Seeing Growth in Ourselves

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In the midst of the economic recession and the failure of the super committee to begin fixing the federal budget, it is not surprising that households and businesses across the nation harbor doubt and perhaps a defeatist attitude about the future.

But HispanicLatino households of all sizes – and business owners in particular – might do well to consider a contrarian approach, a strategy that nets returns by going against the current grain.  Contrarian thinking requires perceiving the future differently.

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The Thankful Tortilla

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So tomorrow the ubiquitous flour tortilla is all but ignored.  For an entire year, day in and day out, it carries within its fragile walls our lowly bean, our stout potatoes, our lofty hopes.  The tortilla tomorrow gives way for one day at least to dark and rich wheat rolls, buttery biscuits and melting loaves of white bread.  Not a bad trade for a day of true thanksgiving.

But come Friday morning, the tortilla will again take on its burden and enfold our very sustenance within its hold.  Yet it seems unfair, after so much toil and labor month after month, week after week, day after day, that it is relegated on the eve of our national thanksgiving to second chair on the operatic stage of family get-togethers.

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Prelude to the Past: In Defense of Anglo Rights

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What happens, asked then-Justice Sandra Day O’Connor when she served on the Supreme Court, to laws designed to defend minority rights when minorities become majorities?  At issue was the Court’s Grutter v. Bollinger decision in 2003 on using some racial preferences in college admissions – a tool that would be unnecessary if we lived in a truly equal society.

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Turning Back History

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The long arc of the immigration story has gotten us here, literally.  Yet on one hand, the demographic and economic forces which are structural in nature and in place have led to the assertion of immigration as a population change agent.  Immigration, as it has always, is adding to the population of the country and changing it in the process.

On the other hand, the countervailing sentiment is also asserting itself, so that states like Arizona, Alabama, Georgia, Indiana and Texas are leading the equally natural anti-immigrant reaction.

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All the World’s a Soccer Ball

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The sight astounded my friend Tony.  He had entered another world far, far different than anything he had experienced.  I had warned him.  He did not believe it when I told him what to expect.  He had been to stately Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C., before, but not for anything like this.  In many ways that day for me in 1978 was when the modern era of globalization became real, although its forces were already underway.

Little did we know then that the arguments among the Chinese elites were underway on whether or how to bring China out of its communist shell into the real world.  Only six years prior, Richard Nixon had astounded the world by travelling to Peking to set off the debate.  Three decades later, the world has changed, so that Beijing ranks as important as Washington. Continue reading →

Not Armageddon Yet

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The Wall Street Journal hid the woman’s face.  Not the usual journalistic fare you see on a Greyhound bus between Austin and Dallas.  The WSJ is more likely found zipping above us on American Airlines on a 35-minute flight.  She sat to my left, within the peripheral range of my one good eye.

Every other week or so when I board the bus to go 220 miles in four and a half hours instead of three by road I resolve to fly the next time or to break down and get a car.  If I get the smallest car on the market, I can minimize my carbon footprint.  But I then think, regardless of the size of the car, about the number of people who would be at risk.  Oh, I can drive.  Recently in a rented car with a package of insurance that could have bailed out the Greek economy, I managed to navigate more than 300 miles safely.  But I still shudder when I think about the old lady I almost ran over with my truck on my way to Christmas Eve Mass at Saint Matthew’s Cathedral in Washington years ago.  The police rightfully would have concluded it was her fault but had I better vision I would have been able to react more quickly.

Behind the WSJ woman, a young man sat fidgeting, his face turned brackish, or perhaps crackish, and dark by either a hard life or drugs or both.  A diamond ring in the ear of an NFL linebacker strutting his masculinity on television on Sundays no longer comes off as improbable.  On a somewhat youngish man who should weigh another 10 or 15 pounds, his stoned ear suggests the rest of him might be too.

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Thinking Beyond the Recession

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An unforgiving national unemployment rate of nine percent and stagnant – or declining – wages for the average household for the last ten years dominate the minds of Americans worried about the economy.  As important is the number of business closings, though it seldom gets the same amount of ink.  More than 1.5 million businesses have closed since the start of the current recession. A high unemployment rate and extenuated business closures feed off each other in an economy with little demand. Continue reading →

Harry Pachon, Hero

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When any individual dies, the temptation is always to make him or her larger than they were.  In my life I have known few hard heroes, those willing to put their lives, careers and perhaps their families on the line.  Most of the heroes in our lives fall within the context of our parents or other members of our families.  Sometimes we actually have the privilege of witnessing an exceptionally saintly priest or a teacher or a friend going the full distance of commitment to their fellow human beings.

There is another category of hero just as important.  I call them soft heroes.  They surely were hard heroes to others.  But soft heroes to me are those men and women whom I have known personally in my life but whose work I have known better than I have known them, and who grow over time.  These are individuals who have done much for many millions of people whom they will never know in ways that seem to be commonplace and less dramatic than grandstanding in front of a bank of cameras.  I call them soft heroes because the battles they fight are often seen as being on paper.  Of course, paper has won many battles in the history of humankind.

Harry Pachon, who died Friday in Los Angeles, was one of those soft heroes in my life.  Harry won many battles on behalf of the HispanicLatino community and on behalf of decency itself through his work, and the organizations that he had a hand of forming and supporting through the years will keep on winning many battles for many years to come.

I met Harry scores of years ago and would run across him in the various cities across the country in which I have lived and worked.  He was slightly older than me.  Ordinarily one of two men in generally the same age bracket seldom becomes an automatic acolyte to the other.  But with Harry, I immediately and gladly took the second seat.

In conversation, Harry was both listener and teacher and long before it was fashionable, he indeed saw synergy in so many different experiences in the HispanicLatino community.  And he helped others foresee the possibilities for their lives and worked to make them real, tangible — and hard.

The temptation to oversize Harry upon the news of his death is an easy one to give into – but in this case it is wholly merited.  For me, Harry was exceptional.  For the rest of the HispanicLatino community and for the country itself, Harry is monumental.

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After Herman Cain are Willie Horton and Pete Wilson Next?

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Hmmm, so this is what the election year is going to look like.  It begins with the sensational accusations of sexual assault against Herman Cain and an equally astounding press conference by the candidate himself that pushes the limits of what is now fair game.  Should we dare visualize how it might end?  It almost should not matter, now that we get a glimpse of what could be a spectacularly sorry election year – except that it might get worse for HispanicLatinos, especially those unprepared or who live in a state of denial.

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Seriously?

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An Associated Press story last week quoted Alabama’s Gov. Republican Robert Bentley, who signed legislation that targets any HispanicLatino who might appear to be in the state illegally.  The law would have kicked every brown kid out of school had a federal court not intervened.  Bentley, not intending to draw guffaws, wondered why his state is being laughed at across the nation.

“Why are we getting all the publicity? I think it has to do with Alabama’s past and the perception that people have of Alabama over the years…and really don’t recognize the amount of progress we’ve made in Alabama over the last 50 to 60 years,” Bentley said.

If you did not know he was serious, it would indeed be a laughing matter. Continue reading →