I’m Not The Only One

Hillary Clinton has remained in Puerto Rico, feverishly campaigning and telling voters there they can have it both ways, in other words, the advantages of being a U.S. state while pretending to be a sovereign nation.

Here’s a brief rundown on Puerto Rico’s current political status (To avoid confusion, I will refer to residents of Puerto Rico as Puerto Ricans and U.S. mainland residents of Puerto Rican descent as Nuyoricans): Puerto Rico has its own Olympic team and enjoys representation in the United Nations.

Puerto Ricans don’t pay federal income taxes (except for those working for federal agencies located in Puerto Rico), but pay into Social Security and Medicare. Despite paying into Social Security and Medicare, Puerto Ricans cannot receive any Social Security Income and are allocated 15 percent fewer Medicare funds than if it were a U.S. state.

Spanish is the official language with English as a widely taught second language. The U.S. dollar is the only currency used on the island and all Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens, except for those few who have denounced their U.S. citizenship as a political statement. Puerto Ricans are not allowed to vote for U.S. President and only have one representative in Congress who has no vote.

Puerto Ricans are allowed to enlist in the U.S Armed Forces, and Puerto Rican men were drafted into the military during World War I, World War II, the Korean War and the Vietnam War. Puerto Rico has a National Guard but relies on the U.S. military for defense. Puerto Ricans have fought in every U.S. war since 1900.

While Puerto Rico’s political status is unclear, there’s no doubt that the relationship between the island and the U.S. is one of a colony subservient to its mother country.  To use a sports analogy, Puerto Rico isn’t on the U.S. team, and it isn’t its own team either, but rather the team’s towel boy.  Whatever goes on in Puerto Rico does so at the approval of Washington, yet Puerto Ricans have no power over the Congressmembers or President who literally reign over the island from 1,000 miles away.  Such is the life of a colony.

What few Puerto Ricans seem to understand is that when you try to have everything you end up not having much of anything.  And that’s exactly what they have.

But Hillary is telling Puerto Ricans the exact opposite: that they really can have it all.  This New York Times article quotes the following:

“At a rally on Saturday evening in Aguadilla, at the western end of the island, Mrs. Clinton struck many of those same themes. To cheers, she said, “I believe you should have a vote in picking the president,” even before the issue of the island’s status is resolved.”

Hillary also promised to give Puerto Rico a greater voice and even a vote in Congress.  If Puerto Rico wants to be granted the same rights as a U.S. state, let them become a state.  Some Puerto Ricans aren’t interested in the Democratic Primary at all.  If they want to distance themselves from the U.S. and hold tightly onto their Puerto Rican identity, they can become an independent country.  But this colony garbage has got to go.

I’ve only visited Puerto Rico a few times in my life, and from my experiences I’ve found most people there blame the United States for most of their problems.  So much disdain for the U.S., yet when it comes time to vote for their future political status, it’s always a dead heat between colony and state, with independence getting a measly 3 or 4 percent.

But Hillary is determined to catch up with Barack Obama by nabbing as many popular and delegate votes as possible by telling Puerto Ricans the biggest possible lie.  And if by some unbelievable fairy tale scenario in which Clinton wins the nomination and the general election, she would either forget her promise to Puerto Rico or introduce some half-assed bill and blame the Republicans for keeping her from giving Puerto Rico all the perks of being a state without having to be a state.

Personally, I think the next President can solve Puerto Rico’s status dilemma by abolishing their “commonwealth” status, thus forcing them to choose between independence or statehood.  But don’t expect Hillary to tell them the cold, hard truth.  She certainly has broken the glass ceiling for her gender-thanks to her, now women can be political hacks as well, complete with the same empty gesture, grandiose promises just waiting to be broken and great big phony smiles you’d expect from most male politicians.

From a New York Times article covering the Primary race in Puerto Rico.

As in other recent primaries, race may also end up playing a role in determining how people vote. But here, Mr. Obama’s biracial identity is perceived as working to his advantage.

“On the mainland, Obama is black, but not in Puerto Rico,” said Juan Manuel García Passalacqua, a political commentator. “Here he is a mulatto, and this is a mulatto society. People here are perfectly prepared to vote for someone who looks like them for president of the United States.”

Couldn’t have said it better myself.

With the Oregon and Kentucky Democratic primaries behind us, only three primaries remain: Puerto Rico on June 1 and Montana and South Dakota on June 3.

Most gringos are absolutely confused about Puerto Rico’s inclusion in this primary race, mostly because they think Puerto Rico is somewhere in Mexico.

The island’s current relationship with the U.S. is an ambiguous one whose status resembles that of a colony. Puerto Ricans living on the island do not pay federal income taxes but pay Social Security and Medicaid taxes.  Anyone who believes the Clinton campaign’s lies about Latinos not willing to vote for a black person for President will find that Puerto Rican electorate will defy their misconceptions even further, especially when one recalls that Puerto Rico overwhelmingly voted for Rev. Jesse Jackson as when he ran in the Democratic Presidential Primary back in 1988.

Real Clear Politics wrote about Puerto Rico’s involvement in the 2008 Primary race, offering a lot of insight into this matter.  And for those who don’t think Puerto Rico will make a significant impact in this race, bear in mind that the island has 63 delegates, more than Montana and South Dakota combined (48). (more…)

No, that wasn’t a typo.  Xenophobes like California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger have long insisted that Latinos, especially those who don’t speak English very well, should watch English language television news.  But a recent article in the Washington Post indicates otherwise.

“Schwarzenegger is wrong, and so is this new consensus. The error is particularly obvious in cities with the largest immigrant populations, especially Los Angeles, the town the governor calls home. Schwarzenegger could discover ample evidence of this all by himself — simply by turning on his television.

Extremely well-informed gringo reporter Joe Mathews offered the following:

“On most nights here, the most timely, serious and civic-minded local news is not available on the Internet, the radio or any of the half-dozen English-language stations that broadcast nightly shows that purport to be newscasts. At 11 p.m. each night here, the best newscasts in the market appear on two Spanish-language channels, Univision’s flagship KMEX and Telemundo affiliate KVEA.”

“If immigrants took Schwarzenegger’s advice and flipped off Spanish stations in favor of English-language news, they wouldn’t have nearly as good an idea of what was happening in their adopted city, state and country.”

Mathews goes on to compare one night of newscasts among Los Angeles affiliates of Telemundo and Univision to newscasts on the same night of LA affiliates of CBS, ABC and NBC.

Take a recent night, after a typical day of Los Angeles news. English-language TV led with the weather (it was raining, which is not as unusual as you might think during an L.A. winter), then moved into splashy reports with dramatic footage of a gang shootout and possible hostage situation in a city neighborhood. Less than eight minutes into the newscast, trivia took over. The CBS affiliate’s third piece involved new questions about the death of Marilyn Monroe. The NBC affiliate dwelled on a hepatitis scare at a party for celebrities and swimsuit models, then attempted a brief consumer-oriented investigation about people’s need to replace their tires more frequently. The ABC affiliate gave five minutes to movies and entertainment, from an Oscar preview to a sit-down interview with Jon Stewart.

“In Spanish, viewers got fewer soft features and more deeply reported, longer pieces. KMEX mentioned the gang shootout but provided far more context, interviewing local residents about recent crime and about how local businesses and schools were affected by an hours-long neighborhood lockdown as police searched for a suspect. KMEX also aired a detailed report on a major beef recall from a local firm, a couple of pieces on local politics (including a roundup of what city and county leaders had done that day) and a four-minute examination of key policy issues in the presidential campaign. The Oscars went unmentioned. KVEA’s half-hour newscast, ” En Contexto” (which means what it sounds like), was even more substantive. It gave a thorough review of local political and government news, then delved deeply into nearly 20 minutes of explanation of rising home foreclosures and mortgage problems. (Yes, Spanish-language viewers were callously left to figure out that it was raining all by themselves.)

“This was no fluke. The next night, KMEX broke the news that the LAPD had more Latino officers than white officers, and KVEA ran a piece on the pay and working conditions of security guards. Meanwhile, their English-language rival KABC was finishing another Oscar preview and beginning a heartwarming story involving dogs.

“There’s no comparison in the coverage,” says Josh Kun, a communications professor at the University of Southern California who closely follows Spanish TV. “For people here, there are two places to look for better news: BBC News and Spanish-language news.”

“Why the difference? As English-language news organizations — desperate to stop the declines of their audiences and ad revenues — cut back on news-gathering, they devote their time and resources to entertainment, celebrities, pets and crime (or, best of all, stories that combine all four). But Spanish-language TV producers, who serve a clearly defined, growing audience, have space to tackle weightier topics.

“The result: The sharpest coverage of state and local issues — government, politics, immigration, labor, economics, health care — is now found on Spanish-language TV. They compete hard on serious stories. As a labor reporter for the Los Angeles Times in 2006, the only competitors I routinely saw at major union stories were reporters for KMEX, KVEA and La Opinion, a Spanish-language daily newspaper. These outlets tell their viewers more about how the state and the region work, they are more persistent in demanding explanations from public officials, and their reports routinely include more interviews with more sources from more perspectives.

“The Spanish-language TV broadcasts are, for lack of a better word, more American.

“On a recent night, KVEA did eight minutes on the Iraq war, spent five minutes on deplorable working conditions in Southern California car washes and had reports on narco-traffickers and the latest key legislation in the state legislature and Los Angeles City Hall. Meanwhile, the CBS affiliate had a reporter doing a trend piece on “night spas” that are open until midnight, and ABC was running an item on high-tech fitness equipment.

“It’s enough to make one wonder if it isn’t time for our political leaders to turn off the English-language TV and encourage good citizens to learn Spanish, the language of civic-minded news.

This is no mystery to anyone who gets their news from Spanish-language television.  It has literally been years since I’ve sat down and watched English-language network news shows.  When I do watch news in English, it is from one of the 24-hour cable news channels.  Unfortunately, Mathews left out FOX, whose affiliates in New York, WNYW, offer the most coverage of anything superficial.  Watching the news on WNYW makes me gag.

Mathews also forgot to mention how hard-hitting the morning news can be on Spanish-language television in comparison to that of any English-language news affiliate.

Despite the aforementioned oversights, I think Mathews wrote a great piece, an expose even, that should open the eyes of the non-Hispanic public to the inadequacies of their own TV news shows.

Now, if only Spanish-language news shows could do something about their lack of racial diversity.  I don’t know about the Telemundo or Univision affiliates in other cities, but in New York our Spanish-language news is inexplicably given to the Latino community mostly by blonde-haired blue-eyed anchors with German surnames.  To look at a Univision or Telemundo newscast, you would think they were filming the show not in New York, but perhaps Berlin or Copenhagen.

I’m not sure why these two networks are less willing to hire news staff of color than English-language networks, but it might have something to do with their owners and CEOs: Univision is owned by Haim Saban, an Egyptian Jew who is now an Israeli citizen and Telemundo is owned by NBC and the network’s president is a man named Don Browne.  People forget that you don’t need to be Latino to own or oversee a Spanish-language media company.  You just need a lot of money.  Though both networks were started by Latinos in the 1950s, they have both been sold off to the highest bidder over the years.

Many people may not know who Mildred Loving is, but her court case overturned a shameful (and legal) practice in the United States.  Mildred Loving died last week, May 2, at the age of 68, joining her husband Richard who died in 1975.  This couple became famous-or infamous-in 1958 for the simple act of marriage.

Mildred was of African and Rappahannock (Native American) descent, and her beloved husband was Caucasian.   The two Virginians got their marriage license in Washington, D.C, but upon return to their home state was charged with “cohabiting as man and wife, against the peace and dignity of the Commonwealth” according to Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act, which prohibited whites from marrying non-whites.  The Lovings fled Virginia to avoid arrest.  Leon Bazile, the judge who sentenced them to one year in prison if they didn’t leave the state, added the following:

“Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, Malay and red, and He placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with His arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that He separated the races shows that He did not intend for the races to mix.”

The contraband couple sought refuge in Washington, D.C. until 1963 when they sued for Virginia to overturn the previous judgment on the grounds that it violated the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution which requires all states to give equal protection to all of its residents.  The state argued that they did not violate the Fourteenth since both spouses were equally sentenced.

The Lovings turned to the U.S. Supreme Court, who ruled in 1967 that the Racial Integrity Act and all other anti-miscegenation laws were racist and promoted white supremacy, citing that Virginia only prohibited marriage between whites and non-whites and not non-whites of different races.

Strangely enough, many states kept their anti-miscegenation laws on the books albeit unenforced, with Alabama being the last state to repeal their race-mixing ban in 2000.

Few people are familiar with similar court cases involving interracial marriages in the U.S. that precede Loving v. Virginia.

In 1948, Andrea Perez, a Mexican-American woman regarded as white, and Sylvester Davis, an African-American, sued the Los Angeles County Clerk to issue them a marriage license.  The county invoked California’s 98-year old anti-miscegenation law which stated,

“No license may be issued authorizing the marriage of a white person with a Negro, mulatto, Mongolian or member of the Malay race”.  Like the Lovings, the Davis’ argued the state law violated the Fourteenth Amendment and the California Supreme Court agreed and granted them their marriage license.

In 1881 Tony Pace, an African-American and Mary Cox, a white woman, both married (not to each other) Alabama residents were sentenced to two years in jail for “living together in a state of adultery or fornication”.  Like the Lovings, Pace and Cox argued the state’s race-mixing bans violated the Fourteenth Amendment, which had just been passed 13 years earlier.  Alabama prosecutors used the same argument Virginia would use 80 years later and added,

“The evil tendency of the crime is greater when committed between persons of the two races…its result may be the amalgamation of the two races, producing a mongrel population and a degraded civilization, the prevention of which is dictated by a sound policy affecting the highest interests of society and government.”

The difference between these three cases is that Loving ruling was decided during the Civil Rights Movement as well as the fact that the case was heard by the Supreme Court.  Had Davis and Perez sought a marriage license in Alabama or Virginia, they probably would have ended up in jail.  After the Civil War, Alabama made interracial marriage and interracial sex a felony that resulted in a prison sentence of two to seven years. Anyone attempting to officiate an interracial marriage could be fined up to $1,000 and be imprisoned for up to six months.  Pace and Cox who were simply having extramarital sex had to serve their time.

Despite these previous challenges to anti-miscegenation laws the case of Mildred and Richard Loving are the most famous because it ultimately led to a federal ban on these kinds of state laws.  The Supreme Court decision nullified all state laws banning whites from marrying non-whites or having intimate relations with each other.

The Loving ruling affects me personally, as it should for all Latinos.  Since Latinos come in many different shades, in Latin America, people of different races are allowed to marry.  In some cases, Latinos of different colors have found life in the U.S. difficult, especially before the Civil Rights era.  Andrea Perez most likely had blacks or Native Americans in her own family tree, but her light complexion initially made her marriage to Sylvester Davis a legal obstacle.

Because most non-Latinos only recognize Spanish surnames that end in “ez” (my name is not a typical Spanish surname but is Spanish nonetheless) most people look at my facial features, hair, eye shape and complexion to try to guess my own ethnic makeup.  For the record, I am a classic trigueno  (being the descendant of Spaniards, the Taino natives they enslaved and the Africans they enslaved to replace the Tainos) with a dash of Italian.  When not correctly identified as Latino, I’ve been mistaken for everything from Greek to Israeli to Italian to sambo (part Native American and part black) to mestizo (part Native American and part white) to mulatto to Vietnamese to Yemeni (for some reason, Middle Easterners almost always mistake me for being from Yemen and no other part of the Arab World).

Personally, I think most people are way off anyway and have no business making such bad guesses.  But my fiancee, whose father is a Puerto Rican Jew and mother is Sicilian, is so light-skinned there is no way she could ever be mistaken for anything except white.  She has been mistaken for Polish, German, Russian and Dutch and almost never identified as Latina.  When we go to the beach, I turn darker while her skin simply turns red and peels off.  I poke fun at her sometimes, calling her my “mayonnaise momma”.

My point is that the Loving case affects me personally because if such race-mixing laws were still enforced in this country, I may not even be allowed to kiss my fiancee, much less marry her.  Of course, this depends on which state considers me non-white, but the notion that I would have to argue my whiteness in court to validate my marriage to my fair-skinned fiancee.

Furthermore, I don’t think the government has any business deciding who can marry who.  Ironically, Loving v. Virginia has been used in court to argue in favor of same-sex marriage, which currently faces the same uphill battle interracial marriage faced so many years ago.  As I argued in a previous post, the government shouldn’t play any part in banning polygamous marriages, either.

Winston Churchill once said, “Americans will always do the right thing…after having tried everything else.”  At least we progress in baby steps instead of not progressing at all.

P.S.: My fiancee’s mother thought I was Chinese when she first met me!

This latest comment is from Hispanic Pundit on a post about the U.S.-Colombia Free Trade Agreement entitled “Quote of the Day“.  I invite you to join the debate.

For those of you who have cared to follow, I’ve been looking for steady work for the last four months.  I recently joined the MSNBC Politics blog ad network and that’s why you see all those long vertical ads on the sidebar.  Right now I’m basically surviving on my tax refund because the money from a job I did last month has run out.

Unlike Google Ad, which allows you to place their links anywhere on the site, MSNBC requires they be near the top of the page.  It just means you have to scroll down a bit farther to see the categories, posts, comments, blogroll and all the other fun sidebar features on INTOO.
For those readers who may find all of these display ads to be visually offensive, just bear in mind that unlike myself, you probably have a job.  This is me surviving.  I am so sick of filling out applications and going on job interviews that go nowhere.  I’m also going to expand my writing hustle and my array of services.

I’ve lost faith in finding steady employment for now.  I’ll still keep filling out job applications and pouring through classified ads, but I will be doing so as if I am buying a lottery ticket: I know I probably won’t hit the jackpot but I also know I have no chance of winning if I don’t play.

My new plan is simply to do what I can to get by and wait for the economy to eventually bounce back.  This New Yotk Times article at least gives me some consolation:

“But the number of jobs reported lost by the Labor Department on Friday was significantly smaller than most analysts had predicted, and the unemployment rate nudged down to 5 percent, raising hopes that the economy may not suffer as severely as once feared.

“It strongly argues that this downturn will be mild and short- lived,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Economy.com. “As long as businesses hold the line on their layoffs, the economy will weaken, but it won’t unravel.”

I was considering applying for the New York Police Department and the New York City Department of Corrections, and the exams are in May and June, but the Mayor has said that due to a decrease in federal funding, fewer officers will be hired this year, so my chances of being hired are not that great.  The only government agencies that seem to be hiring en masse are law enforcement and the Armed Forces, and I figured while policing the mean streets of New York aren’t much safer than policing Iraq, at least I get to go home every night.

The City’s public school system is hiring teachers too, with a fellowship program that provides new hires with a free Masters in Education as long as they agree to teach in the public schools for five years.  I’ve had a few friends who graduated from college and not only couldn’t find work in the field for which they studied or trained, but couldn’t find anywhere else and began teaching during the day as they attended graduate classes at night, so by the time they earn the Masters, they only have two or three years left under their contract.  I wonder how many people have opted to become a poorly paid New York City public school teacher solely because they couldn’t find any other form of steady employment.

The next application season begins in August.  Unfortunately, I missed the February application deadline because I was so confident I’d find a media job.  That was stupid of me, because I could be teaching right now and earning a steady paycheck.

This post is a lot longer than I originally intended it to be, so I’m just going to end now. Again, don’t mind the display ads, and if you’re feeling charitable without having to donate any money, please click on a few of them.