding the country of undocumented immigrants. Regardless of citizenship, these Texas residents were then bused, flown and shipped deep into Mexico to make their return even more difficult.

Today’s profiling of Latino immigrants by untrained local police forces in many states echoes these round ups of yesteryear. “My citizenship didn’t protect me one bit. Our Constitution was reduced to a scrap of paper,” Hirabayashi noted. And yet, in Hirabayashi Latinos have a model to follow; a principled person who refused to accept this abuse, and used the law to right a historical wrong.

Robert Carter is a giant in the world of civil rights, one of the masterminds of the strategy that led to the desegregation of our nation’s public schools and the dismantling of separate-but-equal doctrine. At that time, Robert Carter was part of the team of attorneys at the NAACP and one of the advocates for presenting social scientific evidence to the courts to document the psychic harm of racism and Jim Crow on the nation’s black children.

In that vein, Mr. Carter also played a significant role in the arguments presented in the seminal Mendez v. Westminster case by coauthoring an amicus curiae brief to support the Mexican plaintiffs in California. The decision in Mendez resulted in the first court opinion to recognize that segregation of schoolchildren – in that case, Mexican and Latino children — creates an irreparable sense of inferiority among minority children. And these very same arguments were presented successfully in Brown v. Board of Education, years later.

Robert Carter also had a direct connection to the LatinoJustice PRLDEF (then known as the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund) when he became a federal district court judge in New York City. Judge Carter presided over Guardians Association v. Civil Service Commission where our attorneys successfully proved that the City’s civil service examinations for police officers discriminated against Black and Latino police candidates. Judge Carter’s decision in our favor was eventually upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1983 and paved the way for the increased diversity of the city’s police force.

Judge Carter also presided over the trial of housing discrimination claims by Puerto Rican and Latino residents seeking entry into the exclusive Grand Street cooperative apartments in the Lower East Side in the 1980s, in Huertas v. East River Housing Corp. Judge Carter ruled in favor of the Latino community’s claims that they were systematically prevented from applying to these units, opening up the opportunity to integrate these 4,500 moderate income cooperative apartments.

LatinoJustice PRLDEF Special Counsel, Richard Bellman, noted that “Bob Carter represented the best of the civil rights bar. He was a dedicated and innovative advocate who never wavered from insisting on true equality for all. Indicative of his passion was his consistent position on the evils of de facto segregation, even when the courts stood idly by and allowed it”. Robert Carter had an incredible reputation as a no-nonsense civil rights attorney and advocate and as a person who constantly pushed the envelope to expose American racism.

They both stand as models for the growing Latino community today. And they both have contributed greatly to the platform that allows LatinoJustice PRLDEF and other Latino civil rights advocates to protect the rights of Latinos throughout the country.

Juan Cartagena can be reached at jcartagena@latinojustice.org. Reprinted from the National Institute for Latino Policy (www.latinopolicy.org).

Teresa Wiltz in America’s Wire writes that despite claims of increased educational opportunities for minorities that the performance of black and Latino teenagers remains the same or lower than 30 years ago. In fact, the math and reading performance of black and Latino high school seniors equal that of 13-year-old white students – so much for the post racial society.

Educators and liberal politicos point the finger at low expectations, inequality of resources, less qualified teachers, the income inequality, teacher bias, and inexperienced teachers. They throw in the tracking of black and brown students into remedial class while whites are put into university bound classes.

Further, minority students are more likely to be given “A’s” for work that would receive a “C” in a rich school giving the illusion that they are being educated. Society would not tolerate this record in a football team at any level, or for that matter if we had fewer weapons of mass destruction than 30 years ago.

However, in my view, the major reason for the lack of progress of Mexican American and other minorities is society’s historical amnesia or more aptly its Alzheimer disorder that erases the memory of previous efforts or commitments to bridge the gap between black, brown and white – rich and poor.

The truth be told, educators pay less attention today to Mexican Americans than it did 50 years ago. In the sixties educators and reporters at least talked about it. The late Los Angeles Times’ columnist Ruben Salazar attacked the dropout problem and the failure of the schools to devise a relevant curriculum, as well as the failure to recruit and train effective Mexican American teachers.

In February 1963, Salazar began a series on Mexican American education. He titled his first article, “What Causes Jose’s Trouble in School?: Mexican-Americans Problems Analyzed.” Salazar begins:

Kicked out of school, Jose Mendez at 16 has been trapped in a peculiar twilight zone of American life. They tested him, graded him and pigeonholed him…say some educators, the fault may lie in the tests and the teachers –not in Jose. Educational policy and curriculum are oriented towards the education of the middle-class, monolingual, monocultural English-speaking student… [Jose] is at a great dis-advantage…[he] is a hyphenated American, a Mexican-American … he is culturally confused.

Salazar interviewed educators, Drs. George I. Sánchez, Paul Sheldon, Julian Samora and high school teacher Marcos de Leon on why José was dropping out of school. They attributed the dropout problem to the Mexican American’s inferiority complex, which has intensified his marginalization.

Salazar blamed the schools for the Mexican Americans failure. Schools nurtured a negative self-image, which was reinforced by the movies and literature, and failed to correct the stereotyping of poor Mexicans. It was a vicious cycle: the schools did think Mexicans could not learn, students developed a low esteem, they failed and dropped out.

The experts advocated bilingual-bicultural education, and initially there was a consensus for these programs, from President Lyndon B. Johnson to Republican St. Ronald Reagan. Yet, the Greek Chorus gained traction and labeled the programs separatist, un-American and racist. This nativist movement allied itself with right wing thinks tanks and foundations, and by the beginning of the 21st century, bilingual ed died a violent death.

By and large educators were mute as bilingual programs were wiped out and university based teacher training programs specializing on Mexican Americans were eliminated. At teacher training institutions grade point average was favored over knowledge of the child’s background. Although Latinos comprised 75 percent of the Los Angeles Unified School District, student teachers were given minimal preparation on how to teach Latino students.

The dropout was one of the major reasons for the development of Chicano Studies in 1969. A solution was sought for the high dropout problem that was overexposing Latino students to a life of poverty and not incidentally to the Vietnam draft. One of my first books Cultures in Conflict: Case Studies of the Mexican American was written for fifth graders. The purpose was to build a positive image in order to facilitate the acquisition of skills. These skills would prepare students to enter which ever field they wanted.

The importance of self-image is common sense. I remember looking for engineering computer lab with my future wife at UCLA in the 1980s. We asked several students if they knew where the computer lab was. They all gave us blank looks. Finally, we asked a Latino student who told us to ask an Asian. We did and she told us where it was. Talking to Asian fiends they told me that they exceled in math because the teachers expected them to.

Looking back at my own life, I was fortunate that I ended up in a Jesuit high school where I had to take four years of Latin. My relatives would notice my Latin book on the table, would ask my mother who it belonged to, and they would remark that Rudy must be smart. In contrast, in the first grade, before I knew English, I was pushed out of public school as mentally retarded.

When I became smart, that is adhered to their rules, anytime a Mexican student would act up, other teachers would ask me why? When I told them, they generally did not like the answer. They thought I was flip when I said that my solution for the marginalization of Mexicans was to rewrite the bible and substitute the word Mexican for Israeli. In a couple of decades, Mexicans would start looking at themselves as the “chosen people.”

This identity has helped Jews survive and endure over 2,000 years of persecution. In my view it comes down to self-image.

This was the premise of the Tucson Unified School District’s program. It was the repairing the damage done by marginalization – of being written out of history. The thinking was that learning history, literature and the arts though their viewpoint would repair the image of the greaser, the loser and the numerous other stereotypes.

From the beginning, the xenophobes tried to send the Mexican American Studies program down the same path as bilingual education. It was unpatriotic to learn any language other than English, it was un-American to learn history other than the American way.

The reasoning ignored the past; it was as if the debates of the sixties and seventies never occurred. They disregarded pedagogical principles that even St. Ronald accepted.

One of the books banned in Tucson was Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. It was based on a highly successful literacy campaign conducted in Brazil. The xenophobes’ main argument is that Freire was a Marxist, which is ridiculous since the pedagogy goes back to Socrates. With that aside, would we cast aside a cure for cancer because the researcher was a Marxist?

The Cambium Learning Corp’s Curriculum Audit of the Tucson Mexican American Studies Department which was commissioned by Arizona Superintendent of Schools John Huppenthal and cost the $177,000 concluded,

No observable evidence exists that instruction within Mexican American Studies Department promotes resentment towards a race or class of people. The auditors observed the opposite, as students are taught to be accepting of multiple ethnicities of people. MASD teachers are teaching Cesar Chavez alongside Martin Luther King, Jr. and Gandhi, all as peaceful protesters who sacrificed for people and ideas they believed in. Additionally, all ethnicities are welcomed into the program and these very students of multiple backgrounds are being inspired and taught in the same manner as Mexican American students. All evidence points to peace as the essence for program teachings. Resentment does not exist in the context of these courses observable evidence exists that instruction within Mexican American Studies Department promotes resentment towards a race or class of people… No evidence as seen by the auditors exists to indicate that instruction within Mexican American Studies Department program classes advocates ethnic solidarity; rather it has been proven to treat student as individuals.

There has not been any credible proof to refute claims that the program has improved chances of graduation, improved the students’ self-images, and motivated them to pursue a higher education.

A society that has historical dementia or Alzheimers cannot correct the defects of the present just like it cannot correct racism, sexism or homophobia.

Stupidity and fanaticism led to the destruction of the most transformative movements in Latin American, Liberation Theology. The forces of reaction in order to protect the large landowners redbaited Liberation Theology and substituted a reactionary evangelical Christian movement that promised that their reward would come in the next world. So it is in Arizona.

With the destruction of Mexican American Studies and the banning of the books, Mexican Americans are being put in their place. Vicariously, they are burning the infidels. The difference is that students are fighting back! They are reading books and will remember that anybody can learn. It is their right.

Ha sido dicho anteriormente, pero tiene que repetirse. Los hispanos no son votantes preocupados por un solo tema. Esto, a pesar de la narrativa que la prensa hispana y el lobby hispano propagan. Los hispanos están preocupados por temas más allá del asunto migratorio. Esto fue recientemente confirmado en una encuesta realizada por ImpreMedia que destacó que la economía, y no el tema migratorio, es la máxima preocupación para el electorado hispano.

Claro que no escuchará a muchos de los partidarios del presidente citando este último sondeo ya que es mucho más fácil pintar a los conservadores como antihispanos debido a su oposición a la inmigración ilegal. Tampoco escuchará que la mayoría de los conservadores apoyan el aumento de más modelos de inmigración legal ya que el presidente está más preocupado por ganar las elecciones que ganar en la esencia de problema.

Eso es lo que precisamente buscan los hispanos si tenemos en cuenta que se necesita desesperadamente que Estados Unidos vuelva a ser lo que muchos vinieron buscando en estas costas.

Para la mayoría de los hispanos que son inmigrantes o hijos de inmigrantes, el empleo y la oportunidad de ganarse la vida de mejor forma han sido los principales atractivos para venir aquí y dejar todo atrás. Sin embargo, algunos están convencidos de que los hispanos se sienten naturalmente atraídos a la idea del Estado omnipresente como el principal proveedor de bienes y servicios a perpetuidad y nunca adoptarían una visión conservadora de Estados Unidos.

Estas son las mismas personas que no quieren que sepamos que más de 600 conservadores hispanos y 150 medios de comunicación se reunirán para celebrar la conferencia de la Red de Liderazgo Hispano (Hispanic Leadership Network) en Miami con el propósito de ahondar en las cuestiones políticas que afectan a nuestro país, incluyendo los casi 50,5 millones de hispanos.

Por ejemplo: ¿Qué se puede hacer para reducir el índice de desempleo entre los hispanos que está muy por encima del 10%? O ¿qué hacer con el número preocupante de los estudiantes hispanos que abandonan la secundaria?

En la conferencia se hablará de libertad, no un gobierno grande, y ello ocupará un lugar destacado en las respuestas de los voceros y panelistas cuando se hable de cuestiones urgentes que afectan a los americanos.

Algunos podrían querer que creamos que los hispanos están especialmente centrados en las opiniones políticas sobre la reforma de inmigración sin tener en cuenta otros aspectos importantes. No se lo crea. Y, como una reciente encuesta realizada en la Florida revela, con una mayoría de hispanos diciendo que el país va por el camino equivocado, hay apetito por una alternativa a la política de identificación perfeccionada por la izquierda.

Si la reunión de esta semana sirve de indicación, los hispanos están prestando atención a la exhortación de vivir en un país fundado en una mayor libertad y responsabilidad personal.

OAKLAND— Around this time every year, millions of parents in California are working through the school enrollment process. Unfortunately, while many don’t have a choice regarding what school their child will attend, those who do often find their options bewildering.

My wife and I are both educators (her currently, me formerly). We know the education system well, and what qualities to look for in a school. Still, even we were confused when we moved from San Diego to Oakland and began looking at local public schools.

After months of research and hours spent talking about the pros and cons of schools, we filled out our “options” form with our top three school choices. In some ways, this final step was a leap of faith. The school we picked had low scores but we liked the Spanish immersion program and believed that the principal and teachers could turn it around.

Our experience is not uncommon, as conversations with numerous other parents showed us. As parents, we know that the schools we select will have lifetime implications for our children’s success. But as we make these choices, we lack high-quality information on school performance.

The first problem is the school rating system. Every school in California has two separate ratings.

California has a state system called the API (Academic Performance Index) that ranks schools on a point system up to 1000. However, schools are also ranked by the federal rating system based on AYP (Adequate Yearly Progress). A school can be highly ranked in the state system and do poorly in the federal system. Neither system provides a full picture of how well a school is performing.

For instance, California’s API system doesn’t tell parents how groups of students – such as English Learners, students with disabilities, Latinos or African-Americans – are doing. The federal model provides this information but fails to give the school any credit for the academic progress of students who haven’t achieved grade level standards.

Under the state system, nothing happens to even the very worst schools. Under the federal system, schools that are making considerable progress can be labeled failing and suffer sanctions. Neither system really tells parents whether the majority of students in the school are on track for graduation and college-readiness.

Recently, the Obama Administration gave state leaders the opportunity to apply for a waiver from the federal No Child Left Behind law, which mandates that states apply assessments in basic skills to all students in certain grades if they are to receive federal funding. Such a waiver would allow California the opportunity to develop and use a single school rating system that provides complete and transparent information on school performance for parents and community members.

Eleven states around the country took the option and applied in the first round. Thirty other states have signaled their willingness to apply in the second round in February. California remains undecided, with leaders in Sacramento throwing up an array of excuses as to why we should not join that list.

At a recent State Board of Education meeting, supporters of the waiver asked leaders to quickly come to a decision. Among those gathered were superintendents from the Central Valley’s Sanger Unified School District, Long Beach Unified School District, and Morgan Hill Unified School District in the Bay Area. Advocacy groups including Children Now and Education Trust-West were also at the meeting.

The arguments put forward ranged from building a better accountability system to allowing districts to focus on the highest-need and lowest performing schools, targeting them with the attention, resources and reforms they need to improve. Such steps would help ease the widespread confusion prevalent among parents by providing more concise and accurate information and could also help resolve the widening achievement gap.

Additionally, a waiver from NCLB would offer increased flexibility with federal dollars so state and local leaders can target those dollars at vital areas such as improving teaching and leading, implementing our new state standards, and increasing academic rigor so all of our students graduate college and career ready.

Sadly, no decision was forthcoming form the State Board during the hearing. Instead, leaders stated that they will postpone making a final decision on whether or not to apply for a waiver until March.

In the meantime, it is critical that parents and community groups let state board members know that it is time for California to submit a waiver application. We can’t afford to lose this opportunity to build a transparent, high-quality system for rating schools and districts, one that provides crucial information on how well our schools are doing in preparing all children for college and career.

As parents, we deserve to have all the information we need to make the right educational choices for our children’s future.

Arun Ramanathan is executive director of The Education Trust—West, a statewide education advocacy organization. He has served as a district administrator, research director, teacher, paraprofessional and VISTA volunteer in California, New England and Appalachia. He has a doctorate in educational administration and policy from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. His wife is a teacher and they have two children in a Spanish immersion elementary school in Oakland Unified.

Commentary:
By Andrew Kordik

For readers of history, it was not shocking when the Arizona Department of Education decided to close Tucson’s Mexican-American Studies program. In a debate on the popular news program Democracy Now!, Superintendent John Huppenthal defended his position, saying, “I want to make sure these students aren’t being indoctrinated . . . what we want to do is create a society in which everybody is working for a better tomorrow, not working to get even.”

In reality, Mr. Huppenthal’s policies have precisely the opposite effect, leading to the indoctrination of students by ensuring their only exposure to American history is through state-mandated curriculum for U.S. history courses.

Mexican-American history is not shunned because of what it reveals of Mexican culture, but because of what it can teach us about the United States. The history of the United States is strikingly different when viewed from the experiences of Latin America, and these perspectives are avoided in public schools because they fail to meet the goals of state education.

The story of Latin America, since 1519, serves to undermine the most fundamental myths of the United States’ mission. It is in this story, which is only a microcosm of a global phenomenon, that we see how “the West” developed its position of preeminence by stripping the world of its resources, using these resources to feed a developing industrial economy, and eventually forcing the rest of the world (whose most valuable resources had already been stolen) to compete with well-developed European manufacturing.

To be fair, part of this story is found in textbooks, where it is usually viewed as an unfortunate, but ultimately justified movement of “progress.”

Upon arrival in the Americas, the Spanish and Portuguese (and eventually the English) quickly relieved the Aztecs and Incas of their gold and silver possessions.

Looking to gain more from the Americas, Europeans forced monocultures upon much of Latin America, imposing upon them an international division of labor, whereby each region grew only one crop, which was to supply European markets — in many places, it was illegal to grow anything other than the plantation cash crop (sugar in Brazil, cacao in Venezuela, coffee and bananas in Guatemala, Chiapas, Costa Rica, Colombia, and Ecuador), thus forcing natives and African slaves into dependence upon Europe for other foods. As historian Eduardo Galeano explains, Latin American economies were designed to be dependent on Europe.

This dependency continued, as a well-entrenched political construct, deep into the 19th and 20th centuries. In large part, the United States became a great industrial power by exploiting the resources of Latin America. The tin used for aluminum came from Peru and Bolivia; copper, with its myriad uses, was taken from Mexico, Peru, and Chile; the rubber used for car tires, among other things, came from the Brazilian Amazon; and, until late in the 20th century, the petroleum used to drive those cars came from Venezuela.

As U.S. companies grew wealthier from the exploitation of Latin American goods, Latin Americans themselves saw almost no benefit or increase in the standard of living, with the exception of a few wealthy plutocrats. When Latin American countries attempted to use the ballot box to remedy their problems and kick out American companies, the United States helped overthrow democratically elected leaders (Guzman in Guatemala; Allende in Chile) while imposing leaders who supported U.S. business interests, and who happened to be brutal dictators (General Armas in Guatemala; General Pinoche in Chile).

Such stories undermine American pretensions to democratic values, revealing that the United States government cares more about financial interests than democracy. The danger here is when people become aware of how the past creates the present, they are empowered to make changes in the present for the benefit of the future. Mr. Huppenthal, who has a master’s degree in business, is unlikely to support any program questions the status quo, since, of course, he is a beneficiary of the status quo.

A more serious problem posed by Mexican-American Studies classes is their ability to reveal that this history is still with us, embedded in the very framework of our international organizations. Colonialism is practiced today, but under different names and usually veiled in the obscure jargon of economics. Colonialism is now achieved through U.S.-backed organizations and policies, such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). And by studying these issues, students can see how poverty is created in Latin America, giving them an historical understanding of the politically-charged immigration issue.

With the help of the IMF and the World Bank, Latin America has been opened even further to exploitation. Many financially struggling countries, often controlled by U.S.-backed dictators, accepted loans from these organizations. When these countries struggled to repay their loans, the IMF and World Bank offered to lower interest rates in exchange for the privatization of public resources. For example, the IMF offered billions of dollars to Bolivia, under the condition that Bolivia sell its oil and water rights to foreign companies. President Evo Morales refused such offers and, as a result, is vilified by the U.S.

Among the problems plaguing the Mexican-American Studies program is the fear that students will realize U.S. policies have provided Mexicans with few options other than immigration. Mexicans don’t immigrate the U.S. for the weather or the natural beauty; Mexicans make the trip up North because they are destitute, and they are destitute because of centuries of Euro-American exploitation, corruption, and unfair trade policies, like NAFTA.

Under NAFTA, heavily subsidized American corn has flooded the Mexican market, having the effect of displacing millions of Mexican farmers who simply could not compete with U.S. government subsidies (hence the distinction between free-trade and fair-trade). These Mexican farmers move to Mexican cities and create a surplus-labor force, which drives down the cost of labor for Mexican businesses and American maquiladoras. The result of this surplus labor force is high unemployment, which leads to higher rates of immigration. It is not a coincidence that rates of immigration have skyrocketed since NAFTA’s inception.

There is a legitimate pro-American side to these stories, of course, but it is taught to children throughout their public education experience. In our history classes and textbooks, the perspectives of Latin American nations are non-existent. But these stories, when combined with the traditional U.S. view of the past, give us a more complete understanding of how the United States developed its role in the world.

So, why can’t kids in Arizona be exposed to Mexican-American studies? It’s not that John Huppenthal doesn’t want them to be indoctrinated; it’s that he doesn’t want his state’s efforts of indoctrination to be undermined by teaching children the other half of America’s story. Teach your kids Mexican-American and Latin American history, even if the State will not; it’s our duty to the future.

Andrew Kordik, a long-time resident of Escondido, holds an M.A. in history from Fordham University.

If you missed the press conference after the State Department announcement that the Keystone XL pipeline had been canceled, you missed a heck of a show.

House Speaker John Boehner was mad. And the Republican lawmakers behind him were furious. Over and over, Boehner and the gang asked angrily “What happened?” knowing full well that the answer was, well … them.

Despite their indignation, everyone on that stage knew their actions forced the cancellation of the pipeline.

For those of us who follow Congress, their feigned indignation was more akin to that of a spoiled child throwing a fit when things don’t go his way, and yet another example of why people hate Congress.

The Keystone XL pipeline was proposed to bring bitumen, a low grade Canadian pseudo oil that is strip mined out of the sandy soil in Canada’s Alberta province (it is also referred to as “tar sands” oil and “oil sands”) all the way down to Houston. That 1,700-mile route crosses the Canadian-U.S. border, which means the president has to approve the project. Because of the dirty nature of the oil, it has been a long process to evaluate the merits and safety of the project.

Nebraskans were concerned about the route through a sensitive portion of the Ogallala Aquifer, which is central to the region’s agriculture. Environmentalists hate bitumen because it has more greenhouse gas pollution associated with it than normal oil and there have been troubling questions raised about safe transportation of the new, highly corrosive forms of the oil that would run through the pipeline.

The oil industry, on the other hand, desperately wants the pipeline because Canada’s oil is largely stuck in the Midwest, where it has to be sold at a discount. The pipeline gives them new access to foreign markets and the ability to sell their oil for more money: win-win for them!

When prospects for the project looked bad, the Republicans got involved. They stepped in on behalf of their big campaign donors in the oil industry and tried to score on an issue they believe they could use against the president.

What followed was a campaign of misinformation to convince the public that the pipeline was a massive public service from Big Oil that would create loads of jobs while also weaning us from Middle Eastern oil, filling our tanks with fuel from our friendly neighbors. Both couldn’t be further from the truth.

Still, truth is a scarce commodity these days, and even on Wednesday, Boehner kept claiming the project would have brought 20,000 jobs, with others saying it would be hundreds of thousands — all even as the pipeline builders themselves admitted that the permanent jobs would number only in the hundreds (the State Department puts that number at 20 — ouch). With unemployment at 8.5%, this is about the most cynical way I can imagine to sell a project to America, especially when you know the numbers are wrong.

Also unmentioned? The fact that much of the oil coming out of Keystone XL will not end up in American gas tanks, meaning that it won’t offset our ongoing and unfortunate reliance on the Middle East for oil.

The Obama administration understands that. So when the president announced that a decision on the project would be delayed until 2013, the GOP went into overdrive, passing a law that forced the president to make a decision on the project within 60 days, despite the fact that a map of the pipeline route doesn’t even exist, making a reasonable decision impossible.

They seemed convinced they had Obama cornered. They were wrong. The Obama administration would not be bullied. So Wednesday, the president laid the blame for canceling the pipeline exactly where it should be – with Congress. Both he and the State Department made clear that this was what would happen if an arbitrary deadline were attached to the project. And he followed through with the eminently reasonable decision to deny approval of the project.

Reasonable decisions in Washington? Now that, not theatrics, is what we need more of.

Maria Cardona is a Democratic strategist and a principal at the Dewey Square Group, where she founded Latinovations (http://blog.latinovations.com). She is also a former senior adviser to Hillary Clinton, and former communications director to the Democratic National Committee.

MIAMI - Ambas campañas prometieron una lucha cuerpo a cuerpo y sin perder tiempo, los precandidatos a la nominación presidencial republicana, Newt Gingrich y Mitt Romney, se lanzaron dardos en su búsqueda del voto latino o más bien cubanoamericano de cara a las primarias republicanas del 31 de enero en Florida.

Curiosamente, uno de los temas que los enfrenta es la inmigración, precisamente el que los republicanos han evadido por los pasados años cuando de buscar soluciones se trata, y que han explotado cuando el objetivo ha sido sacar ventaja política atizando a su base más conservadora.

En Florida, los aspirantes al abanderado republicano en la contienda presidencial pretenden demostrar que son pro inmigrantes y pro hispanos cuando en pasados años guardaron silencio cuando las voces más extremistas definieron el mensaje y la imagen del Partido Republicano entre la comunidad hispana, o se sumaron al coro de voces extremistas apoyando medidas antiinmigrantes para avanzar sus objetivos políticos.

Ambos precandidatos participaron, por separado, de un foro auspiciado por Univision.com, la Cámara Estadounidense de Comercio (USHCC), y el Miami Dade College con entrevistas conducidas por el periodista y presentador del Noticiero Univisión, Jorge Ramos.

Gingrich le tiró con todo a Romney a quien tildó de antiinmigrante en un comercial radial que retiró del aire tras ser criticado por líderes hispanos republicanos, y se burló de la sugerencia de Romney de la autodeportación como forma de abordar el tema de los 11 millones de indocumentados que viven en Estados Unidos catalogándola de una “fantasía”. Reiteró además su apoyo únicamente al componente militar del DREAM Act, así como a su propuesta de buscar algún tipo de alivio migratorio para quienes lleven más de dos décadas de vivir en Estados Unidos que tal y como apuntó Ramos, deja fuera a la mayoría de los indocumentados.

En su turno, Romney se declaró pro inmigrante, “me gustan los inmigrantes”.

Aunque ha prometido que si es presidente vetaría el DREAM Act si la medida llegara a su escritorio, aseguró que no está tratando de “castigar” a los jóvenes indocumentados que no llegaron a este país sin documentos por decisión propia pues de todos modos pueden estudiar en universidades costeables —que algunos de todos modos no pueden pagar— y aunque lo hicieran, obtienen títulos universitarios que no pueden emplear por carecer de documentos.

Romney también insistió en que no propone ir por el país rodeando inmigrantes y sacándolos en autobuses, pero que con un plan E-Verify bien implementando y severas sanciones a los empleadores, su plan de autodeportaciones funcionará.

Finalmente criticó a Gingrich por los ataques que ha lanzado en su contra especialmente en el rubro migratorio.

“Es muy tentador presentarse ante una audiencia como ésta y decirles lo que quieren oír”, afirmó Romney.

Momentos más tarde, el ex gobernador de Massachusetts, quien perdió la primaria de Florida en 2008 ante el senador John McCain, fue a la emblemática Torre de la Libertad a hablar ante una audiencia cubanoamericana para decirles lo que quieren escuchar: prometerles mano dura contra los hermanos Raúl y Fidel Castro en Cuba, prometer que revocará la ley Helms-Burton, y que no le temblará la mano para enfrentar a figuras como Hugo Chávez en Venezuela.

Romney estuvo flanqueado por importantes líderes y funcionarios electos de la comunidad cubanoamericana: el ex senador Mel Martínez, el ex Secretario de Comercio, Carlos Gutiérrez, la congresista Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, y el ex congresista Lincoln Díaz-Balart, todos promotores de la reforma migratoria integral y del DREAM Act que Mitt Romney rechaza, pero quienes argumentan que el tema central es la economía y que Romney es el hombre para sacar al país del atolladero y con posibilidades reales de vencer a Barack Obama en la general.

Se calcula que los latinos representan 11% del voto republicano en Florida, con la mayoría concentrada en el Sur del estado, 59% sólo en el condado de Miami-Dade, con el voto mayormente cubano y cubanoamericano cortejado por Gingrich y Romney. En general, los latinos representan 13% del voto hispano del estado y ese voto general está más diluido por la influencia del voto puertorriqueño en la zona central del corredor I-4 el considerado en esta región uno de los más oscilantes y vitales en una elección general. De hecho, sólo el 32% de los votantes hispanos registrados en Florida son cubanoamericanos.

Pero de momento la atención se centra en el voto republicano hispano de la primaria y en esa lucha uno de los desarrollos más significativos de esta semana fue la carta enviada por un grupo de líderes republicanos hispanos a Gingrich pidiéndole que sacara del aire el comercial en que llama antiinmigrante a Romney porque no es “veraz” y es “ofensivo”. El senador republicano de Florida, Marco Rubio, quien se ha mantenido neutral en la interna republicana y a quien se nombra insistentemente como un potencial compañero de fórmula del nominado republicano, también criticó el comercial.

Quizá la parte realmente más risible de la carta es cuando estos líderes afirman que llamar antiinmigrante a Romney “lastima el progreso que los republicanos han tenido con los hispanos”.

A qué progreso se refieren porque un nuevo sondeo de Univision.com, Latino Decisions y ABC News encontró que en una elección general Obama le ganaría a Romney el voto latino 67% sobre 25% y a Gingrich 70% sobre 22%.

Quizá se refieran al progreso obtenido entre los hispanos del Sur de la Florida.

Quizá insistan en creer erradamente que ese voto es representativo del voto hispano nacional que necesitan para ganar la presidencia.

Maribel Hastings es asesora ejecutiva de America’s Voice.

Accountability

Last week’s editorial about Mayor Sanders, his State of the City speech, and his disregard for Hispanic communities received a bit of attention. Univision wanted to tape a segment about it with the Mayor, but it didn’t happen… the mayor choose not to respond… qué lástima, only goes to prove the point of the editorial… Sanders not responsive to this community…

A lot of political movidas in the South Bay: Mary Salas is now in a tough race with Linda Wagner throwing her hat into the race. Wagner has been Councilman Castaneda’s aide and campaign manager. She has already received some big time support from the Chula Vista community

Councilman Steve Castaneda it is said is eying the Assembly seat race, as is Ed Valario, and according to the rumor mill Union president Lorena Gonzalez will move into the South Bay to run for Assembly…. Los hombres de South Bay would welcome Gonzalez into the South Bay with open arms, muy guapa!!!

On the good news front: Humberto Peraza from the Southwestern Community College board flexed a bit of political muscle when he got his proposal to limit campaign contributions through committee. The issue will come before the full board in February… the right thing to do would be to pass it….

For those who saw or heard his speech, his opening video montage played to the music of “Hells Bells” (a Padres’ crowd pleaser). We were astonished to watch images flash of a young black kid with a backdrop of the ills of our barrios and neighborhoods – including crime and presumably gangs, drugs and poverty, and the boy running from this to a new football stadium, new convention center, new library, high rises.

Some have described this video as a bit disturbing. We couldn’t agree more.

The message we got was that all the problems of the barrios and innercity neighborhoods can be fixed with big projects such as a new football stadium – bam! crime is down. A new library – zap! the achievement gap between whites and minorities is solved. A new convention center – pow! drug problems are solved.

Sanders did not address the problems of our neighborhoods. He used them as props in order to sell his legacy.

Sanders’ speech glossed over or blatantly ignored the issues of foreclosures, health services, homelessness, crime, gangs and drugs that plague our children. The issues the pollution, of gentrification, lack of affordable housing, poverty, remained unimportant compared with shiny new projects.

This has been the problem with the Sanders’ administration throughout his tenure. Issues of importance to Hispanics have taken a back seat to the grander issues. The economic disaster of the Pension Fund debacle, the roots of salvation have been on the backs of the working poor who have had to give up healthcare, cut backs on pensions, and the loss of jobs. The homeless issue has been addressed by placing a homeless shelter in Barrio Logan next to an elementary school. While every community in the city has a working citizens advisory group, again in Barrio Logan the mayor has blocked the creation of such a group and has controlled the redevelopment process.

In hindsight, the opening video of the boy running away from the problems of the barrio to the communities to downtown splendor does in fact reflect the leadership of a mayor who has abandoned the neighborhoods for the glory of big development.

What is missing in the media’s coverage of the elimination of the Tucson Unified School District Mexican American Studies program is that students were learning and they wanted to go to school. I take this shutdown personal. One of the reasons I have stayed in education for over fifty-five years is that I wanted to do something about the dropout problem. I always heeded John Dewey’s dicta that a student failure was that of the teacher. If students drop out then there is something wrong with the educational system.

Arizona education has many problems: taxpayers do not want to pay for schools and AZ is dead last in student per capita spending. White parents don’t want their children going to school with Latinos and blacks as well as other working class people, so charter schools have multiplied to “balance” student ethnicity by making it whiter.

Arizona has blatantly avoided federal court orders to desegregate: more than fifty years after Brown v. the Board of Education (1954), the TUSD is still under a federal court mandate to “balance” the schools. The federal government, meanwhile, has poured millions of dollars into Arizona to help pay for integrating the schools.

The truth be told, there has been no improvement. The dropout problem remains over fifty percent. As part of an effort to correct imbalances, the federal court included the MAS program in its desegregation plan which federal government paid for.

Because I have been a highly successful educator, I have seen that building student identity ameliorates an inferiority complex ingrained by the educational process. Innumerable studies prove that an increase sense of self motivates students to better their skills and allows them to succeed in school.

The reason that I want to improve education is personal. I am not religious, but I always remember the nuns telling me when I saw a person less fortunate to say, “There for the grace of God go I.”

Although I could not do the work, I appreciate the work of Fr. Greg Boyle and Homeboy Industries. It hurts me every time I see a gang kid because I realize that as a member of society I bear a responsibility for the outcome. My vocation differs from Greg’s and I work with students by giving them an alternative to gangs when they are young. My feeling is every student that goes to college does not end up in a gang.

The TUSD MAS program was contributing to that end. Despite the racist lies of Arizona politicos it is a model to how to teach and motivate Latino students. And, despite the actions of the TUSD school board, other districts will emulate and study it.

My feelings about the people behind the destruction of the MAS program are that they have no redemption. They are no better than the members of the mafia who do not care about the outcome or hardships they cause as long as they make a profit.

Democracy has been dealt a blow. The actions of these racist has contributed to disillusionment among many students. They have brought about a loss of faith, which is always difficult whether it be in religion or politics. This loss leads to an emptiness and hopelessness. For instance, I know people who as a result of the pedophile scandals in the Catholic Church have not returned to mass.

In ending the MAS program, the State of Arizona is complicit in condemning many Latino students to failure. Thomas de Aquinas defined scandal as a word or action that is intrinsically evil, and leads to the spiritual ruin of another person. You don’t necessarily have to physically cause someone’s sin, but only be the moral cause of the sin. A sin of scandal is not accidental but premeditated as in the case of Arizona elites.

From the top on down, Arizona officials know that their actions cause many Latinos to be stigmatized. They know that they are contributing to their dropping out of school, and they don’t care.

Mark Stegeman, Michael Hicks, Miguel Cuevas and the newly appointed Alexandre Sugiyama all know it. They are bought men who don’t care about the consequences as long as they fill their pockets.

For them, education is business and it doesn’t much matter if Mexican Americans get an education. As long as people hate Mexicans, it is easier to cash in on their lack of education.

It is a well-known fact that the Tea Party is not a populist movement. It is racist and driven by right wing funding that includes the Koch brothers who Mitt Romney says are the “financial engine of the Tea Party.”

Most Arizonans know the role of ALEC (the American Legislative Exchange Council). The People for the American Way Foundation and Common Cause have published a report documenting the fact that ALEC has motivated and written most of the anti- Latino and worker legislation in the state. It is at the forefront of the anti-labor, anti-healthcare and anti-environmental reaction. It is behind the privatization of schools and prisons.

Major corporations including Coca-Cola, Kraft, ExxonMobil and GlaxoSmithKline are key players in Arizona politics. Two dozen major corporations have sat on ALEC’s board which is insidiously called the “Private Enterprise Board.”

Well aware of the growing Latino population, it is to ALEC’s advantage to keep the state white and Mexicans disenfranchised. Thus, it has sponsored voter suppression bills that potentially disenfranchise tens of thousands of Arizonans.

The report identifies fifty Arizona state legislators who are current ALEC members. These bought politicos wrote and sponsored SB 1070, Arizona’s notorious immigration law. It is no accident that privatized prisons are flush with immigrant detainees. Uneducated Mexican Americans also insure future inmate growth. Aside from money to run the prisons, prison labor is competing with free labor.

In Tucson, the Southern Arizona Leadership Council is an ALEC mini-me; an all-white country club whose members overlap with other heavy hitters locally, regionally and statewide. The TUSD superintendent of schools is a former SALC vice-president.

Recently, when Judy Burns, a supporter of the MAS program died, SALC engineered the appointment of Alexandre Sugiyama, a lecturer in Economics at the University of Arizona, to fill her seat. It accomplished its ends by stacking the selection committee.

Sugiyama was obviously selected because he is half Brazilian and half Japanese. He has no ties to the community; he is a lecturer with no publications, or knowledge or interest in education.

His student evaluations are low: “AVOID (reasons): 1. Resents his own job such that he’s consistently 15 mins late to a 1hr class…” Another “if you choose to take this class with this teacher you are in for a real treat. TORTURE. Sugiyama is such a horrid teacher it is unreal. Do yourself a favor and just say NO.”

As soon as Sugiyama was appointed, he voted with Stegeman and Hicks to replace Cuevas as chair and then with a 4-1 majority abolished MAS. Democracy in action.

Thus far, what is lost is what happens to Latino students; no one gives a damn. Nobody cares if they end up in gangs, as long as they make money for the elites — that is what counts. Fear of ending up in a class with a Mexican will generate more Charter Schools and more dropouts will insure larger prison populations in the future. Everyone makes money.

The disillusionment is not limited to Arizona politicos but includes the federal government. The federal courts have not enforced federal laws. The Obama administration is paralyzed furthering the feeling of abandonment and encouraging TUSD Tea Party Board member Hicks to go around saying that state law trumps federal law.

My mother would say about the gaggle in Tucson, no tienen madre. They are disrespectful; they don’t care about the law, or how many people are hurt by their actions.

I am not as nice as my mother was. I feel much like the people in the Boyle Heights area when the Night Stalker, Richard Ramírez, was terrorizing Los Angeles. They put out signs daring him to come East of the River, and then took care of him when he did.

Hopefully the Tea Party will come to L.A.

Con la primaria republicana de Florida en puerta, la primera que manifiesta ampliamente el cortejo del voto hispano del estado del Sol, no deja de sorprender que republicanos como Mitt Romney sigan pensando que la estrategia que aplican para apelar al voto cubanoamericano del Sur floridano es la estrategia ganadora para atraer al voto latino del resto del país en una elección general.

En el caso de Romney, el aparente casi seguro nominado presidencial republicano, resulta no sólo sorprendente sino indignante que mientras busca el apoyo del voto hispano de Florida o más bien del voto cubanoamericano del Sur de la Florida con anuncios en español y cafecitos, su retórica antiinmigrante siga subiendo de tono, deseche cada vez más la reforma migratoria integral, amenace con vetar incluso el proyecto de ley DREAM Act -ambas cosas promovidas por los políticos cubanoamericanos que lo apoyan-, y para colmo, se jacte del apoyo recibido del arquitecto de las leyes antiin-migrantes de Arizona, Alabama y Carolina del Sur, Kris Kobach, una de las figuras más extremistas y divisivas del país en el tema migratorio.

Como la moneda, Romney tiene dos caras.

Romney ya tiene en su esquina a los hermanos Díaz-Balart, Lincoln y Mario, ex congresista y congresista republicanos de Florida, respectivamente, a la congresista Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, y a una lista de ex funcionarios de la administración de George W. Bush, entre esos, el ex senador, ex Secretario de Vivienda y ex presidente del Comité Nacional Republicano (RNC), Mel Martínez, y al ex Secretario de Comercio, Carlos Gutiérrez, todos defensores de la reforma migratoria integral y del DREAM Act para legalizar a jóvenes indocumentados que quieren proseguir estudios universitarios o ingresar a las Fuerzas Armadas.

Todas estas figuras argumentan ahora que la elección general será determinada por la economía y que Romney tiene las ideas para lograr que la economía repunte. Es decir, nada importa que su postura en inmigración sea diametralmente opuesta a lo que han defendido por años.

Es de esperarse que los anuncios en español, los cafecitos y el apoyo de estas figuras que hace cuatro años prefirieron al senador John McCain como candidato presidencial republicano sobre Romney, impulsen al ex gobernador de Massachusetts en la preferencia de los electores cubanoamericanos de Florida.

Aunque Romney emerja triunfante de la primaria floridana y con una mayoría del voto cubanoamericano en su columna, la verdadera prueba de fuego para cualquier republicano sigue siendo atraer ese 40% del voto hispano en la elección general de noviembre.

Ni siquiera en Florida, donde se concentra el voto cubanoamericano más conservador del Sur del estado, eso está garantizado porque en otras partes del estado, particularmente en el corredor I-4, ese voto se diluye con el sufragio de electores puertorriqueños que tienden a apoyar más a los demócratas.

Romney, como otras figuras republicanas, está apostando al descontento de un sector del sufragio hispano con las promesas incumplidas del presidente Barack Obama de impulsar y promulgar una reforma migratoria integral y en su lugar deportar una cifra record de inmigrantes.

Pero lo que olvidan republicanos como Romney es que el voto cubanoamericano no es la norma en el resto del país y que sus posturas migratorias extremas, particularmente contra los jóvenes que se beneficiarían del DREAM Act, son rechazadas por una mayoría de esos votantes hispanos que ya sea por lazos familiares, de amistad o por empatía, apoyan en grandes cifras una reforma amplia de las leyes migratorias, el DREAM Act y se ofenden ante las expresiones de los candidatos en contra de los inmigrantes, o de las cuestionables alianzas como la de Romney con Kobach.

Incluso en el voto cubanoamericano hay sectores que defienden el DREAM Act y que durante el intento fallido de aprobar la medida de manera independiente a fines del 2010 expresaron su rechazo a quienes se opusieron al proyecto por tratarse de jóvenes que no decidieron por cuenta propia ingresar a Estados Unidos sin documentos.

También persiste el rumor de que Romney estaría considerando sumar al senador cubanoamericano de Florida, Marco Rubio, como su compañero de fórmula, para atraer al voto hispano. Quizá lo ayude en Florida, pero no con el voto hispano del resto del país tener a otra figura opuesta a la reforma amplia y al DREAM Act o al menos con posturas ambivalentes.

Como digo una cosa digo la otra. El presidente Barack Obama y los demócratas, aunque tienen el apoyo de la mayoría del voto hispano, tienen ante sí el gran reto de movilizarlo en cifras suficientes que garanticen su reelección en estados clave y por ende, a la presidencia.

Pero figuras como Romney le están alla-nando el terreno enarbolando posturas migratorias extremistas que serán contra-producentes en atraer ese sufragio en la elección general.

Eliseo Medina, secretario-tesorero del Sindicato Internacional de Empleados de Servicios (SEIU), dijo que Romney necesitará más de un cafecito para conseguir el voto hispano en una elección general.

Y el congresista demócrata de Illinois, Luis Gutiérrez, lo resumió así: “Los votantes latinos pueden oler a un farsante y pueden oler que eso es lo que Mitt Romney es. Y si Mitt Romney cree que puede sacudirse la hediondez (de sus posturas antiinmigrantes) seleccionando a Marco Rubio como su compañero de fórmula, debería pensarlo mejor”.

Maribel Hastings es asesora ejecutiva de America’s Voice.

Howls of laughter bounce off the walls in California’s capitol, Sacramento with the revelation of an exciting new criminal defense that follows the creative “Twinkie Defense” in San Francisco a generation ago that justified murder.

The “tumor” defense of Democratic legislator Mary Hayashi bamboozled a judge enough to lower her felony charges of shoplifting to misdemeanors. It is “Laugh Out Loud” funny, and stupid.

Face it Mary, you stole $2500 from the San Francisco Neiman Marcus Department store, including a pair of sexy leather pants, very tight pants. Oh, what a sex kitten the East Bay legislator is; but, a free sex kitten. The judge gave her no jail time after she pleaded “no contest” to the lowered charges.

More alarming, however, is that a Republican legislator is walking around free, unindicted for a crime of immense seriousness compared to Hayashi’s theft of sexy leather pants. Assemblyman Tom Donnelly of a High Desert-based Assembly district has committed one of the worst crimes ever by a California public official.

He was busted for attempting to enter an airplane at the Ontario airport with a loaded pistol in his carry-on bag complete with an extra bullet-filled magazine. Yes, that’s a loaded pistol. The pistol and magazine were confiscated; he was referred to the San Bernardino District Attorney for potential prosecution.

Question, why wasn’t he arrested, handcuffed, booked and jailed? Hayashi was, why not Donnelly?

While we await the District Attorney’s pleasure, we need to discuss an even greater crime Donnelly is committing by introducing Assembly Bill 26 in the Legislature. It mirrors word for word, the infamous Arizona and Alabama anti-illegal alien laws that federal courts have stopped cold.

The three laws are eerily familiar in wording. Could it be they were written by the country’s infamous Yale-educated racist, Kris Kobach, whose daytime job is Kansas Secretary of State?

Here are two provisions of AB 26 that pistol-packing Donnelly has introduced which are onerous and probably unconstitutional (from the official Legislative Counsel’s Digest of AB 26):

(1) “This bill would prohibit public officials and agencies from adopting a policy that limits or restricts the enforcement of federal immigration laws or that restricts the sharing of a person’s immigration status, as specified. The bill would allow any person to bring an action against an entity to enforce these provisions.”

(2) “This bill would prohibit an employer from knowingly or intentionally employing an unauthorized alien, as specified. The bill would establish a process for persons to file complaints of violations of these provisions with the Attorney General or a district attorney. The bill would make it a misdemeanor to make a false and frivolous complaint…”

Notice one glaring word – PERSON, PERSONS in these two provisions, not California Resident or citizen or even adult. In other words, a 17-year-old “person” in Georgia may file a complaint in California under either provision. Sneaky!

Like thieves in the night, the bill’s authors and Donnelly have hidden legal elements in the bill that would permit individuals like Donnelly, who founded the California Minutemen and who is close to national Minuteman founder Jim Gilchrist, to file complaints with the California Attorney General about employers who hire Mexican-looking people resulting in expensive investigations and to punish government employees from doing their jobs by opting in or out of federal programs as permitted.

When a blogger wrote a critical piece about Donnelly’s airport gun, someone – probably Donnelly — from his website wrote the following note that reflects Donnelly’s lack of education, class and political acumen. This California Minuteman founder is famous for his profound hate and racism towards Mexicans.

Sent from Donnelly’s Web Site: “If your (blog) were not so full of inaccuracies, untruths, and outright misinformation, it would be worthy of a true response. You know nothing about me, but don’t let that get in the way of your career in writing fiction. Funny thing is the truth is almost always stranger and more interesting than fiction, but blowhards like you who think they know it all never find that out.”

The Blogger wrote about Donnelly’s airport pistol bust. It pointed out that Donnelly does not have a concealed weapon carry permit. It also questions Donnelly’s truthfulness; he says he forgot the weapon in his bag. Donnelly claims he carried it because of threats of harm rooted in his efforts to rescind the recently enacted California Dream Act that allows state financial aid for certain college students brought illegally into the USA as children, of, say, six months of age.

There is no record in Sacramento or anywhere that he reported threats to any law enforcement agency. Is pistol-packing Minuteman Donnelly telling the truth?

Three years ago, the motel & hotel owners in Chula Vista voted to approve an amendment to the Transient Occupancy Tax (TOT) of 2 1/2% (on top of the existing 10%) that persons staying in our motels/hotels would have to pay. It’s purpose was to “put more heads in beds.” All the taxed money, in turn, was given to the Chula Vista Chamber of Commerce to implement.

The 2 ½% tax has raised more than $400,000 per year. After three years, there is some dissatisfaction with it. (1) The Chamber has not produced any study or facts that show it had any impact. That seems a pretty elementary thing to do, but apparently they did not or cannot do it. (2) As best as we can figure, at least 50% of these funds went to supporting Chamber people and normal operations. (3) We have been told that the MEMBERS of the Chula Vista Chamber of Commerce only pay about $250,000 of dues themselves.

After recently watching four hours of brain-numbing discussion between the Chamber and our City Council, our conclusion is that the Chamber, while perhaps well-meaning in the beginning, ended up just suckering the motel/hotel owners and the City Council into a tax program which is being used primarily to support normal Chamber activities, with no demonstrated benefit to the motels/hotels. That simply is not fair to the motels/hotels. Looking at the numbers, it would appear that the Chamber members simply do not contribute enough to support their own Chamber of Commerce.

This is wrong.

Susan and Peter Watry
Chula Vista 

We must protect woman’s right to choice

Sunday is the 39th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion in the U.S. This safe, legal procedure must remain available to women as part of comprehensive reproductive health care. Proposed restrictions to legal abortion care are unacceptable and are opposed by the majority of the public as well as the premiere health organizations in the U.S. and worldwide—organizations we depend on to advise us on health issues. Spending time attempting to restrict a safe, legal, and accepted procedure is not what federal and state legislators were elected to office to focus on.

Unfortunately 2012 is shaping up to be another year of extremes. Many state legislators have already signaled support for or introduced extreme legislation that will ban or restrict abortion. Legislation that will harm the health of women include “personhood” initiatives — measures to declare a fertilized egg a person — or laws that requires restrictive regulations on health centers, and bills designed to eliminate funding for family planning services, Medicaid, or Planned Parenthood health services. We must not let this happen.

Estela Blanco
El Cajon