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Bilingual Class Gets OK to Grow, (posted 2/15/99) CUPERTINO, Calif. January 28 -- Over the objections of several dozen parents, the Cupertino School District has decided to expand an experimental class into Santa Clara County's first full-fledged two-way Mandarin-English program. Starting next year, the school board decided Tuesday night, instruction will be divided evenly each day between Mandarin and English in the class at John Muir School. The controversial program-which now serves kindergarten students-will remain a pilot project. But the board decided it will be allowed to add one grade level next year, so long as enough families express interest and the district can find space. (San Jose Mercury News) City Touts Bilingual Curriculum, (posted 2/15/99) DENVER, January 29 -- It takes an entire community to teach a child. And that's exactly what the city of San Jose, Calif., is doing. At the National Association for Bilingual Education conference in Denver, officials from the Alum Rock Union Elementary School District in San Jose talked about how they've teamed up with businesses, area universities, community groups and governmental agencies to provide non-English-speaking students with a quality, multicultural education and opportunities. The program, which involves six San Jose school districts, is funded with a $25 million federal grant and community donations. Offering programs ranging from nutrition and parenting classes to disease prevention and assistance with college tuition, the program was launched in 1996 to lower high school dropout rates and encourage and help more students get into college. "We need to stop looking at bilingual education as one model that fits all," said Roberto Cruz of the National Hispanic University, emphasizing the unique ways districts and communities can join forces to address the needs of non-English speaking students. (Denver Post) Judge Orders INS to Set Bail (posted 2/12/99) by Leonel Sanchez A federal judge in San Diego has ordered the Immigration and Naturalization Service to set bond for a local man who is challenging a law that denies bail to immigrants with criminal records who are facing deportation. The ruling may pave the way for new bail hearings for scores of immigrants now in detention across then nation. U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Miller did not address the constitutionality issue of the case but ruled that the INS had failed to apply a 1996 law correctly when it arrested Julio Alves Curras of San Diego last December. Miller said the law did not apply to Alves because the INS took him into custody six years after he was released from state custody in 1992. He said the intent of the law was to deport criminal immigrants as soon as they had completed their sentences. "Congress did not intend for the mandatory detention provision to apply to individuals such as (Alves)," said Miller, referring to a section of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996. The INS has until Feb. 12 to set a bail hearing. The agency plans to ask Miller to reconsider his ruling, a spokeswoman for the INS said. Assistant U.S. Attorney Sam Bettwy, who is representing the INS in the lawsuit, said the agency could also appeal the decision to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. "That decision will be made in Washington," he said, referring to the U.S. Attorney General's Office. Alves' supporters hailed Miller's ruling as a victory for immigrants, who, they contend, are being detained without bail and ordered deported for relatively minor crimes they committed and served time for years ago. "Aliens cannot just be thrown in jail without having a chance to prove they are not a threat to the community or a flight risk," said attorney Jonathan Montag, whose firm is representing Alves. Alves was arrested after he went to the INS office in National City to discuss his application for legal U.S. residency. He was arrested and ordered to be deported because of his 1991 petty-theft and burglary convictions, which he had had expunged from his record after completing his sentence. His supporters said the Mexico native had stayed out of trouble since then and was in the process of settling down in San Diego with his U.S. citizen wife of two years when he was arrested and ordered to be held without bail by an immigration judge. The immigration judge said he was following a 1996 law that expanded the definition of a deportable crime and denied bail to immigrants who had committed such crimes. Alves could have appealed the ruling to an immigration appeals board. Instead, he filed a lawsuit in federal court challenging the constitutionality of the law. He alleged that his rights to due process were violated. A local group has formed around the issue and protested the 1996 law on Monday in front of the federal courthouse in downtown San Diego. Unions and the Fight for Multi-Racial Democracy, (posted 2/12/99) California Studies Conference, University of California Berkeley, 2/6/99 By David Bacon California, like many other states, already has a multi-racial working class. Very soon in the next millenium, the state will become a majority-minority state, in which white people will no longer make up a majority of the population. This is already true in Hawaii, and is likely to become the case in other states in the coming decade. But while we have a multi-racial working class, working people still have little political power-a democracy in form, but not in substance. How well our class is organized, how successfully it battles for political representation and its own political interests, will determine what kind of democracy we have. Working-class power will determine especially if this democracy represents the needs of African-American, Asian, Latino, Native American and other people of color, who are overwhelmingly working-class themselves. In California, changing demographics in population are changing the face of the workforce, and because of that, the labor movement as well. These changes are giving immigrant workers in particular a powerful tool for winning greater economic power and increasing their ability to participate in politics. In the San Francisco Bay Area, Local 6 -- the warehouse union of the ILWU- was a union in danger of disappearing a decade ago. Many of its shops had closed and run away, a common experience for many industrial unions. Latino organizers in Local 6 made an alliance with immigrant workers already unhappy over their conditions. That alliance is saving their union. At Rubberstampede, a toy sweatshop in Emeryville, the union lost an election in 1996 because of promises of wage raises from the boss. When those promises were broken, a spontaneous 16-week strike won a contract for over 300 workers. At Mediacopy, a tape duplication plant in San Leandro, the union defied immigration raids, cooperation between the INS and the company, and a terror campaign by unionbusters. Again the local lost an election, but eventually won a bargaining order, and a contract for over 700 new members. Then in Oakland, garbage recycling workers became angry at their employer on finding out the company that had a city contract requiring it to pay $8 an hour, while giving workers minimum wage. Workers struck and won. Now a hundred new members belong to Local 6. Local 6 organizers began to use the combination of the militancy of this new workforce with the union's own tradition of solving problems through direct action on the job. At the Altamont garbage dump, and on the waste recycling lines in San Leandro, workers started solving grievances by having safety meetings on company time, and refusing to go back to work until the company negotiated directly with them. Some people were fired, and the INS raided one of the sites. But the union and workers haven't been intimidated into silence. These are not just instances of savvy organizers manipulating a passive workforce. This movement is based on a democratic upsurge among workers themselves, angry over their exclusion from the economic and political process generally. While their efforts won contracts and better conditions, they've had a profound effect far beyond that, on the union itself. In December Local 6 elected its first Latino president- Roberto Flotte. It was an historic achievement. Almost two decades ago, Roberto Flotte's father, the first Latino business agent in Local 6, was assassinated in the union hall. Now one of his sons is the local president, and the other is its organizer. Local 6's experience epitomizes a dilemma for many unions. On the one hand, their leaders see organizing immigrants as the answer to declining membership and power. But the militancy of this workforce, which unions depend on for success, and the expectations these workers bring with them as new members, can upset the established political structure and leadership. In Los Angeles in early 1990s, Mexican and Central American immigrants battled police and won contracts in Century City, and rebuilt the janitors' union. But then a group of those workers ran candidates for office, and beat the old guard. In the midst of internal turmoil, the international union placed the local in trusteeship. That didn't happen in Local 6, because the democratic structure of the union helped it survive. The ILWU is a union with roots in the democratic upsurge of the 1930s. The rank-and-file run it as a result. Internal democracy helped the local survive the transition and grow. White workers, who have been the majority population in California's labor movement, and still dominate its leadership, have had some hard choices to make. Many unions have seen conflict over racial, national and gender representation. In San Francisco, Painters Local 4 is trying to get rid of its first elected Latino business agent, Lucho Mauricio. Mauricio helped to save the union, almost doubling its membership by bringing in primarily Latino immigrants and African-American workers. The threat posed by this change in demographics to the existing local leadership was heightened by the fact that Lucho defended the conditions of these new workers against contractors with longstanding ties to officials. Local leaders and the international union have made wave after wave of charges against him, suspending him from office. In the local carpenters union, however, the reaction has been different. At BMP, a large earthquake retrofitting company, the union helped the company's immigrant workers to organize in a militant, direct action campaign. In the middle of the drive, the union picketed the company's offices. On the picketline, an older white man, a union member for many years, looked at the Mexican workers around him and observed that "these people are going to save our union, We've been shrinking for years," he said. "and losing control over our work. If we survive, it's going to be because they get organized and join us." Implied in his comment is the understanding that his local may become, if it survives, a majority-Mexican union. And to him, the survival of the union is the important thing, not the race or nationality of its members. The lesson is that unions only survive by opening their doors and giving the members control, not by barring them. Today the ILWU is a multi-racial union. In the longshore division, Harry Bridges made a commitment to the African-American community of the Bay Area during the 1934 longshore strike in which the union was organized. Side with us, he said, with the primarily white workers on strike, and we will bring down the color line imposed by the shipping companies. Black workers fought alongside white, and the union lived up to its promise. Today, Local 10, the San Francisco longshore union, is a majority African-American union. It has higher wages and a better standard of living for its members than most other unions in northern California, black or white. In Los Angeles, Local 13, the LA longshore union, is a majority Latino union. And in Hawaii, the huge Local 142, with half the whole international union's membership, is made up of mostly Japanese- and Filipino-American workers. But Bridges always said that the purpose of gaining control over jobs wasn't to create an island of high wages and privilege in a sea of poverty and powerlessness. The purpose is to gain power to change society. This is the challenge for unions generally. African-American longshore men and women have a high standard of living now, much higher than the general population of the Bay Area. But their jobs are few today-less than a thousand. In the meantime, the African-American communities of East Oakland, North Richmond and East Palo Alto have depression levels of unemployment, and a generation of young people are being locked away in prisons. Winning good conditions for longshore workers is only part of the battle. The challenge for the union is finding ways to use its power to organize and fight for better conditions in the whole community. The same challenge exists in Hawaii, where the growth of the ILWU changed the island's politics profoundly in the 40s, 50s and 60s, ending the virtual dictatorship of the five sugar and pineapple families. But now the sugar and pineapple are gone, replaced by tourism. And while the union has many new jobs in that industry, the heady days of its political dominance are fading. Democracy is not possible in this country without a strong labor movement. But the labor movement cannot survive and win political power by itself. There are two simulataneous requirements for the growth of the movement for multi-racial democracy. First, the labor movement must be rebuilt. It is in the interest of working people and communities of color in general to fight for the right to organize, and that right can't be won without a general commitment far beyond labor's own ranks. Organizing has become a war in the workplace. Democratic rights-to speak, to hold opinions, to associate freely, to publish what you think-stop at the door to the job. One worker in every ten participating in a union organizing drive gets fired. For immigrant workers, the risk is even greater. Those who have no documents cannot collect unemployment, cannot be reinstated if the National Labor Relations Board holds they were fired for union activity, and cannot legally find another job at all. There is no democracy where the right to a union is concerned. Yet it is in the broad interest of communities in general that workers organize. There would be no debate of the privitization and gutting of Social Security if the labor movement represented half the workers in the U.S., instead of an eighth. If the workers of Silicon Valley, mostly immigrant women and people of color working in the bastion of the union-free environment, had strong unions, they could have stopped software billionaire Ron Unz from organizing the Proposition 227 campaign to gut bilingual education. Strong, democratic unions can be the bastion of the movement for social change. That gives the majority of people, white and minority, an interest in defending workers on the front lines, trying to organize on their jobs. To succeed, these workers need an environment in which their whole community supports them, and will take action to protect their rights. But community/labor alliances, the backbone of the movement for multi-racial democracy, are two-way streets. Unions have to become social movements, defending the rights of workers and communities in general. This is not easy either. California's labor movement can take credit for holding many socially progressive positions. So far, the state has the only state federation which calls for abolishing employer sanctions against undocumented workers. When the state's unions fought to preserve Cal-OSHA and won an increase in the minimum wage, they helped defend the interests of all workers, especially those on the bottom, not just union members. Local unions of janitors and teachers turned their offices into campaign headquarters to defeat Propositions 187 and 209. California labor bankrolled much of the campaigns against these racist wedge initiatives. But tension still exists between narrow self-interest and social movement unionism. In November's election, local unions and activists on the ground struggled to link the campaigns against Propositions 226 and 227 together. Both were attacks on working people. But 226 was much more directly an attack on the power of unions themselves, hitting at their ability to participate in election campaigns. Basic democratic rights were the target of Proposition 227, which denies the right of immigrant children and their families to use their native language in the classroom. On the statewide level, many labor campaign strategists decided not to link these issues together, or campaign against them jointly. This kind of realpolitik places immediate tactical advantage over the long-term necessity of building a stronger movement. It assumes that white workers in particular can't be educated in the course of a campaign to defend immigrants or women or communities of color. Yet the right educates workers all the time in elections, convincing people, for instance, that immigrants are a drain on the economy instead of a source of fabulous profits for employers. This short-sighted strategy undermines the equality and mutual interest necessary to build a strong alliance betweeen unions and working-class communities, especially communities of color. But two long-term changes point to ways of resolving these problems. First, unions are being forced to change by their need to organize to survive. The racial, national and gender composition of labor is changing, from the bottom to the top. It is already a big contrast to the majority-white, conservative complexion of the unions of the 1960s and 70s. In a decade, the labor movement will be even more different. The power of changing demographics in the voting population will change the political playing field profoundly as well. California will be a majority-minority state. That general shift, and the sharp increase in the number of new-citizen voters in particular, will put an end to the era of the racist rightwing initiative. Both developments only create better conditions for the development of progressive politics. Objective conditions can't substitute by themselves for the education and political discussion needed to make workers aware of their own interests as a class. Better conditions only make it even more necessary for progressive, leftwing and class-conscious activists to organize and struggle for a more far-sighted political agenda. But these changes make it much more possible to fight for profound social and economic change, the foundation for multi-racial democracy. Georgia State Professor Sues FBI, (posted 2/12/99) .c The Associated Press ATLANTA (AP) -- A college professor who was investigated by federal agents, allegedly for inviting a Cuban government official to speak at a symposium, sued the U.S. Justice Department and the FBI. Beatriz Morales Cozier's federal lawsuit, filed Tuesday in Atlanta, seeks access to the entire file the FBI compiled on her during an investigation almost five years ago, when she was at Georgia State University. The suit asks that a federal judge review the file privately and determine whether "national security" justifies the deletion of many passages in the file. Ms. Cozier, who immigrated from Cuba in 1961, originally asked for the file through the Freedom of Information Act. The FBI took 3 1/2 years to release the file and then gave her only 30 pages of the 62-page file, the lawsuit said, adding that many of the pages contained heavily edited portions under the justification of "national security." "A law-abiding citizen has the right to know why the FBI is spying on her through her neighbors, friends and family," said Gerald Weber, one of Ms. Cozier's lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union. He argued that there is no reason national security would apply to her case. The FBI repeatedly interviewed Ms. Cozier's family, co-workers and friends, and looked at her real estate, employment and tax records, he said. Molly Halle of the FBI's office in Atlanta declined to comment Tuesday. While at Georgia State in 1994, Ms. Cozier invited Jose-Luis Ponce, then secretary of the Office of Cuban Interests in Washington, to attend a symposium. Ponce accepted the invitation and allegedly criticized the U.S. government during his remarks. A few weeks afterward, an FBI agent arrived at Georgia State and questioned Ms. Cozier, the lawsuit says. Ponce's visa was revoked in 1996 by the United States, in response to a decision by the communist Cuban government to expel a U.S. diplomat from Havana. Ms. Cozier now teaches anthropology at Morris Brown College in Atlanta. Principal, 65, Badly Beaten in Alleged Hate Crime, (posted 2/11/99) LOS ANGELES, February 3 -- In what police called a hate crime, a Panorama City principal was beaten unconscious by two men who told him they didn't want him on campus because he is white, authorities said Tuesday. The attack at Burton Street Elementary School, which is predominantly Latino, may have been related to growing discontent by Latino parents over efforts to scale back bilingual education, police said. With an enrollment of 750 children, Burton Street Elementary is 90% Latino. As at all schools in California, administrators are replacing much bilingual instruction with the English immersion mandated by Proposition 227, passed by voters in June. Under the proposition's provisions, schools are required to offer bilingual classes when at least 20 students in a given grade are granted waivers from English-intensive classes. District records show that officials received more than 200 requests from parents at Burton to extend bilingual classes. (Los Angeles Times) Denver Public Schools Settles Bilingual Dispute, (posted 2/11/99) DENVER, February 3 -- Denver Public Schools and the U.S. Department of Justice settled their dispute about how to educate the district's 14,000 bilingual students, officials said Tuesday. After 11/2 years of threats and accusations of discrimination, the federal agency agreed to let the district do most everything it wanted to do all along, said board member Rita Montero, who helped negotiate the deal. For its part, DPS has agreed to let the federal government monitor its efforts. "They tried to make us scream uncle from the beginning and intimidate the district," Montero said. "I don't think we would sign off on anything if they made us scream uncle. "It's a huge step. I think everyone is relieved." Details of the deal will be released Thursday during a board meeting. The Department of Justice has no comment until then, said spokeswoman Christine DiBartolo. The issue is critical for DPS. More than 20 percent of its students have limited English ability and 90 percent of those speak Spanish. The number is expected to keep growing as immigration from Mexico continues. (Rocky Mountain News) Speaker Urged to Rescind Unz Appointment, (posted 2/11/99) SACRAMENTO, February 2 -- Latino civil rights activists are urging state Assembly Speaker Antonio Villaraigosa (D-Los Angeles) to rescind his appointment of anti-bilingual education champion Ron Unz to a blue ribbon panel on government finance. Villaraigosa, reaching out to a political opponent, recently named Unz and 27 others to an advisory panel he created to examine ways to finance state and local government. Some in the Latino community say the move has backfired. Although the activists agree with Villaraigosa, a possible candidate for mayor of Los Angeles, on a broad array of issues, they revile Unz because he successfully promoted Proposition 227, the anti-bilingual education initiative approved by voters last year. "We should not reward those who attack and hurt our community like Ron Unz," Marcos R. Contreras, state director of the League of United Latin American Citizens, said in a letter sent last week to Villaraigosa. "We should avoid giving [a] position of influence and authority to those who can do harm to our community," Contreras said. Representatives of several other groups offered similar views. (Los Angeles Times) Maquiladora Workers Could Tip Mexico's Next Election, (posted 2/11/99) By David Bacon TIJUANA, BAJA CALIFORNIA (1/31/99) Border cities like Tijuana, Juarez, Nuevo Laredo and Matamoros are becoming the industrial powerhouses of North America. The economic effect of their growth on all three NAFTA countries-Mexico, the U.S. and Canada-is undeniable. But in Mexican national politics, the border area has remained a backwater. That is about to change dramatically, at least in one section of the two-thousand-mile long frontier. A wave of workers floods into the streets when the shift changes in Tijuana factories, as two hundred thousand people go to and from their jobs. Most of them are internal migrants inside Mexico, having come north looking for work from other states further south. They still maintain their official residency in their home towns. On the border, their migrant status disenfranchises them. Mexican residency requirements dictate that people can only vote in state and local elections in the locality in which they officially reside. Consequently, the political structure in Mexico's northernmost states-Baja California, Sonora, Chihuahua, Tamaulipas and Nuevo Leon-is elected by a fraction of the people who actually live in them. All the border governments pursue the same economic policy-using low industrial wages as an attraction for foreign investment. If workers aren't happy about it, their opinion doesn't count for much. Last June's municipal election in Tijuana, however, saw the first effort by a political party to seriously campaign for the votes of maquiladora workers. That effort had its roots in a strike by workers at the Han Young factory-the first legal strike by an independent union in the history of the border plants. Last June, when the strike was two weeks old, the Tijuana police tore down the strike flags strung across the factory doors, and allowed the company to bring in strikebreakers. The police told strikers they could no longer picket or congregate in the street outside. So the strikers took their picketlines into the rest of the city. In the weeks leading up to Tijuana's June 28 municipal election, they staged a series of daily marches through the huge working-class barrios which surround the maquiladoras. They not only appealed for support for their strike, but called on voters to reject the city's ruling National Action Party (PAN), accusing it of siding with factory owners against workers. For over a decade, the PAN has ruled Tijuana and Baja California, and is strong in other northern states as well. On a national level, Mexico has been governed by the Institutional Revolutionary Party since the late 1920s. Both parties share a common policy of using economic austerity to promote foreign investment. In the past, the leftwing Party of the Democratic Revolution has been small and marginalized on the border. The party has made electoral inroads in southern Mexico, and Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, its presidential candidate in the last two national elections, is now mayor of Mexico City, the country's second-most powerful elected office. But it has not been a serious threat to the PAN/PRI hold in the north. Last summer, however, in the midst of Tijuana's growing labor strife, PRD candidates campaigned seriously for the votes of maquiladora workers for the first time. Thousands of flyers were distributed calling for raising factory wages, for child care for the mostly-female workforce, and for free transportation to and from work. These work-related issues were linked to demands for basic city services in the barrios, including housing, water, electricity, paved streets and sewers. Araceli Dominguez, a reporter who had covered the Han Young strike for the city's largest newspaper, El Mexicano, ran for city council on the PRD ticket. She put strikers to work painting and posting her banners, and the paper promptly forced her to quit her job. Meanwhile, the PRD began organizing its first-ever neighborhood committees in working-class electoral precincts. Tijuana's fast-growing streetsellers association, which represents thousands of migrant workers from Oaxaca, set up a PRD committee headed by its president. "We're trying to involve our party in the life of the people," explains activist Jorge Alberto Jimenez, a worker in the Social Security office who passed out hundreds of leaflets. "We want to get rid of the apathy which has traditionally kept voter participation very low." The PRD mayoral candidate, Jesus Ruiz Barraza, rector of the University of Tijuana, spent $300,000 on his campaign, supplementing a first-ever infusion of money from Mexico City. Cardenas came and campaigned for local candidates. PRD support increased dramatically. While the party won only 10,000 votes in Tijuana in 1992 and 1995, on June 28 it received 25,800, or 9.5% of the total votes cast. "In the past, I would have been entitled to a seat on the city council, along with two of our other candidates," says Aurora Pelayo, PRD president for Baja California. "But the PRI and the PAN engineered an electoral reform last year which they used to deny us any seats at all." The party did, however, win council positions in the smaller cities of Mexicali, Tijuana, Ensenada and Rosarito. "We succeeded in provoking a general debate over the conditions of workers," Ruiz Barraza says. "While our city has grown as a result of the increase in maquiladora-generated jobs, we've become impoverished because of the low wages. Since NAFTA was signed, the whole border area has moved backwards economically." Government-affiliated unions, which in the past have been used to turn out votes for the PRI, were also weakened last year. In Mexico City, a new, independent labor federation was organized which does not require its members to belong to the ruling party. A local chapter in Baja California, organized last summer, already has 25,000 members. The new federation, the National Union of Workers (UNT) has begun to challenge government economic policies. When Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo offered workers a 14% increase in salaries to compensate for raging inflation, the UNT demanded 22%. Along the border, the federation calls for a daily wage of 100 pesos ($10), double the present average maquiladora salary. These developments threaten increased labor costs for U.S.- and other foreign-owned factories along the border. "We are rejecting the government policy which use low wages to attract foreign investment," explains Enrique Hernandez, general secretary of the Han Young workers' union and local UNT vice-president. Of Mexico's 10 million permanently-employed workers, one million work in the border factories -- 200,000 in Tijuana alone. Increased voter participation and worker activism could prove crucial in Mexico's national elections in the year 2000. "If the movement among maquiladora workers grows," says Hernandez, who used to head the PRD state organization in Baja California, "by 2000 we could win tens, or even hundreds of thousands of new votes." That prospect promises to unbalance the country's power structure. Hernandez and Jose Peñaflor Barron, the Han Young union lawyer, have been repeatedly detained and interrogated by the Tijuana police. They are continually threatened with permanent arrest and incarceration. Border political authorities and factory owners clearly view this potential political shift with alarm. Honoring Our Elders, (posted 2/11/99) FOR RELEASE: WEEK OF FEBRUARY 5, 1999 (NOTE: In grafs four, five and six, the name "Rudy Acuna" carries a tilde over the "n" in the surname.-UNIVERSAL PRESS SYNDICATE) In a time of great cynicism, driven by the bitter partisanship of our nation's lawmakers, many of us look beyond capitol domes for examples of civility, wisdom or leadership. The spectacle in Washington has convinced many people nationwide to look to their own communities for those qualities. If we were a traditional indigenous society, those governing would be the elders, the wisest of the wise. Instead, this country does not esteem the wisest among us nor even know what an elder is. To revere someone as an elder is the highest tribute one can pay an individual. In virtually all native and indigenous communities who maintain their traditions, elders worldwide hold a special place of respect, governance and counsel. In the consumer society we live in, people seemingly associate "elder" with "invalid." Even the designation of "invalid" demonstrates the indifference this society places on human life. Worse, in this society, advanced age, in and of itself, is viewed as a form of handicap. Several months ago at the Los Angeles Latino Family and Book Festival, we paid tribute to the elders present, pointing to professor Rudy Acuna for his pioneering work in the field of Chicano studies, and to Rueben Martinez, for his national work in promoting literature. When we addressed the two as elders, many in the audience laughed as if we had poked fun at them. That was an eye-opener. Score one for Hollywood and Madison Avenue for glamorizing the youth culture and belittling the wisdom that comes with hard work and age. Acuna is a legendary author and professor at California State University at Northridge who has dedicated his life to the promotion of human rights. Martinez was initially known as the barber who used to sell books out of his Santa Ana, Calif. barbershop. Now he is well-known in literary circles, having coordinated the book festival. Today he no longer operates a barbershop, but he still gives haircuts from his famous Martinez bookstore. Our friend Greg Gomez, a Lipan-Mescalero Apache storyteller, suggests that the country should set aside one day a year when we all pay tribute to the elders who have made a difference in our lives-parents, grandparents, uncles, aunts, neighbors, teachers or friends. Gomez notes that most American Indian nations hold special ceremonies for elders in their homelands. They do so to honor them for their contributions to life. It's different in cities, he said. Though people from many different Indian nations live in cities, the commonality they share is their reverence for elders. Gomez now lives in Albuquerque, N.M., but he and his wife initiated the events to honor elders when they lived in Dallas from the '80s to the mid-'90s. The first year, a Comanche and Kiowa couple was honored. "We steered away from honoring people involved in (electoral) politics. Instead, we honored people involved in human politics-human rights," he said. It's interesting to note that indigenous America honors women as elders when they reach the "change of life." Some honor them when they turn 52, which corresponds to a number that comes from ancient, sacred calendars. In speaking to Eduardo Chavez, director of Chicano studies at the University of New Mexico, he told us that his family is paying special tribute to his mother, Elvira, in June. "It will be a celebration of family," he said. She will be 90 then, and several generations of family will gather from across the United States and Mexico to celebrate her life -- while she's very much alive. In Chicano, Mexican, and Central and South American cultures, grandparents are highly revered, but increasingly, many from these cultures have lost a system through which they can connect with the wisdom of their elders. Some, in fact, send them to rest homes, something unheard of a generation ago. Thankfully, we've heard many young persons now clamor for a new respect for their elders. Another friend, Viviana Lopez of Canutillo, Texas, mentioned that newspapers, radio and TV could be instrumental in how we as a society honor elders by dedicating some daily space and time to pay them tribute. Perhaps this indeed would trigger many of us to pay newfound respect for the elders in our midst. As for our nation's lawmakers, a rare few may one day reach the status of elder statesman or stateswoman. Let's hope they also one day make it to the status of elder. COPYRIGHT 1999 UNIVERSAL PRESS SYNDICATE Both writers are authors of Gonzales/Rodriguez: Uncut & Uncensored (ISBN 0-918520-22-3 UC Berkeley, Ethnic Studies Library, Publications Unit. Rodriguez is the author of Justice: A Question of Race (Cloth ISBN 0-927534-69-X paper ISBN 0-927534-68-1 Bilingual Review Press) and the antibook, The X in La Raza II and Codex Tamuanchan: On Becoming Human. They can be reached at PO BOX 7905, Albq NM 87194-7904, 505-242-7282 or XColumn@aol.com Gonzales's direct line is 505-248-0092 or PatiGonzaJ@aol.com. Three Mexico City Police Fugitives Arrested, (posted 2/11/99) MEXICO CITY (AP) -- Three current or former Mexico City police officers accused of robbing and murdering an American tourist were brought under arrest Tuesday from Texas to Mexico to face trial. The three officers were extradited and flown from Austin, Texas, to Mexico City and taken under guard to city police headquarters, police said. The are due to be arraigned Wednesday. All three were arrested in Florence, Texas, last Saturday. FBI agents, along with several local law enforcement agencies, on Monday said the men had been working for a construction contractor at Sun City for about a month before their capture Saturday. The three men and 10 other current and former >>police<< officers are suspects in several murders of foreign tourists, said John Maspero, an Austin FBI agent assigned to the case. Maspero estimated the fugitives lived in a Florence-area trailer home about a month before their arrest. The three-Hector Gonzalez, 28, Juan Uribe Lopez, 25, and Francisco Gonzalez Leon, 33 -- were picked up by federal agents at the Williamson County Jail Monday and are being returned to Mexico, officials said. They are accused of kidnapping tourists, stealing their belongings and forcing them to drink alcohol until they passed out. The officers have been charged with the murder of Frederick McPhail, a 27-year-old New York University graduate student who was found dead in his car outside Chapultepec Park on Nov. 18. An autopsy showed McPhail died of alcohol poisoning, Maspero said. "These people were holding up people in (the) streets, robbing them of cash, credit cards and forcing them to disclose their codes at the ATM machines," Maspero said. Mexico City police notified officials with the U.S. Embassy last Tuesday that they suspected four fugitives had taken up in the Georgetown area, Maspero said. UC Berkeley Sued Over Admissions Policies, (posted 2/1/99) Wednesday, February 3, 1999 Education: Class action lawsuit by minorities and civil rights groups says reliance on test scores favors the privileged. By KENNETH R. WEISS, Times Education Writer Eight black, Latino and Filipino-American students sued UC Berkeley on Tuesday, accusing the University of California's flagship campus of discriminatory admissions policies that prevented them from being admitted last year. The students, represented by a phalanx of civil rights attorneys, did not directly challenge the ban on affirmative action that resulted in steep drops in the number of racial minority\ students admitted last fall. Instead, the class action lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in San Francisco alleges that Berkeley's admissions officers violate civil rights laws with "unjustified reliance upon standardized test scores" and grading policies that favor the privileged. UC Berkeley officials vigorously defended their admissions practices, saying that the central allegation in the lawsuit is false. "The plaintiffs claim that Berkeley does not want African American, Latino and Filipino American students. That is not true-we do," Chancellor Robert M. Berdahl said in a statement. "We seek minority students vigorously and welcome them eagerly." The lawsuit challenges admission policies used by Berkeley last year, the first time the eight UC undergraduate campuses picked their freshmen classes without preferences for race, ethnicity or gender. Lawyers from a variety of civil rights groups said they targeted Berkeley because it is the most competitive of the UC campuses and turned away the greatest number of well-qualified minority students last year. Indeed, six of the eight plaintiffs denied admission to Berkeley are now freshmen at another UC campus, including three at UC Davis and one each at UC San Diego, UC Irvine and UCLA. A seventh has been accepted to begin classes at UCLA next spring. "UC Berkeley is operating as an exclusive club," said Joseph E. Jaramillo, a civil rights lawyer with the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund. "The campus selected over half of its students from only 5% of the high schools in the state." Although the lawsuit singles out Berkeley, all the UC campuses use similar policies as required by the UC regents. The suit contends that Berkeley's admissions officers assign "unjustifiable weight" to the SAT and SAT II achievement tests and rely too much on "educationally insignificant differences" in these scores. The suit also challenges the practice of awarding an extra grade point to students who earn an A in an Advanced Placement course, resulting in grade point averages that exceed 4.0. Although such AP courses are widely available in high schools with predominantly white and wealthy students, they are scarce in inner-city schools, putting poor and minority students at a disadvantage, the suit states. UC officials have been wrestling with these issues for years. At a regents meeting later this month, a faculty committee will propose cutting in half the extra point students can earn in AP classes. The half-point proposal is a compromise between competing interests: Although UC officials know AP courses are not equally available, they want to encourage students to challenge themselves with rigorous AP classes rather than sliding by with routine classes to earn an easy A. King City Union High School District Hears Arguments Over MEChA, (posted 2/11/99) January 27, 1999 GREENFIELD, CA (Jan 28) (John Tresch) According to John Tresch, a meeting of the King City Union High School District held to discuss the issue of granting a permit to students to start a chapter of MEChA (MovimientoEstudiantil Chicano de Aztlan) on the campus of King City High School ended with the school board taking the matter under advisement. A decision is expected at the board's next meeting on February 10. The meeting, which was held at Greenfield High in Greenfield, was attended by a about sixty people, most of whom opposed the issuance of the permit. Opponents pointed to MEChA's goal of "physically liberating Aztlan," as a threat to the security of the United States of America. They said the organization was subversive and should not be allowed on Campus. According to Tresch, MEChA was defended by the California Rural Legal Assistance organization, which argued that students had a First Amendment right to free speech on campus. In addition, MEChA claimed to have changed the constitution for its chapter to soften but not eliminate the provision that "Aztlan" should be liberated. (From proposed change in MEChA chapter constitution) As stated in the preamble of the Coded State Wide MEChA Constitution, "Liberation of Aztlan." King City High School MEChA defines the phrase "Liberation of Aztlan" as the Social Economic, and self-determination of our people. We define "self determination" as the ability to determine our own destiny. Helping people realize the "American Dream." "Liberation of Aztlan" means the liberation of the American Southwest from U.S. rule. The founding document of MEChA, El Plan de Aztlan, says, "Aztlan belongs to those who plant the seeds, water the fields, and gather the crops and not to the foreign Europeans." MEChA is an anti-American, anti-European organization. California Education Code (Section 38130-38139) ("Civic Center Act") 38135 (b) The governing board of any school district may grant the use of school facilities or grounds as a civic center upon the terms and conditions the board seems proper, subject to the limitations of this chapter. 38135. Any use, by any individual, society, group or organization for the commission of any act intended to further any program or movement, the purpose of which is the overthrow of the government of the United States or of the state by force, violence or other unlawful means shall not be permitted or suffered. On the Meaning of Sovereignty, (posted 2/11/99) COLUMN OF THE AMERICAS by Patrisia Gonzales and Roberto Rodriguez While researching the subject of sovereignty last year, we were taken to some land beneath a highway overpass in San Diego, which almost 30 years ago had been designated as the site of a California Highway Patrol station. The residents there objected and instead created Chicano Park, which is now a repository of rich murals that depict the indigenous history of Chicano/Mexican people. Many people would still put their lives on the line today if any governmental entity tried to destroy the park or desecrate the murals. It is then and there where a new meaning of sovereignty crystallized to us. We asked Salvador "Queso" Torres, an artist associated with the park since its inception, if he considered the park as sovereign space. "I never thought about it. But yes. It's sovereign." Nationally, there are similar spaces with similar histories, such as the Centro de la Raza in Seattle, Escuela Tlatelolco in Denver, Clinica La Fe in El Paso, Texas, Escuela de la Raza, in Blythe, Calif., and also the Xicano Development Center in Detroit. All these spaces-from schools to human rights organizations-were founded by people who believed that government was not meeting the needs of the residents. While most of these spaces were created as a result of injustices, and in some cases the loss of life, they all celebrate life. And each time we've visited such places, we've come away feeling that we have experienced sacred or sovereign sites. These past few months, we noticed the term sovereignty being tossed about during the attempt to put Chilean Gen. Augusto "Senator for Life" Pinochet on trial, and during the impeachment proceedings in Washington D.C. As such, we've continued exploring what sovereignty means, who defines it, who doles it out, and who asserts it. Most people are used to hearing the term associated with nations, as in the "sovereign right" of the United States to unilaterally bomb Iraq. For some Chileans, Pinochet's case is an insult to their nation's sovereignty, whereas the term "sovereign immunity" has been used in relation to the right of "sovereigns," or (former) heads of state, not to be prosecuted by other countries. Moral arguments aside, in the many battles over Indian gaming, the sovereign right of tribes to economic development has been called into question as has their right to "sovereign immunity" or the right not to be sued. We note that sovereignty doesn't seem to have a single meaning or one application. In our work, we've also come across the concepts of ancestral, cultural, people's and individual sovereignty. We've also been examining sovereignty within the context of "globalism," attempting to understand what sovereignty and citizenship means when transnational corporations freely cross borders in their pursuit of maximizing their profits. At a recent symposium regarding the creation of a joint Xicano/Native-American studies department at Eastern Michigan University, a Native-American participant passed us a note that read: "Borders. What borders? We didn't see no stinking borders." We took the note to mean that many of the attendees are part of a hemispheric indigenous consciousness that transcends borders. No doubt, this development must trouble those who believe in the sanctity of modern nation-state borders. The idea of Native- and Mexican-Americans creating a shared consciousness may sound radical, but it is the world's global economy itself that has begun to radically alter not simply human relations, but people's views of nation-states. For example, the conflict between the Zapatista rebels and the Mexican government in Chiapas, precipitated by NAFTA, is one example of how these two groups have come to see themselves as part of the same indigenous family. In the next few years, the meaning of sovereignty will be further examined. The European community is already showing us how sovereignty is changing; people there have the right to migrate to each other's countries, and most now share a common currency. Aside from space exploration and natural disasters, nothing will contribute more to such a re-examination than proposals such as the multibillion-dollar effort by the Clinton administration to revive former president Reagan's "Star Wars" defense program. Imaginary threats don't make sense in an era when the needs of most of the world's population still go unmet. Such prioritization, we believe, will cause people worldwide to emulate corporations by redefining the meaning of sovereignty itself and by increasingly carving out sovereign spaces, irrespective of unseen borders. COPYRIGHT 1999 UNIVERSAL PRESS SYNDICATE Both writers are authors of Gonzales/Rodriguez: Uncut & Uncensored (ISBN 0-918520-22-3 UC Berkeley, Ethnic Studies Library, Publications Unit. Rodriguez is the author of Justice: A Question of Race (Cloth ISBN 0-927534-69-X paper ISBN 0-927534-68-1 Bilingual Review Press) and the antibook, The X in La Raza II and Codex Tamuanchan: On Becoming Human. They can be reached at PO BOX 7905, Albq NM 87194-7904, 505-242-7282 or XColumn@aol.com Gonzales's direct line is 505-248-0092 or PatiGonzaJ@aol.com Pentagon Changes Policy on Use of Troops in Drug War on Border, (posted 2/1/99) By THADDEUS HERRICK SAN ANTONIO-The Pentagon has all but ended the use of ground troops along
the U.S.-Mexico border, issuing new rules that require special permission
for armed anti-drug efforts there. Permission must come from the secretary
of defense or his deputy, said Lt. Col. Mike Milord, a Defense Department
spokesman. The policy change comes well over a year after a high school
sophomore was shot and killed by Marines in the small town of Redford, a
hamlet that straddles the Mexican border just west of Big Bend National
Park. That incident, which claimed the life of 18-year-old Esequiel Hernandez
Jr., prompted Defense Secretary William Cohen to suspend similar missions. "The policy change really gives the secretary of defense oversight
for these missions," Milord said. The decision was made in October,
Milord said, but never officially announced. Marine Cpl. Clemente Bañuelos fired the fatal shot from about 200 yards away after he said Hernandez raised his rifle to fire a third time. Twice, Presidio County grand juries refused to indict Bañuelos
and his fellow Marines. A civil rights probe by the Justice Department also
failed to bring charges against the troops, in part because they had received
permission to fire by radio. The new policy will make the deployment of ground troops along the border very unlikely, said Timothy Dunn of El Paso, author of the Militarization of the U.S-Mexico Border. He said that neither the defense secretary nor his deputy were likely to authorize such missions. "This is as significant a policy change as we're going to have without changing the law," Dunn said. But, he added, "It should never have taken a boy's life to bring that about." In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, this material is distributed without charge or profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving this type of information for non-profit research and educational purposes only. JSRI Home | Community Connections | Latino News Archives
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