Does Chavez legacy gain from multiple streets?

Down in Dallas, officials are fighting about which local street will have to take the “honor” of being named for United Farm Workers founder Cesar Chavez, while officials in Portland managed to pick a street over the objections of the local residents.

In all, Chavez has about 25 municipalities across the United States that have chosen to pay tribute to his memory by naming a street in his honor, similar to the hundreds of towns that have Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevards, or streets, or whatever.

BUT THERE ARE times I wonder if by reducing the name Chavez to that of a road, if we are actually lessening the public’s awareness of the man behind the name.

Could we be creating a future generation of people who will see those “Chavez Street” signs up on the post, think it just another part of the landscape, and care less to find out who he actually was?

Think about it.

How many streets in your respective home community bear a name of someone that you honestly don’t have a clue who that person was? Does it really do much good to stick up a street sign and do nothing more to pay tribute to a person?

I HAVE ALWAYS been of the belief that municipal governments ought to be trying to reduce the number of names they have on their streets (and not just because numbered streets are more simple to follow).

Too many places get tied up in political concerns about who they choose to honor, then they run out of streets when someone who truly is worth honoring comes along. We could get to the point where someone doesn’t get the street named after him, but gets the street post instead.

Think of it. Chavez Pole on 39th Street. It sounds totally ridiculous.

But it’s not any more ridiculous than the infighting that takes place whenever municipalities try to pay tribute to their growing Latino populations, but can’t think of anyone other than Cesar Chavez for whom to name a street.

IT WINDS UP creating a lot of resentment from locals who wind up taking it as a moral crusade of sorts to fight against naming anything for Chavez.

That is what appears to have happened in Dallas, where last year officials wanted to come up with a new name for Industrial Boulevard. They didn’t anticipate a local poll that would show great support for the name “Chavez Boulevard.”

They didn’t go along with it, and now all the people who hated that idea are fighting any attempt to find an alternative.

Perhaps it is fitting that Chavez was controversial in life as a union organizer, so perhaps he should remain as an outspoken presence even now, 16 years after his death.

BUT THE CONTINUING infighting in Dallas is merely making that city look ridiculous, as are the opponents in Portland, which this week renamed 39th Avenue for Chavez.

The locals who live along the street are arguing the usual arguments about how expensive it will be to change their street addresses on all their legal correspondence. There is a slight truth to that.

But it literally has people engaging in a battle to keep as pedestrian a name as 39th Avenue. And I wonder how much it keeps us from truly understanding what Chavez was about?

My other concern is to wonder if Portland now thinks it has done all that is necessary to recognize the fact that the Latino portion is on the rise in that northwestern U.S. city.

READING THE NEWS coverage of the street name change, I get that impression. Reports cite the fact that Chavez joins King, Rosa Parks and Bill Naito (a local business executive of Japanese ethnic descent) in having Portland streets named for them.

Will some people be inclined to think Latinos now got their share, and don’t need to be thought of much more? I’d hope that does not turn out to be the case.

If some people seriously think the Chavez name can be slapped onto a lamppost, then ignored, I’d argue they don’t really understand what the man was about. For Chavez in life was someone who refused to be ignored – even though he represented migrant farm workers whom society at the time preferred not to think about at all.

My bottom line?

STREET SIGNS ARE a cheap tribute, and people interested in paying serious respect to someone’s memory ought to be doing much more than paying for the making of a few rectangular signs.

Otherwise, we might see the day when people will read all those “Chavez Boulevard” signs in Portland and other cities, and figure someone felt a need to pay respect to Julio Cesar Chavez – the great Mexican boxer.

-30-

EDITOR’S NOTES: Local residents will continue to gripe about the Cesar Chavez (http://www.oregonlive.com/opinion/index.ssf/2009/07/no_way_to_honor_cesar_chavez.html) name change, even after it has become official.

This is NOT the honoree (http://www.juliocesarchavez.net/) of all those “Chavez Boulevard” signs that will crop up around the country.

NOTICIAS de LATINO: “Can’t tell the players without a scorecard”

Courtesy of the New York Times, we get an accounting of the government officials who are (http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/06/19/us/politics/0619-scotus.html) going to have to put their reputations on the line beginning next week with regards to the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court of the United States.

The newspaper gave us an accounting of the membership of the Senate judiciary committee – the government body that will get to grill the appeals court justice from New York and recommend whether or not she ought to get the full Senate’s confirmation.

WE’RE TALKING ABOUT political people as long-serving as Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, and as rookie-ish as Al Franken of Minnesota. The latter literally gets his introduction to being a senator by getting a say as to whether or not Sotomayor should be a Supreme Court justice.

And yes, the 19-member committee has 12 Democrats, many of whom are inclined to support her just to spite the people whose nativist rhetoric is at the base of Sotomayor opposition.

That is bound to cause some accusations that the process is somehow rigged. I guess it is, if you consider having a legislative body that follows the will of the people as a whole, rather than the will of one region of the country, to be rigged.

Those confirmation hearings begin Monday on Capitol Hill. Just in case you have enough of a real life that you weren’t hanging on every word of the process that could put the Puerto Rican from the Bronx on the high court, and make her the first Latina.

AND YES, I realize that saying she’s the first Latina technically is diminishing because that merely means she’s the first woman with Latin American ethnic origins. She’s really more than that, which is the reason so many Latino activist groups are taking up her cause and are eager to see her get confirmed.

But I’m inclined to go along with “Latina” because that’s how she refers to herself. Imposing some other label almost makes it seem like I’m not allowing her to define her own self-image.

That would be absurd.

What other items in the news are noteworthy these days?

LADIES ON THE PITCH: There are times when the sexism of Latin American culture cracks me up. It goes down to the very language of Spanish. When there are mixed-gender elements in a group, the male of the species prevails.

It is what creates ridiculous notions such as whether Sotomayor is Latina, or ought to be more broadly thought of as Latino. And it apparently extends to athletics too.

In an age when many people in this country see soccer as some sort of foreigner’s game, and others see it as a sport where the girls can play just as well as the boys, it is interesting to note that many Latinos have problems with their daughters playing the game that is the big time back home.

The Kansas City Star newspaper published a story this week about local high schools with girl’s soccer teams (http://www.kansascity.com/sports/story/1312203.html) and the struggles they go through to get their families to accept the very thought. It sounds too much like the nonsense that Anglo families went through a few decades ago.

UNEMPLOYMENT CONTINUES TO RISE: The National Council of La Raza notes that unemployment for Latinos continues to rise – up about 13 percent these days.

The group says that means Latino unemployment is about as severe as the rate for African-American people (15 percent), and means that this economic downtown is hammering away at non-Anglo people harder than the average of society as a whole.

“Though the outlook may seem bleak, minority communities are invested in the promising deceleration of unemployment,” Janet Murguìa of La Raza told the San Antonio Business Journal.

So perhaps at a time when one of us is on the verge of gaining lifetime employment (that’s what a Supreme Court post amounts to), we ought to remember those of us Latinos (http://www.bizjournals.com/denver/stories/2009/07/06/daily31.html) in search of work.

-30-

Arellano won’t get public voice on immigration issue

It is official – Elvira Arellano is not going to be a member of Mexico’s Congress.

The woman who spent a year holed up in a church in Chicago’s largely Puerto Rican Humboldt Park neighborhood to avoid being picked up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials and deported lost in Sunday’s mid-term elections for political positions across Mexico.

ARELLANO, WHOSE SON remains in the United States (he was born here, so he gets citizenship), had submitted herself as a candidate for Congress from the Baja California, which is the state along the border surrounding Tijuana.

Arellano had hopes of becoming a political official who could put a personal face on the immigration from Mexico’s perspective – in short, why are so many people willing to risk a walk through the deadly desert to live in a United States with hostile elements that cause them to have to live their lives in secret?

It’s not that Mexicans rejected the idea of having to consider if their political system is so flawed that many Mexicans would rather live somewhere else. It more is the fact of politics as usual.

Family rules.

IN SHORT, SHE was running for Congress against the brother of the governor of the Baja.

He needed a political post to hold, and his brother provided a campaign organization that could turn out the vote.

So she probably never had much of a chance of winning. Of course, it didn’t help her much that her political party is the one that has a reputation in Mexico of being “leftist.” Of course, the people who think that are the same types as those in this country who go about tossing words like “socialist” to describe the current president and “Communist” whenever the Democratic Party is discussed.

But it could have been interesting had Arellano gained a post that would have given her fight on the immigration issue a bit of political legitimacy.

FOR THE FACT is that Arellano was the woman who risked much to get into the United States, and once she was here wasn’t exactly getting rich off the American teat, no matter how much the nativists want to claim that “foreigners” are bleeding the U.S. dry.

She was working a job at an airport, so she was the woman who got on the airplane after it landed and the passengers dispersed, and had to pick up after the mess made by those very passengers.

This “illegal” operated a vacuum cleaner. Or at least she did until federal authorities did a raid and busted up her employment.

It was at that point that she took to the church and remained inside for a whole year – based on the notion that federal immigration authorities wouldn’t have the nerve to enter a church and take her out kicking and screaming.

THEY DID NOT.

They waited her out until she finally decided to leave and be an activist on the immigration issue, knowing she’d be picked up eventually and deported – which she was, in Los Angeles.

Since arriving in Tijuana (which puts her within sight and earshot of the United States), she has traveled to Cuba, Spain and Italy to talk about the immigration issue.

It is what she does.

SHE WANTS TO make people aware of the fact that it isn’t a criminal hoard sliming its way across the line in the dirt that is the U.S./Mexico border, but merely people wishing to make a better life for themselves while also potentially boosting the economy of their recipient nation.

After all, Arellano was essentially a cleaning woman – even though some will claim she was a potential threat to this nation because of her proximity to Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport.

The image of the woman with the vacuum being the threat to national security is just a tad too ridiculous to take seriously.

But perhaps the thought of her political bid was also too much for some people to take seriously.

SOME MEXICAN OFFICIALS prefer to think that it is merely a bit of disloyalty to country that causes so many of my ethnic brethren to think that the United States offers a chance of a better life.

That allows them to ignore the very real problems that hold a large percentage of the population down and give them next to no chance to advance in life. That certainly was the situation some 80 years ago when my own grandfathers made the decision while still teenagers that they had more opportunities if they moved from their homes in central Mexican states.

So while it isn’t a surprise that Arellano didn’t win, I must admit to thinking it is a shame. Her presence in Mexico City could have stirred up enough of a political “hornet’s nest,” so to speak, to make the issue interesting.

The chances are good that she would have said some things about her Mexican counterparts that would have even gained some support from her one-time critics in the United States.

-30-

Only six more days until confirmation begins

I’m eagerly looking forward to the beginning of confirmation hearings for Sonia Sotomayor to be on the Supreme Court of the United States – primarily because I’m getting sick and tired of the lame attempts by conservative partisans trying to find any excuse their minds can concoct to try to bash her.

Those hearings in the U.S. Senate begin Monday. That is when the Republican opposition is going to have to put up, or shut up, so to speak. We’ll find out for sure what kind of goods they have on the appeals court justice from New York.

ALL I CAN say is if the trash talk we’ve heard so far is the best they’ve got, then I can’t help but think the lady from the Bronx is a shoo-in to be confirmed to the high court seat.

Even Colin Powell seems to think so.

Because it was a Sunday and because about the only other “news” was pictures of fireworks exploding, Powell’s appearance on CNN warranted more attention that it deserved.

Because about all he was really saying is that it is ridiculous to think the fact that Sotomayor used to do legal work for activist groups promoting the interests of Puerto Ricans and other Latinos somehow makes her racist.

ASIDE FROM THE argument that it is impossible for someone in a minority group to be racist (prejudiced would be the correct word, but it has a lesser meaning), there’s just the fact that the people who seem to get most bent out of shape about Sotomayor are the ones who somehow think that her work on behalf of Latinos goes counter to what this country is about – rather than realizing it upholds the very ideal of a group trying to work its way into the mainstream of the society.

If anything, these people seem to want a Supreme Court that is biased – one that works to hold back the interests of anyone who can’t naturally fit into an Anglo majority (which was the image of what this nation was a century ago).

Powell, who still prefers to go by the Republican Party label when identifying himself, says it ought not to be a disqualifier that she is “Democrat” or “liberal.”

But that is what the Sotomayor opponents want to believe. My guess is they’d love to have nine justices like Antonin Scalia (or perhaps eight Scalias with one Clarence Thomas for show).

SO WE’RE GOING to hear a lot of whispers from people who hope that something from their trash talk somehow sticks – then they can start screaming it to the public come the confirmation hearings next week.

How do I define trash talk?

I’d cite a report published last week by the Washington Times newspaper as being a perfect example – except that it’s not talk, it’s the printed word.

Regardless, the newspaper with a conservative ideological bent goes out of its way to tell us about the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund (for which Sotomayor used to be an attorney).

GUILT BY ASSOCIATION is all it truly is. They want us to believe that everything the group did is somehow reflective of what Sotomayor stood for.

Except that when one reads the “list” of “bad” things that PRLDEF did, only the most hard-core of political partisans could consider any of them “bad.”

The group was opposed to the 1980s Supreme Court nomination of Robert Bork because they thought his conservative agenda would harm the interests of the growing Latino population.

Of course, a lot of other groups also had their problems with Bork’s nomination by then-President Ronald Reagan. That’s why the Senate ultimately rejected the idea of Bork some 22 years ago.

BRINGING UP BORK comes across like someone with a 22-year-old grudge who just can’t let it go. It is as ridiculous as every single time a conservative reminds us of the grief Thomas was put through during his confirmation hearings (forgetting the fact that Thomas got confirmed – and has now been on the high court for some 18 years).

The newspaper also reminds us about how the Puerto Rican group is supportive of a woman’s right to legally abort a pregnancy and also has problems with the death penalty and the way it negatively impacts non-white criminal defendants.

The far right (which was deluded by the outcome of the 2000 presidential election into thinking it was the mainstream of thought in this nation) will hate to hear this, but there are a lot of people in this country who would be in complete agreement with the Puerto Rican group.

Believe it or not, most of those people are not Puerto Rican, or Latino at all. She’s probably closer to the mainstream of society than any of her critics are.

IF ANYTHING, THE appointment of Sotomayor to the high court could wind up bringing a balance to the thought process that ultimately decides when the politicians have gone too far in trying to pass laws that are bad (which is the court’s purpose).

It could mean that the appointment of people like Sotomayor goes counter to that vision of presidents such as Reagan and Bush to stack the federal courts with social conservatives who will take actions that will push their views for generations to come.

And if so, then that is a good thing for our nation.

-30-

EDITOR’S NOTES: Fellow Bronx native Colin Powell spoke out in defense recently of (http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/2009/07/06/2009-07-06_sonia_not_a_racist_says_colin.html) Sonia Sotomayor.

The people who are most vehemently opposed to the thought of Sotomayor on the high court (http://washingtontimes.com/news/2009/jul/02/nominee-advised-critics-of-bork/?feat=home_headlines) are further out of touch with the mainstream of our society than they want to believe Sotomayor is.

Census a count of people, not citizens

One of the arguments I have heard used about how flawed the U.S. Census is these days is that it is wrong for people who are not U.S. citizens to be counted.

Including them in the population count for the United States somehow distorts “the truth” about the current composition of this country – or so argue the nativist elements of our society.

THESE ARE THE people who argue that it is somehow un-American for the Latino activist groups to try to organize efforts to ensure that we get as accurate a count of how many Latinos there are in this country these days.

After all, they will argue, many of the Latinos are not yet U.S. citizens, and should not be counted. Attempts to count them are merely a scam by local government officials who are desperate to goose up their individual population counts to try to increase the share of federal and state funding they will receive during the upcoming decade.

Having written those four paragraphs, I feel like I have committed the act of diarrhea of the fingers, spewing a whole load of “caca” onto the Internet.

Seriously, I don’t understand the logic of people who get so bent out of shape about this issue.

THE WHOLE PURPOSE of the Census Bureau study that will be conducted next year will be to come up with as accurate an answer to a single question – How many people lived in the United States on April 1, 2010?

It isn’t how many U.S. citizens are there. If it were, then we’d have to figure out a way of counting all those expatriots who now are living or working in other countries – but for whatever reason choose to keep their legal status as citizens of the United States.

Not that I’m blaming those people for their choice.

But it is supposed to be about counting up how many people are here in this country. And whether or not one is a proper citizen, if they’re here they ought to be included in the overall tally.

IF ANYTHING, I’D like to get a count on how many people living here are not U.S. citizens, and how many of those do not have the visa or other documentation that would allow them to live openly in this country.

Not that I’m interested in compiling a list of cases for deportation. But I’d enjoy having an accurate figure of how many people were so desperate for a better life that they endured the hassles of slipping into this country (either by literally sneaking past a Border Patrol post or by overstaying a tourist or student visa).

One of the drawbacks of writing commentary about immigration issues is that one of the key statistics (12 million) concerning the number of people who are not in this country properly is little more than a guess.

It could be so ridiculously wrong that it doesn’t deserve to be taken seriously. If anything, an accurate figure would show us just how serious the immigration reform issue truly is.

SOMETIMES, I GET the sense that some people in this country don’t want to bother with the issue because they think it somehow doesn’t affect them directly.

That is why I will always have a hard time comprehending the thought process of those activists who are encouraging people to ignore the Census Bureau study when they receive it next spring.

They claim it is an act of protest to gain the attention of the federal government. I’d argue the way to gain the attention of the federal government and political people is to come up with the most accurate accounting possible of just how many Latinos there are in the United States – and how many of us seriously have visa issues.

If anything, it would show the people who don’t want to take the issue seriously that they risk their own political future because we are a growing number. And by all figures, it appears that growing numbers of us are U.S.-born.

THE REASON WE take the interest in this issue is because we realize there are those of you who cannot (or do not) want to tell the difference between a U.S. citizen Latino, a Latin American with a visa and one without.

So when I receive that Census Bureau form, I will be among those who quickly fills it out (although I doubt I’ll be as enthusiastic as Steve Martin’s “Navin Johnson” character was when the new telephone books arrived).

And any Latino with much in the way of sense ought to be doing the same. If we want to be fully included in the society of this nation, the first step is that we have to be counted.

-30-

EDITOR’S NOTE: Down along the U.S./Mexico border, local officials are trying to figure (http://www.brownsvilleherald.com/news/census-99625-city-residents.html) out how to get the most accurate population figure possible.

It wasn’t just an Anglo war

It should not come as any surprise that people we would now think of as Latinos were involved in the fight for U.S. independence.

Some of the places we now think of as U.S. states were originally Spanish colonies, which means there were people with ties and loyalties to Spain on this continent when the disputes between England and its colonies on the Atlantic coast devolved into a shooting war in 1775.

MANY OF THOSE people were willing to give their support in the form of rations and weapons (and occasional manpower) to their English-colonist neighbors on the continent.

And when in 1779 it became apparent that these English colonists might very well be able to hold out against the British army (they defeated the British at Saratoga, N.Y.), Spain itself declared war against England on June 21 – maintaining that status until the day that England recognized independence for the fledgling United States.

Those of us who are working the barbecue grills on Saturday to cook up some carne asada (rather than some weenies or overly-fatty ground beef) have just as much a right to think of this as our holiday as anyone else in this country.

I feel compelled to say this because I think back to my own U.S. history courses in school that told us about the great French support for the colonists’ effort, and also mentioned various names of Prussians and Poles who helped out. Lafayette, Pulaski and Von Stuben are just a few of the names I can recall from grammar school history.

BUT WHAT ABOUT Bernardo de Gàlvez, the colonial governor in New Orleans who helped sabotage British Navy efforts to gain control of the Mississippi River, then later organized a militia of Spanish loyalists, native Indian tribes and freed slaves that overcame British forces in places ranging from Baton Rouge, La., Mobile, Ala., and Pensacola, Fla.

He wasn’t alone. There were many people on this continent whose ethnic background was Spanish who recalled the recent loss in the Seven Years War of the 1750s and the loss of the colony of “Florida.” Aside from manpower, there were supplies and firearms provided by them toward the English colonists’ attempt at revolution.

It may have been a case of “the Enemy of my Enemy is my Friend” that encouraged them to take a dig or two at the British, but support was still support. Without that foreign support, there wouldn’t be a United States these days.

And for those of you who like to make half-witted cracks about the French and surrendering, keep in mind that if it were true, we’d likely be treating this like a typical Saturday (instead of a day in which you got to leave work early yesterday) and there’d probably be a British history book devoting a paragraph or two to such “terrorists” as Jefferson, Franklin and Washington.

-30-

EDITOR’S NOTE: For those of you who are interested in reading a recitation of Spanish-tinged names that helped support the revolutionary movement that spurred (http://works.bepress.com/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1002&context=refugio_rochin) creation of the United States, one can check out this study – particularly pages 12 and 13.

La policia – the solution, or the problem?

It ought to be one of the many things about life in the United States that is so much better than life in the “old country” somewhere in Latin America – the police in this country are somewhat professional in their work and are not necessarily in the pocket of the politicians or the drug lords.

In short, they’re not the establishment goons.

YET THE PROBLEM these days seems to be that some people in this country with their hang-ups about the growing Latino population want the police to reinforce such beliefs. And in some cases, there are cops who are more than willing to go along.

There are, however, also cases where the local police are reaching out to try to erase the negative perceptions. In short, there are some cops who understand that if they want to gain the trust of the Latino community, they have to do something to show they ought to be trusted.

In fact, the future of Latino/police relations in the next couple of decades is that police departments have the potential to be a virtual checkerboard across the nation – with some departments being understanding of our presence and others downright hostile.

That literally was the impression I got from a pair of news stories I stumbled across on Thursday about Latino/police relations out west – Oklahoma and Utah, to be specific.

TAKE THE POLICE in Tulsa, where they are showing signs they want to hear from Latinos.

Television station KJRH noted that the police department’s web site is now including links for people whose language preference is Español. Those links give people information that might seem as basic as the proper way to report a crime, or the proper telephone numbers to use in varying types of emergencies.

The police even include instructions on how to go about filing a report against a police officer, if one is convinced that a cop did them wrong in dealing with them.

I’m not naïve enough to think that Tulsa, Okla., has become some sort of bastion of friendliness for its Latino population when it comes to dealings with the police.

BUT THIS IS a significant step in letting people know that the police are there to protect, rather than “preserve disorder” (which was once the slip of the tongue of the late Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley).

It is a first step, and if more departments across the nation were willing to behave in such ways, I’d be more optimistic about the future over the course of, say, the next 50 or so years.

I realize this is a situation that will change gradually with time, as law enforcement will have to alter its general approach or else lose its relevance to society as a whole.

But the idea of gradual change doesn’t do much for those people who are living in the here and now. And the fact is that there are some people who are misguided enough that they would prefer to have their police act as “goon squads” of sorts against the growing Latino populace.

TAKE UTAH, WHICH on Wednesday had a new law take effect.

The new law allows for local police officers to seek designation as federal agents for purposes of enforcing the nation’s flawed immigration laws (the ones that President Barack Obama is eventually going to have to get around to trying to fix).

To their credit, no law enforcement agency in Utah was all that eager to take on such a role. At least that is what the Salt Lake Tribune newspaper reported Thursday.

People who push for such laws like to envision the thought of local cops pulling people over for a traffic violation, discovering they do not have a valid visa (because they look “so foreign”), then personally driving them down to the U.S./Mexico border to get them out of this country.

THAT HYPERBOLE MIGHT be a bit much. But the simplistic thought is what some people wish the local police could be.

That new law had Latino activists on Thursday trying to organize to inform people how to go about filing a legitimate complaint if they are hassled by police officers who think they can suddenly enforce their take on immigration laws.

The Salt Lake Tribune says that activists are literally informing people of one of their basic rights when dealing with police – the right to remain silent, at least when it comes to questions about immigration status.

The other “advice” being given out to the Latinos who choose to live in Utah is to ensure that their driver’s licenses and automobile registration are valid and current. Best to give a potentially hostile police officer fewer legitimate excuses to be questioning them.

-30-

EDITOR’S NOTES: Will police in Utah get more bold when it comes to questioning people (http://www.sltrib.com/news/ci_12742154) about their immigration status if they come across people who they think look “too foreign?”

Taking a more welcoming tone toward the Latino population ought not to mean that the laws (http://www.kjrh.com/news/local/story/Tulsa-Police-seek-new-Hispanic-relationship/mS8K37BURk-VaHdnxpAo-w.cspx) are not being enforced.