‘Diversity’ Doesn’t Cut It Anymore for HispanicLatinos

Diversity is no longer an operative word for knowledgeable and informed HispanicLatinos conversing and thinking seriously about the future.  Unity is by far more suitable for the times.  It speaks to the strategic importance of a population that has gained critical geographic and demographic mass.  A microcosm of the kind of collaboration that geography and demography will extract naturally from HispanicLatinos is the daily operations of the country’s Spanish-language television networks.  Every day of the year, HispanicLatino professionals from all corners of the HispanicLatino world produce programming developed and managed by staffs whose primary language of interest might be Spanish derived from different countries of origin but whose language in the control room is likely English.

Aided by a new demography and a resilient geography while Spanish-language television and radio networks expand in more markets while English media distribute both positive and negative messages that bolster its identity, a HispanicLatino population that is allegedly a loose conglomeration of groups competing against each other is unlikely to succumb to expansive division over the long term.

While only an example, the English-Spanish paradigm evident in television production will continue to extend to many more sectors of the economy, calling, of course, on HispanicLatinos to maintain, improve or acquire both Spanish and English to an effective level.

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On Afghanistan, Obama Resonates within the HispanicLatino Community

There was something unusual about President Obama last night when he spoke from Bagram military base in Afghanistan.  His tone of voice seemed to capture the nation’s weariness of war without his own voice sounding listless.  There was no bluster, no nonsense.  Matter-of-fact, he sounded presidential.  He did not rush to useless rhetorical heights.  All of this should have resonated well within the HispanicLatino community, whose contributions to the Bush wars are well documented.

Obama embodied part of the common sentiment expressed to me by a family member a year ago.  “We need to get out.  We have done all we can.  It will not work in the end, but no one has given it a better shot.”  Indeed, the casualties within the country and within the HispanicLatino community will last for decades and entire lifetimes.  It really is time to come home.  It is hard to believe that we have spent more than $3 trillion in those wars and will spend trillions more to take care of the wounded and the families of the dead.

The message Obama delivered was a powerful as the one that went unstated:  Get out, close that checkbook, open up another course at home.  The hope is that the discredited neoconservatives, the ones who sat back while others fought and the habitual warriors who plunged America into these meaningless wars, get the message for all time.

Somewhere in his voice lay the possible reaction of a country were it ever attacked – God forbid – again as in September of 2011.  Only the most ridiculous people would argue for some sort of land invasion – of what?  More probably, we would step up what we are doing now: Keeping the pressure up and waiting for generational change to come in the Islamist world.  Nations can change within a generation.  Some can climb; others decline.  Perhaps that is the reason for a longer commitment than most Americans want now.

 

Court Set to Empower Ethnic Cleansing of HispanicLatinos

Last week a Department of Justice led by Attorney General Eric Holder mounted an attack so lame in front of the Supreme Court against Arizona’s anti-immigrant, anti-HispanicLatino law known as S.B.1070 that even first-time observers realized how thoroughly DOJ had been routed.  Obama’s lawyers cratered in a case of existential importance to HispanicLatinos, who should be thankful that Obama’s lawyers later this year will not handle the challenge before the same Court to the minority-friendly college admissions policies of the University of Texas – meaning those of all of the nation’s colleges and universities.

HispanicLatinos should not be happy about last week’s unmitigated disaster if the Court affirms any part of 1070 in June. Any HispanicLatino citizens who think they are exempt from its ramifications have a surprise waiting for them. As surprised might be President Obama in November.

Most legal experts presume that last week’s faux attempt at lawyering by DOJ will cause the Court to endorse at least part of the Arizona law that targets individuals based on color, race, ethnicity and sound of speech on the mere supposition that they might be in the country illegally.  My fear – and I so hope I am wrong – is that local governments will rush to propose and enact ordinances against defenseless local immigrant and HispanicLatino populations.  Imagine the likes of hundreds of “Americans” like Sheriff Joe Arpaio in Arizona running wild in every state.

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News About HispanicLatinos? Proper Context, Please.

At times in journalism it is not the story but the context that matters.  So it is with news reports this week about rapid declines in Mexican immigration that generated front-page news coverage throughout the nation.  Mexicans coming northward form only one component of the changing demographics roiling the country — and it is important that HispanicLatinos do not think that the size of their population is going to diminsh in any way in the years ahead.  Almost 50 years ago – long before the advent of the HispanicLatino population became newsworthy – the power of demography and the economy made a deep impression on me.

The winding down by Congress of the bracero program that allowed for Mexicans to work legally in the country and the nearly simultaneous closing of the local air force base economically devastated the town in West Texas where I grew up, reducing the county’s population from about 40,000 to 30,000.  But at the same time the country already had written a prophetic passage in its history, and its authors were not Mexican immigrants, changes in the economy or laws passed by Congress but the so-called Anglo population.  Sometime in 1972 or 1973, the Anglo population decided it was going to stop having more than two kids per family.  Thus news gives way to context.

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1070: Any Court Affirmation Will Sink America

The Supreme Court hearing today on Arizona’s retrogressive 1070 law serves to remind us that every HispanicLatino is in the same boat.  It is called America, and when states like Arizona, Alabama, Georgia, Indiana and Texas begin to subvert the very foundations of democratic governance, we have to hope the Court does not provide additional momentum to a state of affairs that might turn ugly.  It has been a little more than a decade since the Court in 2000 greatly damaged the country’s faith in itself by overturning the results of an election that was never fully consummated, thus giving the country a historically disastrous Presidency from which the nation is still trying to recover.  And it has been but two years since the Court further eroded the principles of every vote counting equally with its pernicious decision in Citizens United that unleashed the power of corporate greed that distorts the value of an individual vote.

These are not good days for the republic, and they are potentially worse for HispanicLatinos.  Still, however the court rules on 1070, possibly in June, America will need as never before new leadership anchored by a new vision that must incorporate the convergence of HispanicLatinos from many places into one, unified population to focus on the immediate future.  To help create the new leadership their country needs, HispanicLatinos must forge a new sense of common purpose that incorporates their individual experiences and places of origins to create a new identity – and lay down the foundation to oppose whatever laws stem from a faulty Court decision.

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Religion: Critical but Dangerous to HispanicLatinos (Just Ask the Nuns)

Followers of this blog know it focuses on the need to build a new intellectual framework for the development of a new HispanicLatino identity that is critical to the country’s future.  A HispanicLatino community – fortified with a new sense of self – might be able to accelerate its current economic, social and political standing to help the country remain fiscally and demographically viable.  How a new HispanicLatino identity forms that incorporates their new nation-saving mission depends on HispanicLatinos themselves.  But in undertaking a reformulation of their personal selves that can lead to new self-development and self-determination, HispanicLatinos must be on guard to not fall prey to religions – especially hierarchical ones – that threaten the creative potential of the individual.  Dogma wrecks self-expression and stunts personal growth.  Corroding the status of the individual is but a small step from jeopardizing the democratic concepts of self-government.

The Vatican made the danger of institutionalized religion come alive startlingly last week when it landed on the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, an organization that represents the vast majority of Catholic nuns, who in the modern age have evolved – unlike the current set of bishops and so many priests.

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No Cease in the Cause, No Pause in the HispanicLatino Struggle

It was as most funerals are: The grieving widow and family, the coffin holding the body of a public servant ready for burial and old friends re-connecting.  As so many memorial services do, they bring together individuals who have not seen each other for years if not decades.  Once reconnected, they speak as if it were only yesterday that their lives crossed paths:  Old enemies forgetting what angered them over the years; old rivalries unremembered; stories retold of battles past; minds struggling with faces that they cannot attach to names.

And so it was earlier this week when his family and friends came to bid farewell to Carlos Truan, a long-serving member of the Texas Senate, after his heart failed.  His funeral turned out to be more than a reconstruction of the past and more than about a life well-led that earned the respect of friend and some foes alike.

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If Only a Label Were the Answer

After all the huffing and puffing, the ongoing discussion about the Hispanic and/or Latino labels sort of misses the point. Yes, Hispanic is a confected term, and, yes, Latino, is not far behind but Latino is personally more acceptable to many of us who are Americans but cannot go around town calling ourselves Paraguayans, Colombians, Dominicans, Cubans or Mexicans first but who yet feel differently about our selves, meaning our identity.  Thus the discussion – wholesome, necessary and inevitable – is not about a label but about identity, a term that is as much about who we are as it is about purpose in life.

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Santorum as the New Buchanan

Watching the race for the Republican presidential nomination come to an end when former senator Rick Santorum effectively pulled out of the race, I had two thoughts.  The first: I would have loved to see how Catholics would have voted in fairly Catholic states like New York, Pennsylvania and California for, in effect, the GOP primary contest had turned out to be a referendum on the Catholic bishops and their attempts to inject themselves more in the affairs of state and, as important, the affairs of women.

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America, Still in the Act of Becoming, as are HispanicLatinos

After more than two centuries of existence, America continues to be a nation always in the act of becoming, and the new moment the country has entered allows HispanicLatinos to reintroduce themselves in a new light to the country – and to themselves.  In the 1960’s and 1970’s, young Americans, feeling freed of conventions that were assumed to be breeding a national identity, went off in search of a self that somehow was unfulfilled. 

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