Roberto Lovato on Dreaming Beyond the Walls of “Civilization”
With many of us still reeling and wondering about ABC’s unprecedented and simply devastating display of dumbed down politics during last week’s Democratic debate, this hilarious video from last year says it better than anything , anyone else. Thanks to the Onion for peeling back the layers covering over the Truth about our political system.
Though not an endorsement (I’m still working through whether these elections are some sort of grand political theater designed to makes us magically forget Bush broke the still-broken system), this music video from Mo Rocca is muy chistoso. Enjoy (and sorry for those of you who need translation - but get with it, homes!)
video source posted with vodpod
Despite (or perhaps because of) the economic meltdown, Of América’s stocks appear to be rising. At least that’s what our 2nd (count 2, segundo) appearance in the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) , official voice of big capital, would indicate. This WSJ story about Latino bloggers and Super Tuesday mentions our esteemed site’s recent post about the double-talking bilingual antics of Mitt Romney and the now politically defunct Rotting Rudy Giuliani (Gracias a Nuestra Senora de la Justicia Social).
Given that we’re entering awards season, I’d like to take this opportunity thank the Academy and all of you who visit this barbarian haven for reading, commenting and passing the gas……….uhhh hot air…..I mean .. passing the word that makes such recognition possible.
Actually, mention in the WSJ would not have been possible without the increasingly irrefutable fact of Latino power in the life of América, a fact we try to mirror here. So see yourselves and smile 
Gracias,
R
Today’s Wall Street Journal (WSJ), CNN and the spinning class at large are abuzz with the possibility of a Lou Dobbs Presidential bid. This piece in the WSJ is pretty typical of what the chatterati are saying.
The depths of despair among “disaffected” (and overwhelmingly white) voters is palpable and a Dobbs candidacy may be just the electoral Viagra they need, according to one William Gheen, one of those “grassroots” racists the mainstream media can’t seem to get enough of.
“At this point, Dobbs is the only man in the country that would have a shot at making a historic independent run, and winning,” says William Gheen, president of Americans for Legal Immigration, an influential grass-roots group that favors strict enforcement of immigration laws, a favorite subject of Mr. Dobbs’s.
I for one wholeheartedly endorse a Dobbs candidacy if only because it will raise awareness of the issue in a more pointed way than even Tom Nobody-Can-Out-Anti-Immigrant-Me Tancredo. Really. Dobbs will force Obama and McCain to adopt more definite positions. But that’s less important than the effect such a bid might have among certain segments of the populace.
Among the groups most needing to wake up to the Dobbsian zietgeist are Latino and other immigrants themselves.
Reflecting what appears to be a huge and strategic chasm between many immigrant rights leaders and the immigrants communities they allegedly lead, most Latino immigrants in the United States have no idea who Lou Dobbs, their most powerful and telegenic adversary, is.
Most immigrants can pick out Tancredo, their toupee’d arch nemesis, from a line up, but most can’t identify the more dapper Dobbs. Spanish language media doesn’t talk about Dobbs and immigrant rights activists spend lots of time defending against and cursing him - en Ingles. And CNN en Espanol doesn’t dare turn him into a crossover star lest they risk losing advertising en Espanol. So, people like my parents, my cousins and most documented and undocumented immigrants I know haven’t an inkling what Lou Dobbs means.
Let us hope he runs.
After being accused of racism by the British music tabloid, NME, singer Morrissey published this response in the UK Guardian last week (sorry for the delayed report).
Beloved by many, including many Latinos, some of whom found themselves in a moral dillemma upon hearing the news, the crooner countered the accusations of being a “racist thug” by saying that he was “the victim of the magazine’s agenda to cook up a sensational story”.
Thanks to bordersound for sharing this late, but important news.
In what may be a devastating blow to the throngs of Morrissey maniaticos across the hemisphere, the U.K. Guardian and other British news organizations are reporting that the former Smiths singer expressed anti-immigrant sentiments during a recent interview. Today’s Guardian reports on the controversy stirred up by alleged remarks the aging crooner made when asked about immigration in the U.K.. “The gates of England are flooded. The country’s been thrown away”he responded, according NEM, a Brit music magazine.
The row raging on the other side of the pond has many Latinos and Latin Americans on this side wondering whether their idol harbors sentiments antithetical to migrants. For reasons beyond my limited comprehension of Morrisseyiana, the former Smiths singer has a and massive, cultish fan base in the Américas. His alleged recent statements must come as something of a sad song to thousands of pompadoured, tee-shirt-sporting devotees in L.A., Mexico and elsewhere. Morrissey has denied the allegations and is suing NME for libel.
Of course, these aren’t the first such allegations aimed at him. This 2006 article in the Believer describes some Morrissey performances that make it easier to believe the NME’s report. Consider this description about a concert in Yuma, Arizona,
“When the crowd chanted “Mexico! Mexico!” at an off-the-beaten-track Morrissey concert in the desert town of Yuma, Arizona a few years ago, trying to get Morrissey to acknowledge that the majority of the audience was Latino, the singer responded by saying: “I’m going to sing a couple more songs then all of you can go back to Mexicali.””
or this one about a concert in England,
Draped in the Union Jack flag, a symbol of arch nationalism, and singing songs with such perturbing titles as “Bengali in Platforms” and “National Front Disco”, Morrissey’s acerbic references to “England for the English!” at Madstock failed to appeal to the media’s underdeveloped sense of irony. The performance was taken at face value, and Morrissey was branded a racist.
Whatever the outcome, there’s a lot of gut-wrenching and soul-searching in the land where “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out.”
(From the Progressive Magazine - http://www.thefreelibrary.com/No+laughing+matter.-a0171139392)
No laughing matter
Anti-Latino humor has entered the mainstream.
Roberto Lovato
Late night funny man Conan O’Brien recently tickled his studio audience as he touched on immigration, a hot button topic heard with growing frequency on late night talk shows: “A man in Mexico weighing 1,200 pounds has lost almost half that weight and might enter the Guinness Book of World Records for most weight lost. The Mexican man lost the weight when the family inside him moved to America.” Then at the Emmys on September 16, O’Brien, who won an award, provided a clip of his writing team depicted as Latino day-laborers.
During a “New Rules” segment of his show broadcast in late August, liberal late nighter Bill Maher went to the well of immigrant humor: “New Rule: No more produce-scented shampoo: avocado, cucumber, watermelon. Gee, your hair smells like a migrant worker.”
Jay Leno, who has gone out of his way to tell people, “I’m not a conservative,” has also joined in. During a show in mid-September, he joked, “Well, police across the country now say they’re arresting more and more illegals who are prostitutes. But proponents say, ‘No, no. They’re just doing guys American hookers will not do.’”
And during a recent sketch making light of Latino criticisms of Ken Burns for his exclusion of the more than 500,000 Latino veterans in the filmmaker’s epic War documentary, Jimmy Kimmel deployed images of sombrero-wearing Speedy Gonzalez–a cartoon long considered racist by Chicano activists–yelling “Arriba. Arriba.” Kimmel’s shtick includes placing parking lot attendant Guillermo in compromising positions as when the heavily accented Latino immigrant participates in spelling bee contests with young champions. In another humiliating sketch, Kimmel begs him, “Please do not resort to violence.”
While the immigration debate in Congress ended months ago, the immigrant jokes haven’t. This is not so much because the late night hosts are at the tail end of a political trend, but because they are, in fact, at the front end of a major cultural trend: the mainstreaming of anti-immigrant sentiment.
Immigrant rights activists have concentrated much energy on challenging rightwing radio as well as blatantly racist, formerly fringe video games like “Border Patrol” in which players shoot immigrants for points. But little attention is paid to the more mainstream fare: Top-selling video games in which white good guys kill immigrant bad guys and black and Latino zombies; popular television shows like NBC’s The Office, in which immigrant characters are ridiculed for their accents, nationality, and other traits; movies like the supernatural thriller Constantine or last year’s comic hit Nacho Libre, in which immigrant characters embody evil and stupidity.
The proliferation of anti-immigrant messages in pop culture moved UCLA linguist Otto Santa Ana to study what he calls an “explosion” of anti-immigrant representations in pop culture.
“There’ve always been racist, anti-Latino stereotypes in the media, but things are getting quite bad now,” says Santa Ana, who started documenting anti-immigrant language and imagery he found in California newspapers in 1993, the year that launched the political battles around that state’s Proposition 187, which sought to deny education and social services to the undocumented and their children.
Since then, says Santa Ana, anti-immigrant themes have become more intense.
In his efforts to document these trends, Santa Ana, author of Brown Tide Rising: Metaphors of Latinos in Contemporary American Public
Discourse, and several of his students have gathered more than 100 YouTube clips that he says represent only a small portion of a growing number of “extraordinarily racist, anti-immigrant jokes and other content in sitcoms, film, standup comedy, and other mediums.” Santa Ana’s collection includes a wide spectrum of mainstream programming and movies.
“Some of the clips will make you laugh,” he says. “But once you see the stream of those clips, you stop laughing. You see ten, twenty, thirty, forty, and then you recognize that they’re actually laughing at you.”
In an episode on Fox’s popular Family Guy animated comedy, for example, a couple of bandanad, knife-wielding, Chicano-accented gangster cockroaches in a dirty motel threaten intruders by saying, “Hey, you’re on our turf, man,” and, “Hey, man, I gonna cut you up so bad, you gonna wish I no cut you up so bad.” One of the white characters responds, “I blame the schools.”
In a different episode, after Peter Griffin, the family guy, complains about another character, “He’s a bigger mooch than the Mexican Super-friends,” the scene moves to a tall, crowded building called the “Mexican Hall of Justice” that is packed with people. A white landlord walks up to Mexican Superman and says, “Hey, Mexican Superman, when you signed the lease, you said there were only going to be five of you here.”
Or take the Academy Award-winning hit Happy Feet. Santa Ana explains how the protagonist, Mumble, a blue-eyed emperor penguin, leads a group of bungling, Spanish-accented, smaller, weaker penguins known in the film as the Amigos. Mumble is exiled from his land and scapegoated by elders for allegedly causing a fish famine. Mumble then vows to find the “aliens” that, he says, are the true cause of the famine. Along the way, Mumble, says Santa Ana, has to “teach” what is right and wrong to the Amigos. “It’s striking to see these penguins speaking in Mexican accents, walking funny, and being subservient,” he says.
Santa Ana worries about the effects on his students, most of whom said at the beginning of the class that they enjoyed and even bought the Happy Feet DVD. He also worries about the effect of the $384 million blockbuster on children worldwide, many of whom will also play the Happy Feet game that is part of the gigantic and expansive world of video, a more interactive world that may portend the future of funny and not-so-funny depictions of immigrants.
Depictions of Latino immigrants do not all fall into the negative category, however. The Emmy award-winning Ugly Betty sitcom treats immigrant and immigration in a funny yet respectful manner. It’s no accident that the show is produced by immigrant Salma Hayek. A new video game, “ICED! I Can End Deportation,” developed by the New York-based nonprofit Breakthrough, turns players into undocumented immigrants as they flee from cruel border patrol agents. The same Spanish-language radio jocks who played definitive roles in last year’s immigrant mobilizations are continuing citizenship and voter registration campaigns. Comedians such as George Lopez draw attention to racial issues in much the same way African American comedians have done for decades. Columnists such as Gustavo Arellano, who writes the popular “Ask a Mexican,” similarly use judo-like methods to deflect and draw attention to an anti-immigrant streak that grows.
For his part, Santa Ana, who lives in Los Angeles, takes the long view: “In twenty or thirty years we will be absolutely astonished that people could consume these racist depictions.”
Roberto Lovato is a contributing associate editor with New America Media. He is also a frequent contributor to The Nation. His email is robvato@gmail.com.
(Richardson hamming it up with rotting war criminal Henry Kissinger)
(Colbert with a bear)
In another clear sign that Latinos need to get with the funny thing, a recent poll found that political satirist Stephen Colbert leads veteran politico Bill Richardson among likely voters in next year’s Presidential race. The poll of 1000 voters by Public Opinion Strategies, a Republican polling firm, has Colbert winning 2.3 percent of the vote while Richardson takes 2.1 percent according to a blog at the Washington Post.
The main conclusion we should draw from this is that humor beats “Hispanic” (as opposed to “Latino”). It also points to the fact that we are, without a doubt, well into the media age, an age in which a lifetime of politics can be trumped by a couple of successful seasons in the TV and multimedia sphere. But his (Richardson’s) panic should not be our (his)panic. Richardson is the best representative of Latino politics only if your definition of politics extends as far as the border of elections and electoral politics.
Speaking of borders, did I tell you the one about how I once asked Governor Richardson how he could speak as an immigrant ‘advocate’ when he was among the first to unleash the National Guard because of a “border emergency” due to immigration? He avoided the question -but with a smile. On top of that, his not-so-funny role in the racist purge leading to the ruin of accused Los Alamos scientist Wen Ho Lee should give some of us all the more reason to greet this candidate’s performance with a Simon-like American Idol thumbs down. Maybe it’s not too late to build a “Sanjaya for President!” movement.
But, until that hallowed moment in hair history arrives, it’s time to yell, “Que viva Stephen Colbert!”
Trailers of this new sitcom on the CW, “Aliens in America” look at once different, interesting and potentially problematic. From what I can gather, it’s about Raja, a Pakistani Muslim exchange student taken in by the Tolchuk’s, a white middle class family in Medora Wisconsin.
While it looks like it goes out of its way to paint a somewhat respectful picture of Raja and his faith (we’ll see), some of the basic premises underlying the sitcom look problematic. For one, the “America” in the title looks to mean “white America” as all the characters -major and minor - are white. Of course, part of the point of the show appears to be to interrogate white racism as u will see from this trailer:
Still, the word “Aliens” in the title doesn’t encourage me as that word has a deep and dark history, one they should not be further normalizing, one whose use some of us should discourage. Let’s watch and see what they end up doing. Hope it is a positive contribution to a TV spectrum laced with lots of racist stuff.
This could be your next President laughing it up, up, up to Pennsylvania Avenue:
This interview with Bolivian President Evo Morales on Jon Stewart inspires as much as it makes us laugh:
Besides Evo’s inducement to save the planet, my favorite part is when he says, “Please don’t consider me part of the axis of evil.”
Univision’s monopoly on these kinds of interviews by their sometimes right-leaning hosts appears to be crumbling. I tried to do my part too.
(Members of CPCC during 2007 Puerto Rican Day Parade in June)
Private First Class Jose Peralta stopped smiling. He looked straight into me and answered the unsettling question about war, “I would go to Iraq if they asked me.” His chubby companion, PFC Garcia, and his female companion, PFC Juarez, nodded soberly in agreement while their immigrant parents smiled politely. Their radiant brown hands and faces glowed against their starched straight white uniforms. But, instead of drawing the usual looks of admiration from onlookers, their regalia – shiny black shoes, tight white slacks and white hats and white shirts colored with shiny medals - drew stares of disgust on the Manhattan-bound D train. Riding from the working class immigrant part of Brooklyn near the Navy Yard to Union Square, the historic center of peace marches in Manhattan since the end of the Civil War, they didn’t seem to let the stares distract them. They are committed; they are proud members of the Coastal Patrol Cadet Corps (CPCC); they are ten years old.
PFC Peralta and his fellow cadets are but a few of the thousands of Latino children targeted for early indoctrination into the military by programs designed for the very young. The Coastal Patrol Cadet Corps website states clear goals: “Our activities are designed to build upstanding Americans, with physical and mental stamina, discipline and obedience. Instructions are given in numerous categories, including military discipline, leadership, infantry drill, rifle drill, seamanship, navigation, first-aid, communications, boat handling, drum, bugle and band instruments.”
I asked PFC Peralta if he knew anything about the Latino PBS “The War” controversy raging across the country. “No. I don’t know nothing about that,” said the bright-eyed son of immigrants from Puebla, Mexico. But he had, he told me, already made up his mind about the military: “I’m gonna be the Captain of a navy ship.”
I thought about that earlier encounter with PFC Peralta and his crew as I watched Ken Burns’ War documentary Sunday evening. The 14 and a half our epic was as much about the current and future PFC Peralta’s as it was about the septuagenarians and octogenarians featured in the film. The controversy around whether and how to include Latinos should matter to all as should the issues around artistic license.
One can only the imagine the agony Burns experienced as he was forced to correct his Latino oversight with scenes a reviewer at the New Yorker magazine said had a “tacked-on” feel to them. Placed at the very last ten minutes of the first episode, the East LA accents and bolero music of the Latino interviews do, in fact, make those characters and stories seem completely foreign to the small town USA stories at the heart of the first two hours and the entire epic.
More than the actual film, the controversy around the film will have done more to educate the country about the more than 500,000 Latinos who enlisted, fought or died during World War II. Premiering during a historical moment of unprecedented anti-immigrant, anti-Latino sentiment, The War’s “Oh-yeah,-Latinos-fought-too” feel will not inspire future PFC Peralta’s to enlist. Viewed from the perspective of peace activists, Burns’ jerky editing of Latinos into history (ie; even his Southwestern US-focused “The West” documentary included only 2 Latino characters out of a cast of 80) may actually be a good thing.
Those who depend on war and those who advocate peace know that future wars and the future of the US military itself depends on the decisions of young Latinos like Peralta. As Larry Korb, former Assistant Secretary of Defense for Manpower, Reserve Affairs, Installations and Logistics in the Reagan Administration Defense Department, once told me, “Latinos are very important to the national security of the United States,” adding that, “A decrease in Latino enlistment numbers would make things very difficult for the armed forces, because they are the fastest-growing [minority] group in the country and they have a very distinguished record of service in the military.” If he were Secretary of Defense, Korb, would “be very worried about the possibility of decreasing Latino numbers. I’d be thinking about how to make do with smaller numbers of troops or with further lowering standards for aptitude, age, education and other factors.”
Programs like PFC Peralta’s CPCC are part of an armada of programs and campaigns linked to or influenced by a Pentagon that needs 22 percent of the Armed Forces to check off “Hispanic” on enlistment forms if it is to meet recruitment and deployment goals by 2025. As if mounting a major offensive on a domestic adversary, the Pentagon is, unlike Burns, paying extremely close attention and spending millions to find out about the world of PFC Peralta: what he wears, where he hangs out, what kinds of groups he belongs to, what he reads, what he watches on TV, his grades, his dreams. Members of the Pentagon’s many and well-funded recruiting commands are a permanent feature of urban school systems; programs like the No Child Left Behind guarantee that schools give recruiters PFC Peralta’s home phone number, address and other information. Even popular children’s restaurant chain Chuck E. Cheese is doing its part to make sure PFC Peralta gets the martial message when he’s not at CPCC. Puppet shows at some restaurants include military music and Chuck E. Cheese television has broadcast images of Latinos and others in the Army giving food and supplies to children in Iraq.
Burns failed to fulfill promises to activists that he would “seamlessly” integrate the Latino portions of the film. But his failure will do little to inspire PFC Peralta and other Latino kids to enlist between now and 2025. Hopefully, documentarians of future US wars will lack Latino subjects because there will be fewer PFC Peralta’s to film.
Thank you, Ken Burns, for barely including us in your War.
Those gamers and moviegoers in the house may want to read this piece I just wrote for Alternet about the Resident Racism in some of the most popular video games, including the blockbuster Resident Evil series. More than a few gamers are pissed and have written me and Alternet because the article takes a racial lens to stuff many gamers apparently feel no discomfort about, stuff like Heart of Darkness motif in this Resident Evil 5 trailer promoting the follow-up to this weekend’s movie:
You may also have noted that one of the zombies in the trailer has a bullhorn, as if activists are also the object of gamers restorative violence. If you read the piece, check out the “comments” which are enlightening in terms of how passionate people are about these games -even if they’re racist.
(Poster inviting veterans and community to anti-school segregation event in Taft, Texas)
As a critic of much what passes for news in the mainstream (MSM), I have to give credit where it’s due. This piece by the Washington Post’s David Montgomery is one of the best I’ve seen in the MSM. He tells well the story Chicano, Puerto Rican and other activists have, been telling for years about the racist realities WWII veterans came back to - and fought against. Take this quote for example:
“But the rhetoric flying over “The War” on PBS has obscured a richer story about the Latino experience in World War II, and the battlefield courage of those men is but the beginning chapter. In a sense, you can’t fully understand phenomena like C¿sar Ch¿vez, Chicano power, Latino civil rights activism, those big immigrant-rights marches of last year, Daddy Yankee and the recent Democratic presidential candidates’ debate in Spanish on Univision without a feel for World War II — and the bittersweet homecoming.“
When have you ever heard mainstream media talking about this? Nunca. While Montgomery and the Post are to be lauded for doing something different, more credit goes to Maggie Rivas and the Defend the Honor folks who initiated and continue this critical work. Their work is an extension of the work started after WWII.
We are more than likely not going to get the editing we want from Burns. But, as the article makes clear, this is as much about the present and about how Latinos edited and continue editing the narrative of rights in this country as it is about war.
( Latino soldiers in Cebu , Phillipines during WWII)
Eighty-seven year-old Carlos Alvarez remembers his first experience of war, when he dodged the bullets of Japanese gunners and airplanes in the Philippine jungles during World War II. Now, 60-plus years later, he’s on the front lines of a media war pitting grassroots Latino groups against the multimillion-dollar guns of PBS, its corporate sponsors and legendary filmmaker, Ken Burns.
Since learning that “The War” initially excluded him and the more than 500,000 other Latinos who fought, were injured or died in World War II, Alvarez says he was “upset but not surprised” by what he calls “Mr. Burns negligence for omitting the Hispanic WW II experience.” Rather than fume about it, he and other friends in Brawley, CA collected money and took out a full page ad in their local newspaper. The former Private First Class, in the Army’s 7Th Cavalry’s Troop G, hopes that his campaign would “make people think and realize World War II was not fought and won solely by white males.”
Though “The War” now includes 28 minutes of footage of two Latino veterans, most major leaders of Latino organizations, members of the Congressional Hispanic Congress and a constellation of grassroots groups across the country remain dissatisfied. Different groups with different agendas have organized a number of activities to show dissatisfaction including protests, forums and possibly even boycotts of PBS and their corporate sponsors Anheuser Busch, General Motors and Bank of America.
Burns and PBS have, for the better part of the year, been embroiled in the “War” controversy since early March, when UT Austin scholar Maggie Rodriguez and several other Latino leaders discovered that the film excluded Latino vets. After an initial March 6th meeting between activists, PBS CEO Paula Kerger and advertising and public relations executive Lionel Sosa (a PBS board member and former chief Latino strategist to Ronald Reagan and Karl Rove), Rodriguez and several other Latino leaders organized the “Defend the Honor” (DTH) campaign. After initially agreeing to some of the demands of DTH, Burns – who was not in the initial meeting – held a separate meeting in May with two other Latino groups, the American GI Forum (AGIF) and the Hispanic Association on Corporate Responsibility (HACR) and eventually reached what HACR Chairman, Manuel Mirabal called “an understanding” about the film.
Since then, the national PBS office, which sent a press satement in lieu of the interview requested, has widely distributed that statement, which says, “the producers have shown portions of these stories to audiences at screening events, including one at annual conference of the American GI Forum, a national organization for Latino veterans; The reaction has been overwhelmingly positive.” Asked if any groups besides AGIF and HACR were part of their consultations with groups other than DTH, both the PBS national office and its local affiliates contacted did not name any.
Burns, PBS and their supporters are now on the offensive. In addition to making Latinos a visible part of their unprecedented $10 million marketing campaign for the film, they have also heavily promoted the deal struck with AGIF and HACR. The PBS local affiliate in Orange County said that “the vast majority of concerned groups and individuals have found the PBS response and additional materials produced for the series to be a good solution to the matter” while noting that “there are still a couple of fringe groups who refuse to be satisfied.” Burns went on the attack during a speech at the National Press Club, saying that no Latinos came forward when he put out the call for war stories in the four towns spotlighted in the film: Mobile, Ala., Luverne, Minn., Waterbury, Conn., and Sacramento, Calif. Burns also stated that no one came forward to provide him with databases and other archival material about Latinos for the film.
In response, DHS leaders point out that the filmmakers selected sites with miniscule Latino populations: Latinos in Luverne make up 1.56 percent of the population and 1.42 percent of Mobile. They also say that the little, if any (Rodriguez does not believe Burns did any) outreach to the 15 percent of Sacramento’s population that is Latino and Westbury’s 21.7 percent – took place only after the DHS campaign forced PBS and Burns to hire filmmaker Hector Galán in April. The interviews included in the film came from Los Angeles, which along with San Antonio, is home to the overwhelming majority of Latino WWII veterans.
As they prepare to launch rallies, protests, forums and other activities criticizing the film, Rodriguez and her colleagues say that PBS and Burns’s response is actually helping shape the Latino civil rights tradition that began when veterans returned to fight discrimination they found following WWII, a tradition that led to the establishment of most major Latino civil rights organizations. Says Rodriguez, “History tells us that whenever civil rights groups demand their rights, the inevitable response is that they are called “fringe” and “deviant.”
For his part, Alvarez also said he would continue to the fight for memory. “Even though we were treated as second class citizens (and worse) we served, fought, bled and died to free countries occupied by the enemy powers and to ensure this country remained free. Yet our contributions and sacrifices remain largely unknown or ignored by most of our fellow citizens. Perhaps my little statement will open a few eyes.”
This just in. A very thoughtful and balanced review of PBS’ upcoming “the War” documentary in the New Yorker Magazine seems to indicate that Ken Burns failed to adequately represent the more than 500,000 Latinos who fought, died or were injured during WWII. After describing the back and forth between PBS and Burns and several Latino activist groups and members of the Congressional Hispanic Congress, New Yorker reviewer Nancy Franklin, who got to preview the film, said
“Burns eventually added twenty-eight minutes to the film, which, however, do not add much; the scenes—the extra material throws a Native American veteran into the mix, as well as two Hispanics—feel tacked-on, because they are. Burns had originally said that reëditing the film “would be destructive, like trying to graft an arm onto your child.” It turns out that not reëditing the film was also like grafting an arm onto your child.”
In anticipation of already announced protests, potential boycotts and other actions by thousands of Latinos across the country in the next two weeks, Burns and PBS, which spent an unprecedented $10 million dollars to promote “the War”, and its affiliates have already started their own PR blitz to counter potential damage. KOCE, the Orange County, California PBS affiliate, for example issued a statement saying that “the vast majority of of concerned groups and individuals have found the PBS response and additional materials produced for the series to be a good solution to the matter” and added that “there are still a couple of fringe groups who refuse to be satisfied”. It’s also rumored that “War” sponsors Bank of America, Anheuser Busch and General Motors are also deploying big executives and other resources to try to mollify actions against the film- and themselves.
In response, Maggie Rivas, the UT Austin scholar who uncovered the PBS exclusion of Latinos and organized the “Defend the Honor”campaign said, “that they call the thousands upon thousands who are taking actions “fringe” shows how out-of-touch and desperate they are. History tells us that whenever civil rights groups demand their rights, the inevitable response is that they are called “fringe” and “deviant.”
Let’s watch, wait, see - and then act. Lots more to follow on this one.
As she accepted her Best Actress trophy during last night’s Emmy Awards, Ugly Betty star, America Ferrara, said “I just wish that for everybody that they get to do what inspires them and inspires them to make a change in the world.”
And she’s been doing just that by taking projects like Ugly Betty, projects that make light and beautiful and funny the issue that’s helped turn this country into America, the ugly: immigration.
Unlike its rival comedy the Office, which includes immigrant characters who are ridiculed for their accents , nationality and other traits, Ugly Betty makes light of the immigrant without the denigrating the immigrant experience. Nominated for 11 Emmy’s, the show even includes a positive depiction of Betty’s undocumented immigrant father, Ignacio, whose plight is the subject of some of the series’ storytelling.
Bucking the anti-immigrant trend in pop culture (think gamers playing Resident Evil V blowing Mexican-accented zombies to smithereens), America the actress and Betty the Ugly beautify Ugly America, the country that took as its own the name of the beautiful continent that brought us Betty La Fea .
Felicitaciones!
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