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"El Magonista"
Vol. 6 No. 31
Oct. 16, 2018
Día de los Muertos, Celebrate Archbishop Romero, and CMSC Continues Advance Parole Campaign
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The California-Mexico Studies Center
Armando Vazquez-Ramos, President & CEO
1551 N. Studebaker Road, Long Beach, CA 90815
Phone: (562) 430-5541 Cell: (562) 972-0986
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It took the brilliant Pixar film "Coco" for me to figure out what was missing: the dancing skeletons, the flower-adorned grave sites, the altars crowded with candles and framed photos of deceased loved ones. I'm talking about Dia de los Muertos, and though the celebration of this Mexican holiday is already established in Latin corners of the United States, I'm proposing we go full throttle and declare the Day of the Dead an official American holiday.
Here's why I'm stumping for the idea. I'm a 62-year-old journalist, first diagnosed with cancer in 2014. As I've written in The Times on other occasions, despite surgery, chemo and radiation, my disease metastasized in 2015. When three different doctors told me I would live six months or "a yearish," I began to think a lot about death.
Until then, like most Americans, I'd avoided the subject. Death was something to run away from - a giant negative, a dark mystery, the end of everything. Pain and grief seemed all that awaited any consideration, forced or otherwise, of what Shakespeare called "the undiscovered country." It doesn't take departed psychologist Ernest Becker, who won the 1974 Pulitzer Prize for his book "The Denial of Death," to recognize that most of us will do anything to ignore mortality until it's coming straight for us or a loved one.
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After he was killed, they burned his photographs and nearly every memento they had of their friend. Th
e rest they buried in their garden, just beneath their guava tree.
Maria Hilda and Guillermo Gonzalez feared saying his name, even to their closest relatives.
It was 1980, and a brutal war grabbed hold of El Salvador soon after Archbishop Oscar Romero was shot in the heart as he celebrated Mass in a hospital chapel.
To them and thousands of other Salvadorans who fled the violence in their homeland and came to Los Angeles, Romero was a hero who fought against oppression, against the massacre of the poor.
To others, he was an agitator. They called him a leftist, guerrilla, communist.
Long after he died, Romero's legacy remained so polarizing that the Roman Catholic Church took decades to decide whether he deserved to be a saint.
The moment we've waited for so long is finally here.
Now 68 and 71 years old, Maria Hilda and Guillermo of Granada Hills thought they would never live to see this day - traveling to Rome for Romero's canonization.
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We would like to take a moment to congratulate our very own, Lidieth Arevalo, for her inspirational story and high achievements as a woman of color, an immigrant, and a first generation college student. Learn about Lidieth's personal story in the following episode of "Inmigrantes: El Camino Hacia un Sueño," an original series produced by CentroAmérica TV.
At the CMSC, we have seen Lidieth grow personally and professionally. She joined the CMSC team in May of 2015 immediately after graduating from CSU Long Beach with a B.A. in Film and Electronic Arts. Ever since, Lidieth has produced a number of documentary films for the CMSC as the center's multimedia director. We are proud of her accomplishments, and firmly believe that she will continue on to become a successful filmmaker and community leader.
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But given the administration's heartless decision to suspend Advance Parole for Dreamers, Mayra must choose between her family in Mexico and her life in the United States.
The original
Advance Parole film follows Mayra Garibo's efforts and leadership to challenge the system and pave the way not only for her to reunite with her family in Mexico, but also to prevent Dreamers from suffering a humanitarian and emotional crisis as she endured when her father passed away early this year.
The
Advance Parole extended version aims to build upon and share more stories and voices from other Dreamers, who either benefited from Advance Parole and those who have been unjustly denied.
But to move forward with this, we need your help!
All volunteers, leadership and support initiatives, and community engagement is welcomed!
Donations and financial backing will help us continue to advocate for the reinstatement of Advance Parole, to cover our social media campaign, film production, and marketing costs.
All support and campaign participation is greatly appreciated!
MAKE YOUR TAX-DEDUCTIBLE DONATION TODAY!
Learn more about the Advance Parole provision, and the CMSC's unique study abroad program for DACA recipients, watch this 1-minute movie clip from the documentary:
Also, in case you haven't, you can watch the 30-minute documentary here:
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By Virginia Heffernan ~
LA Times
All happy partisans are alike; each unhappy partisan is unhappy in his own way.
Max Boot, the Russian-born hawkish polemicist, was a deeply unhappy Republican. His cells hurt when Donald Trump announced his bid for the presidency in 2015. Then Trump kept amping to 11 the note of racism latent in Republican thinking, and Boot was struck by deeper plasmic horror.
"I had denied that Republicans were racist," Boot
said recently. "I couldn't deny it anymore."
Tom Nichols, an author and professor at the U.S. Naval War College, was also an unhappy Republican. Earlier this month, during the Supreme Court confirmation vote, when Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) gave her never-ending spiel of sophistry in announcing she was all-in for pity-party Brett Kavanaugh, Nichols knew his party was jacked.
The GOP, Nichols
wrote
last week, exists only for "the exercise of raw political power." Read More
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Cerritos College (Room LC 155)
Tuesday, October 16, 2018
11:00am-12:30pm
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Complimentary
parking, breakfast and lunch provided!!
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You are cordially invited to the monthly
Latino Political Caucus
October 30th, 5:00pm-8:00pm
El Torito de Long Beach
3301 Atlantic Ave
Long Beach, CA 90807
(off the Atlantic Ave exit- 405 fwy)
Come celebrate Día de los Muertos
and
A presentation on Centro CHA's
Latino Economic Summit
Hosted by Armando Vazquez-Ramos & Jessica Quintana
$10 at the door for all you can eat "Taco Tuesday
Free to the first 25 guests to RSVP at:
For more information, contact:
Armando Vazquez-Ramos at: (562) 972-0986,
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La Frontera Mexico y Estados Unidos: Espacio global para la expansión del capital transnacional
Presentadores:
Dr. William I. Robinson, University of California, Santa Barbara
Dr. Gaspar Rivera-Salgado, UCLA Labor Center
Prof. Armando Vazquez-Ramos, The California-Mexico Studies Center, Inc.
Daniel Montes, Union del Barrio
Dr. Juan Manuel Sandoval Palacios, Instituto Nacional de Antropologgia e Historia, Red Mexicana de Acción frente al Libre Comercio
25 de Octubre, 5:00pm-8:00pm
UCLA Downtown Labor Center
675 S Park View St
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Hugo Black rose from his past in the Ku Klux Klan to become one of the great civil libertarians.
It's obvious why the parallel between the battle over Brett Kavanaugh's Supreme Court nomination and that of Clarence Thomas 27 years earlier grabbed the public's attention. In both cases, late-breaking allegations threatened but failed to derail the confirmation process, and both nominees defended themselves with impassioned denials of wrongdoing
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In early June, the Washington office of Representative Pramila Jayapal began to hear rumors about the women. They had crossed into Texas, where Border Patrol officers promptly arrested them. But now the women were somewhere around Seattle, the city Jayapal represents.
Her staff made calls. Usually, undocumented immigrants in the area were held at the Northwest Detention Center, a private facility operated under a contract with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. But the detention center had not received the women. There were too many of them for ICE to house. Instead, as Jayapal learned on June 7, the mothers were now inmates at a Bureau of Prisons facility near the Seattle-Tacoma airport
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The Los Angeles County inspector general has launched an investigation into whether a Sheriff's Department highway enforcement team engaged in racial profiling when it stopped thousands of innocent Latino drivers in search of drugs on the 5 Freeway
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Everything that was dear to Adrian Luna was in a small town in Idaho, and when he was deported, he died trying to find it again.
ST. ANTHONY, Idaho - Belinda Luna, the librarian in this outpost in Idaho farm country, still shakes when she remembers a visit one day a little more than a year ago to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement office in Idaho Falls. An immigration official informed her husband, right in front of her and their children...
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Helen-a smart, cheerful five-year-old girl-is an asylum seeker from Honduras. This summer, when a social worker asked her to identify her strengths, Helen shared her pride in "her ability to learn fast and express her feelings and concerns." She also recounted her favorite activities ("playing with her dolls"), her usual bedtime ("8 p.m."), and her professional aspirations ("to be a veterinarian")....
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The youngest child to come before the bench in federal immigration courtroom No. 14 was so small she had to be lifted into the chair. Even the judge in her black robes breathed a soft "aww" as her latest case perched on the brown leather.
Her feet stuck out from the seat in small gray sneakers, her legs too short to dangle. Her fists were stuffed under her knees. As soon as the caseworker who had sat her there turned to go, she let out a whimper that rose to a thin howl, her crumpled face a bursting dam
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In the madness of the Trump era, terrible things happen with almost no notice. An announcement is made, some news stories are written, and the issue quickly disappears, engulfed in a storm of crazy tweets and lies, followed by expressions of outrage among President Trump's foes.
A good example is the administration's decision last month to
slash the number of refugees who can be resettled in the United States next year to 30,000, down from the already shamefully low level of 45,000
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The migrant men have told authorities there was no attack on the agent who killed Claudia Patricia Gómez González, according to the Guatemalan Consul.
Three men who were on the scene when a Border Patrol agent shot and killed a 20-year-old Guatemalan woman near the US-Mexico border in May are expected to be deported soon, a representative of their government has told BuzzFeed News.
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SAN JUAN IXCOY, GUATEMALA- With an impish smile, 5-year old Filomena draws up her right hand and fashions herself into a cattle driver. She designates her three-year old cousin the unenviable role of bull. "The bull that's going to the United States," Filomena proclaims in Spanish, directing her cousin-turned-bull through the family's one-room, floorless wooden hut.
It's unclear whether she thinks the U.S. is a promised land or something more sinister
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I took my work seriously and did it well, but eventually, it became clear: The rules of the game were fixed in the wrong direction.
On a cool Sonoran Desert evening, just west of Yuma, Arizona, I sat in my white Chevy U.S. Border Patrol truck. An auxiliary cord connected my phone to the vehicle's stereo system so I could listen to podcasts while scanning the desert for border crossers
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On a recent trip to a south Texas detention center, I saw the rawest, saddest expressions of despair you could imagine. If you're a parent, you have to care about this.
As the nation turns its attention from the Supreme Court nomination battle to the midterm elections, national media coverage is dominated by political theater in the fight for control of Congress. In the meantime, a wholly avoidable and self-made humanitarian crisis persists at our border; a crisis deepened by a cruel and vengeful policy that uses the lives of children as bargaining chits in the absence of coherent immigration policy
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Having immigrant teens live in the "tent city" in
Tornillo, Texas, was always supposed to be a temporary solution, after the
Trump administration's policy of separating
immigrant families at the border meant the government didn't have enough beds in the shelter system.
It opened in June, and the contractor running the site had a 30-day contract. At that time, 326 children were being housed there.
But four months after its opening, the shelter 30 miles outside of El Paso has grown into a bustling town. It now holds nearly five times its initial population - roughly 1,500 teens - and its contract has been extended until at least Dec. 31
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October 12 is a feast-day known in various regions and times by many names: Columbus Day, Discovery Day, Hispanic Culture Day, Day of the Americas, Day of the Race, Day of the Indigenous Peoples.
In Mexico in 1928 at the insistence of the philosopher José Vasconcelos, then Minister de Education, it was named Día de la Raza (Day of the Race), denomination of the Iberian-American Union in 1913 to declare a new identity formed by the encounter of the Spaniards with the native peoples of the Americas. In 1902, the Mexican poet Amado Nervo had written a poem in honor of Benito Juárez (a Zapoteca Indian), which he read in the House of Representatives, titled Raza de Bronce (Race of Bronze) praising the indigenous race, title which later in 1919 the Bolivian author Alcides Arquedas would give his book
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Like a lot of Californians, I've made dozens of trips to Mexico over the decades - beach resorts in Baja, Maya ruins in the Yucatán, colonial towns in the interior. Yet I'd never made time to explore the capital's top museums and landmarks, even though their global popularity has boomed in recent years. When I finally gave myself a good look at Mexico City this year, most of those attractions surprised me.
I knew the city's seismic history but didn't expect it to show up as dramatically in the Metropolitan Cathedral.
I expected vibrant street life but didn't anticipate jazz musicians jamming on the sidewalk
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