Somos Primos: Dedicated to Hispanic Heritage and Diversity Issues

HISPANICS BREAKING BARRIERS

Part VI

Mercy Bautista-Olvera

In the coming months this series “Hispanics Breaking Barriers” will present the contributions of Hispanics in United States government and leadership. Their contributions have improved not only the local community but the country as well. Sadly, they have not always received their due recognition. Their struggles, stories, and accomplishments will by example, illustrate to our youth and to future generations that everything and anything is possible.

John Trasviña: President and General Counsel of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF) and Immigration Professor at Stanford Law School

Alejandro Mayorkas: (pending approval) Director of the Department of Homeland Security Immigration Agency

Jennifer Chacón: University of California Davis (UC Davis), Professor of Law

Michael Huerta: Group President of ACS Transportation Solutions

Dr. Jonathan D. Moreno: Professor of Medical Ethics, and the History and Sociology of Science

Nancy Sutley: Deputy Mayor of Los Angeles for Energy and Environment

John Trasviña

John Trasviña the President and General Counsel of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF) and Immigration Professor at Stanford Law School, has been appointed by President Obama to serve as Assistant Secretary for Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity, Department of Housing and Urban Development.

John Trasviña was born in San Francisco , California . He is a graduate Stanford Law School and of Harvard University . Trasviña has devoted his legal career to public service in Civil Rights and Immigration policies.

In 1985, Trasviña began his career at the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF) in Washington D.C. as a legislative attorney.

From 1987-1993, Trasviña served as counsel to Senator Paul Simon on the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, the last three years as General Counsel and Staff Director to the Senate Subcommittee on the Constitution.

In 1993, Trasviña served as Deputy Assistant Attorney General for Legislative Affairs at the U.S. Department of justice. In the senate and in his previous post in the administration, Trasviña handled numerous policy areas, including Civil Rights, Immigration and Judicial Nominations.

In 1997, President Clinton appointed Trasviña as Special Counsel for Immigration Related Unfair Employment Practices; he led the only federal government office devoted solely to immigrant workplace rights and was the highest-ranking Latino attorney at the U.S. Department of Justice. In the same year, John Trasviña, was named by “Poder” magazine’s the “Poderosos 100,” as one of the “100 Top Leaders of the Hispanic Community,” and “Hispanic Trends” identifies him as a “Mover and shaker.”

John Trasviña returned to California , becoming the Director of the Discrimination Research Center at Berkeley

Trasviña is a member of the San Francisco Elections Commission, president of the Harvard Club of San Francisco, and a board member of the La Raza Lawyers Association, ( CORO ) of Northern California . CORO trains ethical, diverse civil leaders nationwide, empowers communities to gain experience in government, and business. He also served on the boards of the Latino Issues Forum and Campaign for College Opportunity and recently served as Chair of the National Hispanic Leadership Agenda (NHLA).

In 2008, Trasviña received the President’s Award from the Pasadena National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and won the 2006 Attorney of the Year Award from the Hispanic National Bar Association.

Trasviña has served on the board of the League of Women Voters of San Francisco, and was the director and fund raising Chair of the Conference on Asian Pacific American Leadership (CAPAL) in Washington . D.C. “Mr. Trasviña has spent his life as an incredible advocate for the Latino community and demonstrated a commitment to justice and equal protection for all under the law,” said the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) National President, Rosa Rosales. “What is most fulfilling to me is my ability to use my Harvard degree in service to my community, my nation and people who are oppressed or marginalized,” said Trasviña.

Alejandro Mayorkas

Alejandro Mayorkas is President Obama’s pick to serve as Director of the Department of Homeland Security Immigration Agency. It adjudicates a broad range of immigration and naturalization issues and oversees international adoptions, asylum, refugee status and foreign student authorization.

(Additional biographical information can be found on April 2009 (112^th issue on this website).

Jennifer Chacón

University of California Davis (UC Davis) Professor of Law, Jennifer Chacón served as a member of Obama’s Immigration Policy Advisory Group during his campaign. She was appointed to serve as an adviser on immigration on President Obama’s Transition Team.

Jennifer Chacón grew up in the border town of El Paso , Texas ; Professor Chacón has always been interested in issues of immigration and international law.

Professor Chacón attended Stanford University , earning a Bachelors degree in International Relations. In 1995-98, she attended Yale Law School earning a Jurist degree in Law. After graduation, she served as a Law Clerk to the Honorable Sidney R. Thomas, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

From 1999-2003, Professor Chacón then joined Davis Polk & Wardwell in New York City . In 2003, she accepted a fellowship at Yale Law School and worked to publish “Misery and Myopia: Understanding the Failures of U.S. Efforts to Stop Human Trafficking” (Fordham Law Review, 2006), the first of what would be several influential articles touching on Immigration, International Law, and Human Rights.

Professor Chacón served as a Professor on Criminal Law, Criminal Procedure and Immigration Law at U.C. Davis. In Chacon’s biography she says, “Identifying the conduct that is criminalized within a society and determining the manner in which the society chooses to protect its criminally accused and those convicted of crimes provides an interesting way to assess the nature and strength of that society’s commitment to democratic institutions”. “My research interests center upon the nexus of Criminal Law and Procedure and more general issues of Citizenship. I hope to contribute to the scholarship that both examines and advances the quest to build more perfect democracies, protective of the right of people”.

In March 19, 2009, Professor Jennifer Chacón was honored with the Distinguished Teaching Award on the 30^th Annual William and Sally Rutter Recognition Celebration for Scholarship, Donors and Recipients in the UC Davis Activities and Recreation Center . The award honors “law teachers who give stellar performances in the classroom.” Since joining the UC Davis law faculty in 2004, Professor Chacón has earned the reputation as an excellent teacher as well as scholar. A committee, including a faculty member, alumni member, and current student, selected Professor Chacón for the honor.

Dr. Jonathan D. Moreno

Professor Jonathan E. Moreno Professor of Medical Ethics, and the History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania has been appointed as Director of Bioethics in the Department of Health and Human Services Team on the Obama’s Transition Team. He has been a senior staff member for two presidential ethics commissions and is past president of the American society for Bioethics and Humanities.

In 1973, Dr. Moreno received his Bachelor's degree from New York ’s Hofstra University , School of Law with highest honors in Philosophy and Psychology. He was a University Fellow at Washington University in St. Louis , receiving his Doctorate in Philosophy in 1977, and was a Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow in cooperation with the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies. In 1998, he received an honorary doctorate from Hofstra University in New York .

During 1994-95, Dr. Moreno was Senior Policy and Research Analyst for the President's Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments. He has given invited testimony before both houses of congress. He has served as a member of the National Human Research Protections Advisory Committee, a senior consultant for the National Bioethics Advisory Commission, and has advised the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

Dr. Moreno is an elected member of the Institute of Medicine (IOM) of the National Academies and serves on the Institute's Board on Health Sciences Policies. He is a member of the Academies' Committee on Biodefense Analysis and Countermeasures. Dr. Moreno served as Co-chair of the Committee on Guidelines for Human Embryonic Stem Cell Research. He is also a member of the Council on Accreditation of the Association for the Accreditation of Human Research Protection Programs. Dr. Moreno also served as President of the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities. He is a Bioethics advisor for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, a Faculty Affiliate of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics at Georgetown University , and a Fellow of the Hastings Center and the New York Academy of Medicine.

Dr. Moreno has written many books, his books include "Is There an Ethicist in the House ( Indiana University , Press, 2005), “Mind Wars: National Security and the Brain,” (Dana Press in 2006) and many others. Dr. Moreno has written more than 250 papers, reviews, and book chapters. He is also a member of several editorial boards.

He is a frequent guest on news and information programs and is often cited and quoted in major national publications, such as The Wall Street Journal, ABC World News Tonight, MSNBC News, CNN Crossfire and many others.

He has held full-time faculty appointments at Swarthmore College , the University of Texas at Austin , George Washington University and the SUNY Health Science Center at Brooklyn . He has also held appointments at the University of Pennsylvania Center for Bioethics, the Children's National Medical Center in Washington , DC , and has been a Special Expert in the Department of Clinical Bioethics at the Warren Magnuson Clinical Center of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda , Maryland .

Michael Huerta

Michael Huerta the Group President of ACS Transportation Solutions, a company that provides technology solutions for collective revenue, enhancing safety and promoting security for the transportation industry was appointed to serve on Obama’s Transition Team.

Michael Huerta is originally from San Francisco , California . His parents are Solomon Huerta (1924-2000) and his mother Della Huerta.

Michael Huerta served as the Executive Director of the Port of San Francisco and Commissioner of the City of New York Department of Ports, International Trade and Commerce.

From 1993-1998, during the Clinton Administration, Huerta served in senior positions at the Department of Transportation (DOT), as Chief of Staff to Secretary Rodney E. Slater and as Associate Deputy Secretary of Transportation under Secretary of Transportation Federico Peña.

Nancy Sutley

Nancy Sutley, the Deputy Mayor for Energy and Environment for the city of Los Angeles , has been named the Chair of the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ), in Obama’s administration. Sutley recently served in the Energy and Natural Resources on the Obama’s Transition Team.

Nancy Helen Sutley was born on April 20, 1962, in Queens , New York . Sutley is the daughter of Argentinean immigrants, Bruno Sutley and Sara Alicia Sutley.

Sutley earned her Bachelors degree in Government from Cornell University and Masters Degree in Public Policy from Harvard University .

In 1999-2003, Sutley served as Special Assistant to Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). She served as Deputy Secretary for Policy, Intergovernmental Relations at California Environmental Protection Agency and Energy Advisor to Governor Gray Davis.

2005-present Sutley has been Los Angeles Deputy Mayor for Energy and Environment, and Mayor Villaraigosa’s appointment to the Board of Directors for the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California. She served as a Senior Advisor to the EPA Region 9 Administrator in the Clinton Administration.

In her new position, as Chair to the Council on Environmental Quality, she will advise the President and Vice President on national and international environmental law, oversee the efficiency of the federal agencies, and make sure they comply with the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA).

Sutley has been instrumental in cleaning environmental initiatives in Los Angeles . Moving the Department of Water and Power to wind and solar energy and replacing diesel trucks at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach in California . Sutley has played a big role by helping Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa retrofit hundreds of city buildings to make them more energy efficient and imposing stricter environmental standards on new commercial buildings.

HISPANIC APPOINTMENTS DURING THE FIRST 100 DAYS
OF THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION

National Hispanic Leadership Agenda
(20- page report)
http://ushli.org/research/reports/NHLA_Report_and_Grid.pdf

Editor: Below is data from the report. Please do go to it and look at the fields in which vacancies are available. The 16 departments surveyed in this report have a combined total of 205 vacancies which would be the logical place to start implementing a “Plan for Change and Improvement” and increasing the number of high-ranking Hispanics in the Obama Administration including Senior Executive Service level positions.

The all but total lack of Hispanic appointments to councils in the Executive Office of the President, as well as to Regulatory Agencies and Independent Agencies, is a great source of disappointment to NHLA and leaves very much room for improvement. NHLA respectfully urges the President to order a thorough review of all applications submitted to identify qualified Hispanic candidates for possible appointment to boards, commissions, and agencies, and to request more applications if necessary.

The Sub-Cabinet

NHLA also commends the President for nominating 17 highly qualified Hispanics to Senate confirmation required sub-cabinet level positions at various departments –

Edward M. Avalos Under Secretary Marketing & Regulatory Services USDA
Luis C. de Baca Ambassador-at-Large Monitor Human Trafficking State
Lorelei Boylan Administrator Wage & Hour Division Labor
Gabriella Gomez Asst Secretary Legislation/Congressional Affairs Education
Sandra B. Henriquez Asst Secretary HUD
Mercedes Marquez Asst Secretary Community Planning/Development HUD
Kathy Martinez Asst Secretary Disability Employment Policy Labor
Alejandro Mayorkas Director, Citizenship & Immigration Services DHS
Victor M. Mendez Administrator, Highway Administration Transportation
Tom Perez Asst Atty Gen for Civil Rights DOJ
Brig Gen Jose Riojas Asst Secretary, Operations/ Security/ Preparedness Veteran’s Affairs Frank Sanchez Under Secretary International Trade Commerce
Daniel Sepulveda Asst Secretary Congressional Affairs Office of USTR
John Sepulveda Asst Secretary for Human Resources Veteran’s Affairs |
Peter Silva Asst Administrator for Water EPA
John Trasvina Asst Secretary Fair Housing & Equal Opportunity HUD
Ines Triay Asst Secretary Environmental Mgmt Energy

NHLA is extremely disappointed in both the number of Hispanics appointed to date and in that not one single Hispanic has been nominated for a sub-cabinet position that requires Senate qw1confirmation at four major departments including Interior, Treasury, Defense, and Health and Human Services.

High Level Staff Positions

Though Hispanics are severely under-represented at this level as well, NHLA commends the President for appointing 28 well qualified Hispanics to other high level positions throughout his Administration including the White House (17), Transportation, Labor, Homeland Security, State, Office Personnel Management, Peace Corps, and U.S. Trade Representative (3). They are:

Lizette Alvarado Office of Presidential Personnel White House
Anthony Bernal Director of Scheduling Dr. Jill Biden White House
Xavier Briggs Assoc Director, Office Mgmt & Budget White House
Alejandra Campoverdi Assistant to the Deputy Chief of Staff White House
Carlos Elizondo Social Secretary for Vice President White House
Kirsten Garcia Legislative Affairs White House
Roberto Gonzalez Associate Counsel, Office of Legal Counsel White House
Noerena Limon Staff Assistant, Presidential Personnel White House
David Medina Deputy Chief of Staff Office of First Lady White House
Luis Miranda Director Hispanic Communications White House
Lizette Ocampo Staff Assistant, Legislative Affairs White House
Carlos Odio Deputy Assoc Director, Political Affairs White House
Michael Ortiz Legislative Affairs White House
Dan Restrepo Western Hemispheric Advisor NSC White House
Dag Vega Director of Communications White House
Moises Vela, Jr. Director, Office of the Vice President White House
Stephanie Valencia Office Public Liaison, Intergov’tal Affairs White House
Lisa Garcia Intergov’tal Affrs/Public Liaison USTR Exec Office President
Luis Jimenez Office of the U.S. Trade Representative Exec Office President
Jennifer Urizar Office of the U.S. Trade Representative Exec Office President
Elizabeth (Liz)Montoya Chief of Staff OPM
Elisa Montoya Senior Advisor to the Director Peace Corp
Esther Olavarria Deputy Asst Sec Policy Development DHS
Laura Pena Special Asst Office White House Liaison State
Oscar Ramirez Special Asst to the Secretary Labor
William Ramos Director Intergovernmental Affairs Commerce
Miguel Rodriguez Deputy Asst Secretary Legislative Affairs State
Yasmin Yaver Office Governmental Affairs Transportation

Other Appointments

Additionally, the President has made four additional Hispanic appointments. Two have been appointed to the President’s Advisory Council on Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships, one to the President’s Advisory Council on Science& Technology, and one Judge. They are:

Noel Castellanos Faith-based Adv Council Member

Dr. Arturo Chavez Faith-based Adv Council Member

Mario Molina Adv Council Science & Tech Member

Marisa Demeo Judge DC Superior

The National Hispanic Leadership Agenda (NHLA), an ad hoc coalition of 29 national and state organizations, has released its report, "Hispanic Appointments During the First 100 Days of the Obama Administration." The 20-page report includes an Executive Summary and a grid on President Barack Obama's first 100 days. At last week's NHLA Board meeting, members voted to issue a "100 Days Plus" report every 30 days for the duration of the year. NHLA remains committed to working with the Obama Administration toward a truly representative government and reporting on the results to the Hispanic community.

A Day of Remembrance
By
Daisy Wanda Garcia
May 15th, 2009

This week, Governor Rick Perry is expected to sign a bill that authorizes a day of remembrance in honor of Dr. Hector P. Garcia. This Bill when signed by the Governor will designate the 3rd Wednesday in September that falls during Hispanic Heritage week as Dr. Hector P. Garcia Recognition Day. The bill encourages public agencies and schools to observe it with ceremonies, displays and exhibits that chronicle the life achievements of Dr. Garcia. This day of remembrance would have no time off for public sector employees and schools. Dr Garcia valued education and it would please him to know that children are not missing a day of school.

The holiday came largely through the efforts of the Texas Hispanic Caucus and members of the American G.I. Forum. On the Senate Side, Texas Senator Juan “Chuy” Hinojosa introduced the legislation in the Texas Senate and Representative Abel Herrero introduced the legislation in the Texas House. "Whether you talk about individuals that needed medical attention without the resources to obtain it or veterans who had given their ultimate sacrifice in our country but were not given the burials they deserved, Dr. Garcia was always the voice and conscience even when it was not a popular choice," Herrero said.[1]
I am deeply grateful to all those who worked so hard to make this day of remembrance a reality. Sadly, what has come to my attention is that many of our youth do not know about the life of Dr. Garcia or who he was. Some have asked why he deserves this honor.

Over fifty years before his death in 1996, my father worked tirelessly to improve the life of Veterans and Mexican Americans in the United States. After WWII when Dr. Garcia moved to Corpus Christi, Texas, he found that the quality of life for Mexican Americans was below standard.

Life in South Texas was bleak for Mexican Americans. Dr. Hector found that the majority of Mexican Americans lived in conditions having no running water, no sanitary facilities and in extreme poverty. Schooling was non-existent or held in substandard segregated schools. Whole families had to work to earn enough money to afford food and little else. Tuberculosis and diarrhea and infant 1910, Corpus Christi. Mary and Jeff Bell Library Kilgore postcard collection. mortality were
high among the Mexican American population. La Gente was too poor to afford medical care, so they died from serious illnesses. Dr. Hector often told about the time a little child came to his office seeking help for his mother. When he arrived at their house, the mother’s tubercular lung had burst and her blood had sprayed on her children.

Dr. Hector set out to change these conditions. For the next 50 years, he systematically attacked the “causes of suppression” such as discrimination, segregation in housing and schools and hospitals, denying veterans their VA benefits. He educated la Gente[2] about the importance of hygiene, education, and voting on his weekly radio program on KCCT radio. Dr. Hector attacked health problems by giving free medical care and medicines to the indigent. He held lectures about sanitation and nutrition. Dr. Garcia held rallies to urge the youth to stay in school and pursue higher education. Also, Dr. Hector extended his medial care to inhabitants of the colonias along the Texas-Mexico border.

Hospitals were segregated. They maintained separate wards for Anglos and Mexicans. Usually Mexican American patients were in kept the hallway while there were empty Anglo hospital wards. Dr. Hector got the hospital administrator on the phone and convinced him to move the patients in the white ward. He followed up his phone conversation with a letter. This is how he single handedly desegregated Memorial Hospital in Corpus Christi, TX.

In 1948 he began an investigation of conditions for migrant laborers in Mathis, Texas. He found the impoverished workers to be ill-clothed, malnourished, and diseased from lack of basic sanitation. Also about this time he found that the Veterans Administration was non responsive to veterans returning from service in WWII. In many cases the veterans did not receive their benefits and services as promised by the G.I. Bill of rights. On March 26, 1948 he organized the American G.I. Forum to advocate for veterans. Soon the American G.I. Forum had chapters in 40 cities in Texas and later throughout the nation. Later he involved the American G.I. Forum in civil rights issues.

Hernandez vs. the State of Texas, which held that Mexican Americans had equal protection under the 14^th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, opened the doors for Dr. Garcia to sue school districts that held separate school systems. It took about thirty years of lawsuits to desegregate Corpus Christi ISD.

So to answer the question why Dr. Hector deserves this honor. Dr. Hector Garcia served his country, community and the people for over fifty years of his life. He became the confident of presidents and elected officials and used his influence to improve the lives of all Americans. President Ronald Reagan recognized Dr. Hector for his service to the nation by awarding him the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1986. He was the first Mexican American to receive this award.

Hopefully, this “Day of Remembrance” will give my father visibility. Dr. Hector P. Garcia is a real American Hero. In this day our youth lacks real role models. When more individuals especially the youth know about Dr. Hector’s legacy, they will learn the true meaning of love for their fellow man and community service. Hopefully, Dr. Garcia, whose legacy was Education and Freedom, fought for equality and fair treatment for all Americans. One of his most profound statements became the American G.I. Forum’s motto, “Education is our freedom and freedom should be everybody’s business.”[3]

Now it is up to us to ensure that his legacy is carried forward. We can begin by making sure the day of remembrance is observed in our schools.

[1] Garcia holiday receives support, Jamie Powell, Corpus Christi Caller Times, January 17, 2009.

[2] An affection term for the Mexican American community.

[3] Insider, Paul Herrera, May 20, 2009

CARRY-ON DR. GARCIA'S FIGHT FOR CIVIL AND VETERANS' RIGHTS

What better way to honor Dr. Hector P. Garcia, than to carry-on his fight for CIVIL RIGHTS and for VETERANS’ RIGHTS. Listening to ‘Dr. Hector’ on the radio, I learned at a very early age – attending a segregated school where we were severely punished and ridiculed by English-speaking teachers, that the manner we were being treated by racist teachers, was known as ‘discrimination’ and that it was a violation of our “CIVIL RIGHTS”. If we have not learned this about the Founder of The American GI Forum – then we have a lot to learn about THE MAN and HIS LEGACY.

Civil Rights equality for us, did not happen by accident. It was men such as Dr. Hector P. Garcia, my father Luz Salazar, Attorney Gus Garcia, Judge Albert Pena and others who dared to fight against a racist system – who made it easier for us to be able to attend previously denied educational facilities, secure previously denied job opportunities, previously denied promotions to reach supervisory positions and ownership of Mexican-American businesses – and so many other RIGHTS we now take for granted. Those who did not live here at the time and are unfamiliar with this part of The United States of America – will never understand our reason why we must keep fighting, so that our future generations will never again suffer the degradation and humiliation some hate-filled people made us go through. We must all strive to NEVER bring shame to his name – nor to this great CIVIL RIGHTS and VETERANS’ RIGHTS organization.

Placido Salazar, 2^nd Vice Commander of the American GI Forum of Texas

Extract from:
Famed civil rights leader Dr. Hector P. Garcia
is to have a Texas state holiday named in his honor.
Steve Taylor www.RioGrandeGuardian.com, May 18, 2009

Under legislation authored by state Sen. Juan “Chuy” Hinojosa, the third Wednesday of September will be a statewide day of remembrance for the founder of the American GI Forum and recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

“Dr. Garcia provided medical care to the neglected and the poor. He answered the call to military service, earning a Bronze Star and six battle stars fighting for his democratic principles,” Hinojosa said. “Dr. Hector P. Garcia Day will remind us that serving our community is an act of selflessness and sacrifice.”

Hinojosa said he hopes the third Wednesday of September, which falls within national Hispanic Heritage Month, will be regularly observed by appropriate ceremonies and activities in public schools and other places.

Hinojosa’s Senate Bill 495 has now passed the House and the Senate and is on its way to Gov. Rick Perry’s desk to be signed into law. State Rep. Abel Herrero, D-Robstown, carried the bill in the House.

“By eroding the core of discrimination through emphasis on education and equality, Dr. Hector was masterful in empowering many to gain respect, opportunities, and inclusion,” Herrero said. “As a benefactor of his selfless endeavors, I am honored to be able to pay tribute to a truly amazing individual who has been an everlasting inspiration to all.’

Garcia first gained national recognition when he secured full military burial honors for Felix Longoria of Three Rivers after the Hispanic World War II hero was turned away from a local funeral home and segregated cemetery.

Garcia advised President John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Jimmy Carter and served as the first Hispanic on the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. He was an alternate ambassador to the United Nations and received the nation's highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, in 1984 from President Ronald Reagan. He died in July, 1996.

Placido Salazar, state vice commander of the American GI Forum in Texas, . . said “Some people refer to Dr. Hector as the Mexican American equivalent of Martin Luther King. Each deserves to be honored in their own way. Hector Garcia was active in civil rights’ issues 20 years before MLK. Every American, regardless of their ethnicity, is better off for the work they both did,” Salazar said.

Corpus Christi state Reps. Solomon Ortiz, a Democrat, and Todd Hunter, a Republican, were co-sponsors of the Hinojosa-Herrero legislation.

“Dr. Garcia is a hero and role model for all Texans. He provided the spark that ignited the struggle for civil rights in the Mexican American community. I would not be where I am today without the leadership and efforts of Dr. Garcia,” Ortiz said.

“Dr. Garcia was a great friend and role model to all who knew him. It is a fitting tribute that the State of Texas recognizes his contributions in this manner,” Hunter said.

In 2007, Hinojosa passed legislation renaming a section of the Crosstown Expressway between I-37 and Highway 357 in Corpus Christi the Dr. Hector P. Garcia Memorial Highway. “Dr. Hector is a national treasure and a hero in Texas and his memory will always be in the hearts and minds of the Corpus Christi community,” Hinojosa told the Guardian at the time.

The Ruben and Maria Bonilla Family of Texas
Three sons, each served as LULAC National President

written by sister Esther Bonilla Read

Ruben Bonilla, Tony Bonilla, Hillary Clinton and William Bonilla
Left to Right

Editor: Esther Bonilla Read casually mentioned in a letter that her three attorney brothers had each served as LULAC National President at some time. I promptly requested an article to honor the Bonilla family. All those involved with LULAC and other volunteer groups realize the hours and dedication that are reflected in achieving a position of national standing.

Maria Ramirez and Ruben Bonilla married in 1927 in Calvert, a small town in central Texas . They raised eight children: Albert, William, Raquel, Benjamin, Tony, Esther, Ruben Jr., and Mary Helen. William, Tony, Ruben and Mary Helen became attorneys. The other four followed varied careers.

Nightly, Ruben spoke to their children at the dinner table about how they were going to college. I (Esther) didn’t even know what “college” meant. Since we attended a school, which housed all twelve grades, I figured college would be a larger building so it could accommodate many more students. Ruben and Maria worked hard - he at his service station and Maria as a housewife. Their dream came true. Below are brief summaries of the sons who became national presidents of LULAC.

William D. Bonilla became the National President of League of Latin American Citizens (LULAC) in 1964. During his tenure Service, Employment and Redevelopment (SER), Jobs for Progress was established. This organization served the needs of the unemployed and the underemployed. William met with Sargent Shriver, Director of the Office of Economic Opportunity and Willard Wirtz, Secretary of Labor under President Lyndon B. Johnson to assist those folks who needed training so they could work to contribute to society. In 1966 LULAC and the American G I. Forum united so their efforts could succeed in helping minorities enter the workforce. Many other issues in the 1960s had to be dealt with and made the organization more visible and stronger than it had ever been.

He and his wife, Sue have six children and numerous grandchildren. His children are Mary Helen, teacher; David, attorney; Jon, attorney; Elizabeth, teacher; Suzanne, attorney; and Robert, legal assistant. William lives a unique experience. He, his son David, and his grandson Clay are the only three-generation attorneys working together in Corpus Christi , Texas .

Ruben Bonilla was thirty-three years of age when he was elected as the national president of LULAC (the League of Latin-American Citizens), and served from 1979-1981. His tenure marked a rapid growth of LULAC chapters in the country and even on military bases in Heidelberg , Germany and in Okinawa . Ruben encouraged the participation of young people in LULAC where they could make a difference. He toured college campuses and spoke to many interested groups.

Ruben informed the nation about the fact that Latinos were younger, had a higher birth rate, a lower median age and a larger continuing immigration flow. America was being transformed and was “becoming browner”. And American leaders, especially Congress, had to deal with the needs of this special population. To address these facts he met with national leaders, i.e., Presidents Carter and Reagan.

He addressed the issue of police brutality against Latinos with success. He worked with Gilbert Pompa of the Department of Justice as they held conferences across America on this subject of interest to Hispanics. It has now become a standard that all presidents meet with the National President of LULAC.

After his presidency, Ruben went on to other leadership positions in the community, i.e., Chairman of the Port Authority of the Port of Corpus Christi . He and his wife Rosie have four children, Patricia, an attorney; Ruben Jr., insurance; Bill, law student; and Lisa, college student.

Tony Bonilla was the third man in his family to hold office as national LULAC president, (1981-1983). His tenure included meeting with editorial boards of several publications with the intention of showcasing Latino writers, actors, and creative folks. He met with the representatives of The New York Times; Milwaukee Journal; the L.A. Times; the Readers Digest; television and movie producers i.e., Jack Valenti; the head of Columbia Studios; etc., all with the intention of promoting Latinos in the arts.

Tony also met with corporate officials from such groups as Budweiser, Coors, Miller Beer, Exxon, Texaco, Draft and other to support LULAC and to include Hispanics on their boards. Many of these groups now award scholarships to graduating Hispanics.

He also extended a hand to the African-American community so they might work together on issues dealing with inequality. Tony participated with LABOR leaders in planning and initiating a Solidarity Day March that involved all Civil Rights Groups; he spoke to 250,000 people from the front of the Nation’s Capital. He participated with Mrs. Coretta King in planning and initiating the 20^th anniversary on Washington . Again he spoke before 300,000 thousand people in front of the Lincoln Memorial.

His travels also took him to Spain on the subject of the emerging political and economic power of Hispanics in the USA .

Tony and his wife Olga had four children: (Tessa, now deceased), Tony Jr., a teacher; Ted, an attorney; and Patricia, an attorney.

Raul Castro: The personification of the American dream
Former governor made mark despite racial hurdles
by Jack L. August Jr. - May. 3, 2009 Special for the Republic

In Tucson a few years back, I dined at the upscale Rocky Mountain Oyster Club with the robust and engaging Raul Castro, the 93-year-old former Arizona governor. The happy long-term result was a book; an interpretive memoir that, in a brief 150 pages, conveys Castro's unique and inspirational life story.

"Adversity Is My Angel: The Life and Career of Raul H. Castro" will be released early next month and, hopefully, students, scholars and the reading public will take time to learn about this humble and inspirational American. Castro's life and career serve as dual role models, not only for Mexican-Americans but for all Americans.

Some of Castro's earliest memories were of his mother sending him into the southern Arizona desert to collect cactus fruit to feed the family.
During his childhood, he experienced racial prejudice, demeaning comments and heard repeatedly that he would spend his life in the copper mines.

Each morning in 1926, for example, Castro, then in the fifth grade, walked four miles to and from school. He watched as the Douglas school system's bus picked up the Anglo children; the bus passed as his classmates waved. Castro, the 10-year-old boy, knew that situation was unjust.

Yet despite such a disadvantaged background, he secured an education and embarked on a remarkable career arc, beginning as a teacher, then a lawyer, then Pima County attorney, Superior Court judge of Pima County, governor of Arizona, and American ambassador to El Salvador, Bolivia and Argentina.

Throughout his professional career, he continued to experience instances of social and racial discrimination only to turn these unwelcome incidents into new sources of strength.

Born in Cananea, Sonora, on June 12, 1916, Castro and his family ultimately moved from Mexico to the Arizona side of the border in 1926 and later, in 1939, through a combination of grueling physical labor and self-denial he became an American citizen.

He struggled too; riding the rails for a year - he described himself as a "hobo" - and earning a living as an undefeated professional boxer. But education remained a central and unifying theme in Castro's life.

He graduated from Arizona State Teachers College in Flagstaff the same year he gained citizenship (1939). Then, after realizing no local school boards would hire a "Mexican" with a teaching degree, he found work in the U.S. State Department as a Foreign Service clerk at Agua Prieta on the Arizona-Sonora border.

Extremely bright and assertive, Castro pursued an American dream. He was accepted by the University of Arizona College of Law in 1947 and earned his juris doctor degree in 2 1/2 years. Immediately thereafter, he began practicing law in Tucson.

In 1951, he became deputy Pima County attorney and, in 1954, he was elected county attorney and served in that capacity until 1958. In that year he was elected as a Pima County Superior Court judge and earned a reputation as a man of keen mind and deep compassion.

Castro served on the Pima County bench for six years until 1964. His stature grew, and President Lyndon Johnson appointed him U.S. ambassador to El Salvador in 1964, where he served until 1968. LBJ said he needed Castro in Bolivia, so the president transferred him there where he served until 1969, when President Richard Nixon removed him and placed a Republican appointee in that critical ambassadorial slot.

Castro returned to Arizona to practice international law and enter Democratic Party politics. In 1970, he ran for governor against incumbent Jack Williams and lost by only 7,000 votes. Four years later, he won a spirited campaign for the governorship against Russell Williams, a relative of the powerful conservative owner of The Arizona Republic, Eugene Pulliam, thus becoming Arizona's first Hispanic governor.

In 1977, President Jimmy Carter selected Castro to be ambassador to Argentina, so he resigned the governorship and went to Buenos Aires, where he served until 1980.

Castro returned to Arizona, practiced law for two decades and recently retired to Nogales, Ariz. His life and career suggest that the adversity in his humble beginnings only hardened his resolve and strengthened his determination.

This naturalized citizen from Mexico, whose life work borders on astounding, should join the pantheon of American role models of the first order. Beyond that, his story suggests much about the human spirit, the ability to overcome institutional and personal prejudice, and the hopes inherent in the American dream.

Jack L. August Jr. is executive director of the Barry Goldwater Center for the Southwest and is the Visiting Scholar in Legal History with Snell & Wilmer LLP in Phoenix. He is co-author of "Adversity Is My Angel: The Life and Career of Raul H. Castro."

Sent by John Inclan
fromgalveston@yahoo.com

To hear former Arizona Governor Raul Castro's voice and comments, cut & paste:
http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://kjzz.org/news/arizona/archives/200706/
raulcastro91/raulcastroweb.jpg&imgrefurl=http://kjzz.org/news/arizona/archives/200706
/raulcastro91&usg=__PJrEivh6v8wKnkpaLxoQnuWYZmU=&h=238&w=247&sz=7&hl=
en&start=2&tbnid=EER65tfh8B9MXM:&tbnh=106&tbnw=110&prev=/images%3Fq%3
DRaul%2BCastro%2B%2Bformer%2Bgovernor%2Barizona%26gbv%3D2%26hl%3
Den%26sa%3DG%26ie%3DUTF-8

On May 13, 1846, U. S. President James Polk declared war on Mexico. He justified the declaration stating “American blood (had been shed) on American soil”. Polk was referring to an incident that occurred on April 25 when a Mexican patrol out of Matamoros, Tamaulipas ran into U.S. scouts along the road from Corpus Christi to Matamoros. The short and militarily insignificant skirmish resulted in a few men killed from both sides and both retreated thereafter to their respective base. U. S. victories at the battles at Palo Alto (May 8) and Resaca de la Palmas (May 9) followed. Congress had not yet been informed of the two battles when Polk declared war on Mexico. The U.S. Army and Navy invaded Mexico at five points (Texas Gulf Coast via Tamaulipas, Texas middle Rio Grande via Coahuila, New Mexico, California and Port of Veracruz). The 21 month war ended with the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo on February 2, 1848. Instead of acquiring all of Mexico (as had been the original intention), the US government bought the area now called the U. S. Southwest.

Such is the history of the U.S.-Mexico War as known by the public as is so depicted in the U. S. history textbooks, movies and TV programs. All are written from the East Coast black and white worldview. Consequently, the ethnic minorities, history, culture and impact of the war and Treaty west of the Mississippi River are ignored. Moreover, the California Gold Rush, railroad expansion to the Pacific Coast and “Indian Wars” are unrealistically glorified with the negative impact ignored.

At the beginning of the war with Mexico the U.S. was determined to fulfill its self-perceived Manifest Destiny to “extend from the North Pole to the Isthmus of Panama and Atlantic to the Pacific oceans”. This political-geographic attitude and view was unquestionably documented in the 1876 book titled "One Hundred Years of Progress" by Charles Louis Flint website of book is: http://www.archive.org/stream/onehundredyearsp00flinrich Most interesting are the maps (attachment) that depict the U. S. in 1776, 1876, and as it was expected to be in 1976. True to Manifest Destiny, by 1976 the southern border of the US is depicted at the Isthmus of Panama! Mexico and the nations of Central America were depicted as yet un-named states of the union.

What the textbooks and media do not depict are the anti-war riots in key Northern cities, the many U.S. citizens who fled to Canada and thence Mexico to join the Mexican Army, the massive desertions of U.S. troops on the field and the strong anti-slavery opposition to the war. Congressman Abraham Lincoln of Illinois was among those who opposed the war as abolitionists saw it as expansion of slave territory. Also not depicted in the textbooks and media was the plight of recently arrived European immigrants who were drafted into the U.S. army as a sure means of citizenship. Many did not speak English or spoke it very poorly.

Moreover, the plight of Catholic immigrants is also not depicted as the discrimination was so severe that many deserted as soon as possible and others (like the San Patricio Battalion) changed sides and fought against the U.S.

Another group totally ignored were the anti-Jefferson, anti-slavery U. S. citizens and Catholics of the Trans-Mississippi and Louisiana Territory. Some had been followers of third U. S. Vice President Aaron Burr who so disagreed with Jefferson that he and his followers contemplated establishing a third North American Republic. Many settled in what is now Arkansas, the Red River (Texas-Oklahoma border area), or entered Texas and New Mexico as legal and illegal immigrants. Many were involved in the creation of the Republic of Texas but opposed U.S. annexation and the war with Mexico. In time the Burr Conspiracy became the Spanish Conspiracy and finally the Lone Star Conspiracy which existed until the late 1880’s. Their story and that of the once imagined third North American Republic was lost and waits to be rescued and told by scholars and the media sure to sensationalize their history.

In the meantime, we must contend with the short-lived sham Republic of Texas that sought annexation to the United States shortly after the fall of the Alamo on March 6, 1836 and before the April 21 1836 battle at San Jacinto. Not yet a recognized Republic, the U.S. rebuffed the offer on the grounds that the United States does not get involved on the internal affairs of a friendly nation. (si ahorita, sure guy). Although the political history of the Texas Revolution has not been written, you can get an insight as to how it came about by studying the Phony Florida War. That U.S. Secret Service led effort failed but succeeded in Texas and California, both of which declared independence and created short-lived sham republics.

James Polk assumed the presidency of the U.S. determined to annex Texas. The Treaty of Annexation was signed in December 1845 and Polk ordered the U.S. Army and Navy to occupy Corpus Christi Bay. The skirmish of April 25, 1846 mentioned above was sufficient grounds to declare war against Mexico. The U.S. Army then moved into New Mexico and the U.S. Navy conducted its first amphibious landing by invading California. The 21 month war was so unpopular that the U.S. paid for the Mexican territory it had conquered and failed to follow up on the acquisition of all of Mexico and Central America. Nonetheless, the continental United States as it is now was created by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that ended the war. Whereas Texas was not a part of the Treaty because it had been annexed beforehand, the Southwest and its Spanish-Mexican residents thus became U.S. citizens. The Native American cultures that predated Spanish settlement of the area were not declared citizens of the U.S. until the 20th Century. Greed, ethnocentricity, prejudices and ethnic-cultural discrimination led to the violation of the Texas Treaty of Annexation, Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and all Native American treaties. That also remains to be told in the history textbooks and media. Hopefully, the next generation of scholars from history to anthropology will begin to correct our current ignorance and misconceptions of history.

End ………………… Zavala County Sentinel 13-14 May 2009 …… end

“It is the destiny of the United Sates to extend from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean and from the North Pole to the Isthmus of Panama ”.

Note section in white was expected to become part of the US by 1970. Charles Louis Flint, ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PROGRESS.

From: Richard G. Santos mailto:richardgsantos@yahoo.com
Sent: Monday, May 11, 2009 10:46 AM
To: Marinez, Juan marinezj@anr.msu.edu

Subject: Mex War

As a side bar, I first did it in Mexico City during a presentaton to the Sociedad de Historia, Geografia y Estadistica. I next made it part of my presentation on Juan N. Seguin (Espia Tejano en la Comandancia Militar del Noreste)in Monterrey for the Sociedad Nuevoleonesa de Historia.

And as I used to tell my classes at Our Lady of the Lake, Trinity U, School of Aero Space Medicine and SW Tx:

Let us suppose I really, really like your house, property, furniture, belongings and everything you own. One day I do a home invasion, beat the you know what out of you, have you on the ground all bloody thinking you are about to die. I put a gun to your head and say: "See those items I have set aside? Well, it is about a third of what all I wanted and I
am gonna pay you $13 million for it. Do you accept? Will you sell me one third of what I have conquered?"

Well, Mexico said yes and sold the southwest to the US.

Richard

Shared by Juan Marinez marinezj@anr.msu.edu
Dr. Armando Ayala DrChili@webtv.net

Cinco de Mayo: More than Mariachis and Margaritas
by Andy Porras

While most of America confuses May 5th as Mexican Independence Day, less know of the incredible connection between the Battle of Puebla, fought between Mexico and France, and the salvation of American, not Mexican independence.

As with every great event, there’s always a story behind the headlines. Cinco de Mayo has more than its share. Mention Cinco to today’s young Latinos and you’re bound to get the same reaction when asking non-Latinos-party-time! But it’s not their fault. Not when there is next to nothing in school curriculums that even hints of a President Lincoln-Mexican President Benito Juarez connection during the Civil War.

Officially, Cinco de Mayo, or May 5, 1862, is when the Battle of Puebla shook the Americas. It was a victory of a ragtag Mexican Army against an elite French military machine. Except, it’s not the end of the story.

Check the date, 1862- the U.S. Civil War was raging. The country was on a path of self-destruction, it seemed. While the North counted on vast industrial resources, the Southern rebs’ quest for secession tempered them with a fierce sprit of fighting, almost barbaric.

President Lincoln could ill afford a nation divided. Benito Juarez’ troops were thought to be no match for the the Euro-warriors who had not tasted defeat in more half a century and were said to be “the premier army in the world.” Both leaders were desperate for a military miracle.

Some historians claim that Napoleon III's (nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte) desire to occupy Mexico was fueled by his intense dislike for the United States and the Monroe Doctrine. (The Monroe Doctrine stated that the United States would oppose any European invasion into the Americas.) A French stronghold in Mexico would thwart the United States' growing power and strength.

Some writers, like Antonio Burciaga and John Shepler point out that Napoleon III shrewdly banked on the fact that the United States, in the midst of its own civil war, would not interfere in the events in Mexico.

“Under orders of their emperor, French troops arrived in Mexico with a dual purpose: to help the Confederacy win the war against the United States and to conquer Mexico.” writes Donald W Miles in his book, Cinco de Mayo- What is Everybody Celebrating?

Thus with state-of-the-art equipment and the French Foreign Legion at his disposal, Napoleon III planned a traditional military assault and victory at Puebla and then on to the Mexican capital, Mexico City. Once the capital had fallen into French hands, he believed the rest of the country would surrender.

Then they would march north and keep their promise to the Rebels. It was quite a plan, except they didn’t count on Texas-born, Gen. Ignacio Zaragoza’s non-traditional battle skills and his passionate pleas to the Mexican soldiers, mostly Zapotec Indians.

“On the morning of May 5, 1862, French General Lorenz led some 4,000 French forces toward Puebla, believing that he would be welcomed with open arms and that the local clergy would shower them with magnolia blooms.” writes Shepler. “Instead, waiting for him was General Zaragoza with a much smaller force of 2,000 troops along with Puebla citizens who brought their own farm tools as weapons.”

The Texas general’s guerilla tactics included sending stampeding cattle into the French occupied areas near Puebla. Then the screaming and machete-weilding Zapotecs sliding down muddy hillsides completely baffled the brightly dressed French Dragoons. The numero-uno army in the world was no match for the inspired natives, who were growing weary of foreign warriors traversing across their lands.

Juarez’ people had risen to the task. Napoleon’s plans to help the South were crushed. On April 18, 1865, the Civil War ended with the surrender of the Confederate army. By then, 617,000 Americans, Union and Confederate, had died in the war.

In gratitude, the Lincolns invited the Juarez to Washington after the war. Maybe someday both countries will get their historical facts straight and celebrate Cinco together. Just like their forefathers did.

Shared by Walter Herbeck
wlherbeck@sbcglobal.net

POTTSVILLE, PA – A jury in Schuylkill County found the two defendants, Brandon Piekarsky and Derrick Donchak, accused of beating 25-year-old Luis Ramirez to death, not guilty.

“Tonight there is no justice in Shenandoah, Pennsylvania. The jury's conclusion is an outrage. Luis Ramirez was brutally murdered. Witnesses testified that it was racially motivated as a result of hate and intolerance. In the week when Congress passed the Hate Crimes Act, this verdict underscores the importance of the passage of this Act. It is time for the Department of Justice to step in and bring justice to the Ramirez family and send a strong message that violence targeting immigrants will not be tolerated and will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law,” stated Henry Solano, MALDEF interim president and general counsel.

PETITION BEING CIRCULATED BY MALDEF

The Petition to:
U.S. DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE
CIVIL RIGHTS DIVISION
950 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W.
Washington, D.C. 20530

We respectfully request that the Civil Rights Division of the United States Department of Justice conduct a thorough and comprehensive federal investigation surrounding the brutal murder of Luis Ramirez in Shenandoah, Pennsylvania and to bring appropriate criminal charges against his assailants.

On July 14, 2008, Ramirez lost his life after he was knocked unconscious and severely beaten by a group of Shenandoah teenagers who yelled racial epithets throughout the fatal beating. Charging documents and eyewitness accounts indicate that Ramirez was punched and kicked in the body and head causing him to foam at the mouth, to sustain two skull fractures, and ultimately, to die.

While local officials initially failed to bring charges against the perpetrators and denied that race played a role in the attack, MALDEF intervened to pressure the local prosecutor to charge the defendants with a hate crime. Soon thereafter, the county district attorney filed murder and ethnic intimidation charges against the assailants.

A retired Philadelphia police officer testified at a preliminary hearing that she heard one of the defendants yell “Tell your [expletive] Mexican friends to get the [expletive] out of Shenandoah or you’ll be [expletive] laying next to him.” The defendant’s comments were directed at Ramirez’s friends who came to his aid after receiving a distress call from him on a cell phone during the beating.

On Friday, May 1, 2009, a jury in Schuylkill County found two of the defendants accused of beating the 25-year-old, father of two, guilty of simple assault. Despite the mounting evidence of a hate-driven and violent attack, the jury acquitted the defendants of third-degree murder and ethnic intimidation. The jury's conclusion is an outrage. Most shocking is the recent news article describing the Jury Foreman’s view that the trial appeared to be biased because of the racism and prejudice he noted among his fellow jurors. Luis Ramirez was brutally murdered and, even in death, Ramirez remains a victim of extreme racism which denies his family the justice they deserve.

The death of Luis Ramirez has repercussions beyond his family and community. The FBI Hate Crimes Statistics Report documents that hate crimes against Latinos have increased by 40% over the past several years. We must work aggressively to prevent hate crimes, and when they occur, prosecute and punish the perpetrators to the full extent of the law.

We respectfully request that the Civil Rights Division of the United States Department of Justice launch a full investigation into the horrible crime that occurred last July in Shenandoah, Pennsylvania. It is imperative that the Department of Justice step in and send a strong message that hate crimes of any kind will not be tolerated in our great nation.

For more information about the case, please go to: http://www.maldef.org/

A November 18, 2008 interview, emphasizes that the media itself has influenced the outcome by the neglect of public visibility to the death of not only Luis Ramirez in Pennsylvania, but also Marcelo Lucero, beaten to death in Long Island, New York.
http://maldef.org/multimedia/video_gallery/gladys_limon_on_abc_hate_crimes

Luis Ramirez, like all generations of immigrants, came to this country with great sacrifice and courage, seeking to fulfill a basic human need, to work for a better life. Only 25 years old, his life was taken prematurely and violently by a group of young people, whose crime, according to witnesses, was motivated by Luis' national origin.?

Take a moment to send a message of condolence to the family of Luis Ramirez today. We need safe and tolerant communities and joining in this effort adds your voice to the growing chorus that is leading to a better America.

Luis Ramirez was born and raised in Guanajuato, Mexico, where he lived with his mother, Elisa Zavala, grandmother, sister, and brother. Ms. Zavala tells that Luis was extraordinarily hardworking and ambitious from a very young age. According to her, Luis worked as a boy to pay for his studies and also to help with household expenses. Ms. Zavala recounts that Luis was so committed to helping her economically that, on occasion, he offered her his small piggy-bank savings. When he grew older, Luis worked 15 hours a day as a supervisor at a local clothes factory. With his earnings, he helped build a home for his family. Luis' ambition was too large for the small economic opportunities in his community. He regularly told his mother that there were better working opportunities "in the north," and that he could realize his dream of providing a better life for his family by going to the United States. His mother finally gave in and reluctantly allowed Luis to pursue the American dream. ?

Take a moment to send a message of condolence to the family of Luis Ramirez today. We need safe and tolerant communities and joining in this effort adds your voice to the growing chorus that is leading to a better America.

Luis, at age 19, arrived in Pennsylvania after making the long journey. He worked two jobs at all times, whether in a factory, construction, or agricultural fields, so that he could support himself and his family in Mexico. After a few years, he met and fell in love with Crystal Dillman. According to Crystal, what most impressed her about Luis was how respectful and hardworking he was. During their three-year relationship, they had two beautiful children together and planned to marry.

On the night of July 12, 2009, however, Luis Ramirez encountered a group of high school football players who told him to "go back to Mexico" and shortly thereafter began their brutal assault on Luis. The beating ended after Luis was knocked to the ground, kicked and stomped on by the four assailants, and then kicked in the head, which fractured his skull. As they fled, one of the assailants yelled a warning to Luis' friend, who had responded to Luis' distress call, "tell your [expletive] Mexican friends to get the [expletive] out of Shenandoah or you'll be [expletive] laying next to him." ???

The assailants deprived Luis Ramirez not only of his American dream, but of his right to be a son, a husband, a father - of his right to live.

Thank you for your continued support of our petition to the DOJ. While our voices are being heard loud and clear in Washington, Shenandoah, and across the country, we must keep bringing attention to this particular situation and related efforts to demonstrate that such conduct is not and should not be accepted or tolerated.

Sincerely,

Gladys Limon
MALDEF

PS. Help us reach our goal of delivering 50,000 petitions to the Department of Justice. Double your Impact by telling 5 more friends and stand up for Luis Ramirez and justice today.

To participate in the petition or send letters of condolences, go to:
http://maldef.org/contact/

Please consider writing a letter directly to the Department of Justice, at:

U.S. DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE
CIVIL RIGHTS DIVISION
950 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W.
Washington, D.C. 20530

The Luis Ramirez Murder: A Violent Act of Injustice

Three things immediately shock the conscious soul upon learning about the murder of Luis Ramirez. The simple manner in which he died is the first of those.

First: Ramirez, a father of three, was beaten to death in the streets of Pennsylvania by as many as seven young men who were at the end of a night of drinking. The motive? Judging by the slurs heaped upon him along with the many blows to his body: apparently nothing more than being out at night while Mexican. The teens who ganged up on Ramirez came upon him walking with a young woman, reportedly his girlfriend's sister. Obviously bringing threat, they asked him what he was doing out at that time of day. Then they set upon him. In the end it was a final hard kick to the skull which left the 25-year-old father convulsing on the concrete with fatal brain damage.

The police arrived shortly after the attack but rather than jump into hot pursuit of the white criminals, they chose instead to search Latino eyewitnesses for weapons, claiming that following the guilty parties simply wasn't their "priority." Ramirez's attackers weren't arrested for another two weeks, even though eyewitnesses at the scene knew who they were without a doubt.

The second stomach-churner is the jury's decision to exonerate Ramirez's killers from the charges of third-degree murder, aggravated assault, reckless endangerment, and ethnic intimidation, leaving to stand only the reduced charge of simple assault. This, despite the testimony of Eileen Burke, a retired police officer at the scene. Burke testified that at the end, the murderers yelled to Ramirez' girlfriend "You effin bitch, tell your effin Mexican friends get the eff out of Shenandoah or you're gonna be laying effin next to him." This, despite two of the accused men themselves admitting to yelling "go home you Mexican [expletive]" at the scene of the crime.

Yet somehow, in the face of these facts, the all-white jury ruled there was no evidence of "ethnic intimidation." According to a CNN report, town residents were quick to explain and downplay the actions of this violent group of "star students and football players" as "just an alcohol-fueled confrontation among kids." They furthered their argument by reciting "a litany of attacks allegedly perpetrated by Latinos against Anglos." Perhaps they could have saved time and breath by saying The spics had it coming.

The third, overarching, shocking reality thrown into sharp relief by the murder of Luis Ramirez is how easily an environment of violently xenophobic rhetoric and targeted hate has normalized a modern-day lynching to the point that it is absorbed and diluted with barely a blip into the everyday news cycle and into public consciousness. How effortlessly a subhuman category of being is constructed and subsequently reviled. How a verdict has been passed on just how to deal with this synthesized Creature, and how effective that virulent messaging has been evidenced in a death like this one and in a pattern that plays out in various towns, cities, and states across the country. Seemingly unconnected cells of hatred hammer the dominant culture's sentence down upon a targeted group, and the system nods and winks when all is done.

Sent by Dr. Carlos Muñoz, Jr.
Professor Emeritus, Department of Ethnic Studies
510-642-9134 http://ethnicstudies.berkeley.edu/faculty/munoz

Editor: Recommend viewing several MALDEF videos on Hate crimes http://maldef.org/

Farm Workers’ Rights, 70 Years Overdue
Editorial, April 6, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/06/opinion/06mon1.html

It is more than bank failures and rising unemployment that give these troubled times echoes of the 1930s. An unfinished labor battle from the New Deal is being waged again.

The goal is to win basic rights that farm and domestic workers were denied more than 70 years ago, when the Roosevelt administration won major reforms protecting other workers in areas like overtime and disability pay, days of rest and union organizing.

That inequality is a perverse holdover from the Jim Crow era. Segregationist Southern Democrats in Congress could not abide giving African-Americans, who then made up most of the farm and domestic labor force, an equal footing in the workplace with whites. President Roosevelt’s compromise simply wrote workers in those industries out of the New Deal.

They were thus sidelined from the labor movement, with predictable results. Though the Dixiecrats have all long since died or repented, the injustice they spawned has never been corrected. Poverty, brutal working conditions and legally sanctioned discrimination persist for new generations of laborers, who are now mostly Latino immigrants.

In New York, advocates are pressing for passage of the Farm workers Fair Labor Practices Act, which would give these workers the rights that others have long taken for granted, as well as seek badly needed improvements in safety and sanitary conditions in the fields. Domestic workers, meanwhile, are seeking a “Bill of Rights” in Albany covering things like overtime pay, cost-of-living raises and health benefits.

A separate effort begun last week seeks to end these stubbornly lingering injustices for workers in all states by fixing federal law. It was announced on Cesar Chavez’s birthday by old lions of his movement, including Jerry Cohen, who as general counsel of the United Farm Workers helped win passage of a landmark 1975 California law that secured unprecedented rights for the state’s farm workers. The campaign has been joined by a growing number of labor groups and immigrant advocates, like Cardinal Roger Mahony of Los Angeles and the Farm Labor Organizing Committee, which represents migrant workers in the Midwest and North Carolina.

In both campaigns, advocates are counting on a changed political landscape to help their cause. But even with Democrats controlling the New York Legislature, the farm worker bill has languished. It faces fierce opposition from growers and has been eclipsed by the entropy and fiscal crises of Gov. David Paterson’s Albany. In Washington, labor advocates are preoccupied by different battles, like the fight for the pro-union Employee Free Choice Act. Other long-sought immigration reforms have taken a back seat to the budget and health care.

But farm workers are used to long, hard slogs and pitiless heat and cold, with justice as their distant but inevitable destination. The advocates see President Obama and Governor Paterson as ideal candidates to take them there, and are not about to give up. “Any just national labor law reform must include farm workers and domestics,” Mr. Cohen wrote to Labor Secretary Hilda Solis, stating an obvious and compelling truth. “If not now, when?”

http://consumersunion.org http://greenerchoices.org
co-founder, http://civileats.com/ http://twitter.com/NaomiStarkman

Sent by Juan Marinez marinezj@anr.msu.edu

http://www.cmmayo.com/last-prince-of-the-mexican-empire.html

Description of book: Who knew that Mexico once had a half-American prince? Or that this little boy’s future was hotly debated not just in Mexico but in Washington D.C. and in every court in Europe? Set in the mid-19th century when Maximilian von Habsburg was Emperor of Mexico, THE LAST PRINCE OF THE MEXICAN EMPIRE is based on the true and never before completely told story about a half-American, half-Mexican boy who, as in a fairytale, became a prince and then a pawn in the struggle-to-the-death over Mexico's destiny.

"Epic in scope...impressively researched...Mayo's reanimation of a crucial period in Mexican history should satisfy history buffs and those in the mood for an engaging story brimming with majestic ambition." Publishers Weekly

"A rich historical novel...Mayo comfortably blends fiction with fact while illuminating a dark corner of North American history." Booklist

Author bio: C.M. Mayo is the author of The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire, an historical novel based on the true story which will be published by Unbridled Books this May; Miraculous Air: Journey of a Thousand Miles through Baja California, the Other Mexico, a travel memoir published by Milkweed Editions in 2007; and Sky Over El Nido, which won the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction. A long-time resident of Mexico City and an avid translator of Mexican poetry and fiction, she is also the editor of an anthology of Mexican writing, Mexico: A Traveler's Literary Companion, which Mexican poet and critic David Huerta has called "one of the outstanding contemporary works on this country." www.cmmayo.com

Excerpt from epilogue:

Once upon a time or, I should say, more years ago that I would like to count, I was invited to a lunch in Mexico City. There in the dining room was an unusually handsome antique portrait of a youth— perhaps English?— cradling a rifle. The scenery included a nopal cactus and, upon a hill in the background, as in a Renaissance portrait...

Was that Chapultepec Castle?

Yes, my hostess told me as our bowl of salad came out in the arms of the muchacha.

And who was the boy?

Agustín de Iturbide y Green, the Prince of Mexico.

I had never heard of him. This bothered me, for I was not only recently married to a Mexican, but I considered myself well-educated. I realize now that we supposedly well-educated Americans, who may be able to recite every this-and-that about Europe, rarely open our minds to the rich complexities of our southern neighbor and this, in part, because we are lulled into an illusion that we "know" Mexico. Our media drench us with images: the wet-back; the bandido and the bull-fighter and the mariachi; the narco-trafficker; the corrupt official with his Rolex, his yacht, his weekends in Vegas; the pobres in their sombreros and huaraches; the ubiquitous unibrowed Frida, and those sugar-sand beaches bereft of people other than, perhaps, long-limbed blondes in bikinis.

A prince! This meant an aristocracy, a theater for power: social, political, financial, economic, military. Certainly, revolutions have erupted in opposition to the idea, but it can be said that, for many people, a monarch and, by extension, the royal family, serve as a focal point for the identity and unity of a nation. To most Americans and Mexicans today, this idea is absurd. But as I write these lines, the Belgians still have their king and the United Kingdom its queen.

These days, usually, one can satisfy one’s idle curiosity with an Internet search, but back then, a search yielded nothing.

A few months later, half way through reading Jasper Ridley’s Maximilian and Juárez, I came upon the chapter, "Alice Iturbide." My surprise at finding my own countrywoman at the apex of this long ago Mexican aristocracy, both antagonist and victim, motivated and blinded by who knew what medley of ambition, avarice, love, borrowed patriotism or naiveté, so intrigued me, I knew at once that I wanted to explore and expand it into a novel.

Writing a book is like climbing a mountain: one step at a time gets you to the summit, though perhaps, once, twice, or a hundred times, one might have to overnight in heavy weather, or retrace a dead-end route and begin anew. In my case, before reaching much of any altitude at all, I fell, to use a Mexican expression, into an eggplant patch.

The eggplant patch was my initial reading of the main works on the period. In these, the story of the little prince is either erroneously or so faintly told as to be— well, it wasn’t anything to hang a novel on. Ridley, for example, claims that Alice had first married Agustín Gerónimo, eldest son of the Emperor Iturbide, and then, after his death, married the second son, Angel. In my later researches, I found no evidence for this supposed first marriage and in fact, as ample documentation in the Iturbide Family Archives in the Library of Congress shows, the three traveled together from Paris to New York where, after many years of ill-health, Agustín Gerónimo died in December 1866. (There, for anyone who wants to see them, are the microfiche of bills from New York’s Clarendon Hotel, one Dr John Metcalfe, and for the conveyance of Agustín Gerónimo’s remains to Philadelphia, where they were interred in the family crypt in St John the Evangelist.)

The best-known work on the Second Empire, and the first based on research into Maximilian’s archive in Austria’s Haus-, Hof-, und Staatsarchive, Egon César Conte Corti’s Maximilian und Charlotte, offers an accurate account of the Iturbides’s tangle with Maximilian in the sum of a single page. Maximiliano íntimo: El Emperor Maximiliano y su corte, one of the indispensable eyewitness memoirs, by Maximilian’s secretary, José Luis Blasio, similarly relegates the Iturbides to the briefest of mentions, and further, claims that "the little Agustín, then five years old, was the son of Angel de Iturbide, who had passed away, and an American woman." Three strikes there: the child was only two and a half years old, Angel was quite alive enough to have signed Maximilian’s contract, and — poor Alice! She did not even rate a mention of her name. Two more examples: Sara Yorke Stevenson’s Maximilian in Mexico: A Woman’s Reminiscences of the French Intervention 1862-1867, a magnificent tome in all other respects, relegates the Iturbide affair to— I found this astonishing— a snippet of a footnote, apropos of Maximilian’s flight from Chapultepec to Orizaba in late 1866. I read and I read, but in these works about Maximilian, the Second Empire, and the French Intervention, whether a memoir or based on original research, when it came to the Iturbides, it was always the same: mystifying errors and vagueness.

Why, precisely, Maximilian would want to take custody of the Iturbide grandsons and why Alice, her husband, and his siblings would agree, at least initially, were questions I could not begin to address when the Iturbides themselves remained obscure.

I knew there were archives on the Emperor Agustín de Iturbide in both Georgetown University and the Library of Congress, but I was still in Mexico City. So my first path out of the bramble was an unlikely one and I found it thanks to Mexican historian Eduardo Turrent, who granted me access to the Banco de México’s Matías Romero archive. During the French Intervention, Romero, one of Mexico’s great statesmen, served as the Mexican Republic’s Minister to Washington, where he lobbied, gathering money and arms, against Maximilian. In Romero’s archive, among countless treasures, I found several letters from Angel de Iturbide, anxiously requesting that he and his family be permitted to return to Mexico. These were dated August, 1867, some two months after Maximilian’s execution, and sent from "Rosedale, near Georgetown, D.C."

Rosedale, Georgetown, D.C.: that was my lead. When I went to Washington, in addition to delving into those archives at Georgetown University and the Library of Congress, I went to the Washington Historical Society Library, Georgetown Public Library’s Peabody Room, and the Washingtoniana Division of the Martin Luther King Library. Alice’s family turned out to be an old and prominent family on both sides. It gave me a start to realize, after several visits to the Washington Historical Society Library, that it was Alice’s lace-capped grandmother, Rebecca Plater Forrest, whose portrait graced the vestibule. Over on Massachusetts Avenue, in stately Anderson House, the Society of the Cincinnati had the records of Agustín de Iturbide y Green’s membership, descended as he was from the Revolutionary war hero, General Uriah Forrest. And in the library of the Daughters of the American Revolution headquarters, I found a copy of his grandmother, Ann Forrest Green’s, diary for 1861. And about Rosedale, which crowns the knoll just behind the National Cathedral, I came upon numerous newspaper clippings, some dating back to the 1930s and including interviews with Alice’s family members. Also of enormous help was Washington DC historian Louise Mann-Kenney’s Rosedale: The Eighteenth Century Country Estate of General Uriah Forrest, and a personal visit to Rosedale one snow-dusted February day.

The biggest trove of information about Alice and her son, however, I found in an unlikely place, for, as far as I can determine, they had no association with it during their lifetimes: Catholic University’s archives, also in Washington DC. As the rest of Agustín de Iturbide y Green’s life is the subject of my next book, suffice it to say, his career in the Mexican calvary ended in 1890 when, for having written a letter to a newspaper criticizing President Porfirio Díaz, he was court-martialed and imprisoned for a year. On his release, he and his mother returned to Washington. In 1892, when she returned alone to Mexico City to conclude some business, she died suddenly of an infection to the foot turned septic. Soon another bout of inopportune truth-telling resulted in Agustín’s expulsion from Washington’s exclusive Metropolitan Club, though many of the members considered this so grossly unfair that, years later, there was attempt, without his cooperation, to reinstall him as a member. And so the one-time Prince of Mexico, orphaned, socially ruined, and plagued by chronic tuberculosis of the bone, made his living as a translator for the Franciscan Brothers and later, as professor of French and Spanish at Georgetown. He nonetheless made a happy marriage which lasted a decade, until his death in 1925. The Catholic University archive, donated by his widow, Louis Kearney de Iturbide, contains his personal papers, scrapbooks, photographs, and her handwritten memoir, as well as many Washington area newspaper clippings, among them, one dated 1939, "Memory of Imperial Fame: Princeling’s Widow Refreshes Lost History," that shows that same portrait I had seen in Mexico City. It turned out that, on a visit to Mexico, Mrs. Iturbide had given it to her hostess and it had then been handed down in the family.

Why, having done so much original research, did I write the story as fiction? I wanted to tell it true, which means, of course, getting the facts as straight as possible but also, and this was the most interesting to me, telling an emotional truth. Why did Alice, Angel, Pepa, Maximilian and Charlotte do what they did? Who encouraged and supported them, and who criticized, intimidated and frustrated them— and for what motives? The answer is not only in historical and political analysis, but in their hearts, and the hearts of others can only be experienced with the imagination, that is, through fiction.

How much is fiction and how much is fact? We will never really know. All I can say is that I have done my utmost to render the facts and the contexts as accurately as possible. All the characters are based on real people with the exceptions of Lupe, Chole, the bandits, the palace nannies Olivia and Tere, the murdered Count Villavaso, and the prince’s bodyguard, though in all these instances, real people did fulfill these or very similar roles, and I undertook extensive research into the sociology of the time and place to portray them, if imaginatively, as accurately as I could.

A last word about research. There is no end to it. This may be true of any period, but it is especially true of Mexico in the 1860s, for Maximilian’s presence there makes no sense without an understanding of both the Mexican and the international context— the American, Austrian, Belgian, French, Prussian, Russian, Italian, English, and so on. The histories, memoirs, and documents themselves reveal only scraps and, at best, patched-together swaths of the wider story, and many as these may be, precious few have been translated. To give one of many examples, L’Intervention Française au Mexique, the monumental three volume memoir by Col. Charles Blanchot, General Bazaine’s aide-de-camp, has not yet been translated into Spanish, German, or English. In 2008— more than 130 years after the fall of the Second Mexican Empire— Austrian historian Konrad Ratz, working from previously untranslated German documents, published Tras las huellas de un desconocido (In the Footsteps of an Unknown), with major new information about Maximilian’s early education; his governorship of Lombardy-Venetia; his last doctor, Samuel Basch; Prince and Princess Salm-Salm; and the shadowy Father Fischer. I had already finished and placed my manuscript; Ratz’s was the last new research I could utilize for this novel. No doubt more wonders are forthcoming. There are more archives I might have looked into. I could also try digging a hole to China. After these several year’s work, with a great sigh, I simply declared, "pencils down."

C.M. MAYO
www.cmmayo.com

Photo of the Last prince of the Mexican Empire: Agustín de Iturbide y Green (1863-1925), can be viewed at http://www.cmmayo.com/last-prince-photos.html with other photos and historical data available at the site.

“César Chávez: A Triumph of Spirit,”
a biography of Chávez co-written by
Richard Griswold del Castillo and Richard A. Garcia

Dr. Roberto Cabello-Argandoña has written extensively about Latino issues and information and the Battle Puebla of Cinco de Mayo of 1862. In this battle, Mexican irregular forces defeated well-trained and superior French Imperial forces. The Battle of Puebla emboldened the Mexican resistance, which eventually expelled the invaders.

Dr. Cabello-Argandoña earned his law degree from the University of Chile, B.A. in Political Science, M.P.A., Masters in Management (Business) and M.I.S., Masters in Information Systems from UCLA, and a Ph. D. from USC.

He is the author of the book entitled CINCO DE MAYO: An Illustrated History. Nuestra Historia Series. 208 pgs. ISBN: 978-1-888205-05-3 Floricanto Press, 2008. It covers the political crisis in Mexico and the United States, itself in the midst of a civil war, and the somber prospects of foreign invasion in Mexico by three major world powers, Spain, Britain and France.

It presents an illustrated narrative probing the historical, political and international factors that led to the Battle of Puebla of 1862 from pre-Independence to the War of In dependence, international conflicts, War of Reform and the subsequent political and economic crisis of Mexico. It examines the question of the foreign debt, the allied invasion in Mexico in 1861, the subsequent departure of the Spanish and British forces and the extent of the French Intervention. It provides a most detailed account of the forces and activities of the French and Mexican sides, during the last three days before, the day of and the day after the battle itself. Examines also the inspiring history of a triumphant Chicano general, Ignacio Zaragoza, (1829-1862), born in a period of international conflicts and forced to flee from his home as a youth because of the American settler's revolt in Texas in 1836.

It includes nine patriotic poems (Spanish-English parallel text) written in California between 1864 and 1865 commemorating CINCO DE MAYO and published for the first time in monographic form.

"This is an amazingly interesting work of historical narrative on Cinco de Mayo dating from 1861, California 1864-1865, and its geopolitical ramifications; ably introduced with a compilation of illustrations from the period." Cabello-Argandoña has been writing about the French Intervention in Mexico for many years. His main preoccupation has constantly been to bring to light the main historical lessons from a failed foreign occupation, the ever presence of enemies within and without, and the resiliency of the Mexican people and their boundless yearns for freedom and respect.

On May 2nd and May 3rd, the Mexican Cultural Institute in Los Angeles, hosted lectures by Dr. Cabello-Argandoña. The following pertinent topics were discussed in relationship to the Battle of Puebla:

1. Mexico was heavily indebted to European multinational bankers from France, Spain, and England.

2. The Government of Juarez in Mexico signed a moratorium of debt repayment to its European creditors.

3. Spain, England and France broke diplomatic relations with Mexico.

4. America, the main backer of the Monroe Doctrine, was in a bitter civil war.

5. Napoleon the III of France wanted Europe to challenge America's hegemony of Latin America and open new markets for European goods.

6. Napoleon the III convinced Austria to support an invasion force by
offering to appoint as Emperor of Mexico, Maximilian of Hapsburg, and the younger brother of Emperor Frantz Joseph of Austria.

7. Soon, Spain, England, and France sent their ships to occupy Mexico.

8. A dispute arose among the allies, and soon the English and Spanish forces left Mexico back to their home country.

9. The French General Lorencez crossed with his forces the Valley of Mexico to Puebla --like Cortez in 1519 and the American Army in 1847 before him--where he engaged the Mexican army, led by Ignacio Zaragoza.

10. The French were soundly defeated at the Battle of Puebla on May the 5th of 1862.

11. Mexican Americans in the American Southwest began forming clubs as early as 1863 to oppose the French invasion and to support President Juárez and Mexico. They began fundraising efforts and gathering at festivities and poetry readings on the Cinco de Mayo. These events gradually became enormously important in coalescing the sense of culture and national identity for all Latinos in the United States.

Author's website
Source: Abelardo de la Pena newsletters@latinola.com
Sent by Dorinda Moreno fuerzamundial@gmail.com

The 'Herrera Dynasty':
6 talented siblings, all accepted to UCLA
By Letisia Marquez, 4/13/2009

It's a major accomplishment for one high school student to get into UCLA. But the six Herrera siblings were able to do something that is a true rarity: Since 2000, they have all been accepted to UCLA.

The youngest of the family — Rebeca Isabel — recently found out that she'll be attending UCLA in the fall. "Once I got accepted, it was a bit of a relief," said Rebeca, 17, who, like her five brothers, is a class valedictorian, a top high school athlete and a talented musician who plays in a popular Mexican norteño band with her siblings.

She said she never felt pressure from her family to get into UCLA. Nevertheless, she didn't want to be the one to break a family tradition that began in 2000, when her oldest sibling, Jorge Andres, 27, was accepted to UCLA. Jorge has since earned a bachelor's degree in Chicano studies and a master's in ethnomusicology and is currently working on a doctorate in ethnomusicology.

Jorge says that, like his siblings, he's been a UCLA fan since the day he was born. His uncle Andres Herrera, now an Oxnard, Calif., city councilman, played defensive back for the Bruins in the 1960s. He was a member of the football team that won the Rose Bowl in 1966 — and the Herreras have followed UCLA sports teams ever since.

But the siblings also chose UCLA because they grew up in Fillmore, a city in Ventura County, and wanted to stay close to home and family.

"We do everything together," said Luis Albino, 25, who has a bachelor's in ethnomusicology and a master's in Latin American studies. "We go to the gym together, the movies, and we work out together."

Said their mother, Oralia: "They'll even clean the yard together and pull weeds. Our neighbors say that we really do everything together."

Donning cowboy hats and leather jackets, the Herrera siblings also play together as Hermanos Herrera several times a week at Southern California dance halls, cultural events and colleges.

Like UCLA, Mexican music is in their blood.

Before Jorge Andres was even born, his father, also named Jorge, had a small harp made for him in Tijuana, Mexico.

By the time each child turned 3, Jorge Herrera had begun teaching them how to hold a harp or guitar and strum a few chords.

The father also played with his own brothers in Conjunto Hueyapan, a group featuring jarocho string music from the tropical Mexican state of Veracruz. The group continues to perform occasionally.

"We just idolized my father growing up," Luis said. "We used to go the performances and watch him and wanted to be just like him."

The younger Jorge recalled that Hermanos Herrera first played together when four of them opened for the Grammy–winning band Los Lobos at the Ventura Theater in 1988. The brothers were between 2 and 7 years old.

"Juan Pablo was dressed like us on stage, and he could barely stand up on his own," Jorge said.

The siblings have recorded six CDs in two Mexican musical styles — norteño, a northern Mexican style that features the accordion and saxophone, and huasteco, a fusion of indigenous and Spanish musical styles native to Veracruz.

Accolades have already come their way. Last year, Hermanos Herrera received a lifetime achievement award at the largest huasteco festival, held in Amatlan, Veracruz. A mural in the town honoring huasteco music includes a portrait of the band.

Steve Loza, a UCLA professor of ethnomusicology who has taught most of the Herreras, calls the siblings part of the "Herrera dynasty." He recalled their father's jarocho band performing at UCLA and noted that the Herreras' uncles, an aunt and several cousins also have attended UCLA.

"They are incredibly musically talented," Loza said. "They learned from so young and can switch easily from huasteco to norteño."

The Herreras also are a testament to the growing number of second- and third-generation Chicanos who retain their Mexican cultural roots.

"When I was growing up, it was unheard of for a young Chicano to play in a mariachi or norteño group," Loza, 56, said. "There was a lot of discrimination and this pressure to assimilate to so-called mainstream culture."

"Those attitudes have been changing," he added.

The Herreras credit their parents with their academic and musical success, saying they kept the siblings focused in school while encouraging them to pursue their sports and musical interests.

The system has certainly worked. In addition to Jorge's and Luis' academic accomplishments, Miguel Antonio, 23, earned a bachelor's in international development studies; Juan Pablo, 21, is a senior majoring in Latin American studies who plans to graduate in June; and Jose Marcelino, 19 is a sophomore who plans to major in economics and Latin American studies.

"You set the bars high and you don't accept anything lower than that," said their father. "The question was never whether they would go to college but where they would go to college."

To view a video of the Herreras, visit www.newsroom.ucla.edu/portal/ucla/electronicplay.aspx?fid=67430&id=E0C5478.

http://newsroom.ucla.edu/portal/ucla/six-herrera-siblings-accepted-88122.aspx
Sent by Juan Marinez marinezj@anr.msu.edu

Southwest Airlines and HACU Announce
5th Annual Education Travel Award Program

Applications are due Friday, June 5, 2009.

“Lánzate/Take Off”

Dallas – April 13, 2009 – Southwest Airlines, in conjunction with the Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities (HACU), announced today the opening of “Dándole Alas a Tu Éxito/Giving Flight to Your Success,” its annual education travel award program. This program starts today with online applications at www.hacu.net/hacu/Lanzate_EN.asp<http://simplesend.com/simple/t.asp?S=
126&ID=25838&NL=2657&N=33938&SI=2024494&URL=http://www.hacu.net/hacu/Lanzate_EN.asp> accepted through June 5, 2009. A panel of judges comprised of college professors and education advocates from coast to coast will gather in the summer to select the students who will receive free travel to their colleges and universities.

Each student is eligible to receive from one to four tickets which the student or an immediate family member can use in the Fall to travel to/from a college or university. The travel tickets are awarded to undergraduate and graduate Hispanic students with socio-economic need who journey away from home to pursue higher education. All of the participants must submit an essay explaining why they deserve the travel award and what inspires them to pursue a college degree. To view the criteria for the 2009 award program, please click here.

<http://simplesend.com/simple/t.asp?S=126&ID=25838&NL=2657&N=33938&SI=
2024494&URL=http://www.hacu.net/images/hacu/development/Lanzate/2009Criteria.pdf>
[http://simplesend.com/simple/uploadedimages/000126/Lanzate_WEB_SW_Airlines_Elizabeth.jpg]

"For more than twenty years, HACU has dedicated efforts to ensure Hispanic success in higher education," said Antonio Flores, President and CEO of HACU, the only national education organization for Hispanic-Serving Institutions. "HACU is proud to partner with Southwest Airlines, for the fifth year, on the ‘Dándole Alas a Tu Éxito/Giving Flight to Your Success’ travel award program. During these difficult economic times, these travel awards are essential to many students currently enrolled in college." Travel Award Recipient Elizabeth Haro

With more than 1,000 applicants in the last four years, “Lánzate/Take Off” is a successful educational program that serves underprivileged students, providing free travel for them and their families to maximize their potential and create opportunities for growth.

“The 'Lánzate/Take Off' travel award allows a student to go home during Christmas break or allows a parent to see their child at graduation,” said Christine Ortega, Southwest Airlines Corporate Community Affairs Manager. “This contact removes barriers and gives each student more confidence to pursue their dreams of higher education without worrying about the family’s economic hardships,” says Ortega.

HACU, which has its national headquarters in San Antonio, Texas, represents approximately 450 colleges and universities, including Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs), which collectively serve more than two-thirds of all Hispanic higher education students in the United States and Puerto Rico. HACU’s international membership includes leading higher education institutions in Latin America and Europe.

After nearly 38 years of service, Southwest Airlines continues to offer the best value in airline travel, allowing Customers the opportunity to travel nonstop throughout the country at a very low fare. Southwest does not charge fees for the first or second checked bag, or for snacks or changes in travel itineraries. Since 1987, the airline has maintained the lowest ratio of customer complaints to enplanements as published in the Department of Transportation’s Air Travel Consumer Report. Southwest Airlines (NYSE: LUV), the nation's largest carrier in terms of domestic passengers enplaned, currently serves 65 cities in 33 states. Based in Dallas, Southwest currently operates more than 3,300 flights a day and has more than 35,000 employees systemwide.

http://www.southwest.comhttp://simplesend.com/simple/t.asp?S=126&ID=25838&NL
=2657&N=33938&SI=2024494&URL=http://www.southwest.com

Sent by Gilda Garcia
ggarcia@unt.edu

Universities asked to establish more
Center for Mexican American Studies programs

http://www.riograndeguardian.com/archives_results.asp

AUSTIN, April 18 - The House version of the state budget includes a provision asking Texas’ 40 public universities to consider setting up centers that study the history and culture of Mexican Americans.

The provision was added as an amendment by state Rep. Roberto Alonzo, D-Dallas, during Friday evening’s marathon debate on the $178.4 billion state budget for 2010-11. Alonzo’s amendment won unanimous approval.

“We have centers for Mexican American studies at UT-Austin, UT-Arlington, the University of Houston and other universities and they have been a very positive experience,” Alonzo said, in an exclusive interview with the Guardian after his amendment was accepted. “I would like all 40 public universities to look at setting up such centers.”

Alonzo said such centers study the history, culture, economics and politics of Mexican Americans. He said such centers will help the state prepare for the rapidly changing demographics that are sweeping the state.

By 2020, the Texas Hispanic population is expected to outnumber the Anglo population, according to the State Demographer’s office. Comptroller Susan Combs produced a report on the state demographer’s projections. Between 2000 and 2040 the Hispanic population will triple in Texas’ urban areas, from 5.9 million to 17.2 million. In rural areas, the Hispanic population is expected to double, from 777,000 to 1.6 million, Combs reported.

In 1980, the Hispanic population of Texas was just under 3 million. By 2040, there will be 18.8 million Hispanics in Texas. This projection indicates that the Hispanic population will grow by 530 percent from 1980 to 2040. These changes are being driven both by high immigration rates and high birth rates, Combs reported.

“These centers for the study of Mexican American life are important because of the big and continuous change in the demographics of the state of Texas,” Alonzo said. “A center teaches students, all students, the history the culture, the economics, the politics of Mexican Americans. The rest of the state needs to know. Mexican Americans need to know.

Alonzo pointed out that Mexican Americans have shaped the history of Texas. He said if that were not the case, the Colorado River would be the Red River, San Antonio would be St. Anthony, and Amarillo would be Yellow.

“We were part of Mexico. After the1848 war, the decision was made that Mexicans that live here could keep their Spanish language, their culture, their heritage and their lands. The reality is many people today do not know this. These centers will help with the change and manage the change that is coming,” Alonzo said.

Alonzo then proceeded to take out his state legislator ID card. The front of the ID was in English and the back was in Spanish.

Texas’ public universities will not be forced to introduce centers focusing on Mexican American studies. He said in his experience forcing universities to do things does not work.

“I just want to bring it to their attention. There have been studies at UT-Arlington which show that students are happy to be there because of the Center for Mexican American Studies. I have seen how well it works. I have been part of it. I think it would be a very positive experience for all the universities that set up a program like this,” Alonzo said.

In 2003, Alonzo succeeded in getting every community college in Texas that has a high or fast growing Hispanic population to set up Mexican American Studies centers. This came about through a request from Richland College in Dallas. “They came to me to ask if the legislature could help set up a center. It had bipartisan support and I worked with then-Rep. Fred Hill, R-Dallas,” he explained.

Earlier this year, Alonzo won a top award from the National Association of Chicano Studies at the group’s state convention in San Antonio.

Multiracial Pupils to Be Counted in A New Way
By Michael Alison Chandler and Maria Glod
Washington Post, March 23, 2009
Source: Estrada Communications Group, Inc. 3.24.09

WASHINGTON, DC — Public schools in the Washington region and elsewhere are abandoning
their check-one-box approach to gathering information about race and ethnicity in an effort to
develop a more accurate portrait of classrooms transformed by immigration and interracial
marriage. Next year, they will begin a separate count of students who are of more than one race.
For many families in the District, Montgomery and other local counties that have felt forced to
deny a part of their children’s heritage, the new way of counting, mandated by the federal
government, represents a long-awaited acknowledgment of their identity: Enrollment forms will
allow students to identify as both white and American Indian, for example, or black and Asian.
But changing labels will make it harder to monitor progress of groups that have trailed in school,
including black and Latino students.

Racial and ethnic information, collected when children register for school, can inform school
board decisions on reading programs, discipline procedures or admissions policies for gifted
classes. The government looks at test scores of [non-white] groups to help determine whether
schools make the grade under the No Child Left Behind law. In an increasingly data-driven
culture, educators also scrutinize such test scores and enrollment figures to pick programs meant
to narrow achievement gaps and equalize academic opportunity.

Under the new policy, the count of Latino students is expected to grow as the non-Hispanic black
and white counts diminish. Many will fall into a new group called “two or more races.” In
schools with diverse populations, especially in such immigrant destinations as the Washington
region, there are likely to be notable demographic shifts, at least on paper. That could shake up
how educational challenges are measured and reroute funding for reforms.

“This will make our whole education system look different, and nobody will know whether we
are going forward or backward,” said Gary Orfield, co-director of the Civil Rights Project at the
University of California in Los Angeles. Along with the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and other groups, the Civil Rights Project has raised
concerns about how the Education Department will handle the new data.

For decades, students have been counted in one of five racial and ethnic groups: American Indian
or Alaska native; Asian or Pacific Islander; Hispanic; non-Hispanic black; or non-Hispanic
white. The categories date to the 1960s and were standardized in 1977 to promote affirmative
action and monitor discrimination in housing, employment, voting rights and education.
Starting in 2010, under Education Department rules approved two years ago to comply with a
government-wide policy shift, parents will be able to check all boxes that apply in a two-step
questionnaire with reshaped categories. First, they will indicate whether a student is of Hispanic
or Latino origin, or not. (The two terms will encompass one group.) Then they will identify a
student as one or more of the following: American Indian or Alaska native; Asian; black or
African American; native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander; or white.

The change is mandatory for new students, but the government is urging schools to apply it to
all. The U.S. Census reached a similar point in 2000, when 6.8 million people, or 2 percent of the
population, were counted for the first time as multiracial. The share was 4 percent for people
under 18.

The Montgomery County school system and others in Maryland already have begun asking
families for updated racial and ethnic information.

In the Fairfax County community of Reston, Lake Anne Elementary School reflects the
evolution of a country now led by a president born to a white Kansan mother and a black Kenyan
father. Julian Bryant, a second-grader at Lake Anne, has a white mother and black father. Elena
Castrence, also in second grade, inherited her father’s Filipino traditions along with those of her
white mother. And Giselle Walter, in third grade, claims Latino, Russian and Irish heritage.
“I want my kids to know they are biracial,” said Julian’s mother, Shelley Bryant. “We say, ‘You
are a mixture.’ We put up his hands and say, ‘See? Daddy is a little darker. Mommy is a little
lighter. We took a mixture of Mommy and Daddy and made you.’ “

How such students have been counted varies from place to place. Many Virginia schools have
allowed parents to select “other.” But in Maryland and the District, families like the Bryants until
now have been forced to choose black or white.

Such choices can be difficult. Charles Guo, a senior at Thomas Jefferson High School for
Science and Technology in Fairfax County, said he feels closely connected to his Mexican-born
mother because he grew up with her extended family. But he also looks like his Chinese-born
father and tends to identify with Asian Americans at school.

The Fairfax school system, the region’s largest, began counting multiracial students in 1994 at
the urging of parents. Today, about 10,000 Fairfax students — or 6 percent of the 169,000 — are
multiracial. The share is 14 percent at Lake Anne Elementary.

Fairfax Superintendent Jack D. Dale said racial analysis of test scores has helped uncover groups
of struggling students. A few years ago, officials found that black students in Fairfax lagged
those in less-affluent Richmond and Norfolk on state tests. But an increasingly diverse school
system needs a more sophisticated snapshot, he said.

“The racial categories have lost their meaning,” Dale said. He pointed out that the black or
African American group could include a student born in Virginia or Nigeria, while the white
group includes students of Middle Eastern descent.

As the counting process changes, so will the way the data are assembled and reported. Only
summarized information is reported to the federal government. All students who indicate
Hispanic or Latino ethnicity will be counted in that group, regardless of their race. All non-
Hispanic students identified with more than one race will be joined in the category of “two or
more races.”

Many civil rights advocates agree that it’s necessary to document the growing number of
multiracial students, but they say these categories will mask valuable information about race that
could be used to analyze educational challenges some groups face. They say it would be more
accurate to report the data in detail, with racial and ethnic combinations.

“If we don’t know that some multiracial, Hispanic and black students are doing worse,” said
Melissa Herman, a sociologist at Dartmouth College, “we can conveniently ignore that they are
doing worse.”

Education Department officials have said the new rules strike a balance, providing more details
about students without creating an overly cumbersome reporting system.

The No Child Left Behind law, signed in 2002, spotlights the test scores of racial and ethnic
groups. Sometimes, whether schools meet standards hangs on the performance of a few students.
Relabeling students could make a difference.

The new rules will give states flexibility to use existing racial and ethnic categories for No Child
Left Behind, creating a double-coding for certain students: A student could be counted as black
for some purposes and Hispanic for others. But a Virginia education official said the state will
use only the new racial and ethnic categories. An informal poll by the Education Department
found that so far, 15 states are planning to use the new categories for No Child Left Behind; most
are still deciding.

The 2005 National Assessment of Educational Progress tried out the new rules. The Civil Rights
Project found that the share of Hispanic students grew significantly compared with the share
under the old system and that test score averages fluctuated. In eighth-grade reading, the
proficiency rate in many states rose for Hispanic and white students and dipped for black
students.

As educators sort through confusion, many families look forward to making a clear statement.
Mary Ann Dawedeit, a Montgomery mother, said that for nearly two decades she has had to
choose whether to identify her three sons as black, like their father, or white, like her. “It will
feel good to more accurately say what your kids are,” she said.
“You have to honor both parents’ backgrounds. It’s hard to check one box.”

Our Beautiful Language
Johnny Peña, Houston, Texas

How many times have we heard one of our own people, or we ourselves say “I don’t want them to grow up speaking English with a Spanish accent”? As a result of this idea those children never learned to speak the language of their ancestors. Spanish is an immensely beautiful language and yet how many times have we been reluctant to display our ability to speak it. Even from childhood, I was always fascinated when I went to a movie and listened to some heavily accented Spanish or Mexican actor like Ricardo Montalban or Fernando Lamas speaking English with a vocabulary that was second to none. On the other hand, how many times have we heard someone speak impeccable Spanish and left us tremendously envious? Many New Mexicans my age, and older, spoke our own New Mexico Spanish before we spoke English, so we are naturally blessed with an accent that is very unique to New Mexico. This is an accent that only a New Mexican or someone who lived in New Mexico can detect. To me my accent is something I am extremely proud of and wear it like a badge of honor, for all to see.

From the language of our grandparents, what ever happened to “Buenos dias le de Dios Don Adolfo, or Doña Victoriana, como amanecio (may God give you a good day Don Adolfo, or Doña Victoriana, how did you receive the dawning)? The respectful titles of “Don” and “Doña” were common place among our grandparents and today, even among older New Mexican. However this form of greeting is very seldom used anymore. My grandmother, on my mother’s side, Doña Victoriana Marquez de Otero, a very loving and gentle woman, showed surprise by saying “Alabo los dulces nombres! (I praise the sacred names).” I really didn’t know the language and either didn’t have access to a Spanish dictionary or was too lazy to look up any of these words. I would laugh thinking, why would she say “Al agua los dulces nombres (To the water with the sweet names),” a statement that makes no sense. Another very common saying was “Dios no castiga con palos ni azotes (God does not punish with clubbings or beatings). Dios mio, que paso (Mi heavens, what happened), was a very common question used by our elders when something unusual happened. Ese huevo quiere sal (That guy wants something), a very unusual saying, was the way my father referred to someone who was hinting for a favor. My step grandfather, on my father’s side, Don Lizardo Salazar, always referred to me as “que hombre tan bien parado (what a tall and proud standing man)’. At the time I didn’t know what that meant, but I dearly loved to hear him say it.

Because people had more time available to them, they had more time to think and compose poems (Versos). What ever happened to all those Versos that we as children used to hear and ignore because we didn’t understand the richness they brought to our lives. My Father used to recite several Versos that he had learned over the years. Probably the one he recited most was

“El Verso de Luperto Gonzales”

You soy Luperto Gonzales y me tratan de ladron.

Me siguio la policia de Albuquerque al Cabezon.

Al pasar por la angostura, el Pajaro Azul me espio,

Me hizo levatar la manos y ai mismo me mato.

Luperto Gonzales was from San Mateo and father of one of my father’s Compadres. At his present age of 97 years, my Father doesn’t remember who composed the Verso.

After I grew up and traveled throughout Latin America I ran across numerous other very descriptive sayings. Hearing and learning these sayings merely re-enforced my love and admiration for this wonderful language my forefathers gave me. As I grew older, I soon

realized that I was able to think in two languages, what a fascinating feeling. There is, however, one problem, which I have never been able to master and that is to calculate in

Spanish. Because I learned math in English, that is the language I calculate in.

The world is definitely changing and our offspring must keep up with these changes. We New Mexicans, however, do have one advantage unlike Hispanics from Texas, Arizona,

California and Colorado. We were blessed with forefathers who insisted on making our state officially bilingual-Spanish/English. We should feel honored that we’ve managed to maintain this blessing, in spite of the constant barrage of outside pressures. The only other place, in the United States, that is officially bilingual Spanish-English is Miami, Florida. Not the State of Florida, only the City of Miami. The Cuban Americans have proudly held on to their Heritage and our beautiful Language.

The young New Mexican, man or woman, that speaks English and Spanish not only propagates our ancestry but is respected for his uncommon knowledge of his ancestral

tongue. Much to my surprise, I have found over the years that non-Hispanics respected me more if I openly carried conversations in both languages, and was not ashamed of it.

Of major importance, in this day and time, is the fact that the world is no longer as large as it was 60 years ago, when I was a boy. At one time in our lives we saw Latin America and Spain as places we would like to go visit but, we thought they had no real value in the way of commerce. Spain and the Latin American countries are rapidly becoming industrialized and the need to “communicate” with them is of vital importance. People in those countries are trying to learn English, but because they are trying to learn English does not justify us not trying to learn & perfect our Spanish. Latin America and the Iberian Peninsula have two key and important languages, Spanish and Portuguese. Individuals that speak Spanish have the basics of Portuguese and that language is relatively easy to learn.

My aspirations of seeing my grandchildren speaking Spanish may hopefully come to fruition, in an English speaking environment. I believe that for each language a person speaks, he is another person. The greatest gift I can give my children and grand-children is the language and history of our ancestors, for it is as rich as is the history of United States. Can we, New Mexicans, keep this Cultural Pride alive and moving, without losing our allegiance to the United States of America? Without a doubt, that is very easy because we New Mexican love our country as much as we love our Heritage. My grandfather used to say “Como es posible que sepas a donde vas si no sabes de donde vienes?”

Sent by Rueben Salaz saljustin@msn.com

The Latino Heritage Museum (LHM)

Over thirty–five years ago, responding to the growing demands for recognition by many Hispanic organizations, a Joint Resolution was approved on September 17, 1968 by the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, 90th Congress.

Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That the President is hereby authorized and requested to issue annually a proclamation designating the week including September 15 and 16 as "National Hispanic Heritage Week"

The time period was selected to tie in with the celebrations of Mexican Independence Day and other Latin American Independence Day celebrations commemorated in our country during September 15 and 16.

Twenty years after the first resolution was passed, congress expanded Hispanic Heritage Week to Hispanic Heritage Month on August 17, 1988 .

It took over 400 years for the U. S. government to recognize the contributions of Latinos/Hispanics in America . Every American should know that the oldest, continuously inhabited city in the United States is St. Augustine, Florida (founded in 1565), and that Hispanic culture had a firm root in the Southeast and Southwest of what became the United States before the English arrived at Jamestown and before the Pilgrims dropped anchor in Massachusetts Bay. If, indeed, every American was taught these facts, he or she is unlikely to be taught much more about the Hispanic contribution to American civilization, however; it’s just not a part of today’s classrooms and textbooks. It is never brought home that Spanish, Hispanicized Africans and Native Americans and their mixed-blood descendants provided the basis for the development of much of American agriculture, mining, transportation grid, city planning, architecture and even law in the Southeast and Southwest. For example, such concepts as the right of women to inherit and own property, homestead rights, and the rights of adopted children to be treated the same as genetic offspring are examples of originally Hispanic legal principles that touch us today in the very heart of our existence: our families. Likewise, the Hispanic background of the United States helps us to understand the important role that Latinos have played throughout the 20th century in the development of this nation.

Hispanics have risen to great heights and established their mark on behalf of U.S. society in many fields of endeavor. There are literally too many distinctive landmarks of Hispanic progress during the past century to note.

The Latino Heritage Museum (LHM) takes on this task to research, document and educate Americans, Latinos/Hispanics and the world of these great accomplishments.

LHM realize the importance of this lost or forgotten history and showcases many surprising facts about the contributions of Latinos in the field of science, aerospace, communication medicine, and engineering. It also presents pioneers such as those who were the first in politics, education, entertainment, sports, media, cinema, and literature.

We celebrate Hispanic Heritage Month September 15 - October 15 to honor these achievements. The information LHM share is not just for Latinos but for everyone. It’s time that we as Americans understand that it took many different cultures to make this nation great. And as true Americans we celebrate Hispanic Heritage everyday!

http://www.latinoheritage101.com/Home_Page.html Website set up 2008.

The Latino Heritage Museum (LHM) is an inspirational tribute to Latinos, Hispanic Scientists, inventors, and pioneers in the field of science, aerospace, communications, medicine, and business, sports, politics and arts/entertainment.

LHM is a touring multimedia presentation, which consists of a museum containing over 100 authentic artifacts. The museum consists of a collection of the most significant Hispanic memorabilia collectibles, rare items, photographs, personal letters and autographs of Latino pioneers from around the world. LHM is a pioneer, the first of its kind, there’s no other museum like it.

The website has a list of Famous Firsts by Hispanic Americans, with links to website information for the individual.

Government

Member of U.S. Congress: Joseph Marion Hernández, 1822, delegate from the Florida territory.
U.S. Representative: Romualdo Pacheco, a representative from California, was elected in 1876 by a one-vote margin. He served for four months before his opponent succeeded in contesting the results. In 1879 he was again elected to Congress, where he served for two terms.
U.S. Senator: Octaviano Larrazolo was elected in 1928 to finish the term of New Mexico senator Andieus Jones, who had died in office. He served for six months before falling ill and stepping down; he died in 1930. The first Hispanic senator to serve an entire term (and then some) was Dennis Chávez, of New Mexico, who served from 1935 through 1962.
Administrator of the Federal Aviation Agency: General Elwood "Pete" Quesada helped create this agency to manage the growing aviation field and improve airline safety. He served in this position from 1958 to 1961. The agency became the Federal Aviation Administration in 1966.
U.S. Treasurer: Romana Acosta Bañuelos, 1971–1974.
U.S. cabinet member: Lauro F. Cavazos, 1988–1990, Secretary of Education.
U.S. Surgeon General: Antonia Coello Novello, 1990–1993. She was also the first woman ever to hold the position.
U.S. Secretary of Transportation: Federico Peña, 1993.
U.S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development: Henry Cisneros, 1993.
U.S. Attorney General: Alberto Gonzales, 2005.
Democrat to run for President: Bill Richardson, 2008. Though he eventually lost the nomination to Barack Obama, Richardson made history by entering the race.

Military

Flying ace: Col. Manuel J. Fernández, Jr., who flew 125 combat missions in the Korean War.
Medal of Honor recipient: Philip Bazaar, a Chilean member of the U.S. Navy, for bravery during the Civil War. He received his Congressional Medal of Honor in 1865.
Admiral, U.S. Navy: David G. Farragut. In 1866, he became the first U.S. naval officer ever to be awarded the rank of admiral. The first Hispanic American to become a four-star admiral was Horacio Rivero of Puerto Rico, in 1964.
General, U.S. Army: Richard E. Cavazos, 1976. In 1982, he became the army's first Hispanic four-star general.
Secretary of the Navy: Edward Hidalgo, 1979.

Science and Medicine

Astronaut: Franklin Chang-Dìaz, 1986. He flew on a total of seven space-shuttle missions.

The first female Hispanic astronaut was Ellen Ochoa, whose first of four shuttle missions was in 1991.
Nobel Prize in Physics: Luiz Walter Alvarez, 1968, for discoveries about subatomic particles. Later, he and his son proposed the now-accepted theory that the mass dinosaur extinction was caused by a meteor impact.
Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine: Severo Ochoa, 1959, for the synthesis of ribonucleic acid (RNA).

Literature

Novel in English, written and published in U.S.: María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, Who Would Have Thought It? (1872). She's better known for her 1885 second novel, The Squatter and the Don.
Pulitzer Prize for Fiction: Oscar Hijuelos, 1990, for his novel The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love.
Pulitzer Prize for Drama: Nilo Cruz, 2003, for his play Anna in the Tropics.

Music

Opera diva: Lucrezia Bori, who debuted at the Metropolitan Opera in 1912.
Rock star: Richie Valens, 1958.
Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductee: Carlos Santana, 1998.

Film

Oscar, Best Actor: José Ferrer, 1950, Cyrano de Bergerac.

Oscar, Best Supporting Actress: Rita Moreno, 1961, West Side Story.
Oscar, Best Supporting Actor: Anthony Quinn, 1952, Viva Zapata!.
Hollywood director: Raoul Walsh, 1914, The Life of General Villa.
Matinee idol: Ramón Navarro, 1923, The Prisoner of Zenda.
Leading lady: Dolores del Río, 1925, Joanne.

Drama

Tony, Best Director: José Quintero, 1973.
Tony, Best Supporting Actress: Rita Moreno, 1975, The Ritz. In 1977, Moreno became the first Hispanic American (and the second person ever) to have won an Oscar, a Grammy, a Tony, and an Emmy, picking up the last of those for her performance as guest host on The Muppet Show.

Television

Star of a network television show: Desi Arnaz, 1952, I Love Lucy.
Broadcaster of the Year: Geraldo Rivera, 1971.

Baseball

Major league player: Esteban Bellán, 1871, Troy Haymakers.
World Series player: Adolfo “Dolf” Luque, 1919, relief pitcher for the Cincinnati Reds, against the infamous “Black Sox.” (He later pitched for the New York Giants in the 1933 Series and was credited with the win in the final game.)
All-Star Game player: Alfonso “Chico” Carrasquel, 1951, starting shortstop for the American League.
Rookie of the Year: Luis Aparicio, 1956, shortstop, Chicago White Sox.
No-hitter: Juan Marichal, June 15, 1963, for the San Francisco Giants, against the Houston Colt .45s.

Hall of Fame inductee: Roberto Clemente, 1973. He was also the first Hispanic player to serve on the Players Association Board and to reach 3,000 hits
Team owner: Arturo “Arte” Moreno bought the Anaheim Angels in 2003, becoming the first Hispanic owner of any major U.S. sports franchise. In 2005, he renamed it the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim.

Football

NFL player: Ignacio “Lou” Molinet, 1927.
NFL draft pick: Joe Aguirre, 1941.
Starting NFL quarterback: Tom Flores, 1960.
#1 NFL draft pick: Jim Plunkett, 1971.
Football Hall of Fame inductee: Tom Fears, 1970. He also became the first Hispanic American head coach in 1967.

Other Sports

Grand Slam championship winner: Richard “Pancho” González, 1948.
LPGA Hall of Fame inductee: Nancy López, 1987. In 1978, she became the first player to have won the the Rookie of the Year Award, Player of the Year Award, and Vare Trophy in the same season.
Heavyweight boxing champ: John Ruiz, 2001, defeating Evander Holyfield.
NHL 1st-round draft pick: Scott Gomez, 1998.

Other Hispanic-American Firsts

Supermodel: Christy Turlington.
Labor leader: Juan Gómez, 1883. The first female Hispanic labor leader of note was Lucy González Parsons, 1886.
Entertainer on the cover of TIME magazine: Joan Baez, 1962.

Sent by Juan Marinez
marinezj@anr.msu.edu

St. Isidore the Farmer (b. 1070 – d. 1130)
Feast day: May 15th
Spanish saint and patron saint of farmers and farmworkers

St. Maria, Farmwife
Feast day: September 14th
Spanish saint and farmwife

St. Isidore the Farmer was born in Madrid, Spain, about the year 1110. He came from a poor and humble family, and worked as a farm hand on a large estate. He was prayerful and devoted to the Mass and the Holy Eucharist. He loved the good earth and he was known to be careful in his farming practices and honest in his work. Together with his wife St. Maria, they led a pious life, ever charitable and willing to help neighbors in distress and the poor who passed by their doorstep. For more on St. Isidore, visit our website for more about St. Isidore and his wife Maria. You can also order prayer cards, the St. Isidore Novena, and other items useful for rural life celebrations and events.

Editor: St Isidore's Feastday was first inserted into the calendar for the United States in the year 1947. The patron saint of farmers and farm-workers, honoring the farm workers, the land and the fruits of their labor. http://www.ncrlc.com/isidoreandmaria.html

http://www.abqjournal.com/news/metro/182242151730newsmetro05-18-09.htm

Monday, May 18, 2009

Corrales Pageant Honors Patron Saint of Farming

By Aurelio Sanchez
Journal Staff Writer
          The mystery of the uniquely New Mexican pageant play, "Los Matachines," has continued unabated for hundreds of years, as it was again Sunday in Corrales to honor San Ysidro, the patron saint of farming.
        Los Matachines de Bernalillo acted out a ritual dance in Corrales that is said to represent the victory of good over evil.
        Different versions of the pageant are played out in New Mexico villages and pueblos every year, its mystery bolstered by uncertain New World beginnings altered by New World adaptations.
        "There are so many different versions all over New Mexico because they weren't recorded," said Charles Aguilar, a violin player in the Bernalillo matachines.
        The Bernalillo parish, the mother church for San Ysidro de Corrales, has continued the matachines tradition for more than 300 years, Aguilar said. Sunday's fiesta honored San Ysidro, the patron saint of farming, and parishioners carried his santo from the old church to the new one as part of the feast day observance.
        "People remembered what they saw and heard, and then they imitated it in their own versions," he said.
        Even the term "matachines" evokes wonder. The word matachin comes from 16th century French and Spanish, and can be translated to mean "clowning," or "trickery," generally referring to the men who dance as a group.
        Meanwhile, on Sunday as onlookers watched from both sides of Corrales Road, parallel rows of colorfully costumed soldiers formed a rough square, as they danced in place to the rhythmic cadence of guitar and violin music, the soldiers shaking gourd rattles in one hand and waving in the other hand a three-pronged wand, called a palma. Only the eyes of the soldiers were visible, as dark masks and scarves covered their faces under elaborate colorful headdresses.
        Inside the square of dancers, two main characters vied in mortal combat: El Toro, a malevolent bull, dressed in a headdress topped with bull's horns, representing evil, charging a whip-bearing character representing good, who repressed evil with a well-aimed crack of his whip.
        Told that the whip lashes sounded and looked real, Paul Chavez, who played the bull, said he was quick enough to avoid most of the lashes, but he attested to their authenticity.
        "I've got the welts to prove it."
        One story says it commemorates the casting off of more than 800 years of Muslim Moorish rule by the Spanish in the early 16th century.
        Another version casts a female lead character, La Malinche, as an Aztec paramour of Spanish Conquistador Hernán Cortés, who helped Cortés defeat Montezuma and conquer the Aztecs.
        In the version staged by the Bernalillo matachines Sunday, La Malinche represents purity and charity in the form of two young girls dressed in white.
        "I do it for God," 11-year-old Danielle Archuleta said, explaining why she wanted to play La Malinche, as her mother Lee Ann Archuleta and aunt, Josette Lopez, looked on proudly.
        "It's a big honor because she is doing it for God," Archuleta said, adding that another of her daughters has played the role, as she herself did when she was a little girl.

While information regarding its origins and development in the Southwest is featured in our Mestizo.book, we would like to provide more detail and bring it up to date focusing on Tony “Ham” Guerrero and Tortilla Factory.

Tony is old school as a 64 year old leader of the band Tortilla Factory. He believes in “la onda Chicana”, the Texas version of 1960’s Chicano consciousness that his music represents. His revitalized Tortilla Factory has recently been nominated to receive a Grammy award for Best Tejano Album. His current sound is not the Tejano sound of Conjunto, the peppy and folksy music or the slick, post Selena radio pop in Spanish. In it there is what Joe Gross describes as “a juggernaut of heavy, almost psychedelic Latin funk that Guerrero thinks defined the band.” It wasn’t a two, three minute radio friendly song, states Guerrero. While the album starts with a traditional folkloric song, it adds complex rhythms, “jazz funk” in the middle, a mambo...

The fusion of jazz, Latin music, funk and rock with African American lead singer Bobby Butler brought about Little Joe Hernández’s band La Familia came to embody “la onda Chicana.” According to retired professor of Anthropology and Ethnomusicology Manuel Peña, what distinguishes Tortilla Factory from Santana was the way they blended the polka ranchera (of Tejano-Texas German roots) with funk bands like Tower of Power. “That, says Peña, was a brilliant stroke that was uniquely Tejano.” Prof. Peña has documented Mexican American music in award winning books e.g. The Texas Mexican Conjunto and
The Mexican American Orquesta. He further enumerates—“La Familia, Tortilla Factory, Latin Breed and Jimmy Edwards (band) were the epitome of being Chicano in the 1970’s. It was one of the most exciting, progressive regional music styles anywhere.”

According to Guerrero, the roots of this Tejano style began with Beto Villa who is the founder of the Orquesta Tejana, a Latin-tinged big band music in 1947. “Villa studied the Mariachis, the sound of the trumpets, the violins. They blended that with the German polkas which the Mexican people in south Texas embraced and loved.” There is no one “Tejano” music any more any more than there is one kind of Mexican American who lives in Texas. Guerrero who was born in 1944 in San Angelo, Texas, was raised by his grandparents who started him with trumpet lessons when he was 8 years old.

After High School, he went to the well-regarded Berklee School of Jazz in Boston. By 1968, he had joined Little Joe Hernandez and the Latinaires where he became the de facto musical director. Bobby Butler an Arkansas native, known latter as “el Charro Negro”, fell in love with Mexican music while working alongside migrant workers. He was to later join
the Latinaires where his rendition of “La Enorme Distancia” was floored everyone. Guerrero saw him as the Chicano Nat King Cole. After the band was changed to Little Joe y La Familia and after its breakup years later, Guerrero sought to start his own group that could incorporate big band chops with then electric funk, one that could blend soul and Chicano music.

He brought in Butler, cut some demos and the rest is history. The band hit the road playing in “the taco circuit,’ from Brownsville to San Jose and recorded about 20 albums. Royalties were scarce and the band never registered its songs with a publisher. After Tortilla Factory reached its natural end in 1986, Guerrero moved his family to Austin, Texas where he played jazz and salsa at Club Islas. Burned out, he had little good to say about major label interest in Tejano in the late 1980’s. “They took anyone that was available.”

With his health declining, a diabetic and failing kidney, Guerrero no longer plays the trumpet, limiting his creative activities to singing. When Tortilla Factory pianist Tony “Toke” Gutiérrez was terminally ill with a brain tumor, Guerrero contacted Butler for a reunion gig in 2006 to raise money for Gutiérrez. That gig planted the seed for “All That Jazz” which was subsequently nominated for a Grammy. Tortilla Factory is back with Guerrero’s version of a musically sophisticated Tejano. And the diversity among Chicanos and their music continues in their evolutionary path.

Happy and Insightful Reading,

Arnoldo Carlos Vento, PhD
Executive Officer

http://www.bookfinder.com/author/arnoldo-carlos-vento
Sent by Dorinda Moreno
fuerzamundial@gmail.com

A local cultural center with a national reputation and a global vision

La Peña Cultural Center Celebrates its 34th Anniversary

La Peña along with muralists, musicians, writers, composers, spoken word artists, and community activists will come together on June 6 and 13, 2009 to celebrate its 34th birthday. This June La Peña is proud to unveil three commissioned portable murals and a work in progress of a Suite of music about La Peña that share these reasons to celebrate.

There are plenty of reasons to celebrate:

Another World is Possible: La Peña makes that dream become a reality in small and large ways; a place where artists who are in Diaspora can call home, a place to preserve and pass on diverse cultural traditions; and organize to improve lives in our community and abroad.
Celebrating Life and Community: La Peña is a kaleidoscope of our diverse communities. "Generation after generation, community after community, La Peña continues to be a vibrant community center, promoting cultural understanding and social justice through the arts" says Nadine Ghammache, Lebanese-American member of the staff collective
Filling the Gaps: La Peña is committed to filling gaps left by the devastated economy and a government that does not provide the quality of public education needed in today's world. La Peña continues to provide programming that is affordable and relevant to the pressing issues of today, and to involve community in thought, art and action. Over 250 students each week take low cost and free workshops in Latin American music and dance, popular theater and hip hop. Evening programs explore issues from environmental justice to the war in Iraq, offering opportunities to reflect, discuss, envision and to act.

Surviving and thriving during this economic recession: La Peña has thrived over the past 34 years despite numerous odds, including the Bush years and the dot.com bust. La Peña continues because of grass roots support and because of the progressive art that emanates from our stage!

CALENDAR INFORMATION
Murals Unveiling & Open House

Saturday June 06, 09 o FREE Donations Accepted. 3-5pm: murals viewing. 6pm: concert
Join us for a reception & unveiling of portable murals commissioned by La Peña from Bay Area muralists Ray Patlán, Juana Alicia Montoya, Tirso Gonzalez, and Susie Lundy. Starting at 6pm we will have performances by youth and adult students of La Peña's classes including Latin jazz, Afro-Peruvian music, Puerto Rican bomba, accordion, guitar, and theater. More details: http://www.lapena.org/event/1110

Musical Suite: La Peña - Ayer, Hoy y P'alante

Saturday June 13 o $12 adv. $14 dr. 7pm: art installation viewing. 8pm: concert

Come celebrate our anniversary with a work in progress performance of La Peña - Ayer, Hoy y P'alante, an original suite of music about La Peña by Wayne Wallace with libretto by Aya de Leon and performed by the La Peña International Orchestra. This work received the prestigious Creative Work Fund grant and integrates La Peña oral histories into a contemporary musical suite about La Peña and the social and cultural movements that make up this community. The La Peña International Orchestra features Wayne Wallace, Aya de Leon, Lichi Fuentes, Hector Lugo, Josh Jones, Ayla Davila, Donna Viscuso, Valerie Troutt and DJ Wonway Posibul. Come early and enjoy an oral history art installation: Creating Home Away from Home, an exhibit of items & objects by ex-political prisoners & exiles from Chile. More details: http://www.lapena.org/event/1117

For More Information Please Contact La Peña at 510-849-2568. Fernando ext. 15, Paul ext. 17 or Nadine ext. 12

LAREDO'S JULIA VERA IN HARRISON FORD MOVIE

COL. 34 LAREDOS MARCH 2009
FROM DR. NEO GUTIERREZ

When do pride and admiration for someone become overwhelming? I found out yesterday when I viewed on opening day Harrison Ford's new movie, "Crossing Over," a gut-wrenching account of man's interconnectedness to man, or the lack thereof. And my source of pride and admiration: Laredo's gift to Hollywood, Julia Vera, who is in 5 full frontal camera shots in two scenes with megastar Ford. Her time on camera altogether, maybe 3 minutes, or so, but that's all she needed to show she was powerful, in command, an outstanding complete artist to the nth degree.

My special pride in her performance? I was Julia's first dance teacher when she was in my dance class at Christen Jr. HS in Laredo, when I started my teaching career. She was in my very first performing dance group in Laredo, in a school assembly. And now, look at her...

But let's backtrack for a moment. About the film: an MGM release at the end of February, Ford shares star status with Ashley Judd, Alicia Braga (Sonia's niece), and Ray Liotta. The subject is super-important, and definitely pulls the heartstrings. The lady sitting next to me at the movie theater cried through the entire movie. The subject is one not far from most of us, immigrants from around the world who enter L.A. every day, full of hope and visions of a better life. But they have little notion of what that life may cost. The desperate situations of the immigrants test the humanity of immigration enforcement officers, Harrison Ford being one of them in the film. Written and directed by Wayne Kramer, the film explores the allure of the American dream and the reality that immigrants find--and create--in the 21st century in L.A. The desperation to become legal in this country places incredible stress on an overloaded American system. The very realistic film is full of drama, thuggish violence and profanity. It's reminiscent of movie hits "Crash" and "Babel." In the film there are many stories that interweave, showing us different characters, each with a more desperate situation than the other one.

If you want to get a good feel of the L.A. geography, you will appreciate the aerial photography from neighborhood to neighborhood.

Harrison Ford plays a truly big-hearted sensitive lonely man, who works for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). In the film he becomes concerned with a little boy, Juan, who is left behind in L.A. when his mother is caught working in a factory and is caught in an ICE raid. Alice Braga plays the kid's mother, Julia Vera plays the kid's grandmother, who lives in Tijuana, across from San Diego, Calif. For sure, the film stresses the urgency of an important national problem.

Julia Vera, btw, has over 60 Hollywood movie, tv, and commercial production credits, all listed in (www.imdb.com). Go there and you will be impressed.

Maybe it's a timely coincidence that as the subject of immigration is treated in Julia's latest film, she has just recently in real life been named Chairperson of the International Institute of Los Angeles, an important organization helping to find solutions since 1914 to the problems of real-life newly-arrived immigrants. Julia's volunteer, non-paid work , furthers the institute which has worked with hundreds of thousands of immigrants and other low-income people to enable them to overcome the barriers that they face in becoming successful and contributing members in their new society. Says Julia:We bring a smile of hope to the faces of children in our childcare centers, we offer reassurance to seniors who join in the weekly dances at our senior center, and we extend a hand up to refugees and immigrants who begin their first jobs with our help. We have changed thousands of lives by giving our participants a new beginning. We help families become self-sufficient, and we promote cross-cultural understanding. To accomplish all this we employ over 200 dedicated, multicultural staff to provide childcare, senior services, nutrition services, and employment services from over 25 centers and offices in southern and central California."

So who is Julia Vera? Born in Laredo, she moved to L.A. in 1965 with her husband and four children. She had her fifth child in California. She started as a census taker, while she kept all her kids in school, busy with classes, baseball, football, and cheerleading. In 1990 she joined Comision Femenil and was elcted national president of the organizaiton dedicated to the Latina woman and her family, addressing issues of health, education, participation in the political arena, and in business. Julia has also been involved in political campaigns of many of her friends, making phone calls, waling the precinct, knocking on doors and distributing flyers.

In 1992 she was hired by UCLA through Dr. Patsy Mendoza, ex-Laredoan, in the Latino Outreach program. (Neo Note: KSmall world. Patsy was my replacement teacher at Christen when I left Laredo to teach in L.A.)

In 1998 Julia decided to dedicate herself to acting. She joined the Screen Actors Guild, and thereby gets to vote for the Academy Awards. After realizing that she had to miss work for auditions, she decided to give up her job and go for broke in show business. She had never looked back.

She says, "Being bilingual is a plus. All of my commercials and some of the tv shows and movies have required me to speak Spanish. I have traveled to different parts of the world through this wonderful work. Now I am also busy with my work as chairperson of the International Institute. I trust God, and I do good. "

But let's jump over to Mexico's gift to Hollywood, sultry Salma Hayek, who's really cashing in these days as producer of "Ugly Betty" in its American version. Of course, most recently you may have seen her on tv news breastfeeding a starving baby in Sierra Leone, Africa. At any rate, Salma's big day in February was Valentine's Day, when she decided to marry her new baby's father, French financier Francois Henri Pinault, in a civil ceremony in Paris.And their daughter's name, what else but Valentina!

But to end with more local goodies. I got a call from Betty Kramer, daughter of my mentor Mrs. Estela Zamora Kramer, of San Antonio. First Latino UT Chancellor Dr. Francisco Cigarroa's name came up because Betty's mom was Dr. Cigarroa's swimming teacher in Laredo when he was a kid known as "Kiko." The conversation with Betty was particularly well-timed since the day before her call Dr. Cigarroa was at the Lulacs Noche Mexicana where he was named Sr. Int'l 2009, ending my same title in 2008. But about Mrs. Kramer's importance in my life: she was responsible for getting Mr. J.W. Nixon, LISD Supt., and Mr. Fernando Pena, Christen principal, to give me permission to teach dance when I was 19 in 1955 and a new teacher at Christen. What a lady Mrs. Kramer is! I was the first male dance teacher in Laredo, so everybody was very nervous about me. Imagine, this past Dec. in my 40th annual dance workshop for Laredo dancers   taught by Ani Vera, 9 of 30 workshop dancers were guys!

And a note from Norma Adamo in Laredo: Jennie Leyendecker Reed, Irma Mireles, and I went to La Posada for George O. Jackson's photo exhibit. We had a great time with wine, all you can eat food, music by Jerry Quintero, and the gracious hostess was Gayle Aker Rodriguez of 201 Gallery. George and his brothers, lots of beautiful Laredo people, including Evan Quiros, all there.

And for a closing thought: it was bound to happen. There had to be a Gutierrez somewhere in the messy picture. OctuMom Nadya Suleman's ex-husband's name: Marcos Gutierrez. And no, he's not the father of the 14 kids.

. Mrs. Kramer was the Laredo teacher that established the tradition of great line dancing in LISD, as in The Golden Spurs and The Silver Roses. One year she brought to LA The Golden Spurs, and in one weekend they danced at BevHillsHS, Disneyland, Universal Studios, and at a Dodger game at Dodger Stadium.

Time for, as Norma Adamo puts it: TAN TAN !

(Dr. Neo Gutierrez is a Ph.D. in Dance and Related Fine Arts, Laredo Sr. Int'l 2008, MHS Tiger Legend 2004, Sr. Int'l de Beverly Hills 1997.( Contact neodance @aol.com )

Sent by Elsa Herbeck
elsaherbeck@sbcglobal.net

----------------------------------------------------
Introdution by Riva Palacio to letter from Victor Hugo to Senor Juarez

Along with the many throw away packets of periodicals which we receive we found a letter from the celebrated French poet, friend of humanity and of democracy and constant enemy of tyranny. The poet sees the wide scope of the great questi ons that agitate the earth, and apostle and defender of human
life, he does not lose the opportunity to
bring an end for ever to the blade of the executioner and the horror of the scaffold.

One hears his voice throughout the civilized world, and his advice, if not always followed, is none-the-less admired, because he evokes the grandeur and elevation of men above their human weaknesses, Victor Hugo wrote a letter the 20th of June. Maximilian had faced the firing squad the day before in Queretaro, and so the voice and its profound counsel would have not been heard by the President of the Republic.

Perhaps the end had been fated from the beginning for the one for whom he interceded. An identical fate occurred with the letter from Garibaldi, the two arrived too late. The letter to us began.

The letter, beginning with the sender’s preface to Riva Palacio.

The author of Hernani, Victor Hugo, has just written to Juarez, president of the Republic of Mexico, a letter which has been published in France, in an English journal, and that we copy and send on, shortening it by a few paragraphs...

The Letter from Hugo

To the President of the Mexican Republic, Juarez - You have been the equal of John Brown. America today has two heroes,
John Brown and you. John Brown because
he brought death to slavery, you because
you kept freedom alive.

Mexico has been saved by a principal and by a man, and that man is you.

On one side two Empires ( France and Austria), on the other a man, a man with only a handful of men, thrown aside from city to city, town to town, ranch to ranch, woods to woods, pursued, nomadic, ...without money, nor bread, nor powder, nor cannons. The usurpation proceeded with all its legions of force. Right was stripped and abandoned.
Yet you accepted the challenge of combat,
and battle waged for five years.

You had for your defenders impassable swamps, waters full of alligators, poisoness vegetation, the yellow fever of the hot country, the sandy ground without water, without grasses, where horses died of thirst and hunger...... In the war against the giants, your projectile has been the rugged
mountains.

And one day, after five years of smoke and dust and blindness, the cloud dissipated and one saw two Empires had fallen to ruin. No more of monarchy, nor armies, no more than .this enormous usurpation in ruin And over this horrible swirl one man was still
standing, Juarez, and at the side of this man liberty.

All that you have done, Juarez, in truth is great, yet that which you have yet to do is greater still.

Listen, citizen President of the Republic of Mexico. You have just demonstrated the power of democracy, now you will show its beauty.

After the ray you bring the dawn. To the barbarians you show civilization, to the despots, principles.

Give to the kings who lord over the people the humiliation of a surprise and complete defeat by giving them mercy.

It is a basic principle that protection be
given our enemy. The grandeur of principles consists in ignoring all else. Men don't have names before they have principles. Humanity is a human collective, man represented through the his humanity. The principles
know nothing of nobody, neither nor more than if they scratched themselves out. In their stupid anguish they know no more than this. Human life is inviolable. Oh, venerable impartiality is the truth! Oh, the beauty of
right without distinction is the righteous
path. Precisely, it is on those who warrant death legally where you ought to abjure the right.

The grandiose destruction of the scaffold, is more important than seeing to culpability.

That the violator of basic principles will be saved by a principle. That he has been shamed. That the violator of right has been saved by a right. Stripping away the false inviolability of the crown, and put yourself
in the true light, that of the inviolability of humanity. That will give him the shock of knowing what really is sacred, and it is that very stance that led him to no longer be Emperor....

Never have you been presented an occasion more magnificent.

Juarez, give civilization a giant step forward. Abolish over the earth the death penalty. The world will see that this is a prodigious step. The nation is at that moment for the annihilation of the assassin usurper. Reflect that he is a man, Think about it, and tell yourself:

“You are the people as are the others. See it.

“This will be, Juarez, your second victory. The first over the usurpation - is sovereignty. The second, to pardon the usurper - is sublime.

.

.”Above the monarchial laws that flow with drops of blood, shine the law of light, and the coming of the most sacred page in the supreme book, that one sees from the Republices, honor to this order from God,
No mataras (do not kill).

These four syllables contain the obligation.

You ought to follow them.

The usurper will be saved, and the liberator will have done it. For 8 years, since Decemb er 2, 1859, without more right than would have any other man, I have followed the world in the name of democracy, and I had asked the United States for the life of John Brown. I was not obeyed. I ask Mexico for the life of Maximilian. Will I be rewarded?

“Yes. It can be said that at this hour it is already done.

Maximilian will owe his life to Juarez.

Victor Hugo

Hauteville House, 20 of June 1867

---------------------------------------------------
Introduccion de Riva Palacio a Una Carta de Victor Hugo al Sn. Juarez

Entra las muchas tiras de periódicos que recibimos con la correspondencia del paquete encontramos una carta del célebre poeta francés, del amigo de la humanidad y de la democracia, del enemigo constante de la tiranía. Desde el destierro ve el filósofo y el postra las grandes cuestiones que los hombres agitan en la tierra, y apóstol y defensor de la vida humana no pierde oportunidad en destruir para siempre el hacha del verdugo y el horror de los patíbulos.

Su voz se hace escuchar en todo el mundo civilizado, y sus consejos, si no son siempre seguidos, son sí admirados, porque envuelven la grandeza y la elevación suprema sobre todas las debilidades de los hombres, Victor Hugo escribía su carta el 20 de Junio. El día anterior Maximiliano había sido fusilado en Querétaro; así su voz y sus profundos consejos no han podido ser escuchados por el Presidente de la Republica.

Quizás ha sido una fatalidad pare el principie por quien intercedía. Una cosa idéntica ha pasado con la carta de Garibaldi; las dos llegaron demasiado tarde. En cuanto al hecho triste que tuvo lugar en Querétaro, nos permitiremos en uno de estos días contestar al célebre poeta francés para que tenga el debido conocimiento de circunstancias especiales que é ignora, y que casi hicieron indispensable que Maximiliano tuviese un fin funesto. - La carta dice así:

“El autor de Hernán, Victor Hugo, acaba de dirijir á Juarez, presidente de la Republica de México, la carta que se ha publicado en francés en un diario inglés, y que á continuación menos algunas párrafos que hemos creído de nuestro, deber el suprimir:

La Carta

“Al Presidente de la Republica mexicana, Juarez – Vos habéis igualado a John Brown. La América actual tiene dos héroes, John Brown y vos. John Brown por quien ha murió la esclavitud, vos por quien ha vivido la libertad.

México se ha salvado por un principio y por un hombre: ese hombre sois vos.

De una parte dos imperios, de la otra un hombre’un hombre con solo un puñado de hombres desterrados de ciudad en ciudad, de pueblo en pueblo, de rancho en rancho,, de bosque en bosque, persuigido,.(con) ni dinero, ni pan, ni polvora, ni canones... Aquí la usurpación llamadose legitimidad. Alli el derecho llamado bandido. La usurpacion precidida de todas las legiones de la fuerza. El derecho solo, desnudo y abandonado. Vos que sois el derecho habeis recogido el guante y acepiado el combate. La batalla de uno contra todos has durado cinco anos.

Vos habeis tenido por defensores los pantanos intransitable, los torrentes lleno de caimanes’ las vegetaciones mórbidas; el vómito prieto de las tierras caliente; las soledades de sal, los arenales sin agua yh sin yerbas, donde los caballos mueren de sed y hambre; la grande y severa mesa de Anahuac, que como la Castilla se defiende por sus desnudo; los temblores de los volcanes, desde el Colima hasta el Nevado de Toluca. Vos habeis llamado en vustrro auxilio á vuestras barreras, naturales á la aspereza de los cordilleras, á las altas murallas basáticas, y á las colosales rocas de pórfido. Vos habeis hecho la guerrs de los gigantes, yh vustros proyectiles has sido las montanas.

Y un dia, después de conco anos de humo, de polvo y de ceguedad, la nube se ha disipado, y entonces se han visto dos imperios caidos en tierra. Nada de monarquia, nada de ejercitos; nada, mas que la enormidad de la usurpacion en ruina, y sobre este horroso derrumbamiento un hombre en pié: Juarez, y al lado de este hombre la libertad.

Todo esto vos lo habeis hecho, Juarez y en verdad es grande’pero lo que os resta que hacer is mas grande todavía.

Escuchad, ciudadano Presidente de la Republica mexicana: Vos acabais de demostrar el power de la democracia; ahora mostrad su belleza.

Después del rayo mostrad la aurora. A los barbados mostrad la civilización; á los déspotas los principios.

Dad á los reyes delante del pueblo la humillación del asombre; vencidios, sobre todo, por la piedad.

Los principios se afirman por la proteccion de nuestro enemigo. La grandeza de los principios constante en ignorarlo todo. Los hombres no tienen nombre delante de los principios. Los hombres es el hombre colectivo, al hombre representando á la humanidad. Los principios no conocen á nadie, ni á nada mas que a si raiamos. En su augusta estupidez no sabes mas que esta. La vida humana es inviolable. ¡Oh venerable imparcialidad de la verdad! ¡Oh hermosura del derecho sin discernimiento, ocupado solo de ser el derecho! Precisamente delante de los que had merecido legalmente la muerte, es donde debe abjurarse de las vías de hecho,.

La grandiosa destrucción del cadalso debe hacerse delante de los culpables.

Que el violador de los principios sea salvado por un principio. Que tenga esta docta u esta vergüenza. Que el perseguidor del derecho sea salvado por el derecho. Despojándolo de la falsa inviolabilidad de la corona, voz lo poneis delante de la verdaders inviolabilidad humana. Que se quede asombrado: que el lado por el cual es sagrado, es precisamente por el lado por el cual no es emperador.

Que este principe que no advinaba que era un hombre, sepa que hay en el una miseria, el rey, y un majestad, el hombre.

Jamas se os ha presentado una ocasión mas magnifica.

Juarez, haced que la civilización de un paso inmenso. Abolid sobre toda la tierra la pena de muerte. Que el momento de aniquilar a su asesino vencido, reflexiona que es un hombre, lo suenta, y le dice:

Tu eras del pueblo como los otras - Vete.

Esta será, Juarez, vuestra segunda victoria. La primera, vencer la usurpación, - Es soberbia: La segunda, perdonar al usurpador, - Es sublima.

Si… á estos principios á quienes obedecen los jueces, á estos jueces á quienes obedecen los verdugos, á éstos verdugos obedecidas por la muerte, mostradles abrir se perdona á la cabeza de un emperador.

Sobre todos los códigos monárquicos de donde manan las gotas de sangre, abrid la ley de luz, y en medio de la mas santa pagina del libre supremo, que se vea el dede de la Republica, sobre esta orden de Dios: No matarás.

Estés cuarto afilabas contienen el deber.

El deber vos lo haréis.

¡El usurpador será salado, y el libertador no ha podido serlo! Hace 8 anos al 2 de Diciembre de 1859 sin mas derecho que el que tiene cualquiera hombre, he tomado la palabra en nombre de la democracia, y he pedido á los Estados-Unidos la vida de John Brown. No la he obtenido. Hay pido á México la vida de Maximiliano. ¡La obtendré!

Si. Puede ser que a esta hora esté ya concedida.

Maximiliano deberá la vida a Juarez - Victor Hugo

Hauteville House, 20 Junio de 1867.

LA LEYENDA NEGRA/THE BLACK LEGEND

HISTORICAL DISTORTION, DEFAMATION, SLANDER, LIBEL, AND STEREOTYPING OF HISPANICS

By Felipe de Ortego y Gasca

Scholar in Residence and Chair of the Department of Chicana/Chicano and Hemispheric Studies, Western New Mexico University; Professor Emeritus, Texas State University System—Sul Ross

[From Real to Reel: Hispanics and the Eiconic Image in Film--Number 11 in a series on La Leyenda Negra]

In The Image (1967), Kenneth Boulding coined the term “eiconic” referring to a “chronologically fixed image”–a sort of frozen snapshot we have in our minds of people. That eiconic image keeps us from seeing people as developmental entities. That’s why we still see in our mind’s eye the American Indian, for example, with a war bonnet, robed in animal furs, and wearing moccasins even though American Indians do not dress that way today.

That 18^th century snapshot of the American Indian is a visceral stereotype. Via these visceral stereotypes, the Black Legend fixes in the mind an eiconic image of Hispanics frozen in time as part of an “infra-reality,” that is, an interior reality inconsistent with external reality.

That eiconic image was at work in 1967 when a Texas publisher asked me to contribute a story for an anthology of Texas stories. I submitted the short story “Chicago Blues” about a Chicano musician in the early post-World War II years. The story had won a major European award juried by Richard Wright. The publisher sent the story back to me explaining that he was expecting a story along the lines of J. Frank Dobie’s “The Straw Man”–a piece that caricatured Tejanos (Mexican Texans) as simple peasants dressed in poplin and wearing huaraches.

Until the advent of motion pictures (film) in the early 20^th century, the primacy of print to diffuse information and eiconic images was paramount. In its diffusion of celluloid images and sub-textual public values, film surpassed the power of print to reach mass audiences. Omar Khayam, the Persian poet wrote: The moving finger having writ moves on / and all your piety and wit / cannot cancel half a line of it. Today, the power of the motion picture camera (now video camera also) to convey a visual reality–however true or false–has become the dominant medium in shaping public values. The motion picture captures eiconic images of people frozen in frames. And all our piety and wit cannot cancel half a line of it.

Unfortunately, in the case of American Hispanics the public values transmitted by film and video are as laden with stereotypes as their print cohorts. From the begining of silent films to the first “talkies” in 1927 (The Jazz Singer) the images of Hispanics in American films simply perpetuated the perniciously eiconic stereotypes extant in American society engendered by the Black Legend. Non-Hispanic film audiences could now see on “the silver screen” the stereotyped images of Hispanics they could theretofore only imagine from the printed page. They could now see Hispanics in poverty-strewn villages, lazing in the sun, uncivilized, half-naked or else see them as mustachioed bandits surrounded by hot-blooded señoritas of easy virtue and loose morals (Luis Reyes and Peter Rubie, Hispanics in Hollywood: A Celebration of 100 Years in Film and Television, 2000, 3).

According to Reyes and Rubie, “Bandits and sleepy Mexican towns” were standard features in silent Westerns in which the vicious greaser image came into being. Bronco Billy and the Greaser and The Greaser’s Revenge (both 1914), for example, confirmed “the Mexican as an evil and sinister villain” (6). Reyes and Rubie contend that the problem of Hollywood movies with Latino subjects or characters has been the ignorance of film makers about Latinos and their history and culture (18). For example, “the battle of the Alamo in 1836 . . . left deep seated prejudices between Anglo Americans and Mexicans that are still reflected over 100 years later in such movies as Man of Conquest (1939), The Last Command (1955) and John Wayne’s The Alamo (1960)” ( 5). Films reflected the low esteem in which Hispanics were held by the non-Hispanic public. With few exceptions, Hispanics were rigidly typecast in films as gardeners or gangsters, as maids or madames. In the main, “Hispanic women have usually been relegated to some version of the stout mamacita, the sexy spitfire, and the suffering mother or girlfriend” (313)

Like films, television was no better. “Although Hispanics have been featured on various series since television began, there have been few Hispanic star or character-driven vehicles” (Reyes and Rubie, 312). Though the George Lopez Show is an exception, its characterizations of Hispanics are stereotyped with buffoonery and antics for comedic effect at the expense of Hispanics. To counter this trend, Hispanic actors organized Nosotros, to improve the images of Hispanics in American films and television.

While it’s true that people should be able to laugh at themselves in comic situations, Reyes and Rubie conclude that “accepting unchallenged stereotyped portrayals in the movies is a form of passive racism.” That Hollywood’s bottom-dollar mentality “masks” that passive racism; that “the insidiousness of racism is not so much the overt acts of [fascism], but the moral cowardice of those who avoid speaking out against off-the-cuff offensive remarks.” For Reyes and Rubie there is “a fine line between the artistic tyranny of ‘political correctness’ and being sensitive to perpetuating a stereotype” (2).

The most notable television shows that parlayed Hispanic stereotypes to success were The Cisco Kid and the Zorro series. Both employed unabashed stereotypes of Hispanics, not to mention that few Hispanics played the lead role. After a 38 year hiatus, Luis Valdez directed the 1994 version of The Cisco Kid with Jimmy Smits and Cheech Marin without the gratuitous stereotypes. While this was a formidable leap forward for Hispanics in films and television, the eiconic images of Hispanics in these media still abound.

The pervasive casting of non-Hispanics as Hispanics has lessened today, providing Hispanic actors more opportunities for non-typecast roles. Until the civil rights era many Hispanic characters in film had been played by non-Hispanics. In Viva Zapata, for example, Marlon Brando played the key role of Zapata while Anthony Quinn played the role of the brother. In Villa Rides, Yul Brynner played the part of Pancho Villa. In The Milagro Beanfield War a number of Hispanics appeared in supporting roles, but the only American Hispanic (U.S.) actor was Freddy Fender. In a number of television shows there are references to (phantom) Hispanics with Hispanic surnames who do not appear on screen. And non-Mexican Hispanic actors are cast as Mexicans or Mexican Americans. In the TV series Empire (1962-64), Charles Bronson played Paul Moreno, a Mexican American ranch hand.

Combating the effects of the Black Legend has been a steep incline for Hispanics in the United States. What is most evident about that struggle is that progress for Hispanics is not a matter of largesse oblige but of nous même oblige, collective efforts to overcome the obstacles in the wake of the Black Legend.

The annexation of Texas in 1845 was the immediate cause of the war. Other factors lending up to the war was America's ambition to acquire New Mexico and California (Manifest Destiny), and the desire to extend slave-holding territory. (Note: There is no doubt special legislation is needed to counter all the anti Hispanic Legislation which the Municipal, Country, State and Federal Governments have enacted for the past 150 years or more).

1861, During the 1860s, Tiburcio Vásquez, Joaquín Murieta, and others are branded as bandits for resisting the seizure of American Hispanic lands in California.

1865: Under provisions of the 1862 Homestead Act, Land speculators acquire American Hispanic land by using squatters to claim the land illegally. This land was obtained illegally with the aid and might of the U.S. Government against their own American Hispanic citizens.

The "Tejanos" (American Hispanics in Texas) suffered outright repression from the Texas Rangers, who were known as the "Hispanic's Ku Klu Klan".

1850 California: The new comers grew jealous of the experienced Mexican-Californio miners, and In 1850, the new legislature (with the might of the Federal U.S. Government) enacted a burdensome "Foreigner Miner's Tax" of $20.00 per month. This new tax was aimed at the American Hispanics and the Spanish speaking Californios, enforced by volunteer armed new comers. Many of our mining terms, like bonanza and placer are Spanish in origin by the way.

Up to the at least the 1940s, Southwest Arizona, Utah, Colorado, New Mexico and California: Birth certificates for American Hispanics did not indicate they were American born. A new born of American Hispanic origin (those who had been here for centuries included), was *born in Mexico* or *Mexican* instead of American.
.
1850, four thousand Hispanic miners gather in Sonora, California, to protest the Foreign Miners' Tax, which was enacted to drive them from gold fields. Many Hispanics could not afford the extra taxation and left.

1851 California counties with the highest Hispanic populations were taxed at a rate five times greater than any other region in the state. Many Hispanics could not afford another extra tax, and left.

1854, the takeover of American Hispanic lands: The Surveyor of General Claims Office is established in New Mexico (includes Arizona) but cannot process claims fast enough to prevent the takeover. Loss of over 75% of Hispanics lands from illegal or legal offical means. A violation of the TGH.

1855 Laws are enacted in California to prohibit many cultural pastimes of the American Hispanic population.

1855 California. Soon the Anglos dominated the state legislature, enacting the tax and laws like the 1855 Greaser Act, which defined vagrants as (quote) "all persons who [were] commonly known as 'Greasers' or the issue of Spanish or Indian blood." The "Greaser" Act. A anti-vagrancy act by the State Legislature Excludes "Diggers" (Indians) but includes persons of mixed Spanish and Indian blood or "Greasers".

This Law was intended to keep Hispanics from owning the mines, and provided
another justification for expropriation of American Hispanic lands.This racist epithet is all too well known to date, which started with ordinary people, and made law in the California State Legislature 1855.

1855, California The anti-Catholic Know-Nothings organize and hold a state convention in Sacramento.

1855, California, The Legislature refuses to provide funds for translation of state laws into Spanish despite the fact that 1) The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidaldo provides for the protection and guarantee of the conquered Spanish speaking Americans, 2) the majority of the State's inhabitants are of Spanish speaking extraction.

1857, California: Former delegate to the State Constitutional Convention Manuel Dominguez is barred from testifying for the defense in The People vs. Elyea because he is a mestizo. (Note: using mestizo was a way to separate Hispanics and keep them from uniting, this was and still used today in the southwest. Many whites considered Hispanics from the acquired western states as "inferior to Indians and Africans because they were racially mixed, a hybrid race that represented the worst nightmare of what might become of the white race if they let down their racial guard".)

1855 Anglo businessmen attempt to run American (Hispanics) teamsters (wagon-drivers) out of south Texas, violating the guarantees offered by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.

1857, Anglo businessmen try to push American Hispanic teamsters out of south Texas, violating the guarantees of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.

1858, Miners and settlers move into Colorado in search of silver, forcing more Hispanic Americans from their land.

1800s - 1900s the western U.S. lynchings of American Hispanics were common on a daily basis.

1862, The Supreme Court rules in favor of Daly City "squatters". The Homestead Act is passed in Congress, allowing squatters in the southwest to settle and claim American Hispanic lands. This was common in California and the southwest.

1863 Arizona: Anglo segment was becoming numerical dominant. Anglo Arizonans were, for the most part, preoccupied with controlling the large American Hispanic population politically.

1889 Northern Arizona: The 1889 Taylor Grazing Act: this law enacted was responsible for the elimination of the sheep industry in Concho, Arizona whose owners were primarily Spanish speaking sheep herders and Native Americans.. Concho, once a thriving Spanish speaking community , with the loss of the sheep industry left Concho and vicinity, in an almost helpless condition, and started its decline and loss of population. .

Southwest, Arizona, New Mexico: 75% of American Hispanics lost their land in the late 1800s and beginning of the 1900s through illegal and "legal" methods. The "legal" methods land was lost is due to the language. The Character (language) of the Southwest was/is Spanish, however land owners were not permitted to argue their case in the Spanish language. All lawyers in the S.W. at that time were Spanish speaking. The U.S. Government brought in English speaking lawyers for the landowners and hence ended up with the land owned by the Spanish speaking landowners.

1848: Land had been the basis of the California socio-economic system. With the loss of land after the U.S. conquest undermined that system. The protections provided by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo were ignored by the U.S.
Holders of Spanish and Mexican land grants, most of whom were American Hispanics, were required to seek legal confirmation of their titles.
The federal government placed the burden of proof on the landowners instead of automatically accepting all titles and then handling challenges on an individual
basis. In direct contradiction to the protection by the TGH.

1883 (May 12) Phoenix, Arizona: Phoenix merchants signed an agreement to receive Mexican currency only at the rates of: dollars, 80 cents; halves, 40 cents; quarters, 20 cents.

Late 1800s, Northern Arizona (New Mexico at the time), my ancestor Marcos Padilla Baca was the Justice of the Peace when the first English speakers entered the region. The American Hispanics helped the interlopers with shelter and food, and were soon repayed by enacting laws which would put American Hispanics and Native Americans out of business.

1884 Texas, there were daily lynchings of Hispanic Americans in the area around Fort Davis, Texas; many Anglos voiced the opinion that the lynchings should continue until no Hispanics remained in the area. Lynchings were a tool of racial oppression elsewhere in the Southwest as well; in California, lynching of Hispanics became so common that in the Hispanic community, American democracy became known as "linchocracia."
(From Vernellia R. Randall Professor of Law, and Luis Angel Toro).

1898 Morenci - Clifton, Arizona: There was a prospect of trouble between American Hispanics and Anglos at Clifton and Morenci. The outbreak of racial conflicts was based on the sympathy of the Hispanics towards Spain in her troubles abroad.
.
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In his Living History Newsletters Rick Collins writes, " Most Americans are not aware of the role of Spain in the settling of the New World, nor are they cognizant of the important contributions of Spain to the defeat of the British during the American Revolution. In his book, Entrada, Bernard Fontana suggests an underlying prejudice toward Hispanics as cause of part of that ignorance. Certainly the Leyenda Negra, or "Black Legend", so strongly touted by the Protestant governments of the Old World helped suppress Spain's contribution to American history. http://www.neta.com/~1stbooks/rick1.htm

If you know of laws, et that discriminate against Hispanics, please provide the information here 1stbooks@neta.com

Sent by Wanda Garcia wanda.garcia@sbcglobal.net

Lieutenant General Leo Marquez is deputy chief of staff for logistics and engineering, Headquarters U.S. Air Force, Washington, D.C.

General Marquez was born in 1932, in Peralta, N.M., and graduated from Belen (N.M.) High School in 1949. He received a bachelor of science degree in zoology from New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, in 1954, and a master of science degree in business administration from The George Washington University, Washington, D.C., in 1967. The general completed Air Command and Staff College, Maxwell Air Force Base, Ala., in 1967 and attended the advanced management program for executives, Carnegie-Mellon University, Pittsburgh, in 1976. In 1978 he was named a distinguished alumnus from New Mexico State University.

He was awarded a commission through the Air Force Reserve Officer's Training Corps program upon graduation from New Mexico State University and entered active duty as a second lieutenant in the U.S. Air Force in November 1954.

After completing pilot training in January 1956 at Greenville Air Force Base, Miss., and the basic instructor course at Craig Air Force Base, Ala., he returned to Greenville as a flight instructor in T-33s. While there he also completed the instructor pilot instrument school at Moody Air Force Base, Ga. In September 1958 he began the interceptor pilot course at Moody Air Force Base, flying F-86D's. Upon graduation in May 1959, he was assigned to the 525th Fighter-Interceptor Squadron, Bitburg Air Base, Germany, where he flew F-102s until January 1962.

He returned to the United States to attend the aircraft maintenance officer course at Chanute Air Force Base, Ill. Following completion in mid-1962, he was assigned to the 325th Fighter-Interceptor Wing at McChord Air Force Base, Wash., as a maintenance officer. In 1964 he become commander of the 325th Organizational Maintenance Squadron at McChord.

General Marquez entered the Air Command and Staff College in August 1966. Following graduation as a distinguished graduate in August 1967, he was assigned to the 3rd Tactical Fighter Wing, Bien Hoa Air Base, Republic of Vietnam, as maintenance control officer.

In August 1968 General Marquez was selected for exchange duty with the Canadian Forces in Ottawa, Canada, and served as system manager for the CF-100, CF-101, CF-104, T-33 and BOMARC missile. In August 1970 he transferred to Headquarters Tactical Air Command, Langley Air Force Base, Va., as the F-111 logistics project officer in the Directorate of Maintenance Engineering, Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff, Logistics. In 1972 he was reassigned within the directorate as chief, Fighter Reconnaissance Branch.

General Marquez was chief of the F-111 System Management Division in the Directorate of Materiel Management at the Sacramento Air Logistics Center, McClellan Air Force Base, Calif., from June 1973 to July 1975. He then was assigned as director of materiel management at Warner Robins Air Logistics Center, Robins Air Force Base, Ga., from July 1975 to August 1977.

The general transferred to Air Force headquarters in September 1977 as deputy director of maintenance engineering and supply, Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff, Systems and Logistics. He was assigned as deputy director of logistics plans, programs and transportation, Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff, Logistics and Engineering, in April 1978. The Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff, Systems and Logistics, became the Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff, Logistics and Engineering, in July 1978.

In June 1979 he become deputy chief of staff for plans and programs at Headquarters Air Force Logistics Command, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio. General Marquez served as commander of Ogden Air Logistics Center, Hill Air Force Base, Utah, from July 1981 to July 1983. He assumed his present duties in August 1983.

His military decorations and awards include the Distinguished Service Medal, Legion of Merit with oak leaf cluster, Bronze Star Medal, Meritorious Service Medal and Air Force Commendation Medal with oak leaf cluster. He was selected as Air Force Logistics Command Systems Manager of the year in 1974. In 1977 he was the recipient of the Air Force Association's Executive Management Award.

He was promoted to lieutenant general Aug. 1, 1983, with same date of rank.

(Current as of October 1983)

Sent by Rafael Ojeda RSNOJEDA@aol.com

Lt. Gen. David M. Rodriguez,
left, will be a Senior Commander Afghanistan

HISPANICS IN THE U.S. MILITARY

By John P. Schmal

Hispanics in the Military (2001)
At the end of September 2001 the Pew Hispanic Center reported that there were 109,487 Hispanics in the enlisted ranks, and they made up 9.49 percent of the active duty enlisted force. In contrast, Hispanics made up 13.35 percent of the civilian labor force 18 to 44 years old, the typical age range for enlisted service. The Center’s statistics illustrated “significant variations in the extent of Hispanic representation among the armed services from a high of 13.99 percent in the Marine Corps to a low of 5.57 percent in the Air Force.”

Hispanics in the Military (2007)
More recent statistics from the Pew Hispanic Center have indicated an increase in the number of Hispanics on active duty in the military to 122,255 in 2007. This Hispanic military population represented 11.06 percent of the total military of 1,105,470. In the same year, the Heritage Foundation estimated that Hispanics and Latinos represented 12.93 percent of total recruits.

In contrast to the military statistics, the entire population of Hispanics/Latinos, as estimated by the American Community Survey of 2005-2007, stood at 44,019,880, or 14.7 percent of the entire resident population. The 122,255 active-duty Hispanics in 2007 included 16,721 foreign-born soldiers.

Hispanic Casualties (2001-2009)
Hispanic Americans have also made up a portion of the casualties that American forces have experienced in Iraq and Afghanistan . Between October 7, 2001 to May 2, 2009, 53 military service members who classified themselves as Hispanics or Latinos died in the service of their country, representing 7.8 percent of military deaths. During the same period, 147 Hispanics have been wounded in action, representing 5.2 percent of all wounded service members.

In a Congressional Research Service report dated March 25, 2009, Information Research Specialist Hannah Fischer reported that the total Hispanic/Latino military deaths in both Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom up to February 28, 2009, was 450 individuals, representing 10.6 percent of all military deaths (4,245).

Hispanic Military Officers

The Pew Hispanic Center report in 2003 lamented the small percentage of Hispanics among military officers and generals. For several years, Lieutenant-General Ricardo Sanchez, who commanded coalition troops for a year beginning June 2003, had been the highest ranking Hispanic in the military. He had been one of just eight Hispanics ever to rise to the rank of general in the Army by 2003. At the time of his retirement in 2006 – after 33 years in the military – only three Hispanic generals were left on active duty.

Since General Sanchez retired, there has been a small amount of progress toward greater representation, but legislators have been taking steps to accelerate the process. According to the Defense Manpower Data Center, as of March 31, 2008, the 13 Hispanic flag and general officers in the armed forces at that time represented only 1.3 percent of the 963 flag and general officers. In contrast, there were 54 African-American flag officers and general officers (including one four-star general) and 883 Caucasian flag and general officers.

In response to this problem, the House Armed Services Committee (HASC) approved two amendments in the defense authorization bill to increase diversity representation within the senior officer corps of the U.S. Armed Forces, and expand Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps (JROTC) Units. Once enacted, the newly established Senior Military Diversity Commission would be mandated to study policies that provide opportunities for the advancement of minority members of the Armed Forces. Special emphasis was placed on developing and maintaining a diverse leadership at the general and flag officer positions.

Total serving in the United States Military: 1,412,529
Of that, total officers: 224,488

38 generals/admirals
146 - lieutenant generals/vice admiral
284 - major general - rear admiral
455 - brigadier generals - rear admirals

Celebrating Commitment to Honor and Duty

In 2007, Bruce E. Phillips, in this article, “Top Hispanics in the U.S. Military: Celebrating Commitment to Honor, Duty and Country” (Hispanic Engineer & Information Technology, January 18, 2007), paid tribute to several of the highest rank Hispanic in the military, including:

Major General Thomas A. Benes, Director, Strategy and Plans Division, U.S. Marine Corps
Major General William D. Catto, Commanding General, Marine Corps Systems Command
Brigadier General Jimmie C. Jackson Jr., Deputy Commander, Combined Air Operations Center , Allied Command Operations (NATO)
Brigadier General Robert Marrero-Corletto, Assistant Adjutant General (Army), Puerto Rico Army National Guard
Rear Admiral George E. Mayer, Commander, Naval Safety Center
Brigadier General Joseph V. Medina, Commanding General, Marine Corps Base Camp S.D. Butler , and Deputy Commander, Marine Corps Bases, Japan
Brigadier General Roque C. Nido-Lanausse, Deputy Adjutant General, Puerto Rico Army National Guard
Brigadier General Joseph Reynes Jr., Commander, 51st Fighter Wing, Osan Air Base, South Korea
Major General Charles G. Rodriguez, Adjutant General, Texas National Guard
Rear Admiral William D. Rodriguez, Chief Engineer, Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command
Brigadier General Angela Salinas, Chief of Staff, Marine Corps Recruiting Command

Hispanic Representation Among Military Recruits

Each year, the Department of Defense is required by Congress to publish statistics on the social representation of the armed forces in terms of such characteristics as race, ethnicity, marital status, and age. One of the chief goals of the Congress is that the diversity in the armed forces should be proportional to the diversity in the general population. However, in a 2009 research publication, the Rand National Research Institute echoed the observations of earlier years by stating that “Hispanics are underrepresented among military recruits.” In 2007, Hispanics made up 17.0 percent of the U.S. population between the ages of 18 and 40, but only 11.4 percent of Army enlistment contracts and 15 percent of Navy enlistment contracts.”

The Rand report indicated that “the under-representation of Hispanics is puzzling, considering that survey data on young people’s attitudes toward the military consistently indicate that Hispanic youth are more likely than other groups to express a positive attitude toward the military.” As an example of this attitude, it was pointed out that in a “December 2007 poll of American youth ages 18 to 24 conducted by the Department of Defense, 12.6 percent of Hispanic respondents stated they were probably or definitely going to join the military, compared with 10.1 percent of black respondents and 6.6 percent of white respondents” (Defense Human Resources Activity, 2008).

Sources:

Asch, Beth J.; Buck, Christopher; Klerman, Jacob Alex; Kleykamp, Meredith and Loughran, David S, “Military Enlistment of Hispanic Youth Obstacles and Opportunities,” (Rand National Research Institute, 2009)

Department of Defense Personnel and Procurement Statistics, “Personnel & Procurement Reports and Data Files, Military Casualty Information.”

Fischer, Hannah, “ United States Military Casualty Statistics: Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom,” Congressional Research Service, March 25, 2009.

Pew Hispanic Center Fact Sheet, “Hispanics in the Military, March 27, 2003,” Online: http://pewhispanic.org/files/reports/17.pdf

Pew Hispanic Center , “Statistical Portrait of Hispanics in the United States , 2007.”

Phillips, Bruce E., “Top Hispanics in the U.S. Military: Celebrating Commitment to Honor, Duty and Country,” Hispanic Engineer & Information Technology, January 18, 2007.

U.S. Census Bureau, “2005-2007 American Community Survey 3-Year Estimates.”

http://www.eddiemartinezart.com/military/galvez/galvez.html

Spain & The American Revolution

An Illustrated Story

By Eddie Martinez

INTRODUCTION

I first began developing my presentation on the accounts of Hispanics in the Military early in 2005 after being invited by Mimi Lozano to join the participant team of Somos Primos’ 2005 Hispanic Heritage Activities, sponsored by the National Archives and Records Administration, Washington D.C.

Bernardo de Gálvez - This segment of the American Revolutionary War is based on the accounts of Spain and Gálvez in aiding George Washington in the American Revolution.

http://www.neta.com/~1stbooks/vital.htm Spain’s Support Vital to U.S. Independence
By Dr. Thomas E. Chávez:

“One of the more important figures to assist the Colonies' struggle for independence was Bernardo de Gálvez. He helped the cause through diplomatic, financial and military exploits against Great Britain in the Mississippi River Valley, the Gulf Coast, including the Floridas, Louisiana and in the Gulf of Mexico. From 1776, when he became governor of Louisiana, until 1783 when the American Revolution ended, Gálvez's patience, audacity, appreciation of frontier people, diplomatic knowledge and military skill greatly contributed to the eventual British defeat.”

“Gálvez succeeded in supplying the successful campaigns of George Rogers Clark, who fought the British foe in the trans-Allegheny regions.”

New Spain’s Viceroy José de Gálvez appointed his nephew, Bernardo de Gálvez to Governor of Spanish Louisiana. Gálvez’s first act of defiance against the British was to order vaqueros and presidio soldiers to drive large herds of Texas cattle, horses, and military supplies to New Orleans.

Lorenzo’s Secret Mission, based on a true story by Lila and Rick Guzmán:

“Colonel De Gálvez drew me [Lorenzo, Tejano] and Calderón away from the others. ‘Lt. Calderón is the special envoy sent by King Carlos to make certain the supplies reach the Americans. I have assigned him the additional duty of escorting you on a particular service. I wish you to deliver a letter.’

He handed me a sealed envelope. ‘Give this to His Excellency, General George Washington, commander in chief of the Continental Army.’ “

“I climbed into the flatboat. Spanish soldiers loosened the ropes and gave the flatboat a hard shove. I waved to Eugenie and she waved back. The day I’d looked forward to for so long had finally arrived, but as I watched Eugenie grow smaller and smaller, I realized New Orleans was a city I could learn to love. Leaving her behind left me with a sense of loss.

The flatboats turned the first bend in the river and she disappeared from view.”

After Spain officially declared war on England, General Gálvez’s Louisiana Regiment immediately engaged British forces along the Mississippi River, winning every battle he fought. As the war for independence continued, Bernardo de Gálvez military forces grew with militia patriots from Spain, Ireland, Mayorca, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Hispañola, Venezuela (as well as other South America troops), and Mexico. From Louisiana his recruits included Frenchmen, Acadians, Germans, Canary Islanders, Indians, and Blacks, both slave and free. One of his top generals was Major General Gerónimo Girón, a direct descendant of the Aztec Emperor Moctezuma II.

The Spanish Frontier in North America By Professor David J. Weber – “Pensacola Bay”:

“Gálvez’s own naval commander had refused to risk running his vessels aground on the sandbar at the bay’s entrance and exposing them to enemy fire from shore. Gálvez had disagreed and had ended the stalemate by flamboyantly leading two ships and two gunboats into the harbor through enemy fire and shaming his own naval officers into following him. For this feat, Carlos III honored Gálvez with the title, the conde de Gálvez. ‘To perpetuate in your posterity the memory of the heroic action in which you, alone, forced your entry into [Pensacola] bay,’ Carlos III wrote to Gálvez, ‘you may put as a Seal in your coat of Arms . . . the Motto: ‘I ALONE.’ (Yo Solo)

With East and West Florida restored to the empire and settlements firmly planted along the California coast from San Diego to San Francisco, the Spanish frontiers in North America had become transcontinental.”

Author and historian, Robert H. Thonhoff – “Honoring Gálvez”:

“In 1789, Spain’s first ambassador to the United States of America, Diego de Gardoqui, stood at the side of George Washington during his inaugural parade in New York City, then our nations capital. Ambassador Gardoqui positioned the Spanish brigantine, the Galveztown, which served as Gálvez’s flagship during the Gulf Coast campaign, in New York Harbor, the only foreign warship thus honored.”

http://www.thecajuns.com/galvezrw.htm President Ronald Reagan - Benardo de Gálvez”:

“Few Americans are aware that Bernardo de Galvez was the Spanish governor of the Louisiana territory that encompassed 13 of our present states. They are also unaware that long before any formal declaration of war, General Galvez sent gunpowder, rifles, bullets, blankets, medicine and other supplies to the armies of General George Washington and General George Rogers Clark. Once Spain entered the war against Great Britain in 1779, this dashing young officer raised an army in New Orleans and drove the British out of the Gulf of Mexico. General Galvez captured five British forts in the Lower Mississippi Valley. They repelled a British and Indian attack in St. Louis, Missouri and captured the British fort of St. Joseph in present-day Niles, Michigan. With reinforcements from Cuba, Mexico, Puerto Rico, General Galvez captured Mobile and Pensacola, the capital of the British colony of West Florida. At Pensacola, Galvez commanded a multinational army of over 7,000 black and white soldiers. These men were born in Spain, Cuba, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Hispanola, and other Spanish colonies such as Venezuela. The city was defended by a British and Indian army of 2,500 soldiers and British warship.

An American historian called the siege of Pensacola "a decisive factor in the outcome of the Revolution and one of the most brilliantly executed battles of the war." Another historian stated that General Galvez' campaign broke the British will to fight. This battle ended in May 1781, just five months before the final battle of the war at Yorktown.

General Bernardo de Galvez and his contributions have been remembered even to this day with statues and even a city named in his honor, Galveston, Texas.

United States history textbooks seldom mention the important contributions by our "forgotten allies," Spain and Hispanic America, during the American Revolution. They also forget that they helped in the establishment and growth of the first democracy in the modern world. The neglect in reporting Hispanic contributions extends to all periods of American history. Textbooks also fail to mention the role of 10,000 Hispanic soldiers who fought on both sides of the Civil War.”

Books on Spain, Bernardo de Gálvez & the American Revolution:

Spain and the Independence of the United States, An Intrinsic Gift By Thomas E. Chávez, (University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 2002)

The Vital Contribution of Texas in the Winning of the American Revolution and

The Vital Contributions of Spain In the Winning of the American Revolution

(Spanish) Vital Contribución De España En el Triunfo de la Revolución Americana

http://www.neta.com/~1stbooks/galvez.htm
America USA - Bernardo de Galvez Hispanics in the American Revolution 1775-1783:

Wednesday, May 26, 1993 *EXCELSIOR *
Volviendo a Nuestras Raices

heraldIca

CONOZCA EL ORIGEN DEL APELLIDO

Both Hemandez and Femandez is a variant of Fernando which means "daring in peace." In the United States, Hemandez is the 5th most popular name and Femandez is the 11th most popular name. Many, many Hemandez and Fernandez were in Nueva Espana in the early 1500-1600'g serving in numerous capacities.

Concha Poblano DE MARA traces a direct maternal line back to MANUEL HERNANDEZ, born 1741 in Santa Maria de Abajo, Jalisco, Mexico. Manuel married Josefa Cervantes. They raised their family on the Hernandez ancestral land grant. The next five direct-line generations were all born in Santa Maria de Abajo, Jalisco, living on the hacienda as farmers and ranchers.

Son, Jose Maria Hemandez, born 1767, married Petra Gutierrez. Grandson, Antonio Hemandez, born 1787, married Guadalupe Diaz.

Great grandson, Rito Hernandez, born 1815, married Ines Jaime. Great-great grandson, Jose Hernndez, born 1840, married Ignacia Ortiz.

Jose Hemandez and Ignacia Ortiz had 8 children, all born in Jalisco. In the late 1800's, when the children had all grown, the entire extended family decided to migrate together to Southern California. Much free publicity was given in travel books to the growing towns of Anaheim, Sani Ana and Orange. Santa Fe and Southern Pacific railroads were competing, fares greatly reduced. Land auctions, subdivisions, promotions all added to tremendous growth in Orange County. The city of Orange was praised as "especially adapted to orchards." The Hernandez clan came and purchased homes on the north side of the city of Orange on Cypress Street. Most were able to f work in the growing orchards and agricultural industry.

One of the Hernandez' 8 children was Micaela Hernandez She and her husband, Teodocio Poblano had come directly to Orange County with the extended Hernandez family. In 1917, their son, Marcos Poblano, married Tomasa Gonzales. The young couple moved to Arizona for work in the copper mines and there raised a family of 6 children.

Concha Poblano, granddaughter of Micaela Hernandez, was the fourth child born to Marcos Poblano and Tomasa in Arizona. Eventually the family moved back to Orange County where Concha met and married native Californian Steve DeMara on August 3, 1940. Steve's roots in Southern California go back 200 years to an early Spanish soldier coming from Sonora, Mexico.

Concha and Steve purchased their home in the city of Orange. After World War II, Steve worked I for the Post Office in Orange, retiring in 1981. They raised two daughters who graduated from Orange High School, now married and living in Corona.

Other surnames on this line: Pablano, Villalobo, Gonzales, Morales, Coto, Gomez, Rendon.Compiled by Mimi Lozano, member of the Society of Hispanic Historical and Ancestral Research.

Mother, Are You Still Watching Us?
by Esther Bonilla Read
http://www.aftertheblessing.com

A friend and I were discussing how some habits are so very hard to break. Even good ones. Her mother had taught her to fold clothes a certain way and even though she is middle-aged, she still folds them the way her mother taught her because she wants to please her mother who has long been deceased.

Her story amazed me. And I told her that I, too, had this funny feeling every time I wiped anything (other than a clean dish) with a clean cup towel. I always seem to wait to hear my deceased mother's voice, "Don't you clean that with my white cup towel! I am watching you." We both laughed.

After our mother died I didn't want to change some things. That way I suppose I felt that I could hold on to her just a little bit longer. Finally, I had to take some action. I asked my sister, "Can you go with me to the bank to close mother's safety deposit box?"

"I'll meet you there." We set a time and a date.

I decided on a box type briefcase not because of a vast amount of valuables, but because my mother kept things in little boxes as some elderly women are wont to do.

Square little boxes. Rectangular boxes. Odd shaped, small receptacles. Etc. That way I could just pack everything and close that chapter of our lives.

* * * *

On the appointed day I take the day off from the school where I work and arrive at the bank, briefcase and all and wait by the large glass backdoor. The security man looks me over. No big deal. I wait some more shifting from foot to foot. Other folks in the bank look my way. I look at my watch and then I look out the large, clean glass windows. The security man looks me over, again. No big deal.

I think about my sister. I begin pacing. Back and forth by the back door. Big mistake. A second security guard comes up. He looks me over. Two security guards are now stationed near me. (Oh, great they think I am going to rob the bank-pull a heist. That's why I'm carrying the big briefcase.) I stop pacing. Big mistake. I look at my watch again. Wrong action. Now they think I am going to make my move. (Where, they wonder is my "piece"?)

I am having thoughts of my younger sister. Not good thoughts. Then I remember we are there to bring closure to this part of our mother's life. My mind is muddled, what with the two security guards surrounding me. I look out the glass doors toward the parking lot. My face feels flushed. An armored truck arrives. More men with guns step out of the truck. I look for my sister. Now everyone looks at me and my briefcase. I feel as though they are going to surround me with their guns, slam my body up against the wall and say, "Hands up and against the wall!" like they do in TOP COPS.

Finally, my sister arrives. "Gee, I'm sorry I'm late. A client walked in just as I was walking out. You look sick. I know this is a sad moment, but you really look bad. You okay?"

"I'm all right." I mumble other things to her, but she doesn't hear me. It's just as well. Limply I hold on to my enormous briefcase, and we walk into the main bank and leave all of the armed security people behind us.

I think, "Mother, are you still watching us?"

San Antonio Express, November 7, 1999

Copyright © 2000 Esther Bonilla Read All rights reserved.
http://www.rubberrubberbandman.com/esther/homepage.html
6ebonr@sbcglobal.net

Mary Helen Berlanga
by
Esther Bonilla Read

It was cold that November Saturday morning in 1947 when Daddy woke me up from a deep sleep and a warm bed in which I lay covered in blankets and quilts. In Central Texas , the temperature moved south in the winter months unlike other parts of the state where the weather fluctuated like a person’s moods.

“I have a surprise for you,” he promised.

I swung my legs to the floor and rubbed my eyes for it was still black outside. Daddy smiled and led me to the dining room where he had a fire burning in a heater. Not far from the heater sat a woman- I later learned was called a midwife- and in her lap was a crying baby girl. I rubbed my eyes again. Was I seeing right?

“You have a new baby sister,” Daddy said.

A little sister who could play dolls with me. My heart jumped with joy. And I smiled at the thought. ‘A little sister,’ I whispered in awe.

Mother named her Maria Elena but we renamed her Mary Helen as was the habit in Central Texas . Spanish names were always changed to English names.

She grew into a darling little girl with green eyes, long pigtails with blond wisps at the end of each braid, and a friendly smile. A beautiful child, the last of eight children born to Mexican immigrants Maria and Ruben Bonilla who were already in their forties, yet were thrilled to have another child.

I didn’t really get to play dolls with her very much because by the time she was old enough to play dolls I was in high school and left for college by the time she was six. Instead, I made her some of the clothes she proudly wore.

As a child and youngster Mary Helen witnessed first hand the efforts of her older brothers William, Tony, and Ruben as they fought for the rights of minorities. She thought, perhaps, one day her time would come to contribute to the cause of the under-represented, and the opportunity presented itself.

Mary Helen became an attorney, married David Berlanga and had four children, Christina, Monica, David, and Cathy. Then she found her calling. While still in her thirties she was elected to the State Board of Education of Texas. She became aware of the history books and how they downplayed the contributions of Hispanics/Latinos. Although Spain established permanent settlements in this country before any other European country, the Hispanics were a postscript, almost an afterthought in the history books.

Mary Helen saw it as her moral duty to “fix this”, to give the proper credit to the appropriate folks, in this case, the Hispanics. And the books didn’t tell students that there were Tejanos (citizens in Texas of Mexican descent) who died in the Alamo along with Travis, Crockett and Bowie. That misled the Mexican American citizens, too. So she set out to convince book publishers to get the truth out, not to rewrite history but to write accurate history.

Mary Helen lost her beloved husband David Berlanga in 2009; he had backed her in all her efforts. He is helping her in spirit and in her memory as she continues battling to right the wrongs in the history books, to make the books inclusive, not exclusive of the roles Hispanics/Latinos played and continue playing in the history of this country.

Esther Bonilla Read

http://www.aftertheblessing.com

THE BEAN CONTEST EN LA ESCUELA ZAVALA
by Frank Sifuentes

Preface

By the time Carmen and I were in the 6th Grade, Miss Durham was our homeroom teacher.
She dedicated herself to teaching us penmanship; and left little doubt she was among the very best in the entire l9th Century.

Seeing her handwriting on a black board using white chalk was like witnessing perfection.
Miss Durham just started writing without ever losing a steady motion: and with extra pretty capital letters!

The entire class had to become sufficiently Anglicized, for surely we were considered the most likely to succeed in the Anglo society: because having the ability to speak, read and write in English was -indeed! - our passport to Americana USA.

Yep! We no longer were those 'mesinkin' children. We had been morphed into American Citizens with universal rights as full-fledged participants in the American Dream.

How we were viewed by classmates who did not finish Zavala is another matter. They saw us as induced, inducted and sworn into becoming like 'bolios, posteros, gabachos,
gringos for all we knew. With a whole bunch of songs under our belt from Americana.

Little did anyone know we still had a long way to go.

First and most 'torturous' for me: We HAD to get a passing Grade in Miss Durham's Penmanship Class before Graduating to Allan Jr. High where we got the privilege of getting education in a more universal setting.

The following story is fictionalized, yet it is based on what
really happened when my sister Carmen and I were in the 6th grade.

THE BEAN CONTEST AT ZAVALA ELEMENTARY SCHOOL,
circa 1944-45 Austin, Texas USA

Carmen and I always got to sit next to each other. And it made me feel secure because she was known as the smartest student that had ever been to Zavala.

I had it made. The reason we sat next to each other is because they thought we were twins being we were in the same Grade.

By the time we were in the 6th grade destined to graduate from Zavala Elementary School, the major consideration was whether we were prepared for Allan Jr. High, Austin's only middle school.

The Zavala School Administration and teachers remained uncertain about us: because though we were well versed in English, they were worried because we almost always spoke Spanish in the hallways, bathrooms, and most of all outside in the play grounds during recess and lunch break.

This created the impression we had not learned much English. And since they dearly loved being educators concerned for our future, they feared it would not be long before we dropped out.

Therefore they put their creativity into the ultimate test by devising a Bean Contest.

They gave each of us a little sack with an exact number of beans inside a bag of Bull Durham tobacco, donated by chain smokers no doubt.

The idea was that each time we heard someone speak Spanish anywhere in the boundaries of the school we would be able to demand they gave us a bean.

They made a chart with all our names on it. And it had lines for each week for those who got gold stars for having more beans than the week before.

Mike Arredondo remembered demanded a bean from Jesse Solis and he laughed in his face and called him a bolio. And made him so mad he had to clobber him.

When Jesse walked away he said "Le'boy a dicer a mi hermano que me pegaste'. Mike had already decided he was going to be a U.S. Marine.

And when the teachers and administrators saw we were being motivated to hear Spanish and that there were all kinds of disputes occurring, they cancelled the contest and confiscated the beans.

Someone planted the beans in the back of the school, motivated I guess by the story of Jack and the Bean Stalk.

And when the plants started to grow they sent the janitor to dig them out with a hoe: Dashing dreams of Jack & The Bean Stalk at Zavala Elementary School.

Chicana activist speaks to Orange County, California audience

Community groups gather around Elizabeth "Betita" Martinez in Orange.

A Tramp Across the Continent

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	VICTOR HUGO WRITES TO BENITO JUAREZ Letter in Vicente Riva Palacio's newspaper, La Orquesta, June 31, 1867 Translation to English by Ted Vincent