HispanicVista Columnists - April 11th, 2005

By Patrick Osio, Jr./HispanicVista.com

Bakersfield, California conservative radio talk show host Inga Barks invited me to be on her show after reading an article I wrote on the hypocrisy of hiring undocumented workers instead of initiating a guest worker program particularly in the agricultural industry, and blaming all our economic ills on the illegal immigrants. She obviously wanted me on the show to argue with my reasoning, to show her audience how wrong I am, and how un-American this thinking is. After all her call to success is in attracting an audience that thinks like her, and of those who love to hate her. Ratings is the name of the game.

So there I was, but I was not arguing and in fact suggested that I didn’t know anybody who is for illegal immigration, including me. That we differ on the methods used to solve the problem…

By Bill Buckley

A lot of people -- roughly speaking, everybody -- saw the pope alive at least once on television. It is estimated that tens of millions of people laid eyes on him in the flesh. All of us have our own memories of one such encounter. The keenest in my own was his appearance 10 years ago in Colorado. Why Colorado? One doesn't ask, and never really pondered the question; but there he was, and the wonder of it was the crowd that surrounded him, viewing him say the Mass.

The wonder of it to this viewer, watching it 2,000 miles away, was the expression on the faces of the 10,000 people the cameras skated about, giving close-ups of hundreds of them. They were young people, late in their teens, early in their 20s. And they were finding the scene -- finding the pope -- riveting. They were overcome into a true and resonant silence. How did this come about?

By Bill Dahl/HispanicVista.com

Movies are a welcome escape for me. When the lights come down and the big screen lights up in front of me, I am transported to an artificial place that provides a respite from the reality of it all. Have you ever noticed the one thing that is certain from one movie theater to the next? No matter where the movie has taken you, when they turn on the lights, everybody’s still in the same seat they were in when the lights went off. This state of suspended animation keeps us in our places and keeps us quiet. It’s unreal!

For the Eduardo and Lola Lopez family, as well as millions of other undocumented Hispanics residing in the U.S., their position in our society remains in a state of Hispanimation: Each night Eduardo dutifully turns out the lights after tucking in his family of six daughters and one son for the night…

By Marcin Król

 

John Paul II is difficult to understand for many Americans. He, like the church he led, was neither Democrat nor Republican. This Pope was more pro-human rights than Jimmy Carter and more anti-communist than Ronald Reagan. But it was in economics that the Pope was even more challenging to the American mind. Polish scholar Marcin Król explains John Paul II's "Third Way" between capitalism and communism.

 

It's worth a read.

By: Domingo Ivan Casañas/HispanicVista.com

Since there is a larger base when it comes to the population increase of Hispanics especially in California we would think that the economy would be getting a big

boost from the Latino/Hispanic population.  

A recent study by the Selig Center for Economic Growth at the University of Georgia did find that the Latinos’ buying power is almost double the rate of the non-Latinos.  It estimated that the buying power just in California would reach an estimated $260 billion in four years.  The growth is certainly there.   However, what we need to realize is that the census data of 2000 showed nearly 54 percent of Hispanic households had four or more people, compared with 31 percent for the general population. 

By Jim VandeHei

President Bush and Pope John Paul II spoke often about their desire to spread freedom and a culture of life around the world. Yet their visions for accomplishing these lofty goals sometimes sharply conflicted.

Bush, who flew to Rome yesterday to become the first sitting U.S. president to attend the funeral of a pope, has told aides that he deeply admired the pontiff's refusal to bend to societal pressures on controversial issues, including on the Vatican's opposition to the Iraq war. The president considered the pope's resolve "awe-inspiring, especially in a world where people shift around, sometimes with the wind," a senior White House official said. "He was a rock."

By Daniel Gutierrez

As I take a look at the landscape of the United States and see Latinos and Latinas running for office, more times than not they are not getting elected in cities where the demographic landscape would dictate a landslide success. I have to take a step back and ask the question: Why?

Some would say it’s because we are more critical of our own leaders than we are anyone else. Others might even say that we are caught up in the theory of the Cangrejo or crab theory that mainstream society do not worry about Latinos because they will inevitably pull each other down when the time comes.

By Laura Carlsen

When Vicente Fox ended the 71-year reign of Mexico ’s Institutional Revolutionary Party in the 2000 presidential elections, many observers heralded it as the beginning of a long-overdue transition to democracy. Now President Fox, in a concerted effort with members of the former ruling party, has closed the door on that transition.

By orchestrating a pseudo-legal offensive against Mexico City’s popular mayor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, Fox has not only dashed the hopes of Mexicans for a real democracy, but has also destroyed the political capital he gained back in 2000.

By Richard N. Baldwin

While a lot of the world has been noting the "new face" on Washington diplomacy as noted before, more recent events should require us to keep our eyes open on this "new direction".

First, there is the matter of the Vienna treaty that the United States signed which includes the right of arrested individuals from other countries to be able to contact their respective consulates for counsel. In a World Court ruling, it was found that a number of death row inmates in the US had never been given that right. And most of those individuals were on Texas death row. This is not surprising as Texas executes about one half of the total of all 50 states in the US. They run a very efficient death machine.

By Joshua Davis

The winter rain makes a mess of West Phoenix. It turns dirt yards into mud and forms reefs of garbage in the streets. Junk food wrappers, diapers, and Spanish-language porn are swept into the gutters. On West Roosevelt Avenue, security guards, two squad cars, and a handful of cops watch teenagers file into the local high school. A sign reads: Carl Hayden Community High School: The Pride's Inside.

There certainly isn't a lot of pride on the outside. The school buildings are mostly drab, late '50s-era boxes. The front lawn is nothing but brown scrub and patches of dirt. The class photos beside the principal's office tell the story of the past four decades. In 1965, the students were nearly all white, wearing blazers, ties, and long skirts. Now the school is 92 percent Hispanic. Drooping, baggy jeans and XXXL hoodies are the norm.

By Raoul Lowery Contreras

Facts almost always destroy the Mexican and immigrant haters among us, as do their stupid acts and "thinking" processes.

For example, Mexican hater Steve Sailer of Vdare.com (a noteworthy "hate site" as categorized by the Southern Poverty law Center) has written extensively that Hispanic voters don’t matter, that President Bush did not do well with them last year and that claims he did are without foundation. He uses funny math and assumptions he makes without a single study of the actual Hispanic vote.

By Barbara Gonzalez

The Council on Hemispheric Affairs

• In September 2004, President Ricardo Lagos met with President Vicente Fox in Mexico City to launch a “strategic alliance” between their two countries. Following the success of their bilateral free trade agreement, the presidents aimed to promote deeper integration and cooperation in the political, social and cultural spheres.

• No matter the outcome of the OAS race – where each of the presidents’ close associates are in a tired pursuit of the secretary-general position – one of its certain casualties has been the Mexican-Chilean partnership. Trust, the pivotal element in the construction of any alliance, was dealt a serious blow last December.

By Erika Robles

Although we constantly complain about the increasing racism, discrimination and poverty that Hispanics face in the USA, Indigenous Mexicans suffer the same problems in Mexico.
In a nation devoted to celebrating its Indian heritage, the terrible irony is that Indians are despised. "Don't behave like an Indian," are common sentences heard among the white mestizo (person of mixed race or blood, specifically a person of mixed European and Indian) and the criollo (direct Spanish descendants) families. The Indians are despised for their physical appearance, their poverty, and their language. Racism enters every criollo and mestizo family, defining the value and the place of the children according to their color. The darkest one may become the outsider, while the fair-skinned one is a prize.

By Nathan Tabor
One of the towering figures of the 20th Century has passed into eternity.
Pope John Paul II strode across the world stage for 26 years, the third-longest reign of any Pope in history. As an ideological soul mate of President Ronald Reagan, John Paul is credited with helping to bring down the Iron Curtain in Eastern Europe. Like Reagan, he survived an assassination attempt (allegedly backed by the Communists) in 1981.
An athlete and an intellectual in his youth, he studied secretly for the priesthood while the Nazis occupied his native Poland. Ordained in 1946, he rose quickly through the Roman Catholic hierarchy, becoming Pope in 1978 at the relatively young age of 58. His trademark became his charismatic personality and his propensity for seemingly ceaseless worldwide travel. During his tenure as Pope, the Church of Rome increased its worldwide membership by one-third, growing from 750 million members in 1978 to over one billion at his death last week.

Patrick Osio, Jr. has written a short but intensive manual on the Mexican perspective on numerous issues between our two countries. The manual is an in depth primer on the culture and protocol for better understanding Mexicans that in turn allows establishing personal and business relationships, and how to avoid the most common faux pas that can ruin relationships and business deals.

The manual is available through Electronic delivery for $9.95 making it possible to download the manual to save on your hard drive, printing its entirety or particular sections while reaping considerable savings over printed copies.