HispanicTrending

To those who use the terms 'Hispanic' & illegal immigrants as if they are one

July 6, 2008
By Dennis Wyatt

It might come as a shock to narrow-minded folks who devalue the richness of the English language by sending thinly veiled vile attacking Hispanics and immigrants - legal and otherwise as if the two are interchangeable - but this state's heritage, culture and economy has strong Latin overtures.

Three emails - of which one came from Southern California and the other from the Midwest - sent in response to a story that stated 3,000 foreign immigrants move to San Joaquin County every year blamed much of this nation's ills on Hispanic immigrants

I can fill at least two-thirds of this column with the names of men with Hispanic surnames I've had the honor of knowing who defended this country by putting their life on the line by fighting in World War II, the Korean War, The Vietnam War, the Gulf War, and the current Global War on Terror. And guess what, many of them are fourth, fifth and sixth generation Americans while others are first generation.

Most are no different than others with different skin tones who work to provide a decent living for themselves and their families.

Yes, there are those that are Hispanic who belong to gangs. But guess what? There are an awful lot of Caucasians who belong to gangs including those with Hispanic names such as Sorentos and Nortenos.

Yes, there are Hispanics in this country illegally. There are also Europeans, Canadians, and Asians here illegally as well with many taking advantage of visa programs and simply over staying the limits. The numbers are indeed higher when it comes to Hispanics but let's not just paint them all as renegade lawbreakers.

There is no doubt that simply being here illegally you have broken the law.

But it is this country that created such a situation through its misguided morphing of the Bracero and other programs that were put in place because the American economy was in desperate need of unskilled labor to fill jobs. We pulled the plug on such programs but it didn't stop the need for the labor.

Get outraged all you want about illegal immigrants - particularly from South of the Border - but just keep in mind it is their backs that are keeping food costs down for the rest of us. They are the ones who will take menial jobs that no one else wants.

I have yet to hear an immigrant - whether they are legal or not one shouldn't assume - with an obvious Hispanic background whine about minimum wage jobs. Yet I can cite at least four clear cut examples of American citizens who -in several of the cases never held a job but did go to the trouble of impregnating girlfriends and producing kids that they can't and won't support - have made it clear they won't work unless it is for $15 an hour or more.

Immigrants are here to make a better life. Yes, I know all of the stories about a small but annoying number who have played the system. But in the overall scheme of things that is nothing compared to those that don't. It would be like someone casting dispersion on Americans of European extraction because of stories of whites exploiting the welfare system.

Which brings up the point that needs to be made by those who lump Hispanics and immigrants into the same word.

It is not OK to do so and then have the audacity to call yourself an American. Debate the pros and cons, triumphs and travesties of immigration today but don't paint it by color. There is no ethnicity known as "American." The strength of this nation is the fact for the most part it is driven by ideals and not skin tone. That doesn't mean there isn't racism, bigotry or discrimination. What it does mean is that the core premise of why we exist is not a remake of the British Empire, France, Germany, Italy or any other nation you want to pick where ethnicity is virtually synonymous with nationality.

France may have Algerian immigrants and those from the Middle East but you can bet your last franc that the vast majority of that nation identifies themselves as being French in ethnicity and a citizen of France in such a manner that they use it interchangeably.

You're an American by birthright or legal immigration. And an American is truly a blending of the globe.

It devalues your own standing as an American when you cast a wide web of bigotry - intended or inadvertent - over other segments of the blend.

American is the sum total of its ingredients regardless of their origins, skin tone, views or religious beliefs.

And when dispersions are cast upon part of the whole and the rest of us stand by and say nothing we are given credence to bigotry and the cancer it festers.

Source: Manteca Bulletin

As American as Apple Pie (and Samosas and Tacos)

July 4, 2008
By Rinku Sen

On this Fourth of July, I will be eating hot dogs. While I was trying to fit in as an Indian immigrant child throughout the 1970's, they represented the quintessential American food. I begged my mother to let me have them for dinner every night, instead of chicken curry and rice. She nixed the hotdogs, but sometimes allowed spaghetti and meatballs -- straight from a can.

Hotdogs were "invented" by German immigrants serving their traditional sausages in the hustling streets of the New World, and spaghetti, everyone knows, came from Italy. If I had been celebrating Independence Day 150 years ago, however, neither would have been on the menu. In those days, Germans and Italians weren't considered Americans, or even white. When they fought over the most lucrative street corner for food vendors in the 1880's, the press reported these incidents as "race riots."

I'll be sharing this holiday with a group of restaurant workers, largely immigrants. Along with the hotdogs, we'll have tacos, samosas, falafel. But according to one side of the immigration debate, we can keep our goodies to ourselves. America doesn't want them, or us.

Immigration restrictionists argue not only that we need to stop undocumented immigration, but cut back drastically on legal immigration as well. They argue that this economy -- no longer industrial but focused on information and service -- has no room for masses of poor immigrants. There's a fear that technology makes travel and communication so easy that new immigrants won't break ties with the old country and reassign their loyalty. To them, the telephone is a dangerous device, and communication with relatives a terribly un-American act.

Restrictionists have tried to modernize their argument, but it hasn't changed much through the years. Immigration of the late 19th century was dominated by Italians, Poles, Hungarians, Jews and other groups from southern and eastern Europe. At that time, these new residents were widely seen as inferior to native-born whites. They were reviled for their refusal to speak English, for their political and economic demands on American corporations, for being so poor that they became "public charges" or undercut the wages of the native-born workers, and for their unacceptable sexual behavior.

The Immigration Acts of 1920 and 1924, the most restrictive immigration policies we've ever had, limited new entrants to 150,000 per year, which was less than a quarter of the total immigration rate at that time. These laws crafted large quotas for northern Europeans, while setting limits for countries like Russia and Italy. Thousands of southern and eastern Europeans, however, continued to come.

As immigrants were deported for violating the quota policies, social reformers began to fight for long-time residents who had built families and communities in the United States. These reformers won a series of changes that gave immigration officials the ability to change someone's status.

The liberalization remade the American identity, but kept it white. Mexicans, for example, were left behind by the process. According to historian Mae M. Ngai, they weren't explicitly excluded, but they had little access to the mechanisms through which to change their status, and no one cared to correct that oversight.

In 1929, Congress also passed the Registry Act, allowing people to change their status if they paid $20, hadn't left the U.S. since 1921, and were of good moral character. Of the 115,000 people who were forgiven between 1930 and 1940, 80 percent were European or Canadian. The attorney general began to suspend deportation orders after 1940, and an internal Justice Department study in 1943 revealed that the overwhelming majority of suspensions went, ironically, to Germans and Italians; only 8 percent involved Mexicans. Instead of liberalization, Mexicans got a guest worker program, and in 1954, Operation Wetback, thecountry's first mass deportation program.

Restrictionists have frozen images of a "true" America, as though our identity hasn't changed since 1776. Stasis, however, is a fiction. Cultures do not stand still, nor should we want them to. We have the chance now to remake our immigration policy in the modern era, not by taking it back to the 1920's, but by grappling honestly with the fact that the American identity is always undergoing cultural change. Modernity challenges us to create a policy that finally recognizes the full humanity of all immigrants, without regard to their racial identity.

If we are indeed what we eat, Americans are already eating like the world. It's time for our policy to catch up to our palates.

Source: New America Media

Day camp teaches kids about Hispanic heritage

July 6, 2008
By Nic Corbett

In the colonial times at Mission San Luis, the western capital of Spanish Florida from 1656 to 1704, paper was like gold.

"They would think we were royalty," said Rob Fleischmann, visitor-center manager, on Saturday, referring to the stacks of colorful cut-out shapes on the wooden table that were part of a crafts workshop.

The crafts workshop has been held at the living-history museum the first Saturday of every month for at least three years, Fleischmann said. Up to 20 people come to the event. Each time, children can take home a different craft at no cost.

Local children visiting the site pasted the shapes, precut out of construction paper, to create "paper molas." A paper mola is a design in which a smaller shape is pasted on a larger shape, which is pasted on an even larger shape and so on.

Crafts such as the paper molas were not part of the culture of the Spanish colonialists; they originated in Panama. Mission San Luis is a Hispanic-heritage site, so organizers don't limit their events and activities to those that relate to the colonial period.

It was the educational value of the event that drew the Althouse family to visit this weekend, said Charlotte Althouse. During the summer, she and her husband search for ways to keep their children learning new things, something they call "Dad School."

Her 3-year-old daughter, Parker, created a paper mola with the design of a flower.

"I think it's really neat to see all these big buildings from a long time ago," said her stepdaughter, Courtney, 12, referring to the reconstructed buildings from the Spanish colonial period.

Source: Tallahassee Democrat

Black, Hispanic gangs kill each other over turf

Innocents caught in crossfire in cities from coast to coast

July 5, 2008
Source: WorldNetDaily.com

Latino gang members were hunting for black people in the Harbor Gateway community of Los Angeles.

Age was not a factor. Neither was gender.

Cheryl Green, 14, was on her scooter, talking to friends when a hail of bullets killed the 8th-grader and injured several other black youngsters.

That was December 2006. But the race-motivated carnage has only increased since then, say law-enforcement authorities from coast to coast – with Hispanic gangs targeting blacks and black gangs, reciprocating as their communities are increasingly surrounded by the exploding population of Hispanics, much of it fueled by illegal immigration.

In Harbor Gateway, the dividing line is 206th Street. Blacks understand it is not safe to cross over to the Hispanic side and Hispanics know it is not safe to cross over to the black side.

Federal prosecutors last year charged members of a Latino gang with conducting a violent campaign to drive blacks out of the Florence-Firestone neighborhood in L.A. County, which resulted in some 20 homicides over several years.

L.A. County Sheriff Lee Baca wrote in a newspaper editorial that "some of L.A.'s so-called gangs are really no more than loose-knit bands of blacks or Latinos roaming the streets looking for people of the other color to shoot."

Perhaps the highest profile example of what some believe to be a racial hate crime was the shooting death of Jamiel Shaw II, a promising high school football player killed near his Los Angeles home in March. Pedro Espinoza, 19, a Latino gang member and illegal immigrant, stands accused of the homicide. He sports a large "18" tattoo on his back, signifying him as a member of the 18th Street gang. He also has a smaller 18 tattooed near his left eye and the letters BK tattooed behind his left ear. Gang experts say BK stands for "Blood Killer."

Though Espinoza has pleaded not guilty to the charge, a witness quotes him as saying days after the shooting: "BK all day. I'm going to wipe all the Bloods out."

"We have domestic terrorists right here," said California Attorney General Jerry Brown at a recent gang summit in L.A. County. "Gangs are like a disease, like a cancer in a community. We have to do more."

Brown compared what is happening in the streets of his state to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He also called on the entertainment industry to stop glorifying the violent gang lifestyle in music and movies.

"I think Denzel Washington and [Robert] De Niro and anyone who has made money glamorizing gang members should contribute [to programs to help kids out of gangs]," said Constance Rice, co-director and co-founder of the Advancement Project in Los Angeles, at the summit.

In May, racial tensions between blacks and Hispanics erupted at Dominguez High School in Compton, Calif. At least eight students were suspended and one arrested after a race riot broke out.

In 2003, 5,570 young people, age 10-24, were murdered – an average of 15 each day. Most were black. While statistics show most of the violence in minority communities is black on black or Hispanic on Hispanic, the trend is shifting, according to many law enforcement officials who say they see an upsurge in racial violence.

Among 10- to 24-year olds, homicide is the leading cause of death for blacks and the second leading cause of death for Hispanics. The Justice Department reported that in 2005, the homicide rate for black males, 18-25, was just over 102 per 100,000, and only 12.5 deaths per 100,000 for their white counterparts.

In Coatesville, Penn., near Philadelphia, the police department is expressing concern about widespread reports of black city residents victimizing Hispanics – mostly illegal immigrants. Police Chief William Matthews says the reports include robberies, assaults and rapes.

He warns if the attacks are not contained, they could trigger the formation of violent Hispanic gangs.

The city has long been home to a large black community. It is now attracting a growing illegal immigrant population that is largely Hispanic.

"It's not long before you have black-on-brown crime," said Matthews. "And we're seeing the beginning of that."

Matthews said African Americans are targeting Hispanics who are vulnerable because they do not speak English and often do not report crimes to the police out of fear their immigration status will be questioned, he said.

Blacks are responsible for robbing, assaulting and raping Hispanics, as well as invading their homes, Matthews said.

"A segment of our community – the African American community – is preying on them," he said.

Matthews said some immigrants do not trust the police in their home countries and the mindset travels with them here.

"They view police as a criminal gang and rightfully so. And they're afraid if they call the police, someone in their family will be deported," Matthews said.

The fear causes crime victims to keep quiet. Therefore, Matthews said, police only know about a fraction of the crimes against Hispanics.

If the issue is not dealt with soon, Matthews said, the city could face the worst crime it has ever seen when Hispanic victims or their relatives resort to forming notoriously violent gangs, like MS-13, to defend their community.

"If we don't get our arms around this problem, organized gangs will fill the vacancies," Matthews said. "There is no violence that's happened in this city that can compare to the violence that could take its place."

Aida Garcia, director of social services for nonprofit La Comunidad Hispana, said she was not surprised to hear about the activity in Coatesville.

"I think this is happening all over right now – all over the county," Garcia said. "This has been happening for a while, except people haven't been talking because they were afraid. This is nothing new."

Meanwhile, last week in North Carolina, the head of the Latin Kings gang held a news conference to call on other gang members to stop the violence.

"I'm asking for all Bloods, Crips, MS-13, everybody out there that represents something, to put your weapons down and let's come to a table so we can talk peace," said Jorge Cornell.

He wants gang leaders to get together for a discussion on how to end violence

"What I'm asking these leaders to do is if you've got one that's going to start trouble with the other, don't let those two, you know, let it get physical," Cornell urged. "And if it does, don't let it cause a war. Let's bring it to the attention of those leaders and let those leaders deal with their own."

Bicultural, yes, but American first

July 5, 2008
By Mary Sanchez

"So when did you learn you were Mexican?" a longtime friend once asked over drinks.

Given my surname is Sanchez, the question might have seemed a bit odd. Especially because the friend pushing the query also was of Mexican lineage.

His intent was to tweak me for not speaking fluent Spanish, for never having experienced childhood rites of passage like ballet folklorico dance class, and for eluding a love-hate relationship with ranchero music.

And yet I always understood that Dad was born in Mexico. Growing up, we did hear some Spanish, but English was what we spoke.

There was no little taqueria down the street because our home was in suburbia. My Latino nature is less obvious, and at the same time deeply ingrained, evidenced in how I view family, time and God.

I recalled my friend's gibe after hearing about the demise of Tu Ciudad (Your City), a slick magazine marketed to assimilated, English-dominant Latinos. People like me.

The concept of Tu Ciudad was brilliant in its aspirations: to capture the affluent portion of the Hispanic population boom in Los Angeles. The magazine's goal was to eventually go coast to coast, addressing this coveted and significant portion of the 45 million-plus U.S. Hispanic population.

Tu Ciudad folded three years after its debut.

In a post-mortem article, editorial director Angelo Figueroa lamented: "I'm not convinced that highly assimilated, U.S.-born, English- dominant Hispanics necessarily want to be separated and marketed to as a group."

No, we do not. Or, at least, I do not. Not the majority of the time, anyway. And I have plenty of friends who'd agree.

Despite the fear in some quarters that new Latino immigrants are not assimilating, the fact is that most of us in the second generation and beyond are so highly assimilated that we're becoming difficult to capture as a niche market.

I do believe that cultural values and traits are passed on, but in subtle ways. A family might lose its Spanish language as the generations pass but still retain an attitude about respect and a way of speaking that is far less staccato and direct than standard American English.

One of the benefits of being "bicultural" is that you notice things others might not. You question assumptions and habits of both cultures. You choose who you're going to be.

And guess what most of us are choosing. Clearly, a love of the United States, but with a deep respect for the immigrant relatives who got us here.

That's why it's almost comical to me when certain Anglos talk about the need for "English only" laws. Learning English is something all second-generation kids will do. They also will learn how to be an American – as well as how to be a Mexican or Dominican or Guatemalan or Colombian. But they will be first and foremost Americans – Americans enriched by another culture.

At various times in our history, "Americanization" has been harsh and coercive. To be accepted, people first had to be stripped of their offending native culture. My Spanish is poor because my father believed he was doing me a favor by not teaching me his native language.

These days, we're better about this. School districts nationwide know that multiple language skills are a plus, not a minus.

My hope is that those Americans who look with fear on the newest stream of immigrants will realize that the newcomers – and, even more, their children – will naturally begin to blend with this country, adopting its customs, language and attitudes.

Yes, Latinos are remaking the demographics of America. But just the same, America is remaking Latinos.

Source: Dallas Morning News

Finding the Beat of Chicago’s Latino Quarter

June 29, 2008
By JEFF BAILEY

IN a fifth-floor art gallery in Pilsen, Chicago’s fashionable Latino neighborhood, vibrant guitar chords were pouring out an open window on a recent Friday night. Four Latina artists were showing their paintings, and the shoebox of a gallery was jammed with a mixed, talkative crowd. Some swayed in time to the music, swigging beer and sipping wine. The din seemed to be drawing art patrons and good-time Chicagoans from all over the huge building at 1932 South Halsted Street, the central site of an every-second-Friday art walk.

Many come to the art walk from the suburbs or other parts of the city, but like much of Chicago these days, the affair draws its real energy from the city’s surging Latino population. One of the painters whose work was on display — Carolina Reyes — moved to Pilsen from a North Side neighborhood two years ago to paint. “Being a Latina, I’m still searching to learn more about my culture,” she said.

For that, there is no need for her to leave Chicago. More than 1,000 miles from the Mexican border, the city is home to about 800,000 people of Hispanic origin, mostly Mexican. That’s more than a quarter of the population and gaining share daily — this when the city shrank by nearly a million residents after the 1950s. But in Latin Chicago, there is a new boomtown to explore.

A native of a mostly Latino suburb of Los Angeles, I moved here 25 years ago; my wife, a Latina from Texas, came 12 years ago. So, it’s natural we would be drawn to areas like Pilsen, where Spanish and English mix against a backdrop of brilliant mosaics and murals of Mexican heroes, and Little Village nearby, where mariachi bands carrying their instruments into restaurants could easily be south of the border. But it’s more than just familiarity and the fact that eating and entertainment on the Latin side of Chicago is generally cheaper. It’s where the energy is.

“It’s happening so fast,” said Carlos Tortolero, who came to Chicago from Mexico at age 3 and, as a 28-year-old school teacher in 1982, started what would become the National Museum of Mexican Art, the city’s leading Latino cultural organization. “It’s becoming a very Mexican city.”

The museum made a name for itself in 2006 when it opened an exhibition about the influence of Africans in Mexico. In a city known for its racial separation, blacks flocked to Pilsen for the show. This summer, the museum will insert itself into the national political debate with an exhibition opening on the Fourth of July — “A Declaration of Immigration” — that will go beyond painting and sculpture to present data to argue that point. “It is pro-American to be pro-immigrant,” Mr. Tortolero said.

Immigrants certainly made Chicago one of history’s great boomtowns. It grew from a nearly uninhabited swamp in the early 1800s to a metropolis of a million people by 1890. An up-to-date version of that multicultural frontier town is on display every Sunday morning at a flea market, just around the corner from where Mrs. O’Leary’s cow — in fable, anyway — is said to have kicked over the lantern that started the Great Fire of 1871. Known as the Maxwell Street Market, it runs along Canal Street south of Roosevelt Road. (The city closed down the original location on nearby Maxwell Street in the 1990s, but the name stuck.) After more than 100 years, it still attracts immigrants and their offspring from many points on the globe. But today, as with much of Chicago, the market moves to a Latin beat. Browsers seem to move in step with the blaring Latin music as they peruse the four-block stretch of stalls that feature art, jewelry and the usual knock-off purses and leather goods.

If you see a skinny fellow with a goatee who appears to know the street-food vendors, he might be Rick Bayless, the Chicago chef and cookbook author who raised traditional Mexican cooking to gourmet status, stopping by on his day off to snack on mole and hand-pressed tortillas. The crowds become thicker around the stall for Lencho’s Tacos, where people take a number and wait their turn. Well before 10 a.m., Lencho’s fans are three and four deep around the counter, lined up for tacos of grilled beef, onions, cilantro and hot sauce — a perfect on-the-go lunch for about $5.

To the north, above the stalls and the brightly dressed shoppers, rises the Loop and its towering skyscrapers, and in a single frame the city’s remarkable accomplishments and its restless, unrealized dreams come into focus.

With much of Chicago’s Latino population relatively new, many of the restaurants, much of the music and other cultural offerings burst with the flavor of home.

Upon arrival in Chicago, “people are much freer to be who they are,” says Mr. Bayless, an Oklahoma native who has adopted Mexico’s cuisine with singular fervor, and in 1987 opened Frontera Grill in the River North area. Its success, along with the success of his more refined restaurant next door, Topolobampo, has spawned many other serious and un-Americanized Latin places, making Chicago an unlikely culinary standout when it comes to Latin cuisine.

Frontera is decorated with Mexican art that Mr. Bayless and his wife have collected over the years, a riot of color and images, and Latin music plays at a volume to permit dinner conversation, though you may still find your legs dancing under the table. His simplest dishes, like the tacos al carbón ($16) — grilled meats served with guacamole, beans and tortillas made on the premises — are memorable for their simplicity and freshness.

Mr. Bayless’s restaurants are, of course, just one side of the story when it comes to Chicago’s Latin cuisine. In the West Side neighborhood of Humboldt Park, a lively Puerto Rican and Mexican area, Carlos Reyna’s small restaurant, Maiz, is a shrine to the many corn vessels — tortillas, tamales, sopes — used in traditional Mexican cooking. In the cozy storefront, Mr. Reyna waits on many of the tables himself and can help you choose a series of small dishes, like a vegetable tamale cooked in banana leaf and triangular tamales covered in mole, to be washed down by tart margaritas. He also serves bebidas frías, the sweet, refreshing mixtures of fruit and water that he grew up drinking in Mexico City. (Try the cucumber flavor.)

Mr. Reyna moved to Chicago in 1986 to pursue a career as a dancer, waiting tables to support himself. When he decided to open a restaurant, he focused on food that reminded him of home. “I always wanted to bring it to Chicago,” he said.

Similarly, over the last 36 years, another immigrant, Roberto Marín, has kept playing the salsa he grew up on in his native Colombia. He works days as a machine operator at an electrical components factory and plays bass most Saturday nights at Las Tablas, a mid-price Colombian steak house on Irving Park Road, north and west of downtown. As dinner wound down one recent night, half the patrons were grooving in their seats to Mr. Marin’s beat, and the other half were rising to dance.

Las Tablas is in a very mixed neighborhood; Latin, sure, but also Eastern European and plenty else. And that is one of the beauties of Latin Chicago: it is spread throughout the city.

But Pilsen, on the city’s near southwest side, may be the neighborhood that is most closely identified with Latin Chicago. Always working class, initially Czech, and now 100 years or so old, Pilsen is mostly a neighborhood of modest cottages and three-flats — the Chicago term for a detached three-family house. For every trendy restaurant or shop in the conspicuously gentrifying area, there remains at least a dozen stores very plainly serving local residents. It remains perhaps 90 percent Latino, and it is mostly Latinos who run those welcoming coffeehouses, upscale restaurants and trendy new stores. But apartments in the area are being fixed up, and higher rents are squeezing out some residents. Anglo newcomers in their 20s and 30s are out and about, jogging and walking their dogs.

“Right now we’re co-existing,” said Sylvia Rivera, general manager of a youth-programmed radio station, WRTE-FM (www.wrte.org), based in Pilsen and owned by the National Museum of Mexican Art. “Hopefully, we’ll be able to do that and share, as well.”

A walk east on 18th Street from the Blue Line El stop cuts through the heart of Pilsen. It is a street lined with cafes and restaurants like Cafe Mestizo (1646 West 18th Street; 312-421-5920), a laid-back coffeehouse where a T-shirt displayed on a wall announces, “Pilsen is not for sale”; and Mundial Cocina Mestiza (1640 West 18th Street; 312-491-9908), an upscale and friendly place (for weekend brunch, try the steak and eggs, surrounded by delicious Mexican side dishes and served with warm, chewy tortillas for about $12). Farther east is Bombon (1508 West 18th Street; 312-733-7788), an elaborate Mexican bakery and wedding cake shop.

Ms. Rivera used to give tours of 18th Street and the surrounding neighborhood, but increasingly visitors arrive unguided and wander by themselves. “It’s all a good thing,” she said.

Indeed, as the Latino population expands its influence in Chicago, as in other American cities, visitors won’t have to go looking for the Latin beat. It will be all around.

Source: The New York Times

Hispanic America

July 3, 2008
By  Ayman Qenawi

MIAMI — Welcome to future America.

In Washington DC, the buzz word in political and media circles is Hispanic.

Candidates, politicians, party leaders, strategists and the media are in an almost non-stop debate about how far the Hispanic vote would title the scale in favor of either Republican John McCain or Democrat Barak Obama in the November White House elections.

But in Miami, nicknamed the capital of Latin America, Hispanics, also called Latinos, have gone way past election importance.

From the moment one steps into a Florida-bound flight everything is said, written or watched in Spanish as well as in English.

Welcoming note, emergency tips, announcements on board the plane is announced by the pilot first in English then followed by Spanish.

In Miami Airport, announcements on loudspeakers and direction signs, not to mention shop names, reflect the Hispanic dominance.

On the bus or in the taxi, people usually tune in to one of so many Spanish-speaking radio stations.

The Miami Herald, arguably Florida's biggest daily, comes with a Spanish version of almost all its politics, sports, nature and health supplements.

Shopping in Publicx, Miami's biggest store chain, pricing and other information on packages are in both English and Spanish.

The big welcoming note of the chain is written in both languages, not to mention the "No Parking" signs outside.

Customers as well as cashiers do almost all dealings in the Spanish language, though in many cases both sides speak English.

"That's why it's," joked one when asked why they speak Spanish and not English.

Hispanic are the largest minority group in Florida, according to data released in March by the US Census Bureau.

The population increased by 70.4 percent from 1.6-million to 2.7-million between 1990 and 2000, a growth rate more than twice as rapid as that of African-Americans, who number 2.3-million.

Multilingual

In South Florida, a person could get lost and ask people for directions in English and they many not be able to help.

They may not even be able to understand.

"You can not control the language people use," says Marco Rubio, Speaker of Florida House of Representatives.

"I do not know how you can tell someone you must speak to the cashier in English.

"I do not know how you can force an eighty, or seventy or sixty-year-old immigrant to learn English and only speak English if they have no plans to leave their homes or immediate neighborhood."

But the Speaker insists that immigrants must learn English or otherwise they will limit the horizon of their prospects.

"I do believes that the official documents of the government must be in English. You do need a unified language you can conduct government business in."

Still, 37-year-old Rubio, whose immigrant fathers immigrated to the US in the 1950s from Cuba, finds rationalizes the spread of Spanish nationwide.

"This is a country that people visit for tourism and for business. We are trying to tell them to Miami, that we are the capital of Latin America and that they can do their banking, invest and work here.

"If you are going to do that then you have to make it easier for people to come here and interact in their native language.

"That's why people like to do their business in Miami because by speaking Spanish they can coordinate with bankers, people in restaurants, lawyers, doctors, engineers and whoever."

Helen Anguirre Ferre, Opinion Page Editor of Diario Las Americas, a Spanish-speaking family-owned newspaper, sees nothing wrong in the widespread use of Spanish.

"English should be the language of the United States of America but I do not see why we can not be multi-lingual."

She believes that learning more languages is good to America and good to Americans.

"I think that the more languages we learn, the richer we are culturally."

Ferre, whose Nicaraguan immigrant father owns the daily, cites a paradigm shift in America about the issue of multiculturalism.

"The idea that we need to be culturally sensitive to others has never been the case. Everybody who came here would melt in what they call the melting pot," she recalls.

"But then you got the debate that with the growing number of Hispanic that what you have was the salad pot. That you can all be one big salad and you can have different ingredients but we are all going to still be American."

She maintains that the values, not the language, make people American.

"Its our value system that makes Haitians who came here 25 years ago completely American today," she contends.

"It's not the language that will make me American. I can speak English anywhere else and not be American."

Ferre insists that people must learn the language of the country.

"I think immigrants need to learn English well. You will only be successful, certainly in economic terms, if you learn to speak English very well.

"Immigrants need to assimilate more and make a greater effort."

Better Prospects 

The Spanish language is even becoming a major asset in the work market.

Leonie Hermantin, deputy director of the Lambi Fund of Haiti, laments that many young Haitian Americans do not get jobs in South Florida simply because they do not know Spanish.

"Haitians and Hispanics do not have the same opportunities," she insists.

"The reality is when people do not speak Spanish in this community it's a handicap."

She says many Haitians lose work opportunities because they do not speak Spanish.

"A very qualified Haitian who lived here for twenty years could come and a person from Nicaragua or Colombia would come in and get the job much quicker because even though they do not speak English they speak Spanish and that's an advantage," contends Hermantin, whose group offer social services for Haitian immigrants.

Haitian speak French and the Creole language often called Krey?l.

Haitian Americans in South Florida region are estimated at between 600,000 to one million.

They are reportedly the second largest immigrant group in South Florida, second only to Cuban Americans.

Speaking Spanish is fast becoming an economic asset not just in Florida but nationwide.

"My older son is working in New York city," notes Ferre.

"And I know that the job he got at a bank and investment firm it really helped that he speaks English and Spanish fluently," she believes.

"It gave him an advantage that may be someone who only speaks English did not have."

Source: IslamOnline.com

Researchers find Latinos willing to pay for public services

June 23, 2008
By Chris Lambrakis

As immigration from Latin countries continues to swell, so has speculation about the implications of increasing Latino populations in communities where they settle. Such speculation ranges from potential changes in local community life and culture to public policy.

Researchers at Arizona State University believe that, at least for the city of Phoenix which experienced a phenomenal triple-digit growth rate of 226 percent in its Latino population between 1980 and 2007, they have helped answer a pivotal question regarding impact on local public services.

According to the researchers, they found that Latinos in Phoenix are generally willing to pay for quality public services. Their findings, based upon analysis conducted on data collected by Phoenix-based Behavior Research Center as part of the City of Phoenix’s 2002/2004 Community Attitude Surveys, appear in the June issue of Social Science Quarterly.

“The research taps into the broader and compelling question of what difference an increasing Latino population makes, focusing specifically on public service delivery in local government,” said Nicholas Alozie, principal author of the article and professor and head of the social and behavioral sciences unit in the School of Applied Arts and Sciences at the Polytechnic campus.

Alozie’s body of research centers on women and minority issues in public policy. He has published a number of articles on Latinos, but he said there is something unique about this one.

The new research challenges beliefs that the Latino population is merely interested in handouts from government. And it helps address what effect increasing Latino populations can have on their local communities.

Alozie said that many local governments continue to shy away from considering Latino and other lower socioeconomic parts of town for serious public services, especially privatized services, for fear that these populations cannot afford, or will not be willing to pay, for such services. Alozie added that the USAID, in its global crusade to improve social justice, has attributed this grounding assumption not only to many of the differentials in service quality often observed across parts of the same local communities worldwide, but even to the non-availability of services in poorer parts of town altogether.

“This research suggests that assumption is misplaced,” he said. “Latinos want superior local public services, and they are willing to pay for them.

“The Latino population is generally poorer than the white, black, and Asian populations,” said Alozie. “This research proposes that Latinos are willing to pay for local services, ranging from crime fighting, ambulance, library and youth programs to countering gang activities, their income notwithstanding. Moreover, our findings suggest that Latinos are more prepared than whites to pay for these services.”

While the research indicates a willingness to pay for services, the researchers suggest that it also is important to consider the broader role Latinos will have in creating and shaping public policy in the future.

“The continuing growth and persistent residential segregation of the Latino population will call for changes in the way local services are delivered to Latino parts of town, as Latinos will demand more and superior services in the communities in which they live,” he said.

Source: Arizona State University

Guatemalan women kick aside constraints in the U.S.

Soccer, a frowned on activity in their home country, becomes a passion.

June 30, 2008
By Molly Hennessy-Fiske

Celestina "Celes" Lopez strode out from under the shade of a battered palm tree in a corner of MacArthur Park, entered the makeshift soccer field of dirt and gravel, and called to teammates in Spanish.

"Don't be afraid of the big ones," said the 40-year-old mother of two, shoulders thrust back, head as high as she could manage on a 5-foot frame.

Her sisters, Francisca, 34, and Elda, 30, walked with her.

"Be like the men -- aggressive," Elda called out. During the week, the sisters spend their days like scores of other illegal immigrant women in Los Angeles: Wedged behind Singer sewing machines, they feed pants and shirts under the needle until their shoulders grow stiff.

But on the weekends they play a game that was off-limits to them in Guatemala. It is on the soccer fields that the Lopez sisters feel like American women.

Growing up at the foot of the Sierra Madre in northwest Guatemala, the Lopezes didn't need to be told that soccer was forbidden. Women did not wear shorts. They did not play games that required machismo.

"The indigenous people didn't like women to play," Celestina said while making tamales for dinner at her Westlake apartment one Thursday after practice. "There were evangelicals who didn't like it either."

There were six children in the Lopez family, three boys and three girls. The oldest, Juan, made the family's first soccer ball out of spare fabric when Celestina was small. She and her sisters were not allowed to play with it.

Her father, Francisco, an evangelical Christian, was a cattle and sheep farmer. He frowned on women playing rough sports like soccer but shared his countrymen's passion for the game. He attended the town's Sunday soccer matches and sold ice cream to spectators. He went to see the popular local soccer team, Club Deportivo Xelaju Mario Camposeco, "Los Superchivos," in nearby Quetzaltenango, where they filled the 13,500-seat stadium. He even took a few of his children to the game, including Francisca.

At night, Celestina would hear her brothers and other neighborhood boys calling to one another to play soccer.

She and her sisters would join them on the dirt roads, under the apricot, plum and palm trees. But the girls would never play.

"We would go and watch, only watch," Elda said.

On Jan. 20, 1994, Celestina left her small town of San Carlos Sija for the U.S., following the path of relatives. With no legal papers, she traveled by land, paying a coyote in Tijuana 15,000 quetzals, about $2,000, to guide her into California. It took her two tries to make it to Los Angeles.

Francisca followed the next year -- after five attempts over a dangerous route across the desert into Arizona. Elda arrived in 1996, again with the help of a coyote.

Life in L.A. proved harder than the sisters had imagined. The only jobs they could find were in garment factories, piecework that paid less than minimum wage with no benefits.

But they began building lives much as they would have in Guatemala: marrying, having children and joining an evangelical church, the Centro Cristiano Vida Victoriosa in Echo Park.

It would be years before they started playing soccer, almost by accident.

In the spring of 2006, after more than a decade of living in Los Angeles, Celestina heard an announcement at church: The minister was organizing a women's soccer league.

The sisters borrowed shin guards from their husbands. They bought knockoff Adidas cleats for $25, almost a day's pay, at Pepe's Sports near MacArthur Park because they knew the owner, a fellow Guatemalan. They persuaded their husbands to watch their five children.

Celestina had already practiced with her husband, Raymundo Hernandez, 35, who had played soccer in Guatemala since he was a child. But she felt awkward in the new cleats, "like a cow in shoes."

She and her sisters were nervous and scared to play. None of them had medical insurance in case they were injured.

But that was not their main concern. Their husbands had played without medical insurance for years and had never been hurt.

The sisters' biggest worry was that they might embarrass themselves by making stupid mistakes.

But as they played that first day at Belmont High School, and in the weeks that followed, Celestina grew confident. Not only could she and her sisters play, they looked forward to it. It loosened them up, relieved the stiffness in their shoulders.

Celestina and Elda felt less stressed. Francisca felt less depressed, stopped having headaches and breathing problems.

After about a year, the women's soccer games became so popular that the minister decided they were distracting churchgoers and discontinued them.

Celestina was secretly pleased. Playing under the minister's watchful eye, she felt she had to be on her best behavior. They would start their own team. For help, they turned to another Guatemalan immigrant.

On any given weekend, scores of immigrants line the hills of the bowl-shaped field where Celestina and her sisters play in MacArthur Park. Vendors with strollers full of Gatorade and Cheetos compete for territory closest to the field, bickering in Spanish. Men stand in clusters on the sidelines, following the action. Mothers dressed in heels and glitter-dusted jeans watch with babies hoisted on their hips. Boys and girls roam nearby, passing soccer balls.

Daniel Morales started the league, Youth Empowerment Through Scholastic Sports Service, for low-income, mostly immigrant children seven years ago. It has grown to about 1,200 players, including a dozen women's teams he refers to as "the ladies."

Annual dues are about $12. Games are usually on Saturdays, with optional practices during the week, and a season that effectively runs all year. Uniformed referees have whistles and carry penalty cards in their pockets, but in some ways the league is still informal.

The medic is an elderly Mexican cowboy who watches games from a folding chair on the sidelines. At the end of the winter and summer seasons, everyone receives a trophy.

Francisca remembers how giddy she felt the day she picked up her first uniform for $25, packaged in crinkling cellophane, like a toy.

"I wasn't a woman," she said, "I was a girl."

Celestina and her sisters didn't have to recruit much for their new team.

Women