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.

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