HispanicLatinos are living through a nationally decisive moment. The pressure is building on HispanicLatino leaders – elected, appointed, self-proclaimed and otherwise – to step up to a point in history as important as any since the mid-1960’s. In but a few months, the Supreme Court could waylay the progress HispanicLatinos have made over five decades to achieve social, economic a political parity with mainstream society – and in the process the Court could jeopardize America’s very future.
Category Archives: Identity
The Education of Marco Rubio
A friend of mine called to yell at me about Wednesday’s blog on Marco Rubio, whom, my friend supposed, I was defending. Well I was, in part.
We cannot live in a nation in which people bend to the fringe, in this case the same whacko-birthers who would disagree with Christ Himself if he appeared and told them President Obama is a citizen and is legally entitled to hold his office, having won the votes of more than 69 million of his fellow Americans in a fair election.
When does this nuttiness end? Now, because a senator’s parents were born outside the United States he cannot be Vice President or President? Nonsense. The other side of me, however, disdains the politician who wants to have it both ways – and Rubio clearly does. But there is much more to the story.
Note: the author served in the Clinton and Obama administrations.
In conveying the idea that he is part of the Cuban exile community that fled Castro when in fact his parents departed Cuba for purely economic reasons, Rubio spun the kind of narrative that candidates for high office require. But his pushing back is against The Washington Post, whose editors published the story that now threatens to ensnare Rubio in his own deception – and not the birthers.
In so doing, Rubio might not be worthy for higher office because he does not appreciate the larger truth: That the birther movement is the angry expression of the part of the nation’s population that is reacting to its new demography.
Rubio evidently does not realize that throughout the country too many of his fellow party members, like the birthers, are reacting to the nation’s changing demographics in the kind of negative, predictable ways that good leaders would decry – except that Rubio does not. Yet large segments of his party seek to diminish HispanicLatinos and their standing. For that same reason, any of the Republican presidential candidates who have not denounced the birthers are giving aid and comfort to anti-HispanicLatino sentiment. The promise of young and talented men and women like Rubio is that they might be able to help the nation transition into a new chapter in its life, not enable the crazies.
However the Post might confront one important HispanicLatino with lofty aspirations, it is not as damaging as the actions of Republican-controlled legislatures passing real laws that push minorities back into the 1950’s with regressive new laws on voter registration and identification that will restrict the very freedoms at the ballot box that Rubio’s parents did not enjoy in the days of the military dictatorship that preceded the Castro regime. Republicans in states they control are slashing education budgets and in the process myopically crippling America’s future.
When New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie spoke at the Reagan Library last month in California, I thought I saw its former governor, Pete Wilson, sitting on the front row. Wilson was the man who in his re-election bid in 1994 ushered in the modern-day reaction against HispanicLatinos that has now swept the nation. I wonder if Wilson was in the room at the same library in August when Marco Rubio gave his own coming-out address that, no, by no means, was meant to signal that, yes, yes, he is very interested in being on the national ticket.
Rubio is very much eligible to be Vice President of the United States. But he might not be qualified for the demands of our times. Nevertheless, his rights should be defended. Too bad he cannot bring himself to do the same for others.
Blogs published Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays or invariably in between.
Not Gone With the Wind
And so the average HispanicLatino is watching the evening news. Alabama’s new anti-immigrant law is front and center. The upshot is that from this day forward, if you are HispanicLatino, you are automatically suspected to be a criminal — a little more than a runaway slave back in the time. It does not matter if you are an attorney from Miami coming to close a real estate deal in Birmingham or an optometrist from San Antonio in for a conference or a student from Seattle changing planes at the airport or a hotel worker recently relocated from Chicago. If your skin is brown and you’re in town, you are a target. It is that simple.
How exactly should HispanicLatinos feel about this? First, any HispanicLatino who supports these laws would be well-advised to stay away from Alabama. Dreamlands have a way of collapsing. Having been the only HispanicLatino in line at the driver’s license bureau a few years ago and having been the only one asked to prove his citizenship, my younger brother, who before that moment had never cared about politics and had hardly voted, is a changed person. Imagine how the blood of a HispanicLatino veteran would curdle with rage at being confronted by anyone about his or her citizenship status.
As more local and state governments enact Alabama-style laws, they are increasing the probability that each HispanicLatino will face such a moment if they have not experienced it already. It is a moment of truth that will shape America’s future. Are we seriously thinking that, having taken its cue from Arizona, Alabama is the way forward to how the country deals with immigrants who are in the country illegally? When it separates all HispanicLatinos from the whole and makes HispanicLatinos feel more separate within themselves? Does watching HispanicLatino immigrants flee Alabama make the rest of HispanicLatinos in the country feel any better about themselves?
When it defended its citizens’ “right” to own slaves – and took up treasonous arms in rebellion to do so – Alabama invoked the Bible but had little inkling of how civil conflcit would harm the state. Through the years as a result of a war, it lagged behind socially and economically so that today Alabama is barely more than Mississippi. Today the descendants of those gone-with-the-wind ironically invoke the same Constitution they once trashed to target HispanicLatinos. The result will be just as harmful, for in the years ahead, when America needs to be the most united and unified, states like Alabama will have caused disunion again.
In a day when the nation will try to survive global demograhic competition that is putting hundreds of millions of hands to work to outproudce the country, shouldn’t we be welcoming immigrants and educating all of them – and educating everyone else in the country – instead of making suspects of an ever-growing HispanicLatino population?
And shouldn’t average HispanicLatinos unperturbed as Arizona and now Alabama swirl around them stop and consider how quickly their résumés already are being deleted from the computer screen in human resources departments – and how quicker still will be those of their children in the future?
Blogs published Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays or in between if essential.
The Language of Us
I was asked if the website and its content would be in Spanish as well as English. Of course. I cannot imagine anyone writing about HispanicLatinos in English not having their websites in passable-enough Spanish. The times call for making sure that anything written about the more-than-50-million-member HispanicLatino community is translated well. Falling short of that falls short of history.
But about translating English into Spanish and Spanish into English: Is there anything more difficult? Words that mean one thing in one household can signify something else next door. The nuances in verb tenses are critical yet imperfect – pun very much intended.
So, what to do? Computerized translations while instantaneous take you so far, thus every line must make the best use of dictionaries and thesauruses – including the bank of words that memory has stored in vaults long not opened, of words not long heard.
The process at first can be daunting but soon enough both languages reveal their artful beauty. A quiet thrill that I cannot put into words in either idiom ripples through me upon encountering a word my parents used that has meandered in meaning. ¿Y este laberinto? my mother would ask upon arriving at home to find not a place of intricate passageways and blind alleys but a chaos of rowdy kids.
In the end, there will be errors and typos but the exercise is more than about affixing meaning to language.
It is about affixing meaning to one’s life.
Next: Tilting at Immigration
Blogs published Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays or in between as warranted.