So the year ends and so does this blog on a regular three-times-per-week basis.  In the year that begins tomorrow, change and events will continue to rock our world.  Sadly, television too soon will break into our lives with news of another mass shooting.  The possibility that Israel will launch its already-planned attack on Iran’s nuclear installations becomes probability as each day passes.  By the end of the spring, the fragile economy might have been harassed back into recession by obdurate House Republicans whose political near-sightedness obscures the electoral razor atop their noses.  Still, despite the immediacy of these events, the most transcendental if not outright existential story for the country remains how HispanicLatinos develop socially, economically and politically.  And so from time to time a thought or two on the subject will appear in this same space.

The beginnings of the HispanicLatino storyline appear old already.  The drumbeat of demographic change has become monotony.  Yet the story is just beginning.  The objective of this blog, which began in the late summer of 2011, intended to advance foundational thought and reflection beyond the routine talking point of a Hispanic/Latino population remaking the country.  HispanicLatinos, after all, will prove more important than the next mass shooting or the combined competitive evolution in the near future of the Brazilian, Chinese, Indian and Mexican economies.  HispanicLatinos must succeed for America to survive.

The HispanicLatino phenomenon, though, is not easily captured.  It seems an apparition in slow-motion, though it is not.  Millions of HispanicLatinos are making millions of individual decisions in their lives daily – from diet to debt – that in the long run will be more important than whether the European Union survives.  The composite meaning of those decisions escapes the attention it deserves for many reasons, not the least of which is the slow, drawn-out understanding by HispanicLatinos of their importance to the country.  The failure of the majority of HispanicLatinos to not understand the historic proportion of their existence relative to the rest of the population threatens the country.  It is, in fact, a matter of national security.

Though the HispanicLatino electorate finally attained some political significance in the recent presidential election year and corporate America more and more understands their commercial significance, HispanicLatinos remain invisible relative to the size of their population.  Remarkably, the best thing that happened to HispanicLatinos was the harsh, destructive rhetoric and anti-immigrant laws authored by racists in Arizona and Alabama that were abetted nationally by the Republican party.  Those events however hurtful to so many began to give form to a perspective that must still be organized then deepened.  HispanicLatinos knew enough to vote almost uniformly Democratic but now ahead of them is finding their voice and determining where they fit in the world.  Without an organic sense of what they are about, HispanicLatinos will remain incomplete and so will be viewed as they are now, as a disparate population on which no one can get a handle.

The political epiphany of the news media of late notwithstanding, the HispanicLatino population is not heard as thoroughly as it should be.  HispanicLatinos do not compel their fellow Americans to an idea that they can quickly understand in shorthand or sound bite.  Unlike African Americans, whose guiding political compass was to correct a grievous wrong and to reorient history to fulfill the promise of the Constitution, HispanicLatinos lack a sense of national purpose, that is to say, a national political identity.  My sense is that the most complete HispanicLatinos are those who have served in the military or those whose knowledge of Spanish gives them a different and deeper understanding of self and, ultimately, of community.  From them must come a new leadership to develop the new ideas of themselves without which HispanicLatinos give the often clueless media – mainstream and new – nothing to grasp onto, so that passé images and exasperating stereotypes remain the currency of muddled ideas that compounds the challenges that HispanicLatinos face in finding themselves and their place in the sun.

The media in turn – paradoxically, given their omnipresence – exacerbates the potential misunderstanding by the whole country of this pivotal moment in the history of the Americas.  Previous generations of Americans evolved without the constant presence of a ubiquitous media.  Not so with HispanicLatinos – except that the impact an unknowing media is having on HispanicLatinos is itself not known.  This is a very dangerous moment, for in the end the individual, personal decisions HispanicLatinos make for themselves is the biggest story of all.

And so from time to time a comment that perhaps achieves insight on the events ahead in our lives might appear in this space.

Jesse Treviño is the former editorial page editor of The Austin American-Statesman.  

HispanicLatino.com

The end of the year holds promising signs for the country and HispanicLatinos – unless the Republican-held House of Representatives drives the global financial markets into turmoil and drags the economy back into recession and/or various foreign crises detonate.  If not for the fiscal cliff, the nation should be able to look forward to start moving again and leaving the blight of the disastrous Bush years behind – finally.  With wars ending (and hopefully none soon aborning) and the economy slowly eating away at the remaining distressed properties in an improving housing market, the country can begin to assess what it needs to do to fix itself for the years ahead.  Finding the will to rebuild its infrastructure, expand its domestic energy supply and strengthen its educational systems, the nation can deliver on its promise.

Though it takes courage to tackle the issues at hand, a strong economy can salvage much.  With the Bush Recession slowly lifting, the oft-misused phrase “the fundamentals of the economy are strong” comes closer to being true.  No country’s economy is better positioned to explode – and burn with a flourish.  Some of the country’s travails – a plague of obesity, students saddled with hundreds of billions of dollars in debt, a corrupted Washington, a broken immigration system, an increasingly farcical Supreme Court – are redeemable.  For that precise reason, HispanicLatinos need to step up their efforts to help resolve the challenges that vex the country.

HispanicLatinos did themselves a favor by voting overwhelmingly Democratic last month – thus serving notice on out-of-step Republicans that they will be blamed for any misstep that makes the future more challenging still.  In fact, the GOP is on probation.  But so are Democrats – and HispanicLatinos themselves.

On so many fronts the problems that confront HispanicLatinos can be traced back to their being forced by history and other forces for starting life behind or on the wrong foot.  But most of those can go a long way to being resolved with better parenting, higher levels of civic engagement, more focused decision-making by individuals and more effective and courageous leadership by their elected and appointed leaders (and the development of new leaders and/or the replacement of those least worthy of their positions).

HispanicLatinos often reveal themselves in public opinion surveys as being the most optimistic of all groups in the country.  I always hope that those feelings reflect an innate sense that the fundamentals of their community and the nation are strong.  But I also have suspected that many tend to settle for too little or for only enough to get them by – the wrong attitude in a nation in which individual initiative and achievement are essential.  Of all the things HispanicLatinos need is the prerequisite ability to see what is possible in their lives.

And everything is possible.

No HispanicLatino youngster anywhere in the country is doomed automatically to a life defined by bad schools or bad diets.  Good parenting can overcome any challenge.  In families in which parenting could be improved, there almost always is an aunt or an uncle or cousin or teacher or coach or priest or pastor who can make a difference.  But for these secondary actors to have an opportunity to intercede, a greater, more positive vision of the future must be revealed and organized for all.  Hope comes from an elevated sense of self or from leaders who can spell out how their communal good fortune can motivate HispanicLatinos to create for themselves a far different destiny than that often ordained by the past.

HispanicLatinos who have done well and have excelled have a special responsibility.  Unless they engage, they give free reign to those who can stunt everyone’s progress.

The fundamentals of the country are good.  And so are those of the HispanicLatino population – but they must stoke themselves into the fire that they can become.

Jesse Treviño is the former editorial page editor of The Austin American-Statesman.

HispanicLatino.com

As the Republican party continues its autopsy of its epic failure to unseat an incumbent Democratic President laboring under the worst economy since the Great Depression, it should keep in mind the figures 124 million and 62 million.  If at least 124 million Americans vote in a presidential election, they are almost certain to put Democrats in the White House.  In truth, President Obama could have given up as many as four million of his 65.6 million votes last month and still won.  In the 48 months between the election of 2012 and 2016, another 2.4 million HispanicLatinos will turn 18 and most will be eligible to vote.  These new voters represent an increasingly politically-engaged group that last month voted more than 70 percent Democratic.  That is how real and deadly the future seems for Republicans.

In many ways the future is unmanageable for the GOP.  It is one thing to gaze at the spectacle of House Speaker John Boehner dealing with the Tea party in the Republican Caucus in the House of Representatives.  That is bad enough.  But even if Republicans at the national level can somehow moderate their views on issues of importance to HispanicLatinos, women, gays and lesbians and independent voters in general, they will have to deal with radical Republicans at the state level – which for all practical purposes in a digital, 24/7 world can produce unrelenting chaos.  Any story coming out from any state capitol or county courthouse can become a national sensation in a microsecond.  Think Joe Arpaio in Arizona or Todd Akin in Missouri.  That is what makes the 62-million figure important.

In the past three presidential elections, the Republican nominee for President pulled in 62, 60 and 61 million votes (Bush in 2004, McCain in 2008 and Romney in 2012).  It seems that 62 million is the marginal high point for a Republican candidate that the spending of one billion dollars by the GOP this year could not reach.  It would take a pretty disastrous Democratic candidate to lose a presidential election in the years ahead.  Any nominee better than John Kerry – who barely lost to George W. Bush in 2004 – could win enough electoral votes to achieve the Presidency.  And just getting to 62 million votes will prove more difficult for Republicans in a nation with a growing population.  Each year, the number of white, non-HispanicLatino voters – the base of the party – contracts in proportional and real terms.

The best barometer of the challenge ahead is what almost happened in Arizona to Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio – the most visible anti-HispanicLatino Republican in the country.  Arpaio won just 50.7 percent of the vote, according to the Arizona Capitol Times as participation among HispanicLatino and revulsion among moderate Republican voters increased.  What a victory it would have been for the GOP had Arpaio lost in a state Mitt Romney won.

From a strategic perspective the nation’s demographic numbers look appalling for Republican candidates at the presidential level.  And from a tactical perspective, the fiscal-abyss and gun-control narratives playing out in Washington today are a disaster. As worrisome for Republicans reviewing the fiasco of eight weeks ago is the news that the Obama political machine that churned out almost four million more votes than needed on Nov. 6 is going to keep going in some form or another.

The advantage that Democratic strategists developed through a better understanding and use of technology and, finally, through the appreciation of the country’s demographics is not one to be surrendered soon by relatively young men and women who have their entire political futures ahead of them.  This bright, energetic and talented group has tasted power and already has changed history.  It hardly seems possible that they do not have larger worlds to conquer.

If these modern-day wunderkinds are now thinking about targeting the last redoubt of Republicanism in the country – state legislatures in marginal states taken over by Republicans in the 2010 Tea party tide and the big enchilada, Texas – then the GOP has bigger problems on its hands.  It will have to fight populations numbers trending against them, have to figure out how to change its political positions and have to deploy valuable resources to defend its last bastions of power.  Not to mention having to explain upcoming decisions by a Supreme Court with a Republican-appointed majority that wants to take the country backwards in time.

The postmortem Republicans are conducting of the 2012 election will reveal that their party was stuck in a prolonged period of antemortem that might make it impossible to revive an organization that expired from self-inflicted wounds but more so was afflicted by reality.

Jesse Treviño is the former editorial page editor of The Austin American-Statesman.

HispanicLatino.com

It seems inconceivable.  Republican leaders in Washington and elsewhere do not get how dangerous the fire they are playing with is.  On almost every front – ranging from the disaster of the fiscal cliff to the submarining of President Obama’s governmental nominations to the prosecution of Benghazi to control of dangerous weaponry that kill kids to contraception to defending millionaires’ tax bills – Republicans are the ancien régime before its collapse in France.

It is one thing to not understand that the country no longer agrees with their positions on everything from taxes to gay rights to woman’s choice to climate change.  It is quite another thing to not realize that the country is ready to move on.  For Republicans, the latter is the more dangerous.  Since the country knows what it believes and thinks, when it decides to move on, it will and start leaving the past behind – and it has.

The end of the year comes fraught with symbolism.  Knowing that the ground has shifted under them socially and demographically like that which had shifted under the rulers of aristocratic France before the revolution, the Republican party is reacting in a way that only accelerates their doom.  To me, the optimism of a few days ago that Congress would begin to address how to control assault weapons of mass destruction and how to manage and administer immigration and how to address other critical issues is way too high.

The new year will make things worse for Republicans and, unfortunately, for the country.  Instead of a fast spring in which real progress could be made – Democrats with an advantage but Republicans with a golden opportunity to moderate their image and brand – we face deadlock…and a real possibility of the economy being thrown back into recession!  Imagine that: A conscious decision to implode the economy.

In retrospect, the Obama campaign’s selection of Forward as its campaign theme captured the country’s sense of place and self.  When chosen, the word was lambasted by Republican candidates for President since so little progress, according to them, had been made against the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.  But those of us who have been banging the drums for years about what the social and demographic changes mean for the country understood it.  The country has changed.  It truly has.  The only ones who have not changed are about 20-25 percent of the country that is the essence of the Tea party that runs the Republican party.

So: Meaningful action on control of weapons?  Doubt it.  Meaningful immigration reform?  Doubt it.  Meaningful reform and improvement of schools?  Doubt it.  Meaningful rebuilding of the country’s infrastructure?  Doubt it.  Meaningful new ideas on climate change?  Doubt it.  A meaningful approach on how to convert natural gas into the nation’s new economic engine?  Doubt it.

When the bottom line is drawn by the end of next year, it could be that the country might be in revolt especially if the economic recovery is strangled by a misguided few who in their own way are as socially misanthropic as Adam Lanza was before he walked into a school hall in Connecticut and slaughtered 20 innocents.

What a corner the Republicans have painted themselves into and what a precipice the country now faces as a result.  In the first reaction to the disasters now taking shape in Washington, the global financial markets reacted badly.  It was at long last the economy that drove the despots in Paris to ruin.

When Pat Buchanan won the New Hampshire primary in 1992 and had with him a band of right-wing crazies brandishing pitchforks, he was on to something.  Except that the band has grown into national revulsion – but on the other side.

Jesse Treviño is the former editorial page editor of The Austin American-Statesman.

HispanicLatino.com

The day was long, its shadows stretching their elongated forms across the road.  To the left of me at a car mall along the interstate, a super-sized American flag too heavy to fly full was at half-mast, its drooping symbolic of a nation weighed down by grief and bewilderment about what to do next about the blood-madness unleashed by guns in our society.  I wondered if the political system could bear the responsibility of steering the nation around and through what has become a moment of turning, when we as a people are presented with the opportunity to grow.  This, after all, is not like the attacks of September 11, 2001. Those attacks were of an enemy foreign to our land; there was no reason to doubt anything.  Connecticut was an attack from within.  The question now is whether we can react against those who attack us every day and then attack us all at once on a campus of innocents.

The faces of the murdered children and of the little survivors in Newtown crack and crush the heart.  Their shadows should be enough to haunt a feckless Congress into action. And much can be done, such as banning the nasty assault weapons that to many are a symbol of right-wing extremists but that for me are about something else, something difficult to explain.  It can be best told by a story of many years ago.

The house on Capitol Hill that I lived in had been robbed for a third time in one year.  A couple of months before, I had been mugged after parking my car two blocks from the Supreme Court.  Crime was endemic in Washington at the time.  I was almost 25 and having been raised in Texas had been around guns but had never been taught to use them.  I remember my father cleaning his rifle at the height of the Cuban missile crisis when no one discounted war with the Soviets, and I remember the jackrabbits and deer he used to bring home to feed his family at times.  Nothing on earth beats venison tamales.  And so, I had never been opposed to guns and given the rising threat to my personal safety from the near-useless D.C. government, I thought it was time to inquire about getting a gun.  So I called a friend in Virginia who was a gun enthusiast.

And so he came over the following Saturday morning.  I told him I wanted to learn how to fire a gun and maybe get one, and so it was determined we would go to his shooting range later that week to start the process.  But as he talked I saw him get more and more excited.  There seemed to be something else at work in his personality, in his identity.  He began to talk in a way that made me realize that for some people guns are more than, well, just guns.  I remember to this day the relish with which he said, “Yeah, they make you feel so powerful.  It’s a rush.  All that power.”  I italicize that word not to take literary license.  It was he who emphasized the word by bringing his hands up to his chest as if holding something of greater value than himself.  The image of Adolf Hitler gathering his arms to his chest while speaking in near ecstasy to a bunch of fanatics comes to mind. I did not keep the appointment.  The rapture in his voice makes me nervous to this day but it also provides me with what for me is an insight to the current lunacy.

In the reports after Columbine, Virginia Tech, Aurora and Sandy Hook, speculation suggests that the exercise of power was at the core of what motivates young men of similar psychological makeup to embark on such violence that almost always includes their own destruction.  What an amazing moment if we as a society are producing individuals who feel such powerlessness as to trigger such madness.  Are they just the extreme of any of us who sometimes futilely battle insurance companies and banks and government and cable companies and oil and gas companies and drug gangs?

Have we reached a point when personal rage is refracted routinely into personal identity?  But my father was not a gun nut.  He would have defended us if the Russians had parachuted into West Texas.  And if he were still alive today and his family needed food, well, a deer in the Texas Hill Country would not be safe.  I doubt my father every savored the idea of power rushing from his rifle.

All of this is about something else.  Something is afoot not valid years ago.  To me, the difference is the wave of violence in movies, television and music that has permeated all of life.  Exposure to violence is synonymous with the increase of massacres in other countries as well.  It is not an American phenomenon.  It is about the need to satisfy helplessness through a sudden lunge for power even at the cost of self.  We have too many guns amidst too many young men not connected to life but to violence.

We do not have to reassess the meaning of the Second nor the First Amendment.  The purveyors of violence and irresponsible gun owners must reassess the impact of their vice and their personal shortcomings on the rest of us, including the children.

The gun lobby is not all wrong; neither is the other side, of which I count myself a member.  We must transcend absolutist thinking.

We all have to come out from under the shadows.

Jesse Treviño is the former editorial page editor of The Austin American-Statesman.

HispanicLatino.com

When Republicans ponder if they are going the way of the Whigs, they do not have to go much further than listen to Mike Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas who aspires to be President.  Huckabee said after the tragedy in Connecticut last week that because prayer, according to him, is banned from public schools:  Should we be so surprised that schools would become a place of carnage?  Huckabee’s God evidently tolerates a misanthropic young man pumping hot bullets into 20 kids and six adults because the Constitution allegedly prohibits prayer in schools.  Actually, prayer happens in schools every day.

Had Huckabee been elected President in 2008 – he was the frontrunner at one point – and re-elected in 2012, he would have stood at the podium at the White House from where President Obama spoke to a stunned nation on Friday.  But would comfort from a President Huckabee have settled upon the shell-shocked, distraught families of the victims or would blame have rained on them for not forcing the local school board to force the kids of Newtown into prayers clubs?

I cannot even begin to fathom what would have driven Adam Lanza to commit the incomprehensible.  And neither can I understand the likes of Huckabee whose view of God is so vengeful and small.  All of us have sinned, but I doubt God punishes people who do not pray to Him/Her on a daily basis.  Huckabee imagines a God who punishes youngsters for the presumed constitutional transgressions of their parents.  Huckabee cheapens God.  He cheapens children who had not yet reached the age of reason.  For some, Santa Claus had more immediate meaning; and most of them could not even have known what prayer is.

I am so much against guns but I also know that the cat is out of the bag.  You cannot put the potential evil of 200 million firearms back into pre-molten steel.  And I am also aware that people have to defend themselves, much like the Constitution must be defended. But I am also aware of how dangerous men and women who think like Huckabee are.  To be so mindlessly callous towards shattered parents and lost families, their souls flayed by pain, who are searching for an explanation – any reason, any hint – as to why this abomination would happen is itself an abomination.

A woman I know in a high public setting was offended one day when I interrupted her daily biblical reading.  She had sensed that I have little patience for people who ostentatiously make their religiosity a public brand.  “Don’t you know, Jesse, that God is a jealous God?” Seldom at a loss for words, I could not respond to someone whose concept of God is so narrow as to be offensive, well, to God.  Still, all of us must define our relationship with God, so her feelings are as real and as justified as anyone’s.  Huckabee’s comments, however, give currency to the argument that religion today and the Republican party have been hijacked by the self-centered few at a time when the nation needs nationwide consensus to solve its fiscal and social problems, including how to deal with the blood-madness that guns have loosed upon the land.

From a tactical perspective, Huckabee’s comments will be heard by moderate and independent and female voters who might not have wanted to vote Democratic last month but were left no choice by an equally self-centered and overly religious Republican nominee.  These critical middle-of-the-road and independent voters shopping for their sons and daughters and grandkids or smaller brothers and sisters for Christmas almost certainly will have Connecticut on their minds – but surely with a different sensitivity than Mike Huckabee’s.  Upon hearing Huckabee last week, they probably do not regret voting the way they did.

And I bet they will be less willing to listen to this gruesome, heartless right-wing babble in the future.

Jesse Treviño is the former editorial page editor of The Austin American-Statesman.

HispanicLatino.com

The political bickering over the fiscal cliff looks small, and it is, in comparison to the larger demographic cliff the country already has sailed over with greater implications by far.  The fiscal crisis in Washington today is just the beginning of the deeper financial plunge ahead – unless the economy is transformed to create new jobs with better-than-average wages to increase revenues, that is to say, expand the middle class.  The Congress and the President can negotiate tax rates but they can do little about the birth, death and obesity rates changing the country and its fiscal foundations far more profoundly than current balances in the federal government’s accounts.

The largest of the combined financial problems, of course, are Medicare and Social Security – whose futures look problematic since the elderly are living longer, minorities are not earning enough to support these programs and the young are incurring obesity-related health-care costs scores of years before they should.  When looked at analytically, the precise importance of the HispanicLatino population to the nation’s future becomes glaring.  You do not have to know the actuarial and budgetary numbers to understand that the current fiscal abyss is part of the much larger problem.  You cannot expect a growing HispanicLatino population with low, static incomes to support the growing cost of everything.

The facts are plain and simple:  A growing elderly population with soaring health-care costs hardly can be supported by a growing HispanicLatino population whose households are worth18 times less than white, non-HispanicLatino households.  And when health-care costs burn from both sides of the life spectrum, the fate of any country is not difficult to discern.  The worth of the average HispanicLatino household and a shrinking middle class do not generate enough of a financial stream with which to put out the fiscal fire already burning.

The incessant drumbeat of how important the HispanicLatino population is to the country might be altering long-held views on immigration.  Most of the nation now wants pathways to citizenship for the millions of workers in the country illegally.  It is not hard, for older Americans especially who hear the message, to understand that more tax-paying workers are necessary to support their future.  There is, however, a part of the population that will never understand the equation.  It lives in delusion in a world that no longer exists.  And these individuals, of course, are unable to comprehend that unless the country undertakes to rebuild itself – through directed investment in health care for the young to nip the obesity problem now, through targted investment in education and through verifiable research and development to solve the problems of extracting and using natural gas to transform the economy – nothing done in Washington on taxes and spending now will mean much later.

Washington these days has the feel of pettiness when these should be days for optimism.  The electorate turned back a right-wing philosophy that would have ensured the country an inglorious fate – except that a small band of Republicans continues to look at the nation in a different light than what it is:  Blessed with a new and more youthful population and a new source of energy that can remake the country and re-engineer its economy to create a new and vibrant middle class.  The opportunity the country has before it is an opportunity that cannot be diminished by paltry political fights.  Before creating a second American century for itself and for the benefit of humankind, the country needs to look beyond the small to the great.

Republicans talk about smaller government not realizing that in talking about it they make themselves look smaller still than they did the night of the election a month ago. The election blew apart their perception of reality and confirmed Americans’ belief that government can coexist with free enterprise.  The election was, after all, about the economy.  History could record the results as a departure point to another sustained period of American greatness.

Republicans look smaller not recognizing the greater promise ahead.

Jesse Treviño is the former editorial page editor of The Austin American-Statesman.

HispanicLatino.com

The Supreme Court’s decision to rule on gay marriage after sidestepping the issue for so long constitutes another pivotal moment in the development of the new Hispanic/Latino social and political identity.  Like every group that evolves into the consciousness of being an American, HispanicLatinos become in various forms the products of efforts to attain the American ideal — which changes over time.  The American of today is not the American of the 1960′s and certainly not the American of a half century later.  Neither are HispanicLatinos.

How exactly HispanicLations evolve — bombarded as they have been by the sweeping forces that have transformed society during five decades of halycon change — is not yet fully evident. In many ways Hispanics or/and Latinos are still discovering themselves.  Many are sinewously insecure.  A population that goes by two different names cannot be anything but a collection of individuals still figuring things out — advancing the idea that HispanicLatinos are not like everyone else.  Indeed, they are not alike in many ways to each other.  But regarding gay marriage, it would appear that HispanicLatinos in toto have moved past their former thinking — and, thus, their former selves.

The more interesting question is why HispanicLatinos are not following the script they were once expected to read from and, more so, how does one address them in the third millennium of modern time and the third century of the American Republic?

It is not as if HispanicLatinos do not understand the issue.  Gay marriage is not burdened by the intricacies of the fiscal cliff or the complexities of the challenges to peace in the Middle East.  No, the question — like the image of two women or two men getting married — is quite simple and clear, and HispanicLatinos have moved to the right side of history.  Yet while HispanicLatinos remain socially conservative, they evidently are not a conglomeration caught in stasis.  They have grown in numbers and they have matured in their understanding of the world around them.  Perhaps they have been forced to by religions and political parties that are their own worst enemies and that thrived on exploiting insecurity. 

It is more difficult every day for HispanicLatinos to respect churches that align themselves with a political party whose official line is bellowing forth anti-immigrant language that conflates into discriminatory and hateful rhetoric against HispanicLatinos of all kinds and shapes regardless of citizenship staus.  It must have been just as difficult for Catholic bishops and their Republican allies on election night to accept that 71 percent of HispanicLatinos nationally rejected a right-wing philosophy that is not appropriate for modern times.  In some states the figure zoomed past 85 percent.  In any market, 71 percent is whole-scale rejection of a product.

In this environment in which HispanicLatinos have unleashed themselves from old thinking, they have the opportunity to develop a higher sense of globality, that is, to reexamine the world around them and rethink what caused them to be who and what they are.  Leaders, corporations, institutions and organizations — and molders of public opinion — who understand the journey of self-discovery that HispanicLatinos are pursuing will have a better chance to influence their behavior and, more important, their formation.  Thus it is that progressives have an opportune moment to reshape the political foundations of the country for years to come by helping to move a people shaped by inherently anti-democratic institutions into democracy’s corner.

HispanicLatinos are looking for an original experience.  They are about the business of finding themselves, starting from a new original point.  The previous point of their origin cast them as followers of decisions made by others.  Today, they do not depend on the past so much as on desire to take control of their own future.  Of their own selves.

While HispanicLatinos historically by and large are not necessarily programmed to look under the hood, they are forced to do so by high-profile public issues like gay marriage, made more possible by the tragedy of AIDS that brought all sides of the political spectrum out of their own closets.  The mindless anti-gay “humor” on Spanish-language radio — a daily, nauseating reminder of the failure of so many Latin American societies to pro-gress — is an antiquated aberration.  That kind of archaic thinking, while less relevant in today’s world, still cannot be gratuitously dismissed.  It hopefully represents no more than the momentary inability to advance onto a higher intellectual plane.

The very idea of relations between members of the same sex remains a source of discomfort for some HispanicLatinos.  But not as discomfiting to the new and large HispanicLatino population moving ever more confidently into the future.

Jesse Trevino is the former editorial page editor of The Austin American-Statesman.

HispanicLatino.com

The recent fire in a factory in Bangladesh that claimed the lives of114 garment workers generated international headlines and calls for reform of working conditions in similar plants in Asia.  Yet the ongoing human tragedy along the border with Mexico somehow escapes notice.  Scores of mostly Mexican immigrants are dying trying to get across along the frontier.  More than 120 bodies of human beings once treking through Brooks County alone in South Texas have been found this year.  They died of exposure to harsh conditions, rattlesnakes, dehydration and foul play.  The number of victims more likely reaches 500.  Authorities estimate that only one in four victims is ever found.  The chances of surviving are low.

This ghastly, sad human toll is only one of the imperatives that should be driving discussions about immigration in Washington.  At the moment, though, there does not seem to be a draft plan being discussed uniformly by all interested parties.  If a breakthrough is not soon achieved, it will be a long time before today’s propitious, post-election opportunity comes again.  And, if the latest jobs report from the Department of Labor released last week indicates an economy turning around, then it will become again the magnet dulled by the Bush recession and by the slow recovery afterward.  Would now not be the right time to put a system in place so that future immigrant waves are not chaotic repeats of the acrimony and suffering of the past three decades? 

Make no mistake, the immigrant tides — high or low — being discounted now as phenomena of the past will return as the economy improves.  We should prepare with a new system of laws.  But what should the system look like?

The resolution to the immigration “problem” — which at the moment technically does not exist since immigration actually is at net zero — must be realistic.  That immigrants are not flooding the border as in recent years does not mean that too many sojourners are not perishing.  Despite so many dying along the border, the face of immigration is no longer just that of individuals crashing the border so much as the 11 million or so who are here, anchored to new lives by families, jobs and other permanent circumstances.

So the resolution of immigration starts with the issue of the 11 million, with the border largely having been secured — except for the fact that the drug cartels are now the most reliable way for many immigrants to make the crossing more safely, if such a thing can be conceived.  Be that as it may, the main sticking point is the millions here illegally. The answer is to give them legal status immediately and then push them into line to get their citizenship pegged to the year they entered.  Fine them a penalty of some sort but get them legalized.

Additionally, they would not be entitled to public assistance until they became full citizens, but any additional business enforcement mechanisms should be predicated by a health insurance paid by companies caught illegally hiring other undocumented workers.  The contributions of the workers to Social Security should be held in suspense funds so that if they decided to return to their homelands before they achieve citizenship, they can withdraw most of it.

For those who want to come into the country now to fill jobs spoiled Americans do not want, give them legal permits for fixed amounts of time with the same health insurance proviso.  That solves many of the arguments about immigrants costing the public purse through indigent care.  These temporary immigrants who return should be entitled to full Social Security refunds that induce them perhaps to invest in job-creating business in their home countries.

To satisfy secure-border proponents whose views often find their origin in military thinking, perhaps the new system incorporates accelerated citizenship status for immigrants who go directly into military service if they are allowed in as temporary workers but become unemployed.  A component, too, of “immigration reform” can include language that maintains current border security expenditures at current levels.

The bottom line is to stop creating so many illegal immigrants in the first place by building a system that accentuates the positive within itself and not the negative — and does not cause human beings to die in the wild.  When we achieve that the border will be secured at last.  Border security is also about human security. 

The prospects for real progress on immigration remain unknown, but they should be higher than having to survive the drug cartels or Brooks County.

Jesse Trevino is the former editorial page editor of The Austin American-Statesman.

HispanicLatino.com

Posted on Dec . 6 for Dec. 7

News reports in the weeks leading up to the election in November about obstacles being placed to obstruct HispanicLatinos and other minorities from voting terrified a  friend of mine in New York.  I assured him that the Obama people were on top of the situation.  Of course, the Obama team had a lot of it covered, filing lawsuits left and right.  More important, though, minority voters reacted and voted in greater numbers than in 2008.  Does that mean that efforts to intimidate minority voters will stop?  Of course not.  The Obama campaign is not going to prosecute the issue, and the individuals who ramrodded these unnecessary, nonsensical laws, aided and abetted by simplistic slogans about drivers’ licenses and boarding airplanes, are motivated not by civic sensitives as they are by racial and ethnic animosities.  And that is a lasting feature  of life in America today.

 
That kind of accusatory statement seems to be as pejorative as the unkind statements Tea party types make about minorities.  But the anti-voter laws became an avalanche as a reaction to Barack Obama’s win in 2008.  Previous superficial social conventions were the products of a belief that the country would never elect a black man President in the first place.  So, after his victiry, disappointment gave rise to strategies intended to prevent his re-election by taking aim at all minotities.  The motivation of the voter-intimidators was made evident by the fact that these anti-discriminatory laws were enacted not just in swing states but in states that Obama had no chance of carrying.  So voter intimidation laws also are aimed at HispanicLatinos who live in swing states and in states that in due time will feel their states pulled into a new political orbit.  HispanicLatinos have to be on guard.  Maximizing their political power is critical for their social and economic advancement.

 
But beyond keeping these tactical imperatives in mind and keeping Republicans’ — especially HispanicLatino Republicans’ — feet to the fire, what are the larger issues that HispanicLatinos should dog?

The fiscal abyss and the long-term debt are evident concerns and so are Medicare and the future of Social Security.  Many HispanicLatinos work in body-debilitating jobs. Extension of the retirement age and reduction of benefits are worrisome concerns.  That is not to say that retirement age and other benefits cannot be discussed; they just should not be re-litigated in a way that harms those most in need.  From this kind of distinction made by those who want to increase the retirement age and cut Medicare comes by far the highest concern for the HispanicLatino population going forward: The actual existence of the belief within too many Republican circles that the new demography is going to ruin the country financially instead of sparking a successful renaissance.  From this kind of thinking, of course, stems the infamous “47 percent” remark made by the highest representative of the party’s beliefs, its presidential nominee.

 
It is hard to quantify how ubiquitous this belief pervades important sectors of the country’s government, institutions, corporations and other important organizations.  But its existence has never been more obvious and, unfortunately, more portentuous. Pulling back the veil of what millions of individuals think about HispanicLatinos shatters the niceties that give birth to meaningless social conventions.  But its defrocking complicates the politics of the future that ideologically tempestuous times already have made difficult.
How do socially responsible HispanicLatinos who might or not be members of the 47 percent deal with this new brutal reality that is now part of the political lexicon and part of the actual political agenda of so important a part of American society that is part of its government and the nation’s governance?

 
The only answer is to defeat it at every turn, which brings us back to the voter registration and participation obstacles that must be superseded.  Not only must those challenges be overcome, HispanicLatinos must raise their game at all levels.  If they do not, my friend in New York will have a lot more to worry about.

 
Jesse Trevino is the former editorial page editor of The Austin American-Statesman.

HispanicLatino.com