Gung Ho!

I saw the martial arts film The Grandmaster yesterday and the sage philosophical musings of some of the different schools of Chinese fighting led me to ponder how is it that every time the American government wants to start a war with someone, they waste no time shouting it to the winds. What about the stealth, the element of surprise, the strategy? What about knowing your enemy? (If they did, they would think twice about it).
I do tai chi, which is not, as you may think, a gentle stretch for little old Chinese ladies, but a martial art. My teacher is always saying things like, you gotta have strong legs so the first thing you do when confronted by a possible attack is, run the hell out of there. The first rule of Chinese martial arts seems to be to avoid, deflect, defuse, and discourage confrontation. If that is not possible, however, then that swift, out-of-the-blue, lethal kick will come in handy. But if you let your enemy, (and the enemy of your enemy, which in the case of Syria is also your enemy) know two weeks in advance that you intend to kick his ass, it may not work out as well.
I just came back from France, where the national pastime seems to be to sit in cafés and talk. The French are obsessed with thought and discussion, and having as much paid vacation as possible. The Magnificent Arepa had an epiphany that the reason why there are so many French philosophers is that the French like to sit at cafés, smoke, drink coffee, and think. Like Sartre and Beauvoir at Les Deux Magots.
Americans however, are obsessed with action. No sitting at cafés in the middle of the day for us. We do shit without thinking.
This is the only way I can explain the surreal moment we are having right now about going to war with Syria. First, we don't do anything when it's the time to do it, if ever; we wait until the guy has killed 100,000 people and then, when he steps over "the red line" (which, as Jon Stewart points out, is a dick measuring tape), we bluster and threaten and announce our intentions to attack. Obama whips his dick out, and not to be outdone, many of the putrid vermin that populate Congress follow suit. This is the one issue in which Republicans all of a sudden stand behind a President they have stonewalled every step of the way. They strangle health, education, immigration, economic issues, but war? BRING IT!
Has there been a thoughtful conversation, analysis or debate about this latest hankering for infernal action? Can this President, who promised to get out of Iraq and Afghanistan now say with a straight face that we are going into Syria as well?
The problem with Americans is that ours is a lethal combination of "gotta get things done, but first we need to brag about them". We neither do them when it is advisable, if ever, nor talk or think about them enough, which should be always. So by the time we take action, we do it thoughtlessly, unleashing even bigger messes, more enmity, and more chaos.
There must be an alternate way, a way of reason and brilliance. This takes true brains, and is therefore rarely used, but this constitutes the ideal scenario: people with great strategic thinking come up with smart, complex, unfolding solutions; not gung-ho, easy as a fart, morally abject posturing that is going to get us into a whole world of trouble. Again.

Obama: Cruel And Unusual Punishment

They are not that different. Photo via Gawker.

Barack Obama is great at giving rousing speeches of consolation after every fresh mowing down of Americans, whether it's toddlers in Newtown or runners and their supporters in Boston, but his presidency is marred by having increased some of the cruelest policies in the history of this country. Those who love him, want to pretend this is not happening. They give the guy a pass they would not dream of giving George W. Bush. After 9/11 and with the pretext of fighting terrorism, this country threw the Constitution in the garbage and set it on fire, discarded the Geneva Convention, and imposed a series of unprecedented measures that strongly curtail the safeguarding of individual rights and the administration of true justice. What is going on in terms of lawlessness is directly proportional to our revolting public discourse about freedom and democracy. Revolting.
1. Guantánamo. Wasn't he supposed to close it? There is a terrible hunger strike going on, in which some prisoners are being force fed with tubes up their noses. Some of these prisoners have been festering in there for more than a decade. This defies the Geneva convention, the American Constitution, and every human rights law in existence. This is an outrage. For instance:

In September 2012, a Yemeni man named Adnan Latif died at Guantanamo in what officials say was a suicide. Latif had been cleared by the Bush and Obama administration, and a federal judge had ordered his release. That order was overturned on the Obama Department of Justice's appeal, however, and Latif died after a decade of imprisonment despite never having been accused of a crime. He was the ninth person to die at Guantanamo.

2. Drone attacks in Pakistan. I'm no fan of islamist barbarians, but these attacks seem to hurt far more civilians than they should. They also increase the fanatical hatred that these people harbor for the US.

3. Mass deportations of undocumented immigrants through a cruel, inhumane, utterly repulsive system manned by the Department of Homeland Security and ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement), which is based on keeping detainees in private prisons that happen to make money by the inmate. This is appalling.
There have been more deportations in Obama's presidency than at any other period in American history. This has been documented extensively, but if you want your liver to collapse, read William Finnegan's piece in The New Yorker about an American man, Mark Lyttle, a unfortunately brown skinned redneck, who was deported to Mexico twice, despite the fact that he is mentally ill, and as American as apple pie and egregious human rights abuses. Out of 400,000 deportees, about 1% are American citizens who are wrongly deported because of a despicable system that is willfully blind to justice and reason.
Since it looks to the rest of the world that we only shed tears, do vigils, light candles, bring flowers and write poems when Americans suffer, think of your fellow citizens. That could be you on the wrong side of the incompetent, sadistic bureaucrats of the DHS and ICE. Hell, with enough bad luck, someone might confuse you with a member of Al-Qaeda and send you to Guantánamo, where you have no rights whatsoever.
These things not only go on unabated in the era of Hope and Change, but they are pursued with unusual zeal, because Obama's greatest fear is to be accused of being soft on terrorism, of being a tender hearted liberal who doesn't have the balls to stand up to the "enemies" of this country.
So next time he brings a tear to your eye with his oratory, remember, there but for the grace of God you go. We are letting this country become a fascist state. It has become worse during this Democratic presidency. Don't whine later when your rights are trampled.

Common Sense Prevailed

All of a sudden we are in love with the Electoral College we usually so despise, n'est pas?
I think the elation in the country after President Obama's reelection victory is not so much that he won, but a breath of relief that we are not as stupid and benighted as to elect a man and a platform that hinged on destructive lunacy. Almost half of us are were as stupid and benighted as to do that, (looking at the electoral map I feel like scooping out most of the middle/south of the country and kissing it goodbye - except for awesome New Mexico).
But what is truly heartening is that a narrow majority voted for sanity, common sense and reality.
I am very disappointed with Obama. I voted against Romney, rather than for him. As you voted, you probably became aware that there were more than two candidates in the ballot, who were completely ignored by the media. This is a travesty. It's a sports contest between two teams, not a real democracy.
I got a million emails asking me for money from Barack, Michelle, Joe, Bo the dog. I did not donate one red cent to the campaign, as punishment for the issues in which he has been remiss, such as immigration, gun control, the environment, drone attacks and others. I was very disappointed at his unwillingness to push things through despite Republican opposition. And I certainly hope that now he will finally stop campaigning and pretending he can work with the Republicans, and really push the most liberal agenda imaginable; really exercise his Presidential power and deliver on his promise to invest nationally on infrastructure, education, raise taxes for the rich, and send this country in the right direction. Am I convinced he is going to do it? No. But this is what I expect. And this is what those of us who voted for him should demand.
It is undeniable is that the Democrats live in a demographic reality that the Republican party refuses to accept. I was listening to Ed Rollins on Fox talking about including women and minorities next time around as if he was writing a shopping list for the supermarket. This party will pay lip service and effect the most empty tokenism, but it will never understand in its bones the real makeup of the country. It is out of touch with reality. One only had to look at the makeup of each candidate's supporters at their rallies.  On the Romney camp, no one of color and very few young people. On the Obama side, the kind of people that you see on the streets everyday, that means, pretty much everybody. And a lot of young people, who are the most important voters because it is them who have to live with the consequences of their political choices. The Republican party painted itself into the most lunatic corner and this is the end result. But if it served a purpose, was to get apathetic people off their asses to vote against them. For this, they should be thanked. Serves them right for pandering to fringe minority extremes. The vast majority of the American people find their faith-based distorsions revolting (as in legitimate rape, condoned by God). The vast majority of the American people could care less about whether you are gay and you want to marry. And they don't buy the logic of a millionaire paying less than half the tax rate of the working stiff. Many women comprise this majority, and they are certainly not going to vote for someone who seems to hail from the 1950s.
Latinos did not only turn out in force but in the best news in centuries, their power has grown exponentially and has nothing to do with the four and a half Cubans that used to hold elections hostage in Florida for years. The greatest gift of all: Cubans in Miami have become irrelevant. Woo hoo! What's more, their children are probably voting Obama. Times have changed. It's time for Latinos to demand political payback. Immigration reform now.
For all the wringing of hands, Netanyahu machinations, and the despicable disinformation on the part of Republicans whose foreign policy spells real disaster for Israel, 70% of Jews voted for Obama. Lechaim!
Romney ran an atrocious campaign. Just from the way his campaign proceeded one feared for the fate of the country. He seemed incompetent, flaky, insincere, disconnected from reality, aloof and nowhere near ready for the job. Obama had David Axelrod, genius, on his side, but also common sense.  Also a widening gap and a formidable class war that should turn the tide in favor of the 99%.
I can't wait to see what the Republican narrative is going to be going forward. In the meantime, enjoy the reprieve and expect much better from the President this time around.

A Threat To Judaism

We Jews worry about Iran and terrorists and anti-Semites and haters, but in my mind, a dire and dangerous threat to the survival of Judaism as a legitimate religion, and also to the survival of Israel as a democratic Jewish state, is the explosive growth of the ultra-orthodox community and the demographic decrease of secular Jews.
This is extremely scary. Judaism is not about the minutiae of whether you are allowed to take an elevator or steep a tea bag on the Sabbath, or to look, God forbid, at a woman. That is superstition, debasement and the distortion of a great religion. Obsessive compulsive religious disorder is what it is. But there is among some Jews an absurd and unspoken view that maintains that the ultra-orthodox are the only ones who know all the rules and therefore are the true keepers of the flame, which is utterly false. Secular Jews are allowing the fundamentalist fringe to distort and take ownership of Judaism through their abandonment of their own culture and history. They will have no one but themselves to blame when most Jews become a herd of retrogrades, like the Taliban.
Rabbis and Jewish Cassandras have always blamed this secular Jewish decline on intermarriage. This may be so, but only to a certain extent. As a Jew, you could marry Mother Theresa or the Dalai Lama and still know and celebrate Jewish traditions and teach them to your children, if that was your wish. You don't even have to believe in God to be a good Jew. But you have to know where you come from and what made you this way, and if you have children, you have to let them know as well. The lack of interest on the part of many secular Jews in knowing and furthering these traditions and the Jewish languages is tragic, regardless of whether they are religious or not.
In Israel, secular Jews are to blame for allowing the ultra-orthodox to abuse the citizenry and the state using religious piety as extortion. The abuse is so egregious and has gone on for so long that only recently have Israelis started to demand that their fanatical fellow citizens join the army and obey civil laws like everyone else. I don't understand what took them so long. Actually, I do. Thirty years ago, the ultra-orthodox were still a minority and, since they marginalized themselves from modern society, no one took them seriously. Now that they have exploded demographically, and in the process have become even more intolerant, retrograde and insane, and worse, politically powerful, all of a sudden Israelis can see too well the monster they have created. A monster that demands the humiliation of women on the public sphere, and sucks the teat of the government dry while doing absolutely nothing to ensure the survival of the state, except for breeding like rabbits (a cynical and ultimately self-defeating ploy for those who think this is going to help Israel at all. I'm talking to you, Bibi). A theocratic Israel, drained of intellectual, scientific and artistic talent is as good as dead. 
All Jewish communities in the diaspora have enriched their countries in many ways, but the American Jewish community is unique, given how culturally influential it is and given the singular circumstances of immigration to the US, the fabled melting pot that only happens here. And while the presence of the cultural American Jew is felt more strongly than ever in the public sphere, the actual Judaism of many secular American Jews threatens to become a vestige, since they are quite uninformed about their religious tradition. Soon all that may remain of an intellectually vigorous, vibrant and essential Jewish culture may be the neuroses and the shtick, like an episode of Seinfeld.
I am an atheist, but I went to a secular Jewish school in Mexico, I speak Hebrew and Yiddish and I come from a community that, while thoroughly secular, respects religious tradition mostly in an orthodox way. No one in Mexico, not even the Jews that attend conservative synagogues, would think of shortening a shiva (the Jewish mourning tradition) to Tues and Thurs from 4-7 pm because of convenience, like some American Jews do. This is shocking to me. I have heard American Jews say "my parents are Jewish, but I am not". This is appalling to me. Unless you are consciously willing to renounce your cultural and historical heritage, what the hell does that mean? Nobody speaks Hebrew, let alone Yiddish or Ladino. It's a great loss.
To be honest, (and this is maddeningly paradoxical), as much as I admire the American penchant for inclusion and tolerance, I feel far more at home at an orthodox High Holiday service than at the newfangled smorgasbord of inclusiveness that is offered by some progressive branches of American Judaism. I prefer a male rabbi and a male cantor and all that patriarchal jazz, to a yoga and meditation kabbalistic Shabbat service; so sue me (in the interest of full disclosure, I don't attend either. I've paid my dues as a Jew). Still, the lite, p.c. version looks to me like a new agey jamboree of phony rituals. Maybe that's because I grew up with the orthodox way, and that's what's close to the bone.
This enthusiastic re-purposing of Judaism, by the way, is an American singularity that does not tend to happen in any of the other Jewish communities in the diaspora, except maybe Canada. Jewish American parents, products of a great democracy and brave new children in a land of immigrants striving to become as American as possible, shunned the old world shtetl mentality of their grandparents, then tortured their kids with half-baked Hebrew school and now nobody knows anything.
It's a hard problem to fix, and some American Jews are trying, with magazines like Tablet, a great resurgence of proud Jewish humor (see Larry David and Judd Apatow), hip communal seders in happening nightclubs, prayer shawls with rainbows and other manifestations of modern Judaism. But I suspect that what is needed to ensure the survival of the modern Jew is a revitalization of a more solid Jewish traditional and cultural education.
I'm not saying we should not evolve. Certainly, there are some ideas in our ancient, tribal religion that are incompatible with our modern day ideology (among them the oppression of women, the ostracizing of gays, and practical injunctions that have been rendered moot since the advent of electricity), but I wonder whether we are diluting the great Jewish transition into modernity with such minute tailoring to our lifestyle, that Judaism becomes unrecognizable, inauthentic and therefore, disposable. The greatest irony is that it has been so hard and has taken so long for us to get here: to be able, for the most part, to live freely and safely as Jews in the world, without fear of annihilation, and yet we are losing the battle for Jewish culture, from inside. We cannot allow the ultra-orthodox to dictate the rules of Judaism in the 21st century, unless we want to live in the dark ages again. We must know our stuff and those of us who have children, must pass it on to them.

I have been always deeply anti-religious, complaining as a child that if Passover is supposed to be a celebration of freedom, why then are we forced to eat nothing but Matzoh for eight days. The beautiful Passover seder my grandfather led with gorgeous praying melodies, songs and jokes, I hated during most of my childhood. Now, when I go back to Mexico to Passover seder at my uncle's home, I am deeply moved at the bizarre accident of history that allows us to eat gefilte fish Veracruzana style and a matzoh and mole gratin, while we listen to a beautiful, unique style of prayer that is centuries old. I am deeply concerned that when my uncle is gone, this incredible seder, this authentic connection to centuries of dogged determination to survive, is going to disappear forever. His sons know the melodies, but the investment with us busy, modern Jews is one of diminishing returns. I am already mourning, not the loss of religion, but the loss of a rich and stubborn culture.
I am convinced that living in a self-imposed religious ghetto is not the only way, nor the right way to sustain Judaism. The only Judaism that can thrive in the future is a strong, genuine tradition that accepts its millennial roots while living in harmony with the modern world. But for that, we gotta know our own story.

Vote For Pedro

As a good Mexican citizen, I took advantage of the new electoral law that allows Mexicans abroad with old voter cards to vote in the next Presidential elections.  The system has improved from last time around, when instructions were so arcane, it was clear they wanted to make it as hard as possible for the millions of us who are abroad to vote. Why we can't go to our local consulates or embassies and vote is beyond me. We will probably get there in the year 3000. Yet now, after minimal bureaucracy, and with no cost to me, I got my voting package in the mail. The dilemma this time is that the three main candidates are abysmal. The fourth candidate from a newly minted party, nobody knows him from Adam, and though he looks and sounds like an egghead, he is a protege of Cruella De Vil, aka Elba Esther Gordillo, a paleolithic mafiosa who runs the 1.5 million strong teachers' union and who nobody has been able to get rid of for decades. I can't vote for him.
I did not see the presidential debate but learned that the most conspicuous feature was that the woman who was handing out the questions to the candidates (why do we need one?)  looked like the vulgar version of a Playboy bunny. Which although sad and deeply shameful, should not be surprising. The political class in Mexico continues to treat Mexicans like retarded children. They think we are a bunch of ignorant, simple minded yahoos. It has barely noticed that Mexican society has changed at a par with the new facebook/twitter world order. Hence, they show their contempt for the Mexican people by picking a bunch of mediocre, incompetent losers. Mexicans are ready for a true democracy; not so their political parties and the media monopolies that have leeched on them for ages.
Only contempt can explain why the monolithic parties vying for the Mexican presidency chose their candidates so thoughtlessly. Like we say in Spanish, de los tres no haces uno. You can't make one by putting the three together.
The most egregious one is the PRI's guy, Enrique Peña Nieto, whose claim to fame is that he was governor of the State of Mexico, where he is accused of using violence to repress protests. But he is young and telegenic and, most importantly, married to a telenovela star, which also points to his party's unholy alliance with TV giant Televisa, a blight on the Mexican nation if there ever was one. As a campaigner, Peña Nieto has been a national disgrace. Unable to speak off the cuff at the most important book fair in the Spanish speaking world, he could not recall the name of ONE favorite book of his, which promptly launched an endlessly ingenious string of sarcastic memes that are still going on. People make fun of his ignorance, his inherited inability to speak normally (if you are from the PRI, you are genetically unable to be spontaneous. You speechify at the people, not talk to them), and his mini pompadour, also known as the copete. Most recently, in a very surprising development, he visited a posh private university, which his advisers undoubtedly thought a safe place, since the juniorcitos, the hijos de papi, the fresas and pirruris (all epithets that describe spoiled rich kids) who go there have never been interested in anything but their own well being. Lo and behold, he was chased out of the campus by a vocal group of students who, like any Mexican with an ounce of sense, do not wish to see the country revert back to the PRI and its corrupt, cynical, nefarious paternalism. If he had more backbone, perhaps he could have made himself heard above the racket. He chose to flee. Mexico being the country of mistrust, the country where no one is thought to have any purity or principle, soon the PRI spun the protest into what they themselves did for 70 years, accusing the students of being planted agents of the opposition. The 131 students,  promptly created a viral video stating their names and showing their student cards to the camera to show that they were not anyone's lackeys. The most surprising, and most wonderful thing is that this happened in this fancy campus (the fancy have always voted for whoever keeps them that way, but not anymore). It is encouraging to see youth in revolt, and I certainly hope they will take this revolt to the voting booth, from which they have been traditionally absent, if anything, to show the PRI it is not wanted back. There was an impressive march of young people against the PRI, which the media was trying to downplay. The pictures point at a hell of a lot of people down Reforma Avenue.
I keep hearing Peña Nieto is ahead in the polls, but I surmise these polls are as trustworthy as a Mexican politician. After his terrible public appearances, all I hear is utter disgust with him so I wonder who in that fictitious country of polls actually likes him.
Meanwhile the PAN, which has been in power for 12 years (after 70 of the PRI's perfect dictatorship, as Mario Vargas Llosa called it), and which has fallen from the public's grace mainly because of the suicidal war on drugs waged by President Calderón, chooses a woman who was Secretary of something or other, and who lacks any credentials to be the president. Not because she is a woman, but because if she were a man, she still would lack the credentials, the personality, and the acumen. Whose puppet is she? Because of the war on drugs, Mexicans want someone who is going to give them the impression he/she is going to deal with the violence. She represents somehow the worst aspects of the PAN, which is a right-wing Catholic party with an antiquated ideology about women, gays, and the rest of the enlightened world.
The third option, which many of the intelligentsia, the young and the eternally utopian endorse, is Andrés Manuel López Obrador, better known as AMLO, who was mayor of Mexico City and who lost the last presidential election and proceeded to orchestrate a disruptive, 6 month long hissy fit that paralyzed Mexico City and made me loathe him forever (even though I was not living there at the time). Sore losers cannot possibly be good leaders. This one, the oldest of the bunch by far, is a mix between old fashioned Mexican populist politics and tired Latin American lefty demagoguery. People are afraid that he will be Hugo Chavez Jr. I simply do not trust him. I don't trust people who promise to fix absolutely every injustice. They are liars. I was hoping that the candidate of his party, the PRD, would be the competent current mayor of Mexico City, Marcelo Ebrard, but the conventional wisdom is that he may be liked in DF but cannot win in the rest of the country (which tends to hate the capital). Mexico is a country where demagogic populism has been the norm for ages, hence they chose someone who connects more with the people. Pity, because Ebrard seems capable. Maybe six years from now?
I heard the recorded greetings the candidates made for us voters abroad and none of them said anything smart or sincere, but to my surprise, the only one who spoke about the situation with a broader point of view was Peña Nieto, even if it was fed to him through a teleprompter. The other two just pandered to the Mexican migrants to the US, as if the election hinged only on the immigration problem. And Quadri, the fourth guy, was just awkward.
The Mexican paper ballot leaves an open space to scribble an alternative candidate of your choice. Rather than abstaining, which is useless unless done by a concerted and huge majority, this is the only way I see to express my discontent with the candidates. I know who I am voting for. She is a very smart woman who is not a politician, but who is always reading Mexico the riot act. The vote is secret.

p.s.: Mexicans abroad, remember to send your ballots back before June 20!

Now Showing At A Theater Near You

A very eerie and elegant The Woman In Black, a not so great Hugo and a freakishly good Meryl Streep in the pedestrian The Iron Lady.

On DVD:
A grossly underrated The Ides Of March and a great Demián Bichir in a not so great A Better Life.

Plus, my customary annual rant about the Oscars.

Auxilio! The Mexican Dropout Rate

The New York Times published an article about the appalling dropout rate of Mexican high school students in New York City, which is the worst among Mexicans in the country. The numbers are horrible:

If the article is sad and shocking, the comments section is terrifying. So many hostile comments comparing the ignorant Mexicans with the progress-driven Asians, classic comments about sending everybody back, and Americans getting "the dregs", instead, I guess, of Nobel Prize winners.
Anybody who thinks that the NYT is only read by bleeding-heart liberals is in for a rude awakening. I was so offended by the hatred and hostility of the majority of the comments, that I chimed in:

If you come from a country where poverty makes work, not education, the most significant social value, and you yourself had nothing but an elementary school education, if at all, it is hard for you to understand why education is so important. You place a much higher value on work, so that the family can survive. Unfortunately, many of the hardworking Mexican parents who come here are victims of these circumstances. If they barely had an education in their native language, how can they be expected to master two? How can they really comprehend what education means?
If Mexico better educated its people and gave them more opportunities, there wouldn't be millions of Mexicans trying to make a better life for their families in this country. But it is in the interest of the ruling Mexican elites to keep Mexicans poor and ignorant. The government has to deal with millions less people, and wages can be kept miserly, all because the majority of Mexicans can't really afford to have an education.
Don't blame the immigrants. And don't blame bilingualism. Bilingualism can be a solution if it helps Mexican parents learn English, so they can participate in the education of their children.
John, 23: these people are not the dregs. Without their hard work and cheap labor, who else would Americans like you exploit? 

John is a commenter who thinks that Americans are getting the dregs (that is, Mexicans) of the cream of the crop of immigrants.
Let me add that Mexico has a free education system ranging from elementary school to a postgraduate degree, but even a free education is something that many Mexicans cannot afford.
Twenty years ago, as I started my career in Hispanic advertising in New York, our agency was commissioned to create a public service campaign to address the issue of the Hispanic dropout rate in the city. In those days it wasn't yet about Mexicans, but still more than 50% of Hispanic students did not finish high school. We created a powerful campaign (TV, subway and bus shelter posters, radio) based on the poor prospects that young Hispanics faced if they did not continue their high school studies onto college. It was meant to shock them and their parents into thinking seriously about finishing school. It never saw the light of day because of squabbling between the different well-intentioned but politically correct social agencies that were supporting it, among them the United Federation of Teachers and I don't remember which Hispanic groups. We were heartbroken. We all thought it would have made a big splash.
The numbers among other graduating Hispanics seem to have risen since then, but the Mexican immigrants to the city are relative latecomers and something must be done to shake them out of their belief that work, not studying, is the most important value they can instill in their children.
The reasons for dropping out of high school here are many, but key are: an illegal status and fear by parents of deportation plus lack of serious opportunities for illegals, and lack of education and English skills by parents, who do not participate in the education of their children simply because they can't. I have always maintained that Hispanics who come to this country need to learn English. In fact, the big Spanish TV and radio channels, which have absolutely no educational or cultural programming, could include bilingual or English literacy programs for adults, if, as they claim, they are so invested in the well-being of the community. Hispanics are not going to desert them the minute they learn English. Why wouldn't they keep enjoying their favorite programs in Spanish?
Many of the NYT's commenters have a very negative perception of bilingualism. I don't think that having Spanish media or bilingual communications in Spanish is the only thing that keeps immigrants from learning the language. It helps of course, but bilingualism is something to be desired by everyone. In the anti-immigrant hysteria currently sweeping this country, defending bilingualism has become tantamount to invoking Satan, but speaking more than one language is always an advantage to anyone, including Americans who rely on the fact that their language dominates the world, and thus can't see why it is desirable to speak something other than English.
Bilingualism is a two way street, and just as Spanish speakers are aided by communications in Spanish, by the same token they can learn English through bilingual education and immersion. What keeps Mexican parents, who are key figures in their children's educational attainment, from learning English is their inexperience with learning in general. Learning a new language is already very hard for adults, and many Mexicans are at an even bigger disadvantage because of their extremely deficient educational level, which is a national disgrace. This, unfortunately, is the perfect storm that the article speaks about. Their neglect of education needs to be changed into an appreciation of education as a value of the highest priority.
Education makes you smarter. Let's say things are so bad that you may still only find a job washing dishes: if you speak two languages and you are educated, you will rise faster than someone who doesn't. This is not a hard message to understand. A strong work ethic is a great value to have, but education provides a wider net of opportunities and a true chance at progress. Imagine: with their hardworking ethos, plus a strong value in education, there is no limit to what Mexicans (as well as anybody else) can do.

Today On I've Had It With Hollywood

My review of Into The Abyss, a Tale of Death, A Tale of Life, by Werner Herzog.

Yet one more movie which should encourage the national debate about the death penalty in the US. We are after all, the only civilized, industrialized nation that has it, to our enduring shame. We are in the company of evil, rogue, and backward regimes. Just to be in that list should make us strike it down.
It is a complicated issue. True, there are certain people one wishes they die a painful death. If someone killed someone I loved, I'm sure I would feel a burning desire for revenge, but that doesn't mean that this is what a civilized democracy in the 21st century needs to do for me. To put them away for life should be punishment enough.
It's hard to fathom how all those ghastly Republicans bitch and moan about big government, but they conveniently forget to factor in that the death penalty is the most humongous, egregious intrusion of government into the lives of citizens. All they want is to shirk their responsibilities to their fellow citizens and not pay taxes, but government is suddenly not big enough when it comes to the death penalty or to telling women what to do with their reproductive health, or to terrorize hardworking illegal immigrants, or put mostly people of color in jail and profit from it.
Hardly anything that their beloved Jesus Christ would have ever approved of.
In fact, Jesus was a victim of the death penalty. It is beyond human reason how they can reconcile his suffering and his teachings, to which the notion of revenge is anathema, to their cheering a candidate under whose watch more people get executed by the state than anywhere in the world, except perhaps for Ghadaffi's Libya, or Syria. This brand of American Christianity can only be described at bat-shit lunatic crazy, and evil. And the sane citizens of this country need to fight it with all their might, if they want to live in a free democracy.

Lost in Detention

Yesterday I was flippantly flipping TV channels when I landed on this devastating Frontline documentary about the horrible policies of the Obama administration re the deportation and incarceration of illegal immigrants in this country. This dismal state of human rights abuses is going on in this country every day, and gets reported regularly by the Spanish broadcast media in the US, but it is as if it did not exist at all on the mainstream media. It is a hidden shameful secret, sort of like the Japanese internment camps in WWII. Particularly shameful, since it is happening on the watch of Barack Obama, who should have the decency to know better.
Because of the unwillingness and the inability of Congress and this hypocritical president to enact immigration law reform, what is happening right now is sheer enforcement without legal reform; that is, a police state nightmare. The amount of human rights abuses committed against illegal immigrants has soared. The Bush administration privatized immigrant detention centers, and currently there are 250 of them, some of which are notorious for having housed hardcore criminals in the past. These centers are not under public scrutiny, nor are immigration detainees guaranteed the right to a lawyer. The documentary focuses on one specific center in Texas (hellhole of the Western world, it seems), where scores of sexual abuses of female inmates as well as beatings and racist taunts have been denounced.
A program called Secure Communities is supposed to deport criminal illegal aliens exclusively, but instead stops people because they had a broken taillight or did not signal a turn, and if they find they are undocumented, it sends them to detention centers that treat them as hard core criminals.  The Obama administration has made this program mandatory in every state and it requires the cooperation of local law enforcement, which basically turns the local police force into informers for the immigration authorities. There is something about this entire exercise that seems a violation of human rights. If a cop stops you for a broken taillight, and finds you are undocumented, is that his job, to rat you out to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (the cynically named ICE) so that they can detain or deport you?  There are many hardworking men and women who get separated from their families in this way. If you see this movie without sound, you'd think it takes place in China or the former Soviet Union or some such totalitarian nightmare.
The Obama administration has not only ignored the promises it made to the Hispanic community about immigration reform, it has hardened its stance on illegal immigrants, surpassing the number of deportees and detainees of the Bush years. ICE needs to fill a quota of 400,000 deportees a year, so innocent people get swept into this nightmare. This may include people who entered the country legally but let their visas expire, or simply good people without papers. 46% of illegal immigrants now have families in the US, many of which are comprised of American born children. Mothers and fathers are being deported and held in detention indefinitely, never told when they are going to be deported or released. Families are destroyed, and all this is because Congress and the White House refuse to deal with this dire national policy crisis.
Now, those on the right say that illegal immigrants are criminals and are breaking the law. But as Anthony Romero of the ACLU points out, immigration enforcement is an administrative matter, not a criminal matter. Coming into a country illegally cannot be treated in the same scale as other more heinous crimes. There are degrees of malfeasance; anti-immigration hysterics have got to stop pretending that coming here illegally is tantamount to murder, rape, or other hard crimes.
And why are only the workers penalized for illegality and not the businesses who hire them and encourage them to stay? The people who give illegals jobs are also breaking the law and should also be punished. But Americans want to have their cake and eat it too. They want cheap, unregulated labor for their businesses but at the same time they want to criminalize the workers who are trying to make a living. The sheer hypocrisy is revolting.
I am disgusted with Obama for many other reasons, but this is more than a disappointment; it feels like a huge betrayal. Democrats think that liberals don't have a choice in this coming election, and are scared of a Republican victory so they are going to vote Obama whether they are disenchanted or not. This should not be the case. Hispanics, as one expert said, are not going to vote Republican, since that would continue the same inhumane policy, but they can certainly threaten to withhold their very significant vote until something gets done to correct this situation.
I will not vote for this president unless I see real change, and from what I've seen so far, this is very unlikely. So what if the Republicans win? A Republican administration could not be much worse than what we already have.

Más Respeto, Por Favor.

The new, astonishing figures for the Hispanic population in the US:

I find this very interesting. There are almost 32 million Mexicans in the US. The next large group is Puerto Ricans, with almost 5 million people, and the next, Cubans, with almost 2 million.  Although Mexicans are six times as many as the next big group, for some reason they seem to be under served and under represented.  Other groups, like the Cubans in Miami, make much more noise and seem to have far more political clout, even though they are actually less relevant. Here in the East Coast, Mexicans are almost invisible. We see them cooking and delivering our food, but otherwise, they don't make a political racket. They barely have political representation. My guess is that recent arrivals come from poverty and are severely undereducated. They are concerned about surviving, sending money to their families, and they are not used to having a political voice. They have been abandoned by their own government at home and they are not about to trust the one here. I hope that with new generations of Mexican kids born in America this will change. I'm hoping that they will integrate better and get to be Supreme Court judges, mayors, presidents of this country. They need to get out of the ghetto. And for this, they all need to learn English.
When I arrived in New York in 1992, the Hispanic advertising business in the East Coast was run by people from Cuban or Puerto Rican origin. There were a only a handful of Mexicans working in this industry and being Mexican turned out to be a huge asset for my career. I always resented, and still do, that every time I wrote copy, someone would ask if a person who wasn't Mexican would understand it. Not that I was writing Mexican slang, but once in a while, a legitimate Spanish word that was perfectly commonplace in Mexico would jump out at people. Some thought that Mexicans were too uneducated to understand perfectly commonplace words (there was a lot of ignorant prejudice from some quarters and there still is. Some people like to feel superior to Mexicans, because of race, economic status and education levels). In my mind, I was writing for the majority even then, and the majority rules. I still feel the same way. If the communication is national, it should speak to the majority. If it is regional; that is, if it's only going to air in Miami, then do it in Cuban and let the minority get used to it. Native speakers, whatever their country of origin, are deeply sensitive to regional accents. So in Miami they are used to Cuban, as in the Southwest and California they are used to Mexican, and here in the East Coast, to the Spanish spoken in the Caribbean islands. I believe that there is a neutral Spanish accent that is perfectly fine, and this is the neutral Mexican accent, which pronounces all the consonants, and which, without the melody, is as neutral as the Colombian accent from Bogotá, without the singsong. And whoever doesn't like this, should take a look at the numbers above and zip it. 
One of the problems I have with the "Hispanic" market, is that because we strive to include everybody, the Spanish language that we use in mass communications has become impoverished. It is hard to write ads with humor, not because it is impossible, but because someone will always question whether the others will understand it. Advertising and marketing categorize people into targets until it dehumanizes them, as if people from different national origins are inscrutable aliens from a different galaxy that have no connection either to one another or to the rest of humanity. This results in people looking at every word in a sentence as if it was devoid of context. As if the way we speak is by understanding every single word in a sentence separately, without connection to what precedes it or what follows. In short, common sense leaves the building.
Let me give an example: popular idioms and expressions enrich communication. They are part of our culture. So if I want to use an expression like "sale más caro el caldo que las albóndigas", "the broth ends up costing more than the meatballs", which means something similar to "pound wise and penny foolish", everybody understands the gist of it, but it will have to go through a gauntlet of people who will admit they understand it, and even like it, but they are afraid that someone from the Dominican Republic might not. You can rest assured that it will never go on air. This is, among other reasons, why you can barely find good commercials in Spanish in the US.
The Spanish now used in mass communications in the US is for the most part an insipid, generic language that has no personality, no bite, no irony. Often times, it is sloppy and grammatically incorrect, or it is a lazy, literal translation of English idioms. As I was trapped in Cancún by hurricane Irene, I was watching the coverage on CNN en Español. I was appalled at the poverty of the Spanish of the newscasters and reporters. They sounded like nothing recognizable because for the most part they were speaking in some sort of awkward, literal Spanish translation of English; whenever they didn't know a word in Spanish, which was very often, they just said it in English. I cannot understand how a network with the resources of CNN can't hire good journalists, reporters and anchors who are native speakers of Spanish, and are fully bilingual and know the structural differences between the two languages. They can't be that hard to find.
The problem is bigger than advertising. Since this is not a Hispanic country, we don't have a solid literary and verbal culture. Our Spanish is poor. Children at school do not learn poems, songs, expressions, games, and literature in Spanish. We don't have good Hispanic-American literary writers who write in Spanish. We barely have a handful of good Hispanic-American writers who write in English. Our TV channels are a disgrace in terms of content. There is no cultural content. Newspapers and magazines leave much to be desired. And advertising, which in its best form should contribute to pop culture, is for the most part lame, artificial, generic and it belongs to no one. By trying to include everyone, it really speaks to no one.
So I have two points to make:
1. Our Spanish sucks, and we should do something to improve it. Making it generic makes it poorer.
2. Because there are almost six times as many Mexicans as any other Latins in this country, Mexican-influenced Spanish should be the language used to speak to the majority of Hispanics in the US.*


*By the way, if there was a Spanish-speaking majority from another country, I would stand by this, as much as it may pain me. It's only fair.

The Aftermath of Disaster

This was published in Spanish by Reforma exactly one year after the attacks.

After the initial shock, apparently I went back to my normal, ornery self:

Tuesday, September 11. Night.

South of 14^th Street, the island is cordoned off. Nobody can go below 14^th Street unless they show proof of residence in the area or are joining the rescue mission. Phones don’t work very well. I have less trouble calling my family in Mexico than making a local call. I feel relatively quiet, but I know my emotional distance comes from some automatic defense mechanism and not from my own volition.

The silence on the street is total, except for the sound of police sirens, helicopters and fire trucks, which is rather sparse given the magnitude of the disaster. I get international calls from some concerned friends. They know I live nearby. I watch TV and have internet on at the same time. On TV they regurgitate the horrible images of the explosions and collapses over and over, ad nauseam.

I have never heard such silence in my block, a spot full of usually crowded bars. A city in which people go out to eat, to drink, to dance seven days a week, has been completely silenced. A permanent hum scares sleep away. I don’t understand where it comes from. I open the windows to better listen to it. The smell of burnt rubber invades my apartment. I realize that what I’m hearing is the labored breathing of the buildings. 

Wednesday, September 12.

Today it smells worse. Giuliani has said that we should stay at home and we obey him. Giuliani, resented by many in this liberal city because of his abrasive personality and his puritanical and paternalist tendencies, behaves compassionately, intelligently and prudently, and he inspires trust. I have been cooped up at home all day. The phone rings every 15 minutes. Friends from all over the world call to comfort themselves that we are fine. Their calls make more bearable the loneliness and terror that have settled in the pit of my stomach. My intuition is that they are just as scared of the new world disorder that threatens to engulf us all. The calls are of mutual support. My friend Delia writes that her young daughter dreams at night of people jumping out of windows.

Between the acrid ashes and the media coverage, I’m disgusted. I decide to go outside and sniff around. Kids play under the cloud of dust and ash, followed closely by their parents. Some bars, restaurants and cafes are open. I see clusters of people standing on the corners that look south. I don’t understand what they are looking at. People wander around aimlessly from one corner to the next, shooting pictures and videos.

In this town of screamers, few people talk. At the corner of Houston and Sixth Ave, next to the fire station, a crowd gathers. People cheer every time rescuers or ash-covered firefighters go by. A young woman scrutinizes a lamppost and I decide she is crazy until I focus my eyes on the post and see the flyers with the pictures and names of the missing and the desperate messages imploring for news of their whereabouts.

I cry because these bastards have paralyzed my unstoppable city. But not completely. On the opposite corner, two Italian restaurants have opened their doors and the beautiful people eat pasta and drink wine au plein air, air rife with traces of asbestos, pulverized concrete and what in my view have got to be the human ashes of at least five thousand souls. However, I’m not surprised. I always knew that New Yorkers would never relinquish their inalienable right to go out for dinner, regardless of whatever catastrophe the future may bring. With this logic, I tell my husband, who is safe and sound in Panama, that this is the best week to make reservations at the hottest New York restaurants. But who has the appetite?
Since there is no traffic south of 14^thSt., some people make their dreams come true and glide through the empty streets on their rollerblades and bicycles.

Something never before seen: people look you in the eye as they pass you by. Men see me walking alone and look like they are ready to comfort me (and look like they are ready to be comforted back). The way things are, it seems that this week all the single girls may find a beau.

A guy gives me a small comic book. The doodles are very modern, but the content turns out to be an exhortation to return to the lap of our lord Jesus Christ, sponsored by one of those sects there’s no shortage of in this country, of loony evangelicals who are way too eager for the end of the world. Of course, they could not take long to materialize. How did they get to New York is beyond me, Greenwich Village even more so. Or were they already here?

At night there is thunder and lightning and military planes zoom by. I’m not scared. I have the air conditioner on to avoid hearing the silence. 

Thursday, September 13. 

North of 14^th Street, Manhattan seems perfectly normal, except taxis refrain from honking their insane horns. In the advertising agency I work at, I learn that one of our colleagues has lost his niece. My eyes tear up with indignation constantly.

Some of our clients have asked us to take a look at our commercials currently on air to make sure they don’t say things like “ A delicious explosion of flavor” or “A bomb of refreshment”. We make jokes in bad taste: “The Osama of sodas”, “A Jihad of nutrition for your family”.

Bush has declared that we all should go out at noon and pray at the worship place of our choice, which seems to me the stupidest idea that can occur to the president of a country in crisis, in a city which may still harbor extremists strapped with explosives. Besides, as an agnostic, I feel frankly discriminated against. In fact, I feel very alone in my distaste for these government-sponsored paroxisms of spirituality.

To judge from the tone that the media here have adopted, from now on we will be exposed to an indiscriminate barrage of sentimentalism and cheap patriotism. I have already started getting despicable chain letters with feelings of unity, prayer and revenge. The news are no longer news. They are lachrymose testimonies of the poor people who are desperately looking for their dead ones. I wonder what they are saying in the Middle East. What does Saddam think, for instance, what has Muammar declared, what’s the story in Kabul. If I watch the local news, I’m never going to find out. Here they are showing a paramedic that found a doll amid the rubble (there’s always one) and he intends to erect a monument with it if no one claims it.

The cloud of acrid dust has spread beyond 14^th street. I search for mouth masks at the drugstores. They are all out.

Bush, who since the incident, has the mien of a kid lost in the supermarket, uses an inflammatory and reductive rhetoric that seems taken straight out of a Hollywood action flick. We’re gonna smoke them, he says, Wanted, dead or alive. I haven’t the slightest doubt that this helps incite the incidents of harassment against members of the Arab-American community, and what is worse, against anybody who wears a beard and/or a turban. An idiot screams at the owner of a falafel joint nearby, “you make money here, but this is my country”, followed by a string of invective. Even though there are four Arabs and one aggressor, they remain silent. Standing half a block away, I can feel their fear. I don’t dare intervene.

Between testimonies, I read in the CNN news ticker the following item: an Islamic extremist in a German jail called the American authorities and warned them that there would be an attack on the WTC. Nobody talks about that. Nobody talks about the fact that Osama was trained by the CIA and that the Taliban is the result of American intervention in Afghan affairs. Nobody mentions these details, except some liberal friends that send me emails with such information. But, like Seamus Milne of The Guardian said, Americans react as if this instance of terror is a sheer impulse of evil that came out of nowhere, random and incomprehensible. They can't conceive that they may have done something to provoke it. They don’t know how much and why they are hated. It’s true. Information exists in this country and it is available to anybody, but few are interested. In general, the lack of American curiosity about the world is alarming.

 Union Square has become a spontaneous meeting ground to write thoughts, leave votive candles, hang pictures, play the congas. A group of young people sing and dance Give Peace A Chance, a song I’ve always found intolerably kitschy. A vigil has been organized at 7 pm. People are asked to light a candle in memory of the victims. A big crowd has gathered. A couple appears dressed as the Twin Towers. They are on stilts, dressed in black velvet leggings covered with shards of mirrors. They dance among the people, who are taking pictures. Why do these expressions of solidarity disgust me so much? Because they are vulgar, childish and innocent. Everything becomes a circus. I go to a movie and spend the entire screening thinking that an extremist is going to blow us all to pieces. 

Friday, September 14.

A regular day. North of 14th St. it looks like nothing ever happened. Taxis blare and create jams, people eat in restaurants.  New York, as usual.  

Saturday, September 15.

A friend who was upstate at the time of the catastrophe wants me to go with him to Canal St., which is now the border of the city. He wants to see something concrete. The only concrete thing to see are hordes of people with little American flags and tourists. People are snapping up postcards with pictures of the towers. The only concrete thing there is to see is a smoking crater at the end of the city’s canyons.

We have lunch at a restaurant where we are treated as if we had descended straight from heaven. Every two minutes they ask us if the food is to our liking. In fact, it is excellent. It is the first decent meal I’ve had since Tuesday. I feel it has been prepared with an intense desire to forget everything and come back to our banal normalcy. It tastes like glory.

A group of friends and I go to the movies. We need to get out of this funk. We pick Barbet Schroeder's Our Lady of The Assassins, based on the book by Fernando Vallejo. The film is in Spanish, which is delicious. And it turns out to have plenty of resonance. It’s about a different kind of terror (drug violence in Colombia), but it is hilarious, blasphemous, violent, and we enjoy it. A lot of its dark humor escapes the small audience. One of us says that when you live with the social injustice that causes this kind of savagery, you have a much more refined sense of irony. A phrase in the film is burnished in my mind. I paraphrase: 

“But child, don't you know that the difference between thought and action is civilization?"

My friends go home but I don't want to go to sleep. I go back to Union Square. The candles and the congas are still there. There’s a group of pale bearded guys and skeletal women with long skirts that sing songs only they know. Another sect. There are hundreds, maybe thousands of lit votive candles, bouquets of flowers, poems, exhortations for moderation, prudence and sanity. The catch phrase of the day is "An eye for an eye and we all go blind". People, respectful, are silent.

I find a Mexican flag. Someone has written on it 500 mexican ilegals (sic) unnamed. I find it an exaggerated number, but I don't doubt it. They are the kitchen helpers, the pizza delivery guys, the bathroom cleaners. I have not seen photocopies of their portraits, nor their names, or faces or teary relatives on TV. 

I can’t say I’m praying for them and their families, but my mind finally becomes silent.

Diallo-Rama

So we finally get to see and hear the woman who accused DSK of attempted rape. She had the risky idea to tell her story to Good Morning America. Now everybody is saying she sounds fake. I saw the interview. Looks like it was edited by Young Frankenstein.  Robin Roberts solemnly asks a question -- cut to Miss Diallo answering -- cut to images of them walking down the street -- cut to another question. Clumsy, stilted and the rhythm is off. Why couldn't it be a natural conversation where we could get a more spontaneous appearance from Diallo? I saw the TV interview with the father of that crazy Norwegian creep and the camera was set behind him, so as not to show his face, and was fixed on the reporter as she spoke with him. There were no cuts or camera moves. The compassion in her face was palpable, and his declarations, uncut and unrehearsed, felt genuine, poor man.
What I'm saying is that I would not blame Nafi Diallo exclusively for seeming histrionic and fake. This piece of garbage journalism is rehearsed and overbaked. 
Still, she doesn't come across like the shy, mousy thing people expect of a rape victim. She is attractive and exuberant. She is histrionic. She cries, or pretends to, on command. Her accent is funny. She has personality. She went over the top with the bit about finding out DSK was going to be the next president of France and fearing for her life because in her country if you mess with power, you can end up dead. But I kinda like her spunk. I like that maybe DSK finally met his match. Instead of one shitty human being maybe now we have two. Bring it!
At this point she may be eyeing the book contract and the paid appearances, but she has to know that if she goes to court, as she so fervently wishes, the defense is going to destroy her. She knows what they are saying about her lies to immigration, contacts with undesirables, numerous bank accounts and all that, so if she insists on a day in court, either she is too brave, or she's nuts.
Maybe she went on TV to perversely encourage Cyrus Vance not to pursue the criminal case, so she can try to get the money from the civil case? Otherwise, I think it was a pretty bad move, unless she is one of those people whose goal in life is to be on TV. Still, as I have said before, she may be a conniving diva, but if she was attacked, a crime was committed and needs to be brought to justice. I still believe she was attacked.

Now, all those indignant people who are livid about the fact that immigrants from fucked up countries lie in order to gain political asylum in this country, do me a favor, get a life.
People want to lynch this woman because omg! she lied in her immigration application. Americans behave sometimes as if they cannot fathom that someone would lie for whatever reason. This George Washington syndrome is very annoying. People tell lies all the time. Pious lies, little white lies, necessary lies, malignant lies. Don't act as if this sullies your entire concept of humanity beyond repair.
Guess what, if you come from a hellish place and this is the way you can gain entry into the land of opportunity, you are going to lie to get in. People lie to the asylum system all the time because they are desperate to come here. It's not good that they lie, but as Suketu Mehta writes in this week's New Yorker, it's what gets them in and it's what is expected. Officials expect to hear the most truculent stories and so applicants make them up, or embellish on already horrible circumstances. Everybody knows applicants lie. Everybody knows business owners look at social security numbers that might be fake and look the other way. So stop the freaking self-righteous hypocrisy already. It's revolting.
Many immigrants abuse the asylum system. I heard of a Venezuelan gay man who claimed political persecution, even though there is no official policy of harassment against gays in that country (simply put, everyone is homophobic). As I was reading Mehta's account of the immigrants' lies about atrocities and torture, I remembered reading about the Iraqi translators who have helped American troops in that war and now that they ask for asylum for totally legitimate reasons, they are completely ignored and abandoned by the US government. These people risked their lives to collaborate with an occupying force and this is the thanks they get.
Americans will never understand what it means for someone to seek a better life in a foreign country. (Well, let me qualify that. They may start knowing what it means after August 2, when we default on our debt. But that's another story, also involving a very particular form of local stupidity).
Many Americans don't understand the risks people are willing to take, or the things they are willing to do to be able to have a decent life. They get all bent out of shape because people fake their names, their social security cards, their stories. I'm not saying it's okay, but I can understand why they do it. As long as they work hard, pay taxes and do not harm anybody, what the hell do you care?
You don't know how good you have it here.  You don't know that people from other less coddled countries navigate much more treacherous realities, full of impunity, corruption, chaos, poverty, and hardship. Get a passport and travel around (all-inclusive resorts in the Caribbean don't count) so you can get a sense of the real world out there, you morally superior fucks.

Take This Job And Shove It

Funny: the less Mexican illegal immigrants there actually are (numbers are falling precipitously), the more draconian the measures being passed in certain xenophobic states. Some people will argue that the main reason Mexicans have virtually stopped crossing the border illegally is because they don't want to deal with those terrible anti-immigration laws. I'm sure they have given people pause. But it is important to point out that they are not the sole reason why Mexicans are choosing to stay home. According to this article in the New York Times, there are many more substantial reasons why Mexicans are not crossing over, namely, that life has gotten better in Mexico. 
This is hard to believe when all we hear is about thousands of deaths due to the "war on drugs" and the anti-immigrant hysteria here in the States. It's hard to believe even for Mexicans, who, used to ages of corruption and inefficiency, are constitutionally incapable of believing that things are going well in their own country, or that their government is doing something right. But birthrates have fallen from seven children per woman in the 1970's to two today (thanks to an enduring family planning campaign by the government. I still remember the slogan "la familia pequeña vive mejor" -- "a small family lives better"), and despite the best destructive efforts by the Catholic Church. 

As families' economic pressures are eased, more children are studying, more are going to college. Many former migrants are coming back. Certainly, life must also have gotten better because they were, if I am not mistaken, the second source of income for Mexico after oil. They sent a lot of money back to their hometowns, and they are coming back with money to spend. And many Mexicans are applying for legal work visas, because they are doing the math. Why pay $3000 to risk death at the hands of the merciless desert heat, murderous gangs or rapacious smugglers? Get in line and ask for a Visa. The United States cannot live without this labor force.
Even with the solidity of the numbers quoted in the article, I'm a little skeptical. The article focuses on the state of Jalisco, which is a pretty prosperous state. It says that a lot of the work there comes from the boom of fancy tequila marketing (as I've always maintained, tequila is not only the Nectar of the Gods, but good for all that ails you, including apparently curbing illegal immigration). Yet I wonder if really poor states like Oaxaca, Chiapas and Guerrero are seeing the benefits of this economic upswing.
Still, I'm so happy that circumstances prove that Mexico is not only not a failed state, nor should it be annexed by the US, nor is a dark hole of underdevelopment, but a great, dynamic country which has always teetered between extraordinary progress and stagnation.
I hope that economic, social and political progress will continue. I love the college kid in the article who says that he wants to come to the US but as a tourist. Now that is change.

Band Aids for Hemorrages

As if I have nothing better to do with my time, I write in the comments section of the NYT.
You should know that there are a lot of crazy Mini Sheriff Arpaios out there clamoring to deport, shoot to kill, seal the border, build a wall, etc. They sound like crazy crackers.
Here's what I wrote. Except here I may use more colorful language because this is my blog.

Sending 1200 National Guards to the border is a joke.
Giving Mexico millions of dollars for their futile war on drugs is useless.
All the measures taken by the Obama administration so far seem like a band aid trying to contain a full blown hemorrage. I am a Mexican American citizen.  I don't believe in the Minutemen or Sheriff Arpaio's illegal tactics and I am appalled by the hypocrisy of all those people screaming bloody murder against the immigrants but saying nothing against the legitimate businesses who hire them.
The measures needed to start solving this problem need to be long term.
First, the vermin of both parties who sit in Congress need to pass some immigration legislation pronto. Unless there is a coherent federal immigration policy in this country, nothing is really going to change except the rising level of anti-immigration hysteria. States coming up on their own with their racist, unconstitutional solutions are not going to help nor make a dent in the influx of immigrants. This is not a states' problem, it's a federal, foreign policy problem.
Secondly, the war on drugs that Mexico has been asked to undertake singlehandedly, in which thousands of Mexicans have died due to the endless voraciousness of American drug consumption needs to be reframed. Prohibition encourages criminality and outrageous profits for the drug mafia. 90% of Mexican drug production is consumed in the US. Is anybody going to do something about this? I'm sick and tired of the bully gringos whining about Mexico. Look at your own meth-infested backyard. That is not Mexico's fault, you spoiled crybabies.
Third, Mexico needs to get its act together (the nerve!). It cannot expect to continue farming out its poor, uneducated, desperate citizens to a country that does not welcome them, except to exploit them. It needs to improve the rural standard of living and education, It needs to give its own citizens a future.

May Day

                                                     La Pasionaria, Jr.

Fuck Arizona

Gov. Jan Brewer signed a law whereby Arizona police can demand immigration papers from people that look to them like they could be illegal. That is, anyone brown. Perhaps Paddy Moloney, a recent illegal immigrant from Ireland is in Arizona illegally, but no one is going to stop him, because he doesn't look like he could be illegal.
What asshat law is this?
As Chief Justice of my own Fantasy Supreme Court, here's my beef. Fair enough if a state wants to curtail the presence of illegal immigrants. They have every right to do so. There are surely ways to do it, however, without restoring to racist discrimination.
My ruling is: if immigrants are forced to carry immigration documents at all times, then so should everyone else.
But because of this law, American citizens of Mexican or Latin American descent, or legal immigrants are going to be discriminated on the basis of the way they look. Mind you, long before the first paleface arrived, the first inhabitants of Arizona were Native Americans, followed by Mexicans. There must be American citizens in Arizona whose brown ancestors have been there for hundreds of years, but who could now be mistaken for a wetback.
I read somewhere that the Arizona police are not happy about this law, because it's none of their business and it puts them in a terrible position. And they are right. But there is a minority of racist cranks that makes a lot of noise. And Gov. Brewer and John McCain are having primary challenges soon, so there you have it: Republicans caving in to their basest instincts once again.
In many countries in Europe people have a national id and you are supposed to carry it with you. Let's see if all Americans are willing to be forced to carry and present a national id that is not a drivers' license. But to demand of only one group to carry papers, there is something highly disturbing, undemocratic and un-American about it. 

The Amigo Country...

...apparently has set up shop here in the US. According to the Pew Research Center, more than 30.7 million people in the US are of Mexican origin. 19.3 million of those were born here, and 11.2 million are foreign born, like me.
Mexicans represent 65.7% of all Hispanics in the US, estimated at 46.8 million, and 37% of all foreigners. Hispanics are now 15.4% of the total population of the United States. So más respeto, vatos.
These numbers are huge. They are radical. Mostly, because considering how many Mexicans we are, we certainly do not have the political influence or make the noise we should be making (compared to the four Cuban cats who have held US foreign policy hostage from Miami since forever, for example). We are way too silent. Too busy working to complain. But that's because most of us have little education and even less money.  With these numbers, we should be seriously influencing immigration and foreign policy, among other things, both here and south of the border. We can no longer be ignored by both governments. And wait for the Census results...
There are many important corollaries to these significant numbers:
1. Are these numbers to blame for the recent improvements in Mexican food in New York City? You bet. Is this why we can now buy churros at the subway? Indeed. Is this the reason for the recent ascendancy of chipotle flavored everything? You gringos are very lucky.
2. I work in Hispanic advertising. It has always frustrated me that someone always asks whether the Dominicans, the Puerto Ricans, the Cubans or the Ecuatorians understand expressions that come from Mexico. Frankly, who cares? If they don't understand them now, they will soon, just like the Korean deli owners and anybody who works at a restaurant now speaks Mexican inflected Spanish.
I have always said that Mexican Spanish should be the Spanish used in national Hispanic advertising by virtue of its majority. Period. Number one, it is pretty good Spanish. Number two, I don't care if you think this is arrogant. Me vale madres.

 These numbers are from 2007. I rest my case.

3. I suggest that we scrap 5 de mayo, which is a bullshit holiday and celebrate instead September 15, which is our Independence Day. 
We seem to have taken back the territory that Antonio Lopez de Santa Ana sold to the US in the 19th Century. Karma.
Speaking of which, I was informed through Facebook that there is a petition going on to declare a national holiday honoring César Chavez, the Mexican civil rights dude who  originally coined the phrase "sí se puede", yes we can. I say, why not?

Plus ça change

Not to ruin your lovely weekend or anything, but here are some fresh remnants of the depravity of the Bush administration.  Immigrant detainees dying in private jails and officials scrambling to cover up their deaths and mistreatment.
Every time stuff like this surfaces, I wonder how is it that Bush and Cheney and their despicable minions roam the Earth unscathed.
Instead of jail, why don't they just deport the people? Do you know that they have detained legal immigrants because of bureaucratic technicalities that then disappear into a nightmarish rabbit hole from which there is no way out? 
Enjoy the outrage!

Census Madness

I was reading an article in the NY Times about Evangelical churches helping the US Census count illegal immigrants and the comments section was unbelievable. Hysterical anger about illegals being counted. Mostly, the screaming was along the lines of "go back to your own country, you parasites".
People are under the wrong impression that only citizens get counted. Everybody needs to be counted. That is precisely the reason for a Census.
I find it amazing that these hateful, spiteful Americans conveniently forget why immigrants are here. They are hired by people who are also breaking the law. How come nobody is outraged by the employers, but everyone wants to chase out the employees? Racism, pure and simple. And cowardly, to boot. So this is what I had to say:

Wow! Tell us how you really feel about the hard working people who do the jobs that American businesses are not willing to give to legal citizens because the salaries and benefits would become too expensive to pay. People will continue to come here illegally as long as American businesses continue to hire them under the table. If you want that to stop, you should penalize those who hire illegals first.
But you are all a bunch of hypocrites. Why don't you show the same outrage about the corporations who profit from hiring illegals?
Who is going to pick your strawberries, and slaughter your pigs and clean your toilets without charging 7 bucks an hour and expecting insurance and a 401K? Who, do you think, helped clean up after hurricane Katrina? Do you know what FEMA stands for in Louisiana, Senator Vetter?
Find Every Mexican Available.
So GET REAL.
The Census is a count of the people who are living in the US, legally or not. It is important to know who lives here, because that is REALITY, not IDEOLOGY. And as long as the conditions are here for people to come looking for a better life, they have every right to organize and every right to benefit from being counted.

Meanwhile, that I can buy churros on the street outside a NY subway station is to me, a sure sign of the wonderful contribution of immigrants to this land. To judge from the brisk business going on, I am not the only one. 

They Are Closing Hutto!

I wrote about this disgraceful prison for illegal immigrant detainees (and their children), after reading an alarming article in the New Yorker.
Apparently, the Obama administration is going to "reform" and make "more civil" the detention centers for illegal immigrants. I find it interesting that these news appeared exactly two days after the NY Times claimed that the Obama administration is continuing the inhumane policies of Bush's persecution of illegals. Things that make you go hhhmmm...
This is one case in which public outcry can bring about changes in policy and I feel like screaming hurray!, but I am wary of the Obama administration's claims of reform. Lately, they seem to be applying this word too liberally to stuff that isn't really changing all that much. Like health care, for example. Or torture. In Hutto's case I was exultant, until I read that they are going to transform it into a detention center for illegal female immigrants. Hutto was conceived as a maximum security prison, and the premises are not fit for the detainees, who are not dangerous criminals.
Still, it looks like we should count our blessings with this administration.
It's not change; it's change, kind of.