WELL, IT’S BEEN A WHILE since I’ve written, here, and I do it less and less. Most of what I have to say politically, I put out there in the form of video, as was the intention stated in the video Cambiando, made at the end of 2008. Of course I will always be writing, here, there, here and there. I write today to tell you about my impending trip, and a few other things.

1) Netroots Nation 2010. I entered a contest to win a scholarship to attend this annual blogfest, as without these sorts of things, I’d no doubt never go! So I’m happy to say that Democracy for America along with America’s Voice have awarded me a scholarship and I will be there this year in Vegas, from July 22 – 25th. If we’ve spoken and you are going to be there, drop me a line at nezuaATxolagrafikDOTcom (or if you gots mah numba, text me) and perhaps we can meet up for a good soul-healing bout of drunken karaoke or something.

2) Thanks. There’s been a few times that I’ve asked for help from my readers for events like this or when things got tight, and you have come through for me. We’re all hanging on by our fingernails, there’s a lot of blog fundraisers out there (I’m not about to pitch one today), and yet readers have always cared enough to reach out in that way. Usually I thank you privately, and if I’ve ever forgotten, I want to apologize and thank you publicly now for each and every cent or time you’ve done so. I have de-emphasized the Donate button on my blog over the years simply because I didn’t want people to feel there was a nag everytime they came to read. But it’s always there, if you step in something and feel the need to share it.

3) Wolves in green bonnets. My amigos over at newcomm.org have asked me to bring to your attention an important link on their latest investigation and report on how the tireless racist factions of the anti-immigration movement have infiltrated the environmental agenda and dialogue. It’s important stuff.

Who would have thought that the renowned Lester Brown of Worldwatch Institute or Roderick Nash of the classicWilderness and the American Mind would involve themselves in a portion of the environmental movement that dallies with nativists and white nationalists?  Or that the Weeden Foundation, a mainstay funder of numerous environmental groups, might “steer the environmental movement toward a course fueled by bigotry and racism?”

With the release today of “Apply the Brakes: Anti-Immigrant Co-optation of the Environmental Movement,” the Center for New Community has laid these unseemly realities bare, and exposed yet another effort by anti-immigrant forces to corrupt the dialogue on the relationship of immigration to population growth to environmental degradation.  As well, the report maps the ties between anti-immigrant interests and environmental groups nationwide.

4. Mushy-mouth politicians who live in splendor and comfort chastise children who have fallen into the gap of society’s unfair laws for taking it upon themselves to drag the apathetic public eye their way.

Yeah, Dickdurbin the Senator is mad at DREAM Act students for highlighting the government’s inaction, an inaction that causes them great pain, emotional struggle, and societal roadblock.

Tuff titty, Elite Dood. You embarrass yourself with all your noise and even while trying to cover your own ass by saying “For nearly a decade, Sen. Durbin has sponsored the DREAM Act” as well as dropping the implication of threat in saying that the “tide of public opinion has long been on the side of the DREAM Act.”

So what? If they don’t be quiet you’re gonna take away your ineffectual words of support? Dig: YOUR TEN YEAR TIDAL SUPPORT HAS GIVEN THEM NADA. So unless you are willing to engage in action just as bold as they, risking just as much as they? Shut up. Damn, most of the time, Politicians really are such unself aware, silly, unserious assholes.

5. Rock and Roll Remains Righteous.

(LOS ANGELES, CA July 21) Rage Against the Machine will play their first concert in Los Angeles in 10 years at the Hollywood Palladium Friday with all proceeds going to benefit Arizona organizations fighting SB 1070. Oberst and The Mystic Valley Band will also perform.

Benefit concert performers will be joined by long time civil and immigrant rights activists Dolores Huerta, Co-Founder of the United Farm Workers (UFW), Chris Newman Legal Director and General Counsel of Legal Challenge to SB 1070, and Arizona grass roots leader Sal Reza of Puente. This will be the Soundstrike’s first official press conference.

Soundstrike participant and Rage vocalist Zack de la Rocha said, “SB 1070 if enacted would legalize racial profiling in Arizona. This law runs counter to music’s essential purpose, which is to unite people and not divide them. We want to thank the artists of conscious that have joined the Soundstrike throughout the world who use their role as artists to stand for civil and human rights.”

Okay, gente. I’m outta here. On a plane in a few. If you’re out Begas way, hit me up. Peace!

News With Nezua vids first appear Monday mornings at La Frontera Times. Wednesdays they show up at UMX, as well as in a dim setting at The XOLAGRAFIK Theater. Link to YouTube version: Part One and Part Two.

THE FRIENDS I KEEP NOWADAYS are involved in the struggle.

Meaning, they are engaged in standing, speaking, or working for social justice. It’s not as pretentious as it sounds. After all, they are Xicano writers, or Boricua thinkers, or queer lawyers, or Black entrepreneurs or Asian auteurs, or Gender-Breaker System Shakers, or disabled poets, or feminists or Feminists, or some overlap of all these things! So all it means to say they are involved in social justice in some way is that they love themselves and are self actualizing, and support others who travel a similar road.

They are sane; they do not listen to paid contortionist leeches like Glenn Beck who take a phrase like “Social Justice” and try to make it into something strange. They know what it means. (Most, if not all, don’t even listen to the Rupert Mindfuchs Station. They love themselves that much.) They are kind and wise beings; while faulted, they never imagine they have the right to take, stomp, or siphon simply because they have the opportunity, or because a law happens to allow it. They are broadminded and intelligent; they get that imbalance is a dangerous scenario to nurture, and that helping ourselves does not have to hurt others, nor should it.

I don’t really want to waste time with people, otherwise. It’s just a drain, and a battle in the wrong place to get hung up on an individual who is not “there” with you.

Of course it is no utopia, even in activist/advocate circles. We all have our interests, and they do not perfectly align. But again, with the wise lens of interconnectedness, we work together to understand how each our particular “causes” are bound up in the same struggle. Because they are.

I am not blind to reality. I understand members of each community have members who do not recognize this. There are always class issues that can divide any community. There are members of the Latino/Mexican/Puerto Rican/Cuban, etc communities who have homophobic issues without realizing they harm the many queer Latinos with such attitudes. There are still members of the Feminist community who are oblivious to the staggering amount of issues women immigrants face. There are members of the Black community that support SB 1070, without realizing how siding with lawmen like Arpaio or politicians like Russell Pearce who are bringing laws made possible by extremist groups like FAIR puts them on the side of their very own persecutors and killers. And thought I know all won’t agree, I would hope that most Asians are already aware of today’s Yellow Peril-like glare, and that Jews shiver to watch authorities randomly requesting people’s papers—

Because we need to recognize these overlaps in social angst and persecution. And not only in retrospect!

I, too, tire of the poem about who “They” first came for…because the poem serves nowadays as a sweet Facebook status or Twitch of wisdom and then we move on. I tire of it because the point of that poem was to warn the human race of our own tendencies to side with the oppressors, even when by all means, we are of the same cloth and in the same loom.

It is an old, and beautiful piece of writing. It sprang from another time, and sadly it applies today. But let’s step out of distant sorrowful gazes; let’s leave the library and the history class for a moment.

Now Is the Time!

Because Now is the time to stand up. Now is the time to say “I’m not waiting for Them to come for me. I’m educated. I’m fluent in English. I’m a citizen. I’m middle class. And I believe in what is Right, not in What is Currently Legal. I believe that what I do is a part of What the USA Is.”

Now is the time to get your hands dirty and fight. The most vicious elements of bigotry and racism are not takin’ it easy. They are ramping up and have infiltrated politics and media and prowl the streets at night, as well. Your heart is needed, brother. Your strength is needed, sister. Arm yourself with knowledge, and enlist that wild, thriving heart.

And don’t fall for the ILLEGULL-SCREECHERS venomous and self-righteous screeds.

A LEGAL lens is not the Equivalent nor the Determinant of Truth

Law does not equal truth. Law is but a clumsy attempt that the human being wields in order to reach into the murky and layered realities of our huddled mass of culture and times and fish out Truth. And justice. And thus, this high-power but sometimes clumsy crane arm must always be closely scrutinized, because that steel contains no nerve endings. And if our aim is off, it reaches into people’s lives, grabs them by the hair and plunges them to the bottom of a lake where they will be suffocated and perhaps never emerge from the clutch of human passion gone wrong.

So to screech THEY’RE ILLEEEGAL really just makes you look like…a pod person. Like a YouTube commenter. And a bigot, in truth. An unsophisticated one, is all.

But some of the most effective bigots are not unsophisticated. They know not to use all capitals. They know not to screech “ILLEEEEGUL.”

They know how to affect the veneer of the respectable. But they are still acting in the name of bigotry.

I grew up poor. We made our way to American Mediocrity and with our own VCR and new car by the time I left the house at 15. But before that, for a while, we had less than nothing; we had the road. We had a bucket for a toilet and three stumps for front steps. I don’t give fuckall about veneer. It means nothing to me. I hardly see it. I know what a spendy and fancy coat bestows on the wearer. And I know you can snatch that coat off and the same miserable, stinking, stick-figure will be there underneath it. I judge not by the coat, but the stride and the shape inside.

A Wallet Sized Snapshot is No Substitute for A Big Picture

So I was saddened to read this post supporting SB 1070 on the Huffington Enquirer by an African American named Clarence Jones, hailing from—of all places—the Martin Luther King, Jr. Institute at Stanford University.

The article brandishes an impressive thread count, and the buttons are handcrafted by the most worthy of workers; the history of the cut and the fashion is well documented and highly regarded. But the figure within clamors with ignorant angles, stumbles in the darkness inside. The coat is simply too large for its occupant.

While claiming a grasp on the “big picture,” the writer seems ignorant to what the big picture is, instead offering us phrases that eerily echo some of the most vile anti-immigrant voices out there before finishing up.

As an African-American who lived through and before the Civil Rights Movement, I’m no fan of assessing people based on their skin color. But holding a struggling State’s feet to the fire on tactics is missing the point . Why are protests not being directed to our national government and the government of Mexico? Why aren’t these groups demanding that our porous border with Mexico be closed, once and for all? It’s not impossible. We have the most sophisticated surveillance and monitoring technology in history, the most formidable military in the world, yet we are unable to stop the daily intrusion of illegal immigrants from Mexico into the United States? This is a failure of policy, not one of capability.

The author is African American, has lived through the Civil Rights era and is “no fan” of racial profiling. Which is good. Because Facebook’s rules won’t even let a group that stands for Racial Profiling have a fan page. No dilemma for him.

But not fanning a Racist Facebook Group’s page doth not a humane or thorough thinker make. Standing under the banner of one of social justice’s greatest icons and leaders—MLK jr—Jones is baffled as to why we are not using our “formidable military” and surveillance technology to “stop the daily intrusion of illegal immigrants.” And thinks this is “the big picture.”

Here is a quote from a Utah Minuteman site that today linked to my site as a “Race Monger” blog:

The Utah Minuteman Project, is a grassroots effort of likeminded citizens and legal residents of Utah whose goal is to defend Utah and America from the scourge of illegal aliens from around the world who have invaded us, plundered our public treasuries, killed our citizens, stolen our jobs, and aggrandized their demands against the common weal.  Similar to patriotic movements across the Nation, the UMP is dedicated to securing our borders, recovering our sovereignty, and re-establishing the Rule of Law in Utah and Washington D.C.  Just as important as these imperatives, our efforts are intended to educate the ignorant and motivate the apathetic to understand who we are as a people and what binds us together as Americans.  Truly, if we do not know for what we stand, we cannot know for what we struggle.

With an editor’s quick touch, the Utah Minutemen could be sophisticated bigots. They are not quite there. But really, their words and sentiment seem not too distant from Mister Jones’ overall message.

Even while congressmen get themselves arrested in acts of civil disobedience, and Anti-Immigrant politicians like Tom Tancredo submit that this law requires racial profiling and is wrong…Scholar and writer at the Martin Luther King Jr institute, Clarence Jones maintains that targeting SB 1070 is wrong.

I wonder what MLK would say.

Why Target Arizona?

Why target Arizona? It’s simple!

Or it would become simple if you did research into who is helping to get these laws brought to the table, who the lawmakers are, what groups are supporting them. The ties to Neo-Nazis and white supremacists, the eugenics movement and their thinking, and white nationalists are well-documented by now.

Are these the people you feel aligned with, Mister Jones? Do no bells go off simply knowing about these many ties and affiliations? Or…are those sorts of details a part of the picture not big enough for you?

Arizona is a petri dish for these types of laws. They begin there, and spread. Seven other states are now considering laws like SB 1070. These efforts are aided by the extremist nativist anti-immigrant group FAIR.

That is why we target SB 1070. Now, while there is time.

Do you stand with these efforts? Or with those of FAIR? Perhaps—Mister Jones—you should donate to FAIR? Because I’m sure all the efforts expended to turn our nation into one that does their bidding and resonates with their own neo-nazi flavored philosophies have drained their coffers.

The writer continues with his “big picture”:

Any version of amnesty for illegal immigrants and efforts to organize a boycott of Arizona will detract from the number one priority affecting substantial segment of the American people: unemployment.

Ah. “Amnesty.” So this is perhaps a Conservative writer. I see. That explains some things.

Well, you are wrong, Mister Jones. And I feel sorry for you if  you think words like “Amnesty” help project a wider understanding of a Big Picture. It is a loaded term as you well know; it is a Right Wing talking point meant to infuse a disgust in people that they ought feel kindly about letting Mexican criminals off the hook for invading/overwhelming/outsmarting/outnumbering Real Americans.

And anyone who thinks Arizona is only after legal things, then I ask them to explain the culture-eradicating elements of their recent legal moves removing teachers with accents from teaching English, or Mexican American studies.

Hm? it’s about bein’ legal? Sure.

A ludicrous question or two:

Why don’t the pro-amnesty undocumented immigrant leaders join forces with the “anti-illegal immigration” leaders and bring the Government of Mexico to the table?

Because the human rights activists cannot “join forces” with people like FAIR, nor would they! That would be like a human being “joining forces” with a hungry crocodile. Yum! Your suggestion that people who would rally to the same causes that  MLK jr has—seeking justice and humanity for the downtrodden and vulnerable poor—should sit down and join forces with people who sometimes wear hoods or congregate with those who do shows you have no clue what you are talking about, and further, are despoiling the name and legacy of Martin Luther King, jr.

The annual cost of maintaining and providing services to illegal or “undocumented” citizens should be tabulated, assumed and paid by the Government of Mexico or credited against the annual cost of oil we import from them until such time as immigrants from their country become U.S. citizens.

Okay. Fair enough.

Before that, let’s return all the illegal social services contributions that were taken from many undocumented workers’ paychecks. I bet that lump sum would be no paltry pile, and could cover most if not all of that. So let’s keep going, and return any taxes that were taken at all from their pay, and while we’re at it, let’s return all the illegal goods that were produced by their “illegal” labor, and all the affiliate profits that were leveraged on the doings of those businesses by various agents.

Right after that, let’s tabulate the costs of NAFTA to Mexican campesinos and the Mexican corn market and larger economy. Let’s—while we’re at it—tabulate the costs of human lives, suffering, destruction of historical items and the looting of museums and buildings that the USA has wrought in Iraq. And let’s keep tabulating the damage our own nation is doing around the world. Let’s tabulate the costs of funding Mexico’s Mérida Initiative, which gives cash and police weaponry/surveillance gear to enable Felipe Calderón to bring about more torture and murder of its own citizens in his disastrous Drug War.

Or…is getting to the Big Picture done by only focusing on one small area that supports your argument?

I’ll come back to your cost argument in a moment. First I want to finish quoting you by dropping your last sentence in here.

Let’s face it: right or wrong, the Arizona legislation is treating the symptoms of an international disease that needs much stronger medicine.

And there, I am almost with you. Almost.

Yes, immigration needs to be taken up on a federal level. Though certainly not with the backward lens you propose! That is not taking up immigration; that is militarizing our nation. It rhymes, but will have very different consequences.

As far as blaming the non-movement of legislation for Arizona’s very special hostility toward Mexicans, you are wrong. And unsurprisingly by now, you are the one missing the big picture.

The Long War on the Indigenous

SB 1070 is not some new phenomenon cooked up by Arizona lawmakers just this year because Obama’s White House has not acted on Weeding Out the Illegals™! Arizona is acting out a long-running battle against inevitability. I touched on a bit of this the other day, but a more thorough and academic explanation can be found here:

“Looking Hispanic” has always been a misnomer; what it really means is those who are dark and short and who look the “most Indigenous.” Truthfully, here in Arpaio Country, that profiling that everyone fears is already here with us. And to dispel illusions, the darkest amongst us have always been subjected to racial profiling by the “migra” and by law enforcement agencies everywhere in the country. This is true whether we’ve been here for a few days or for thousands of years. And to dispel further illusions, this civilizational clash alluded to is national in scope; witness the many hundreds of anti-immigrant bills nationwide since 2006. Only its epicenter is here. [...]

SB 1070 brings us to a moral precipice. After World War II, a consensus developed here that it had been wrong to have incarcerated the Japanese in internment camps because such action was morally wrong. Virtually no one had the courage to assert this while it was happening. Law enforcement has that chance today, to refuse to obey SB 1070 that is both, morally repugnant and outside of the U.S. Constitution.

Regarding the larger civilizational struggle, the context is akin to when Europeans first came to this continent. The conquistadors came for gold, land and bodies (slaves). The friars, on the other hand, came for souls. Similarly, the migra and extremist legislators want bodies deported; the state school superintendent, Tom Horne, wants souls.

Bodies and Souls. I have long called it “The Long War.” Meaning the war on the indigenous and their resources by outsiders who have had a few generations of offspring by now, who have in turn absorbed enough of the new dogma to forget whom they owe for what, and who they are in the entire big picture. It rolls on, in many shapes. SB 1070 is the latest.

The Big Picture

Like you, Mister Jones, I want us to discuss, the Big Picture. Or, I should not be snide: unlike you. Because despite your open-minded subhed, you are not offering Big Picture fixins. Just more oppressor snackybits.

Here’s my final point. And it goes back to your tabulation masturbation; it goes back to who costs whom what.

I get that we are a nation long encouraged not to think for ourselves, and not to think with our heart or mind’s eye. We are a people long conditioned to powermongers who do all they can to shore up their power, weaken ours, and tell us how to think. And I get that we’ve been told to fear so so so much in the past ten years. Trust me. I feel it weigh at times on my spirit…then I remember who I am. I am an energy and consciousness allowed space and time on this earth for a short time; I am not beholden to adopt any other person’s idea, fear, or hope. I am free of that.

But it’s out there. And I get it. Fear the Arabs, fear the blacks, fear the mexicans, fear the poor, fear the crazy, fear the ugly. Fear anything that throws a shadow on your beautiful castle with it’s lush Green Zone and moat.

I also get that this immigration furor that has been cooked up is simply theater. And many players stand to benefit.

Big business, which wants (ideally) a million people working for a penny a day so those Goldman-Sachs types at the top can have a hundred wardrobes and twenty planes.

ICE, this new police/military/federal force that surely costs billions, needs justification to continue. Cities and towns now count the enforcement measures as ways of propping up their economies.

Racists and white nationalists see a way to reshape the populace by lies and violence.

Humbler goals are harbored by most of these undocumented people. Families want to stay together, want to be Americans, want a chance to live in success or at least not in misery. Workers want to earn 8 times more by simply moving to another area; just as Jersey residents might travel to NYC to work every day, and just like people fudge their own insurance to pretend to drive in one state while living in another.  Except in Mexico, it’s not about a slightly lower insurance rate. Families simply cannot survive. Parents abandon their kids simply to be able to work and send them money so the rest of the family can live.

To see what is going on, and then to sneer about law and call for the military? Wow. It sure is one way to respond, no doubt. No doubt. But if I were doing that, I’d not have the nerve to then attach Martin Luther King Jr’s name to anything I wrote. Honestly.

But back to my thread. There are a lot of actors in the game who make honest accounting of the issue difficult.

But this enforcement mania is theater.

If there were a way to remove all ten or eleven or twelve million undocumented people at once, and place them back in Canada, Ireland, France, Germany, Poland, Iraq, Afghanistan, Guatemala, Venezuela, China, Chile, Mexico and wherever else they come from—I’d say okay. Do it. Do it so you can see how the US way of life collapses entirely. Just falls to the ground. The difference would be cataclysmic, the results echoing out everywhere. You want to talk depression? Economic trouble? Class warfare? The rich or moderately well-off would need walls around their own yards, screw the border.

Can you imagine the number of businesses that would collapse? Cease to exist? Neighborhoods empty and vacant and crime filled? How many Postvilles would play out across the country?

If you had some conceivable way of sweeping every undocumented person out of the nation, I’d say do it because the outcome would cripple America, all that labor and family and energy going back to where it could do good and be recognized for the good it does. And then we might learn.

But there is no way to do that. Nobody really wants to do that. No honest actor in all of this thinks we can do that or actually wants that to happen.

So…what do they want?

Those who work to persecute the undocumented today want to keep this ongoing terror theater going for a couple reasons.

Politicians want to manipulate the vulnerable and to keep as much labor as they need to keep the American Economy wheels turning. Turning with fear. Turning because those working the gears have no choice and are just holding on to get by. Which is a sort of slavery by other means. Serfdom by other names. It’s abuse and exploitation.

The anti-immigrant factions that attempt to turn the hostile lens of criminal law on their own counties simply don’t want to see Mescans in their damn ‘hood. That’s what SB 1070 is about. Get out of our nice, pristine, fake-ass neighborhood. But that’s as far as they want it to go. They, too, need all the wheels to keep turning. They don’t want factories and businesses and crops and restaurants and communities around the nation to fall apart.

So it’s terror theater and economical rewards and its an abuse of human beings and a spit in the face to our purported abilities to think and feel and act reasonably as a society.

By These Deeds We Shall Be Known

In fact, the way we approach or fail the Immigration issue today contains the key to all our current societal and cultural and moral dilemmas. It is what will determine how far forward we want to go in this era. What are humans in this land capable of? Are we still bound by greed? Are we still defenseless against our more primal inclinations? Racism. Equality. Feminism. Individual greed vs the collective good. Questions of property and what it is used for, what land means. How connected we want to be to the humanity that helps us set our tables, to mother earth, and those who feed us.

As I see it, we are being called to step up in a very particular way. It is a unique time. The conversations are all shifting, rapidly evolving, almost too fast for the belly to keep up with. How will we do? Will we rise to the occassion? Or meander along in mediocrity, still sowing great pain and propping up imbalance and bigotry justified by bad law and force?

Walls in the mind, walls in the desert. Rituals and roles. Bodies and souls. You can contain another’s with a show of force, but it will be at the cost of imprisoning your own.

THIS IS A SPECIAL DAY for a number of reasons. Here at UMX, I cannot help but think of my own, as this is The Unapologetic Mexican’s fourth birthday. That’s like 20 years in blog years! Empires rise and fall out here in a couple years! Seemingly sound friendships are utterly exploded in a three day flamewar! Massive campaigns ripple across the blogiverse, change the world, and then subsume into pixelated fade out in an eighth of that time!

And I’m still going, and still raising hell, and still talking to some of the same cool cats I met in the early days.

In that time, I’ve seen immigration and the human rights issues involved there, and the ones needing attention regarding the Latino community, become centered in the meanstream media in a way I never expected. I’ve seen numerous lists, groups, companies, and orgs spring up to address these needs. The landscape has changed a bit, the challenges remain the same, la lucha sigue.

Echoes. I became gradually more and more aware of all those issues for various reasons, but a lot of it began with my father’s activism/poetry/writing on our community’s situation. I’m thinking now of the late 80′s-ish Coors’ boycott. (People telling gente not to boycott AZ may not understand the tradition and success of our boycotts.) I remember jefito and Margarita takin’ me along to chill with some of their friends, and that issue came up on the way to their casa—no Coors, whatever we end up buying to bring over!

And I learned about Prop 187 through different pieces he  wrote, and it was HR 187 4437 that of course prompted the massive turnouts in 2006…it was part of that energy that gave birth to this blog. But our community has been in this struggle since I was born, and of course, much longer.

Here we are in 2010, and SB 1070 is not so different than the Sensenbrenner attack. Same poison, same sentiment, different name and state. Same backlash. And the bill is headed for the same defeat, if we stay strong.

Stay strong.

We may need to. I am hoping for the best. Remember, in 2007, the police stormed the LA march with tear gas and rubber bullets. That was their response to the massive turnouts in 2006. But we do not fear them. We will show up.

Today are the marches. All across this nation. (I’ll be in Salem). Let those who decry protest and marches and demonstration note of how we do, from coast to coast. And let those who join us be empowered and happy in their hearts, or at least stirred deeply with righteous fury. I send much love to all of you who are takin it to the streets. Feel this beat. Stay safe. Steer clear of provocateurs and tense police! Be loud. And be joyous!

ALEX SANCHEZ, the vato who does such good work at Homies Unidos has been freed from jail after he was scooped up by authorities for a wiretapped phone call which improperly placed him behind bars. This is very good to see, as he is such an example of someone doing good for the community, especially on a level so needed, fighting back against the vacuum tractor beam of crime and gangs that scoop up so many young gente. Above is a beautiful little (exclusive) video from Cuéntame.

[An Introduction to my Presentation at Kirwan Institute]

I am Joaquín. When I was eight years old, I changed my name to Jack. I didn’t intend it as a political statement, of course. I just wanted to fit in with everyone else.

With everyone else in the suburbs of Maryland, that is. That’s where my second family lived at the time the court proceedings were finalized for my legal adoption. My father, a politically-minded poet in his late 20s by then, was gone. Gone to the West Coast; gone to the South. Gone to the jungles of Chiapas, machete and pen in hand. He was meeting with ancestors and kin; photographing and writing about the Mayan Indians.

And gone from our lives. He and my mother (she’d say) had been Too Young to work things out. No doubt that was true. My mother was a Jewish girl from New York, and my father a Chicano vato from El Paso. They met on the campus of UCLA in the summer of 1968. I’d not begin to understand until much later the size of the cultural gulf that surely stood between them, as well.

At eight, I imagined I’d become anew. Cast away those things attached to my old life. It was a new time, a new life. I had a new name. And I could be a new self. I’d learn one day that changing who you are is not as simple as changing your name. But for the moment, I thought with these changes to birth certificate and social security card and school attendance sheet, I might finally fit in.

The feeling that I didn’t fit in had grown in me for a few reasons. One was my name. A name that on the East Coast in 1978, was an anomaly. A name that defies the rules of the English alphabet, and so, one that many people will mispronounce. My teachers were some of them. It was a name my peers would either fail to remember, or would in many cases ridicule. In class after class of Brians and Joshuas; of Lauras and Jennifers; of Matts and Tonyas, you learn something from being the one with the weird name. You begin to infer. You understand that you are apart from the others in more than just one way. With every souvenir license plate keychain in every gift shop that ignores your name; with every approach of  roll call from a new teacher and every introduction to a new person bringing dread to your belly, you are reminded you are Other.

By itself, who knows how much it would matter to have a name rare among your peers. And if it were a difference not attached to the many others that would not vanish from my eyeline over time, I imagine not much. Were this the only example of how I tried to conform to the dominant culture’s desire to eradicate my culture and history—and self—it would hardly matter. Here, it serves well as a symbol. And isn’t that what a name is for?

A name can tell us who we are. It can tell us where we come from, who came before us, and our place in today’s society. It can even offer glimpses into the future. A name will not always contain so many secrets, but mine did. And it had been left for me to discover this. I didn’t know it then—when I rejected it in favor of the plainest, shortest, easiest-to-pronounce and least-Spanish name I could think of—but it was as if I had been left a pendant with a treasure map to my own history and legacy inscribed upon it. I would some day grow to be very grateful to reach into my dusty pocket and find that map.

My father chose the name Joaquín from a poem written shortly before my birth; a poem important to the Mexican American community. The dramatic narrative foretold a confusion I was already experiencing as a boy, and portended a strength I’d need later.

I look at myself
And see part of me
Who rejects my father and my mother
And dissolves into the melting pot
To disappear in shame.

The name my father gave me tied me to my culture in the strongest possible way—by both naming me after Corky Gonzales’ quintessential Chicano as well as describing a path I was already walking. Come the day I turned to re-read the book my father gave me as a teen, I’d find my own past; my own troubled reflection, there in its passages. And I’d understand a bit more of those things that hence had only flitted about on the periphery of my vision.

Maybe I tried to vanish into the American Dream. Repurpose my outline. Maybe I wanted to become just like you; just like him; just like the boy in the poster, the one on the screen, the hero. I wanted to be the Fair one, the Right one, the Good one…the white one. I did not want to be the Mexican one. The one whom the world around me insisted was, instead, the Dark one, the Little one, the Bad one. The Criminal. The Servant. The Thief.

Culture is powerful. Media is powerful. For much of my life, the relationship was one-way. The current of news, opinion, metaphor, imagery, and storytelling was aimed at me. There was simply no way to wield that mechanism. The thick tongue of the dominant culture sang its songs into my mind and I sang along.

I thought that without a Spanish accent, divested of a Spanish name, and with lighter skin than my father, I could walk away from both my blood and what the world seemed to think of my blood. I was wrong. This cannot be done. You are who you are. Your family is your family. Your blood remains your blood. And whether you call it corazón or something else, your heart remains your own heart.

But I was right to understand that there were and are strong currents in place. Undertow that buoys a few, drowns many, and directs the rest into a preferenced route. We call the flow of information, evaluation, entertainment, iconography, story, and slant that is our collective conversation and counsel “the mainstream.” And depending on your relationship to it, you may be able to swim to your desired destination without much struggle. Or you may find yourself grasping for purchase and gasping for air.

At 18, I took my name back, and perhaps that was the first concrete step toward making my own path; toward standing strong against the tide that batters us daily. I’ve not looked back since then.

Because as the hate crimes perpetrated against Latinos rose higher and higher; as the Right Wing created a culture of fear against the US’ Southern border and all below; as conservative pundits repeatedly reinforced revulsion of the Spanish language and those who speak it or are otherwise touched by it; as the mainstream culture’s historically derisive lens on Mexico and Mexicanos became more intense and hostile in many places, preaching hatred to a virulent degree, I knew I had to grab a hold of that firehose of energy, and help filter and redirect the flow of news, opinion, metaphor, imagery, and storytelling. The world was being made more dangerous for my people, and for me.

This is the terrain from which grows all the content and action launched from my blog The Unapologetic Mexican today. These are the issues that can be found informing the articles I write, the videos I make, the art I produce. The themes of values in culture, symbolism in media, messaging in news copy or slant; racism; human rights; identity; ethnicity; language, power; history; community; self. The day I began my blog was hardly a first step to empowerment and self-awareness. It was an important one, though, making possible many subsequent steps.

When I present at the  Transforming Race Conference in March, I will speak about these themes and in what way I’ve been able to engage them, to make change; about the four years I have been keeping this blog, and all the ways in which it aided me in reclaiming a feeling of pride, and a greater understanding of how I can support and inform and empower the communities to which I belong.

New Media is nothing by itself; it is a hammer without the dream of the carpenter; a garden hose on a hot, arid, dusty day. All alone, New Media is but form awaiting function. But given you can access it to a reasonable degree, you can stop being a passive imbiber of the media and all its messaging. You don’t have to shout at the screen, you can speak your reply or alternate view from the screen, too. You need not rest at bemoaning the media’s slant because you have a greater ability to replace it. And you can add your strength to a purpose enjoined by many, and together, affect our common society.

This new format we call “blog” is not like a pad of paper; not like a radio station, not like a community bulletin board, not like a classroom, nor a movie theater, nor a newspaper, nor a meeting room. It is all these things and more.

My father said “in my day it was mimeographs and in yours it is la bloga.” He was speaking of  the activism begun in El Chicano Movimiento, the era from which the poem Yo Soy Joaquín sprung forth.  It is no longer 1967, it is now 2010. The shape of la lucha transforms, but the struggle remains at hand:

Like a sleeping giant it slowly
Rears its head
To the sound of
Tramping feet
Clamoring voices
Mariachi strains
Fiery tequila explosions
The smell of chile verde and
Soft brown eyes of expectation for a
Better life.

And in all the fertile farmlands,
the barren plains,
the mountain villages,
smoke-smeared cities,
we start to MOVE.

La raza!
Méjicano!
Español!
Latino!
Chicano!

Or whatever I call myself,
I look the same
I feel the same
I cry
And
Sing the same.

I am the masses of my people and
I refuse to be absorbed.

In the four years I’ve written my blog, I’ve educated myself and others. I’ve enjoined the national conversation, and been invited on panels of web influencers, and into progressive fellowships. I’ve found friends with the same interests, and together we’ve organized sites and groups to work together on issues that concern our communities. I’ve written and co-written pieces that have made it into print. I’ve had my blog used in college courses, and my videos in high school classes by teachers who found my writing online.  I’ve had librarians request copies. I’ve launched a weekly web show that is sponsored and that exists to support and empower and inform the Latino/a community. I’ve been employed as a columnist on immigration, and flown to various states to speak on these issues, and to accept awards for groups I’ve helped found. And all this, in place of fuming in the living room, hiding behind a phony name, or otherwise letting the fickle currents of the day sweep you wherever they may.

We are the new media. We are the new voice resounding with the old truths. We are the culture changing. And throughout all these changes, we are still right here and moving forward.

________________

Also posted at the Race Talk blog; written at the request of the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity’s Media Relations Manager to help promote the Kirwan Institute’s Transforming Race Conference, at which I’ll be presenting in March.

Note: I wrote this as a prelude to the presentation. Not a mirror of it. This part of the story is very much about identity, about my personal journey…and that’s part of the story of this blog, and relevant to an Institute on the Study of Ethnicity. But I don’t want my presentation, itself, to be so much about the empowerment of one person. I don’t think that’s such an important or original story to tell. Or enough people are telling it already, we could say. Of course it’s an important story to me! We all want to thrive, we all want to better ourselves and our situations. But my presentation Unexpected Pathways to Empowerment will be focused more on how New Media can enable our community–any community–to become more empowered, and how many of us can tap into that and help it to happen. To me, today, that’s an important distinction to make. And connecting people to work for causes that aren’t part of the individualist recipe for success (and thus benefit a greater amount of people) is more important (especially these days) than any one person becoming well-read or well-known.

YO SOY JOAQUIN is a poem that means a whole lot to a lot of gente, and I am one of them. My father gave me the book in my late teens, and honestly, I didn’t look hard at it for another fifteen years or so. But when I needed it, it was there. Corky Gonzales‘ words were there for me when I reached for the strength I’d need to crawl out from under the cloak of shame that mainstream US culture reserves for the Mexicano, and embrace my proud, indian roots; my winding and intertangled—if not sometimes troubled—Mestizo roots; my enduring and strong Mexican roots. Señor Gonzales reminded us we are not historical drug dealers, knife-wielders, or dish-washers…and even when we are, we are something else, too. We belong to a legacy, we are tied to this land, we are descended from fierce warriors, and Indian kings, and beautiful culture and traditions that cannot be washed or stolen away by the dominant culture. We are something new, a combination of those things, and the unknown New that we forge here in an often-hostile environment.

Very empowering and proud ideas for the Indian still hunted on the land his ancestors once called home, a land he/her and his/her kin still call home. A land strewn with tangled paths, that disconnected from that understanding, can lead one to wander too far, and become lost.

Yo Soy Joaquín is un grito of solidarity and collective self-love and when it was brought forth in the late 60s, Chicanos gathered around this and waved it forth like a shining banner. My old man explained the impact of Corky’s poem like this:

“Here, finally, was our collective song, and it arrived like thunder crashing down from the heavens. Every little barrio newspaper from Albuquerque to Berkeley published it. People slapped mimeographed copies up on walls and telephone poles.”

—Juan Felipe Herrera

And not just on telephone poles! When I was born before the decade flipped, Jefito named me after this very poem. This is one small way that my fate and purposes and awareness were sown long before I knew that to be the case.

But one day in 2005, I walked up a hill with my back straight and with the light of ten suns in my eyes because I could carry a feeling of self-love and self-respect and a belonging to something much more beautiful and larger than myself…and it was the day I opened up this poem again and really took my time with it. Shortly after, I began this blog.

So thank you, Mister Gonzales. Once again.

On Friday, March 19th at the Denver, Colorado Auraria Campus Gym, there will be a symposium held to honor Señor Gonzales and his work. To register and find out more, call (303) 964-8993 or email char1551@comcast.net.

Or Nezua Leaves the Media Consortium and Moves On to What is Next

FOR THE LAST YEAR OR SO I’ve written a column on immigration matters for The Media Consortium, which was first called The Weekly Immigration Wire, and later The Weekly Diaspora.

Abruptly, the job has come to an end by my editor telling me on the phone they are not renewing my contract due to “editorial strategy.”

I’ll write  about the experience and related thoughts here to close up the story, as well as to think it out for my own satisfaction. I am taking my time with it and if you prefer curt and properly concluded writing, feel free to skip this post taking away nothing more than the fact that what comes after this point from TMC—whether it is called “Diaspora” or something else—is not my work.

I feel honored to have kick-started that new project of theirs and get it off the ground for the first 13 or 14 months. I’d be lying if I did not admit some frustration that I am let go just as CIR is centered, finally, in the national dialogue.

I publish this a handful of days after that happened. I’ve thought long and hard about what I should say, if anything, about my experiences. It is very hard out here in the NEW MEDIA [echo echo echo SHINE] world. You need to think about what you put live. I don’t want to react. Ranting was never a viable option; I’m not here to be petty. But the first draft of this post glossed over so much that I experienced, and mostly to put on a pleasant face professionally. And…yanno. To not Rock the Boat.

And the more I thought over the entire experience, the worse I felt about that. What do I do out here? I talk about my experience in the world, about ethnicity, about the power structures we run into, about immigration. About New Media. About writing…journalism…about allathat. Hey, that’s why the Kirwan Institute is flying me across the USA in a couple months. Dammit! Some people want to read about these things. And…as a writer type, I’d say until I write things down, they exist in a strange and nebulous place in my consciousness…likely to be erased by the everyday rushing of blood through my arteries, the living of the next breath, the What Is Important Today factor folding into the next day….

This is a Story About

It’s very tempting, when telling a story, to define the content as I did with the subhed atop this writing. It is natural to want to sum up, conclude, compartmentalize, prologue or otherwise provide a frame with so many words in order that your reader can better absorb the thesis.

But I can’t really say what this is a story about. It’s not just about my leaving my last job. Not at all. And yet, that was the departure point for much of it. Ultimately, I don’t want to predispose your thinking. In fact, I’d say it’s possible ten people could reach the end of this post and come away with different things. I’m not sure. But that’s how I wrote this. Not entirely sure of much except what it felt like to live and remember the moments.

This is a story about a number of things. People, the USA, society, gender, race, ethnicity, language, communication, media, blogging, challenge, lessons, immigration, people of color. Lenses. Business meeting art. Cultural change. More?

Marginalized Voices Are Being Mainstreamed…or Are They?

The job brought challenges. For them, I am grateful. They help me grow. They did and still do.

My very first one was perhaps due to the blurry crossover between what I do here at UMX all the time, and doing something that feels sort of the same, is often on the same topics, and written from the same seat!—but otherwise completely different in everything from process to pace. It is a business someone is running, and a job they offer me. Sounds obvious. But when you begin writing online—and when I began writing about immigration, specifically—it was from a very organic place and manner. I was going to say, I sometimes say, “I never wanted nor planned to write a word on immigration” but the truth of it is, I began the blog for the May Day Marches of 2006. That marked the official start. So I was bound to begin writing on it sooner or later.

But mostly what was driving me and my writing was wrestling with what IDENTITY means here in the U.S. to someone like me. I wrote about Chicanismo. And, también, about standing up to be counted among those willing to stare down the racists and those coming at mi gente from all sides. Talking about my family means talking about the border. And about American Indigenous. And about the war waged on us for many many years. It means talking about the power of the people, about programs like Bracero, about women who are on their knees cleaning the floors of the wealthy US citizens. Like mi bisabuela. It means talking about inequity. It means talking about immigration.

So my arc here has been a curriculum born from heart and only incidentally becomes marketable because of how long you’ve been at it, how much you run your mouth, the “hot” issues of the day according to Rahm, and an explosion in the new media frontier of which you simply happened to have been on the early tide of for serendipitous reasons.

When you find work through that path and segue over into a scheduled job…there are going to be a few places where you stop and say “Oh, wait. This is a wildly different thing.” With varying degrees of conflict required before it is clear. And here I may simply mean conflict to your expectations or personal running monologue.

I got there, though. In working that job. That’s one thing I feel proud about. Granted, it was not an easy transition. Me and my editor knocked heads a few times, especially early on. But that’s what having an editor is about. I have both been and had editors, and it is always a touchy relationship or one that takes time to feel out between any two particular people, as they will no doubt be passionate about words. But I grew to feel out the job. I grew to see that it was a place I section off my overall agenda and care and passion and feelings for the movement, and just earned my money doing what was required. For most of the time I worked for them, I felt good about TMC, because I was still allowed to speak my peace on the issues. That is, to use a lens that was not DC-centric, that was rooted in a more expansive and less border-frantic philosophy, or rather that spoke of the harm borders do, how they are in our mind, and how here in the US, immigration issues are not seen coherently, but too often a place where racism and imperialism dominate. But there were always tensions. I’m sure they existed for varied reasons, I won’t pretend to be omniscient. But there is going to be tension when you write from that place, and yet are involved with a media collective that hues to a different voice overall, one that is “independent” but yet still corporate in many cases, or DC-centric in ideology. That is only expected.

Though some things were not expected. One day my editor called me out of the blue to tell me she had issues with my “tone.” I was baffled. She didn’t mean my writing tone in the articles. She meant personally. On the phone. On emails. After a few minutes getting no clear picture of what this meant, I found myself getting frustrated, but tacked to the particulars to try and get clear of the indefinable accusation. I’d need a specific example. No, there was no real example to be had. I think the only one she could find was that recently I bragged about my blog “crushing” TMC’s blog in terms of activity. (Not respecting authority? Acting as if I were equal to them in status or power? Bad social etiquette? I said it in humor, after all….) Other than that, it was just an overall “tone” problem. I pointed out the good things I said about TMC recently as well, asked why we didn’t focus on those things. I didn’t bother to link her to my drowning maestro glosario entry, I honestly expect self-identified Feminists to already be familiar with these types of dynamics—surely she’s been told similar things by men who wanted her to offer up a bit of deference at any given moment?—and don’t want to insult them by snarkily throwing a bingo card into a tense situation like that.

So I mostly bite my lip while my belly flips. I end the phone call saying I don’t really appreciate the call coming during free time to convey what it had to convey, and I will continue to be as conscientious as I’ve always been. I felt very frustrated.

“For you, talking about race is a necessity; for us, it is a luxury.”

That quote is from a classic post in the classic iteration of UMX, back when the blogosphere just began to talk about race in the mainstream, it seemed. The person who made that statement was a commenter called “truth machine” who came by to make an ass out of himself for a short time one day, three februarys ago. The phrase was first offered as a cold observation of fact, and then again as a vehicle intended to deliver Wite Disdain.

It also communicates the difference in approach that can be found between many left-ward factions that otherwise share much agenda. For example, white feminists have the luxury of not having to factor into discussions of Feminism the issues that are particular to women of color. And as most know out here, that is actually an ongoing tension in organized Feminism.

This is one place tensions manifested at times between me and my last employers at times. The difference in viewpoints. Nothing antagonistic, as with ‘truth machine.’ But in a way that is useful to examine simply to learn about the new social and cultural terrain which we traverse here in the U.S. of A.

Other people are talking about this terrain, too, of course. Tracy Van Slyke, an owner of The Media Consortium, just co-wrote a book called Getting Beyond the Echo Chamber and in it she did a fair job—the best yet so far, I’d say, of any white progressive author writing out histories of the blogosphere—of looking around and seeing more of the terrain out here than normally recognized by many white progressive book writers: The black blogosphere. The women of color. The brown blogosphere. (Don’t remember if it got deeper than that in the book, I’ve a little left to go.)

Tracy quoted me in her book (forgive the self-referential move) as saying the difference in people of color and “identity-based” bloggers vs. white progressives is that (in about every angle of our activism) we are talking about our lives. Our families and their lives. About being in the crosshairs. About hate crimes rising against us. About very personal real-life up-close things. How our family came here, what struggle has been for our families, and finding a place, yet, where that story is told. Whereas the “Progressive” blogosphere often comes to these issues from a more detached, idealistic, altruistic, or theoretical place, when they do come at all. That’s just a fact, it’s not an accusation or a slur. It simply has to do with the history, overall, of our peoples. And what attention is given to the struggles of different peoples in the media, and why. And how that is portrayed when it is.

This is not an original insight, and it is not rare to hear it circulating in the blogospheres con melanin, but I was happy to get the sentiment into her book, happy that she included it. In fact, it made me feel very good about her and about the work they were doing.

Interestingly, there were some times writing the column when the same truth contained in that quote interfered with my work; or at least provided more challenge for me and my editor—a 20-something year old white woman. As I pointed out one day to my editor after having an article flat out rejected as a whole rather than being sent back to me with edit notes here and there—I am not like the fellow writing the TMC Economy Wire (very cool cat named Zach), nor Lindsey, who writes the Healthcare Wire. I am here dealing with issues that are inevitably personal and emotional. But maybe that’s not business talk. I have to admit there was nowhere really to go with that, once its said. So once I said it, I told myself I had to learn better how to compartmentalize. And I did.

Absorbing the Energies

What did I do to write on immigration every week?

I paid attention all week to news. This was (and is) how I know what’s going on, the landscape. I am on multiple list-servs, I am in touch with hundreds of people through Twitter and email and so on.

But the day I’d write the column, I’d open about ten or fifteen pages of articles (a predetermined list that was composed of independent news media who were members of TMC) and read through, slowly. If there are videos, I watch them. If there is audio segments of radio, etc, I listen. I sit and absorb ALL of this in one big undulating wave of information and energy. It’s quite a dosing!

So when the news would get thick with Mexican@s being mistreated or hunted, or in hate crimes being dismissed and the killers walking free, or when an abuela is manhandled or harmed in detention, it sometimes messed me up inside for a bit. I hope this is immediately understandable. Beyond the identification, I am an artist and certainly with my “nerve endings on the surface” as amiga Erika says of the artists’ condition. Shoot, I remember nights trying to write about these news stories and ending up in tears. And one time—it had to do with when a lot of abuses in the detention centers were coming to light—just ranting in my column. And then, as I wrote above, my editor called me back on the phone with a somewhat tentative “Um…this isnt really what we are looking for.”

She was right. It was my soul bellowing in pain, and yes, it was words coming from  a heart torn by barbed wire and thus, a voice that should sound out and perhaps be heard as one part of today’s human response to the immigration issue…but it wasn’t what they were paying me for.

I never submitted another article like that. I figured I’d just keep it in my blog, was grateful I have people willing to read what I write here.

Clash of the Lenses

I’d say I got the format down pretty damn well by the end. I became better and better at letting the words go without a struggle. I’d say pretty quickly. That night had a lot to do with it. Just a shift of the mindset.

I’ve been a fan of Poe for many years, many many years. And I’ve read up on some of my favorite authors as a boy and I know about Dickens and others getting paid to write in periodicals, or installments of fiction, and having to alter their words to make a buck. Knowing that is what prepared me, even, for selling art to magazines and such. You adjust to that particular market. My writing voice, which normally relies more on build, on rhythm, on music, and color, needed to fit into much sparer, dryer, “delivering news” type of style.

This reminds me of a chapter, again, in Beyond the Echo Chamber, by Jessica Clarke (directs the Future of Public Media Project at American University’s Center for Social Media and is the former executive editor of In These Times) and Tracy Van Slyke (the program director of the Media Consortium and is former publisher of In These Times.) The chapter is called Move Beyond the Pale, Male and Stale, and in it the authors predict the media landscape, if it wants to survive, must move beyond white male dominated viewpoints and the dispassionate, removed typical journalist voice; borrow a bit from the heart, soul, and fire of the blogosphere.

It is tempting here to make a cheap shot about how the edits to my work taught me the opposite, to tame down my voice. But that would be ignoring the very heartfelt and much-to-the-left thinking that they always allowed through, mostly in my final paragraph. I think just by hiring me, there was an example of media allowing less “stale” voices. And I do appreciate that. So yes, for what it’s worth, I do think they followed—or attempted to while I was with them—that dictum.

After all, this is a new media group. And as progressive as they want to be, they are a business that has to contend with the power structures in place. Anybody can talk about the white male centric landscape all they want. But it remains a power system that preferences certain voices and actions and views, nonetheless. These values and preferences ripple out and ripple down and ripple over, and I think they are worth talking about so that more and more people see the invisibled rule that shall never be spoken and can make a new way; can “move beyond the pale, male, and stale.”

Once I accepted within that writing about immigration with the job hat was very much different than writing on immigration for myself, the process became infinitely easier. In fact, after that took hold in me, I don’t think I ever bucked an edit anymore unless it said something new that distorted the orginal meaning beyond acceptability, or was something I could not approve being said about the Mexicano or undocumented community, or on the behalf of either. I didn’t need a fight, nor to be as intractably idealistic as a 19 year old would. I needed to write what was happening in immigration in the independent news circuit, and be true to myself. That was possible, most of the time.

But I did note the difference in our lenses and how that became a conflict at moments…and how the “brown” voice would be subsumed in a more anonymous, neutralized voice. And seeing that happen bothered me, sure. The media voice and how it handles mexican americans and white vs non-white is central to what got me out here, and what affected me as a child, and what needs to be shifted. If I am going to be involved in making media, then I have to feel good about how I am affecting the world in that specific aspect! Perhaps not every minute. But certainly when certain topics are being discussed.

Showing you an example of one edited—before and after—paragraph of my writing for TMC will give you a clearer idea than my describing the dynamic. (The original Diaspora blog post. The original source article.)

BEFORE TMC EDITS:

Reviewing Helen Thorpe’s Just Like Us: The True Story of Four Mexican Girls Coming of Age in America, Emily Deprang writes on a story that unfolds on a bus trip from Tucson to Houston and back and “details four young Mexican women” in varying legal situations—two with papers and two undocumented. Thorpe’s narrative is told through the eyes (green) of a “pale” skinned woman who has the chance to get up close to the idea of people being the same despite their citizenship status and are, after all, “Just Like Us.” DePrang calls the book “an epic journey through the realities of undocumented life” and feels “[e]very American—documented or not—deserves to meet Marisela, Yadira, Elissa, and Clara.”

AFTER TMC EDITS:

Emily Deprang reviews Helen Thorpe’s Just Like Us: The True Story of Four Mexican Girls Coming of Age in America for the Texas Observer. The story unfolds on a bus trip from Tucson to Houston and back and “details four young Mexican women” in varying legal situations—two with papers and two undocumented. DePrang calls the book “an epic journey through the realities of undocumented life” and feels that “every American—documented or not—deserves to meet Marisela, Yadira, Elissa, and Clara.”

Those edits can be reasonably defended. Some of my wording is unclear “on a story that unfolds on a bus trip” or cluttered, and my editor was great at lancing that stuff away. I learned from it, you better believe me. I’ll watch your fingers when you play that git-tar!

But you’ll notice what has been taken out with the edits, as well.

If you read the original article, you’ll see that the author herself very much intended to draw distinctions—those of hue and ethnicity and the privilege that comes with being lighter, with having green eyes, with being white. (If you get a feel for the book by reading the entire article, you might argue that this idea is central to the entire book that is being promoted:

Late in the night, the bus crawled to a halt, kicking up dust and gravel, and the lights came on, waking everyone. Wordlessly, the bus rustled to life and passengers began rummaging for purses and wallets. The doors hissed open, and a Border Patrol officer mounted the steps and creaked along the aisle, asking passengers if they were American citizens. When he approached us, I looked up at him with my pale face and green eyes and said, “Yes,” a defiant little frown on my privileged face. I didn’t offer any documentation. His eyes flicked to Juan, who proffered his Green Card. The officer studied it with a flashlight, front and back, scrutinized Juan, looked again at the card and returned it. The bus was silent until the officer left, and it was silent for a long time after.

The write-up celebrates how They Are Just Like Us, but as you can imagine, this would be a strange voice to adopt for a person of mexican descent writing on the piece, as I was. “Them”? “Us”? It becomes tricky, navigating this post-racial world!

My editor seemed to have answered this challenge by stripping the paragraph of any indication of this tension. And yet that tension is what the writer is communicating. Here I feel…it was the editor’s inability to grapple, yet, with these issues that made these edits, that rendered the very important lingering upon these tensions into a muted, spare collection of much safer words.

Moments like that gave me great pause. I bounced the edits back, learned not to push too hard whenever necessary, just move on with the JOB. But I’d spin into inner dialogue. Questions.

Were we—TMC and I—furthering positive change by our relationship? Was a reality/voice typically marginalized and under attack at almost all times—truly being given a platform? Or was I facilitating nothing more than the appearance of them doing so—Tokenism?

These well-hewn paths are not unique to TMC or any one company, new or old. There are simply currents in place. Strong currents in place that rise from standing structures in the stream. If you are to find a new path, it will not be the one of least resistance.

When I was accepted into NYU Film and both my best friends were so jealous that they couldn’t hide their disgust. They had wanted to be filmmakers all their lives. And I decided when flipping through the Cornell book at the last minute that my long-time dream of acting would be best expressed in pursuing a Film and TV degree. And got into NYU. And when I was two hours south, and writing and shooting short films not much later, I always invited those friends to star or be crew in my films. I wanted to bring them in to the circle of possibility.

When a certain “brown” list serv began, I argued hard for a woman or more to be on the mod panel, to shake up the typical power structures. I wasn’t even on the mod panel, and believe it or not, it really was an argument. But the young male in charge acquiesced as we had both been in Chicago when the list was conceived, roomed together, and I was kind of “in on it” to some degree. I reached out to various women of color to ask if they were interested at that point.

When my friends and I began the Sanctuary, we did the same thing—reached out to bring in people who had less of a platform. I could go on, and there are many examples that do not involved me, but I know less about them.

Those who want to change the landscape and remake the power paradigms need to always be pushing power outward to the margins. There will always be those with less power in a given moment or situation, and who have suffered in ways due to that reality. And until they get more, the societal structure will be unsound and unjust. The more drastic the ratio of inequality, the more danger exists in that unsound structure.

Those who wish to hoard the power while pretending they are here to make a new day will meet conflict when they appear in the midst of those wishing to truly change the system. This happened recently on the aforementioned list-serv dedicated to “brown” issues or framing, and is in fact related to this story.

The Process of UnNatural Selection

There are bloggers out there who have written for years on immigra—Oh, hell. I was gonna totally background myself and put it all carefully without ever mentioning UMX so as to avoid the accusation that my care for an issue is all about my own ego! Now I’m reacting preemptively to idiots. Never worth the time. Which brings me anyway (isn’t that neat?) to the link I wanted to bring in. Because some responded to the next post I’ll link by claiming all I wanted was more blogroll links.

If you’ve been around since the classic days of UMX, you may remember this post. The post’s use of the word “front” is a double entendre. For me, that post stands out as my having finally internalized the realization that most white progressive bloggers at the time (or the ones known to me) saw their range of issues are universal ones, while issues that apparently disproportionately affected people of color (and especially MESCANS! for cryin out loud) are fringe issues, “pet issues,” etc.  You know! This was that crazy blogular year of 2007! Shit was blowin’ up ALL over! And that post sprung out of my seeing the reality of the mainstream focus as it applied to the Mexican American community, or the undocumented or the Latino community. It was also pretty raw because it was me reacting to the march the year AFTER the massive march in 2006. And those numbers inspired many, and made it feel that change was imminent. So when 2007 came and the march was stomped by the police walking in creepy military type formations because they needed to make a point about massive numbers of mexicans marching, it was jolting.

But in truth, the police attack on la marcha in 2007 was only a catalyst. That feeling had been bubbling up for a while.

It is clear now that the immigration issue presents a true challenge to human rights activists as well as those who identify as “Progressives.” And I’m sure there are many posts by many people saying as much; I’ve read many since then. And it was, in fact, a reader/commenter who summed that idea up concisely in one of my threads, which is where I got the title for “The True Front of Progressivism.”

I’m not claiming I originated anything. I’m making clear, using a narrative I can stand behind as witness, where tension existed on this issue, in some parts of the Internet. This is where I learned. Duke, a co-founder of the Sanctuary, could point out his own posts on how Dkos/Markos was insisting immigration was not a relevant topic for Democrats, and so on. Manuél, Kai, Mala, Kety—everyone could tell their part of the story.

No matter which angle you come at it from, the fact is, it has only been recently that immigration has become a “hot” issue on the Left.

In the last year or so many groups have sprung up. Groups that exist to advocate for immigration rights, lawyer firms with Twitter accounts that cater to immigration. While NDLON has been pushing hard for the issue for years, it is only now that the larger entities like Dkos and Netroots Nation and such are embracing the issue, devoting more time, money, space. They want a win. A Democratic win. And I’m sure they feel it is the Right Thing to do. Now.

So there’s some background. Now we come back to the present.

Remember that “Brown” list? Let’s call this (purportedly) Latino-centric list “BrownWorld.” Well, one day about a week ago, someone sends an email, happy about a panel of speakers pushing immigration as an issue. Happy because it’s a big media draw, and in large part because the well-known Markos Moulitsas (founder of Dkos) is pitching the idea that Now Is the Time for Immigration reform.

But right away, some voices spring up on the list, protesting that nobody who follows the issues regularly is being included. Some of these bloggers are on top of this nearly every day. For years. Remember, the white-O-sphere had been very resistant to seeing immigration issues as their issue. The Wite Disdain was offered in place of any humble examination that a greater justice could be had by the core issues being more inclusive or basically, just more aware of the actual real world. That reality is remembered by many. While others want to move past it without acknowledging it in any meaningful way. They probably see no need.

Yet, on the parts of the bloggers who were brushed off, a resentment brewed. We had been told these issues that drew crosshairs on our families were “pet issues.” “third rail.” Not to be included in the constant push for justice!

I am reporting how some were reacting to this announcement of this panel. For me…I had already learned. Didn’t and don’t really raise hell about it anymore. Don’t see the point. I’ll still make the statements I do about what I see. But it’s not like I do it to make it stop or make someone see. I make the statements I do…to make them. Because it’s what I see from where I am sitting.

The overall response from many after I wrote True Front was that I had been “begging for links” in my post. The focus mostly rested on my tone. Though nobody spoke to me directly, I got the feedback in various ways. Sort of a “trickle down” effect. There were sentiments expressed that nobody who blogs should ever “shame” people into acting  (…to save lives?). Okay. I think I agree with that, after all. I didn’t write to shame anybody into anything. I was calling it as I saw it.

But I got the message! Many were annoyed by it. Okay. What I chose to take away was “organize and support your own people and don’t expect the so-called ‘Progressives’ to get in on it.” And I think it was an empowering lesson and message, one that Malcolm X. touched on in his many talks to the African American community.

Then a year or two passes, and suddenly some of those same people are taking up the helm. Yes, I understand why those voices leaped up on the list when that panel was discussed. Markos was one of those people who had not long ago opined on the non-necessity of advocating for immigration reform.

Look, I’m 40. Not 20. I know a bit of how the world works. And in fact, having Markos get behind immigration is, I’m sure, a net positive for the promotion of the agenda in the media. I, too, understand the bafflement of those on BrownWorld who saw the panel as 100% a good thing and couldn’t understand why those damn immigration bloggers were complaining again! Hey! Immigration is now gonna get some backing by a blog star! Influence and all that. Of course, now that a person stakes a claim on the issue, the question comes into play as to what they might see as satisfactory as far as terms of the bill. What will they push for, exactly? What will they concede?

But off the bat, yes. The more voices, the better!

And I said so:

I am not suprised by the stars heading up the “cause.” But hey, I would love to see Markos and others get on this issue with the fever and passion and endurance and knowledeability and powerful stances I’ve seen for years from many smaller immigration-oriented bloggers, so who knows what will happen. Anything is possible.

So yeah. You can see I needed to acknowledge the truth of things. We don’t need any more hidden histories. But at the same time, it’s not a bad thing that he is speaking in support of immigration, come on!

The thread went on… .

It’s funny, on “BrownWorld” how there are a couple non-brown people (white) who can always be counted on to leap up when us oversensitive and whiny POC and put the pressure on to be quiet. I think part of it is this DC mentality that if everyone is cheering that the picnic was sunny, nobody will remember the rain. So a voice not in lockstep really rattles them, as if it portends gloom, foretells failure. Insecurity?

These unofficial list monitors say things that sound amazingly…Reaganite. They are like Progressives…until it comes to their reaching for logic born out of conserative thinking. Like telling us “I just think you are disempowering yourself” by pointing out the eternal preferences that overlook certain voices.

I think of Clarence Thomas who hates himself for Affirmative Action perhaps helping balance against historical and systemically entrenched injustice in his own path. Would that also be the logic of the BrownWorld Reaganites? That this program is disempowering to minorities? Either way, they leap up over and over, striving to hammer down the Last Word and help the system stay as it is. They never see the larger justice suggested by questioning certain entrenched value systems.

They identify too much with the standing systems that preference what they do. I get that. But it feels obscene on a “brown” list.

Let me tell you something, white people. If you are on a Brown-centric List. Don’t find yourself in that position. Also, males? If you are on a female-centered list? Don’t do the same thing to women. Also, ANY PEOPLE who are SUPPOSEDLY in a cause that disproportionately affects certain other-related people than yourself? Don’t be finding yourself all up in that issue laying down the law for them.

You’d think these things would be obvious.

Anyway, in the course of that conversation, the Reaganites offered a couple other points of view.

One was that it was an “All-Latino” panel, so what complaint had any of us? Always complaining, no solutions, they said. (Because…including voices that have been on the issues for years is not implied as a solution inherently in the original observation?)

They were saying that Markos Moulitsas is “Latino” in a political sense. I know they weren’t meaning it like GOP uses Michael Steele–for an appearance reason with no visible cultural stance or pride or agenda that prioritizes the community. Because that’s called a “token.”

But I don’t have to be so ungenerous either. It is possible, too, that Mister Moulitsas is just now thinking about how the issue applies to him and his family. Or not even. Maybe the rightness just happens to now be revealed to him. These things can be very personal and I wouldn’t attack someone for any pace they take, if it is natural. That would be meanspirited and just stupid.

So it wasn’t important until now. And now it is. Okay! At least now it is.

Yet what I DO take issue with is how when the media that had all gathered together to be in the presence of Markos’ Very Huge Megaphone and asked him what other bloggers were involved with immigration, he replied that he couldn’t think of any offhand. That there were some smaller bloggers who had been doing some good work, but he hadn’t yet figured out a way to reach out and help give them a voice.

I guess it did not strike him that one way to do so…would be to mention their name or blog at that very moment.

If someone is an expert on the social landscape of the Internet in any way…that is a bad position to stake out. To claim such distance from the very issue you are championing. After all, this is the same Markos who emailed me personally a few months ago to inform me he had put my name in the hat when Presente.org asked him who to look at for choosing their National Campaign Director! This is the same Markos that has The Sanctuary on his blogroll! He knows peoples names. Let’s not be silly.

But don’t take it too far: I do not think it was personal. I’m betting the omission at that moment was a reflex that simply felt “safe” when presented with the question.

Those who aren’t really interested in changing the landscape of power and only want their own chair on the dias do not push power outward. They instinctively hoard it to their table and cradle their arms around it.

Is this about my thirsting for links? Is this about me wanting an immigration blogger limelight? Nope. I made it clear how tied to that issue I am and why and what it’s not about. Additionally, I am much more involved in art lately than blogging (as you can tell by the blog since January 1) and I find myself in this different role and relationship to the issue not by accident.

This is just a story I want to write down here and remember.

The Gloves With Spikes Inside Them

Don’t they wonder? Those Reaganites on the progressive lists? They claim we are just over emotional, don’t want to solve anything, etc. We leap up passionately about the same things over and over…don’t they wonder why? Why we would do it, if we know it hurts us? Do they not think there are consequences to bucking these systems? Oh there are. Beyond being told you are whiners and ‘disempowering yourself’ by supposed allies. Beyond, too, being hushed by other people of color. Maybe older ones, maybe more careful ones. You can get some people of color very worried by rocking the boat too much, and they may lash out at  you for fear that they will reap consequence for your actions. They have become more practical, and often grew up in a time where it was much less safe to do so.

If you attack patriarchy, there will be consequence. If you attack white supremacy values there will be consequence. We know this. White people often HATE hearing about white people. And the talk need not even be so pointed; most visibly stiffen to even hear the phrase “white people.” Having the phrase appears means the normal invisibility of Whiteness is banished and that there IS a dynamic and that it CAN be named and described. It’s enough to get you thrown out of a holiday picnic!

There’s a reason I hid most cultural markers of mine as much as possible for years. There are currents in place. There are unwritten rules. If you push back…you will feel it.

First in the belly. A fear. You did something dangerous. Should’ve kept quiet. Don’t rock the boat. Why are you starting trouble? Shhhhh. You fear that every time you do this and do it publicly, it will come back in a form that makes your kids ask why you can’t afford things more and more. You will limit your job opportunities. You will make enemies. You will feel uptight. You will, at times, feel a target.

The effects of pushing back on power structures are not unknown to those who do it continually. If you had to assume these people of color were not being overemotional, but are in fact very RATIONAL actors…what would prompt them to do these things? What would prompt us to keep at it? Because many blows for justice come with a pain that marks the hand wielding the tool. Why would you keep swinging?

One of the Reaganites trying to shut down the mostly-POC complaints said he couldn’t understand how we kept saying the Progressive Blogosphere is mostly white. I replied that it was indeed viewed that way. I had just read Tracy’s book and as I mentioned, had been impressed to find the inclusion of histories of the brown blogosphere and black blogosphere and women of color-o-sphere in addition to the . I pointed out to him that in her book, in the chapter “Move Beyond the Pale, Male and Stale” Jessica Clark and Tracy Van Slyke had pointed out that in fact, the Progressive sphere was viewed as white and privileged. I went on further to say that to ignore this was to fall into a blindness that Whiteness prefers: the invisibility of its own dominance in a sphere.

I felt pretty good about slinging out my employer’s book title and some content. I thought she’d like how I used it as a forward-thinking example of literature, aware of the demographics of our modern day and on the cutting edge of where media had to go. I knew my editor was on the list, and would read the email. Our call took place only a short time after that list meléé.

I was actually surprised when less than twenty seconds into the phone call, I was told I was being let go after 13 or 14 months!

A Different Direction

We had only been scheduled to speak about how to get the column done on Wednesday night. But after a neutral greeting sentence or so, my editor says “I’m glad we had a chance to talk” as if it were not expected. That line struck me as odd, especially as it led directly to “because we are not going to renew  your contract.” She went on to say tersely that now that the “[immigration] issue is heating up” they wanted someone “in DC.” I said Okay. It was a bit surreal for me. I hadn’t expected it at all. I’m the first one to write on this column for them, I got it off the ground, and I’ve been on it for years before this, and here I felt like I was the boxer who trained for so long, jogged to the ring in his satin red jacket and was told the fight was off before the bell rang.

I totally forgot to ask if she liked the plug I gave Tracy’s book. Nor did I argue. I just said ‘Okay,’ right away. To my ears, she sounded put off-balance by the quick agreement, if anything. Maybe she was expecting more resistance. Because she offered an explanation a second time, even though I hadn’t asked for more. “Yeah, we’re just gonna…take it in a different direction,” she tacked on. Hunh.

I wondered immediately what direction this might be. Will the new writer continue to pose questions like this on media calls? Will they continue to try and push awareness outward by continually advocating for more grassroots voices in the column? Whatever direction it takes, I hope it is one useful to the People. And also, yes, I do hope that The Media Consortium is successful in their plan of building a lasting coalition of smart, informative, independent media.

What We Have Here is a Failure to Communicate

Obviously, there is no way to know exactly spurred the call. There could have been a few reasons. An “editorial strategy” that required I be FedExed the last of my pay within days; that would pay me for two more weeks, but required not another day of work from me. Strategy that thought it better to have no column at all for a couple weeks rather than have me write it; better to have no immigration blogger at all since none is waiting in the wings.

And Hell, I want to take it personally! But there is no point in that. Maybe the entire operation is faltering and needs to reboot. As I said, I agree that it is time for the next level. I feel it in my life, yes. And I was beginning to feel very frustrated by the lack of communication. Everything felt in flux with no clear direction of where it was going. By the end I was doing the work their interns had been doing for 8 months or so…before they just stopped. With no warning to me that I can remember. I used to bring it up, but stopped mentioning that the interns weren’t doing their part of seeding the article ladders, and just started doing that work myself.

In fact, the end came as a bit of a shock simply because I thought that I was getting my part down much smoother; that my editor and I had worked out a system that no longer included too much back and forth. I was even writing very much in the style I knew was preferred by then. Any conflict—or outward appearance of it at least—had disappeared.

But perhaps not. Perhaps I was just not in the loop there.

I think bloggers have it hard when we get hired by companies like this. What lead you to blogging? A need to call out the truth, no? A need to present your side of it? A need to join forces and support those you want to see grow? A need to stand up to step on destructive patterns and forces. Do these traits and needs go away when you get a paycheck? No. And is there a consequence to still saying what you want about what’s going on? Even if it takes place on a closed list? Yes, you better believe it. Is that what happened in my case?  I don’t know, can’t be sure, don’t care. It doesn’t really matter.  I wrote it here, as I said, because I feel there are things to learn and know by traveling the narrative. Even if one doesn’t agree with all the statements I made. And because I needed to write it down.

And now, I need to move on.

I hope I haven’t made any hard and fast statements about things, as I feel this is all very much part of a story and a learning that is far from over. I do not offer this account as the definitive chapter, but only one angle in on a narrow window of time. Perhaps added to other days and stories, it will help tell a larger truth.

And So It Goes!

I’ll end by saying thank you to TMC for 13 months of employment doing something I enjoy doing. For supporting my voice while they did. For teaching me a bit more about dry AP style journalism (that is not sarcastic at all!) And one more time for the cash flow. There were a few months were things were so bad on my end, my TMC gig was primarily responsible for insuring the rent got paid. So okay, there is a note of anxiety now, as finding another gig at this time is not necessarily going to be easy. But I am confident that my fate brought me here for a very good reason and that it will work out beautifully.

If you want/are able to help bridge the gap, donations will be accepted with gratitude.

And so it goes! And on we go. In a different direction. In two weeks I’ll be in the Yucatán. Sounds good to me.

[For those new to the Unapologetic Mexican Blog (UMX), The Weekly Diaspora is a (paid) article I write for The Media Consortium. It is a column that runs on a few other sites, as well.]

By Nezua, Media Consortium Blogger

Professional pundits and Democratic politicians are in a frenzy over what Martha Coakley’s senate seat loss to Republican Scott Brown might mean for American politics.

Immigration reform in jeopardy

As Harold Meyerson of the American Prospect reports, the loss of one seat probably won’t derail heath care reform, but it does make the chances of passing immigration reform slimmer. Meyerson writes that immigration reform is “necessary to restore our economic vitality and political equality,” and actually passing reform would benefit the Democratic faction. Unfortunately, that means that immigration reform will require 60 votes in order to pass the senate.

The Texas Observer‘s Melissa del Bosque writes about the slim chances of immigration reform passing in 2010. According to Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-TX), a member of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, a 2011 target date is “probably more realistic.” del Bosque refuses to lose hope, reminding us that Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-IL) has assured the public that “the Obama administration promised to bring up the issue in 2010.” Of course, bringing up an issue and actually passing reform are two very different animals.

Holding on to hope for 2010

In her daily roundup of Spanish-language media, Erin Rosa of Campus Progress also urges a positive outlook “despite the reorganization of the Senate.” Rosa relays that Rep. Xavier Becerra (D-CA) assured the media during a telephone conference that President Obama “remembers his promise well.” While “most latinos” interviewed are impatient, they hold on to hope that 2010 is the year for reform.

TPS for Haitians

Haitian undocumented that are currently within U.S. borders will be given Temporary Protected Status (TPS), as Julianne Hing reports for RaceWire. The decision only applies to Haitian immigrants in the U.S. prior to January 12, 2010. Hing observes that it is unfortunate that it took “a disaster of this magnitude” to inspire the White House to offer TPS to Haitian immigrants, though it is “a great relief.”

What will the recently granted TPS status mean for Haitians that are already in deportation proceedings? Such is the case of Haitian immigrant Jean Montrevil, as Aarti Shahani reports for New America Media. Montrevil came to the U.S. on a green card in 1986 to “make it big,” but in his efforts, “got stupid,” and caught up in selling drugs from his taxi cab. That was 20 years ago, and Montrevil has served 11 years in prison to pay for his errors. Montrevil is now a father of four and a community leader. The Department of Homeland Security considers his prison time proper cause to deport him. Many others feel he has done his time, and is a positively contributing member of our society. Democracy Now! also covered Montrevil’s story recently, as noted in the Jan. 7 Diaspora.

Invisible to the first world

Why are countries like Haiti mostly invisible to first world nations like the U.S. until catastrophe strikes? Leonardo Padura asks, before the earthquake, “Who talked about Haiti?” for IPS News. Haiti desperately needs the emergency aid so generously given today, but the country has needed help for a long time. “Let us hope that tomorrow, when the tragedy no longer dominates the headlines, and the dead are buried,” writes Padura, “we will not forget Haiti exists….”

Disappointingly, “U.S. corporations, private mercenaries, Washington and the International Monetary Fund” are remembering Haiti in a rather cruel and opportunist fashion, as Benjamin Dangl reports for AlterNet. At a time of crisis and great human need, Washington D.C. is “promoting unpopular economic policies and extending military and economic control over the Haitian people.” This is disturbing, as a long history of economic exploitation helped render the country vulnerable to disaster. The recent earthquake has claimed roughly 200,000 lives so far.

Haiti in context

While borders and border cities bear the brunt of blame when migrants move, the cure won’t be found in bigger bails of barbed wire, or harsh enforcement tactics that deny escape from economic desperation or dangerous conditions.

Jocelyn Barnes, reporting for The Nation, provides a much needed contextualization of Haiti. There are many related factors that weakened and harmed Haiti’s ability to thrive, not the least of which have been storms and earthquakes. But the privatization of Haiti’s infrastructure—which was “championed” by current envoy to Haiti in charge of “leading the quake assistance brigade” former president Bill Clinton—have definitely been instrumental in the country’s fate.

Marching against Arpaio

Finally, given the recent holiday celebrating the life and efforts of civil rights hero Martin Luther King, Jr., we would be remiss in overlooking the January 16 march in Arizona protesting Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio. The event was organized by Salvador Reza, a respected Mexican American activist and community organizer in Arizona. Musician Linda Ronstadt, Co-Founder of United Farm Workers Dolores Huerta, and approximately 5,000 people marched from a park to Tent City, the name for the sheriff’s makeshift detention center.

Arpaio is reviled by many in the Latino and undocumented community for his methods of racial profiling and humiliating treatment of detainees. Recently, Arpaio was compared to Bull Connor by an ad published in in the Arizona Republic by 60 black leaders and the Center for New Community.

King’s vision was large and led to new horizons; it cannot possibly be contained to one era, or one day on a calendar. The struggle continues, every day, everywhere.

____________________________

Also featured at Huffington Post, America’s Voice, FDL, The Media Consortium, Talking Points Memo, Open Salon, DailyKos, Sanctuary, Open Left, Rabble, RaceWire, In These Times Blog, NAM Ethnoblog

[For those new to the Unapologetic Mexican Blog (UMX), The Weekly Diaspora is a (paid) article I write for The Media Consortium. It is a column that runs on a few other sites, as well.]
______

By Nezua, Media Consortium Blogger [Original title: Protecting Haitian Refugees Through Immigration Reform ]

On Tuesday, the worst earthquake in 200 years struck just off the coast of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, as The Nation reports. Bringing “catastrophic destruction” to the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere, the disaster has spurred relief efforts worldwide. Crises like this are important reminders of how the treatment and protection of refugees must be a part of immigration reform.

Temporary protected status for Haitian refugees

In September of 2009—just one year after Haiti was decimated by four successive hurricanes and tropical storms that affected at least 3 million people—New America Media (NAM) made a prescient call to halt all deportation to Haiti, and grant Haitians temporary protected status (TPS) status in the U.S. “before more Haitians die or are impacted by natural disasters.”

Andrea Nill, writing for NAM’s EthnoBlog, reminds us it was only ten months ago, in March of 2009 that the Obama administration indicated it would “continue deporting undocumented Haitians,” in spite of the critical situation on the ground. Yesterday, Nill argued that not granting Haitian refugees TPS at this point would be “inconsistent with the promises the Obama administration has already made to the people of Haiti.” Later in the day, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Janet Napolitano responded by stating deportations to Haiti would, indeed, be temporarily halted.

Legalize the undocumented; boost the economy

It’s a fortunate confluence of circumstance, when doing the right thing could also help our faltering economy. Jorge Rivas of RaceWire highlights a new study on the beneficial economic effects of legalizing undocumented workers through comprehensive immigration reform. The study came about through a partnership between the Center for American Progress and Dr. Raul Hinojosa-Ojeda, associate professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. The research suggests that legalization would yield $1.5 trillion to the U.S. Gross Domestic Product over a 10-year period, generate billions of dollars in additional tax revenue, increase wages for all levels of workers in the U.S. (the “wage floor”) and create hundreds of thousands of jobs.

Detention center cover up continues

RaceWire also reveals new developments in the horrific tale of corrupt immigration officials “desperate to conceal” multiple incidents of abuse in Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention centers. Violations of law include “covering up evidence of gross mistreatment, undercounting the number of detention deaths, discharging patients right before they die, and major efforts to avoid scrutiny from the news media.” Reportedly, ICE has made great efforts to cover up detention conditions and cruelty. (Video below).

‘Draconian’ anti-immigration legislation passed in Mississippi

Rev. Jeremy Tobin of American Forum reports on a piece of “draconian” anti-immigration legislation passed in Mississippi in March of 2008. SB 2988 makes it a felony for an undocumented immigrant to work in the state. The bill includes a waivable fine for employers that cooperate with the prosecution of undocumented workers. SB 2988 oppresses immigrants and weakens the power of organized labor. According to Tobin, one frustrated legislator said that the bill was “making it a crime to work an honest job.”

Tobin calls out various organizations that backed the bill. These groups “started out anti-civil rights” and have since “reinvented themselves to be anti-immigrant rights.” He also notes that a “disturbing” number of Mississippi Democrats voted for SB 2988.

Also featured at The Nation, Huffington Post, America’s Voice, FDL, The Media Consortium, Talking Points Memo, Open Salon, DailyKos, Sanctuary, Open Left, Rabble, RaceWire, In These Times Blog, NAM Ethnoblog