illegal
Why we fight for immigration reform and a ‘path to citizenship’ (video)
Donald Trump and the GOP haters want to split this beautiful family up and send the parents back to Mexico. We can’t let that happen. The President’s DAPA (Deferred Action for Parents of Americans) initiative is now stalled because the Republicans won’t vote on the Obama’s nominee to the Supreme Court, a judge who could potentially end the body’s 4-4 deadlocks.
CNN video: ‘Remittances’ from the U.S. keep this Mexican town alive
After a son leaves his small, impoverished Mexican town of Francisco Villa to find a better life in Chicago, he sends money to help his family — and hometown — alive. Racist Donald Trump says he would stop these “remittances.”
Xenia Rubinos: Brown people do it all in ‘Mexican Chef’ (video)
New York City alternative whirlwind Xenia Rubinos makes quite an exhaustive list of things that brown people do, including Mexican Chef. Brown cleans your house, for example, and brown takes the trash, brown even wipes your granddaddy’s a$$.
PREVIOUSLY ON XENIA RUBINOS:
Welcome to 2040 and life on ‘The Other Side’ (video)
Exterior, day: Destitute desert town in the year 2040. Audio: Spanish newsradio tells the story — unemployment is 86%, gangs are everywhere and food and water are getting scarce.
There’s only one thing a father can do — smuggle his family across the border to the prosperous country on The Other Side.
You can’t deport me! I’m Scotch-Irish, like President Obama! (toon)
Herr Trump can’t deport me! I’m of Scotch-Irish descent, just like President Obama. Here is my official CLAN POCHO tartan if you don’t believe me.
Watch: Pregnant mujer crossing border gives birth to ‘Alien’
Locked in the back of a van, desperate migrants must cross the Mexican border into the U.S. before one of them gives birth to an illegal alien. The Birth of an Alien (El Nacimiento de un Extranjero) is from Sumiko Braun.
Got milk? Not without immigrant farmworkers! (video)
Check out this trailer for Farmworker: How Immigration Feeds America from freelance journalist Diana Prichard. She’s working on a film telling the story of how immigrants are critical to American agriculture.
And always remember who worked hard to get you that next glass of leche or bowl of hot queso.
Not Rockwell: ‘INS is watching him!’ (music video)
I always feel that somebody’s watching me. Could it be La Migra? [Music video by Comedy High.]
Three poems from Mexington, KY by Profe. Steven Alvarez (audio)
Steven Alvarez, POCHO amigo and Assistant Professor (Writing Rhetoric and Digital Media, Latin America Studies, English) at the University of Kentucky, teaches a course called Mexington, about the growing community of Mexican Americans in UKY’s hometown, Lexington. He’s a poet, too.
CON PAPELES / CON DIGNIDAD
0:03to my left is Appalachicano see & down the canyon just six miles in
0:07a thousand people oh it’s citizenship—
0:09one senses the isolation of citizenship in Appalachicano seen the twin mining
0:13communities nestled in the corner mountains—
0:15the history this area has been a history of struggle—
0:18labor struggle—
0:21do—
0:25do—
0:28since the turn of the century—when the club dinner in A district was the first
0:31major coal producer in Kentucky—
Mas…Three poems from Mexington, KY by Profe. Steven Alvarez (audio)
Video trailer for ‘Desierto’ now includes Donald Trump quotes
Desierto — a gripping action-adventure film inspired by events on the US-Mexican border — opens in two weeks. The original English trailer (above) has now been supplemented with a trailer that includes remarks by Donald Trump:
Mas…Video trailer for ‘Desierto’ now includes Donald Trump quotes
A young family, divided by the border, lives ‘Through the Wall’ (video)
Undocumented immigrants Abril, brought to the U.S. as a child, and her 2-year-old boy Julián live near San Diego. Julián’s father Uriel was stopped by police for a minor traffic ticket and deported to Tijuana. In order to see each other, Uriel, Abril and Julián must cross difficult terrain to reach the border to spend time together the only way they can — Through the Wall. [Video by Tim Nackashi.]
‘Meet an (orange is the new black) Immigrant’ (video)
Thought experiment? Guerrilla theater? A prank?
When Sergio Mieja (he’s @SMieja95 on the Twitter) got the idea for this video, he didn’t know exactly what the message was. He just wanted to see who supported Donald Trump.
“But as I was filming it,” he explains, “many of the people I met expressed their feeling and emotions towards this subject and it was then I knew what the purpose of this video was and realized it had a much more significant meaning. Please share this message with your friends and family.”
A professor visits migrants at the border near Nogales, Mexico
By the time the two young women walked into the shelter, the other migrants were mostly finished with their meals. They stood out as two women among dozens of recently deported men enjoying a meal before continuing on their way. I did what I had been doing all that January morning: I served them each a glass of hot chocolate and a plate of food.
We were volunteering at the Kino Border Initiative (KBI) in Nogales, Mexico, as part of the Center for Social Concerns’ Border Immersion Faculty Seminar. For several years, Notre Dame students have participated in this seminar, but this was the first time it was being offered to faculty and staff as well. As a professor of U.S. Latino literature who studies and teaches about the border, this was an opportunity for me to experience the border in a different way.
Mas…A professor visits migrants at the border near Nogales, Mexico
Versifying in Texas: Rossy Evelin Lima is a poet on a mission (video)
Rossy Evelin Lima is an award-winning Mexican poet and linguist. She spoke at TEDxMcallen last year about her experience as an immigrant writer in the U.S. Her website is is here.
Wall Street Journal Video: So you want to build a border wall?
Seriously? You want to build a 2000-mile-long wall between the U.S. and Mexico? Follow along now as the Wall Street Journal explains exactly what that entails.
From Dreams to Trash: ‘El Sueño Americano’ (photos)
These photographs document the personal effects of migrants apprehended in the desert by U.S. Border Patrol agents which were subsequently seized and surrendered during processing at a U.S. Customs and Border Patrol facility in southern Arizona.
Marilynn Montaño is embedded in her migrant father’s rough hands
Orange County poet and activist Marilynn Montaño’s poem His Machucada Hands is a “testament to the ways that being undocumented has taken a physical toll on her father’s body. The title, she said, came from noticing his hands on the steering wheel every morning as he drove her to middle and high school,” according to the PBS News Hour.
Mas…Marilynn Montaño is embedded in her migrant father’s rough hands
What happens when young deportees get sent back? (PBS video)
Even before the recent MIGRA raids targeting families denied asylum, hundreds of thousands of undocumented Mexican immigrants have been deported annually. Many were kids when their parents brought them over the border.
And those who grew up in the U.S. have found themselves living in what feels like a foreign country — Mexico. It’s like a dream Los Otros Dreamers never imagined.
PBS News Hour Special Correspondent Fred de Sam Lazaro talked with some young people who are dealing with culture shock as they try to start over — strangers in a strange land.
What the past can teach immigrant advocates of today
[POCHO amiga Nancy Landa aka Mundo Citizen was a DREAMer before it was cool. Brought to the U.S. as an undocumented child, she was elected student body president at Cal State Northridge. And then she got deported.]
In paying my respects to those who came before me and their struggle due to their legal status, I share an excerpt of this 1995 L.A. Times article featuring the first undocumented student body president of California State University, Northridge, Vladimir Cerna (1996-1997), about his life and advocacy efforts to fight the Donald Trumps of his time.
Pocho Ocho best ways to tell if your tamales are illegal
After the Border Patrol at Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) confiscated and incinerated 450 “illegal tamales” flown in from Mexico (photo), we asked tamale experts how law-abiding citizens could determine if their tamales were also illegal.
After all, when tamales are illegal, only illegals will have tamales. Here are the Pocho Ocho Best Ways to Tell If Your Tamales Are illegal:
8. The tamales “accidentally” turned off their body-cams
7. Fake Syrian passports
6. Hipsters keep asking you where you got them
Mas…Pocho Ocho best ways to tell if your tamales are illegal
Alejandro González Iñárritu: ‘No human being is illegal’ (video)
OSCAR winner Alejandro González Iñárritu spoke to an audience at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) Sunday night. No human being, he told them, is illegal.
Here’s the transcript:
Mas…Alejandro González Iñárritu: ‘No human being is illegal’ (video)
Playing the Trump Card (toon)
There’s more like this at ArnieBermudez.com
Dear President Donald Trump: Confessions of an Anchor Baby
January 20, 2017
Dear President Donald Trump:
Now that you’ve become our new emperor, I mean, the 45th President of the United States, I have a confession: I’m an “anchor baby.” Given that you represent the best white hope to “Make America Great Again!” I’m confessing in exchange to be pardoned for my birthright citizenship crime.
Honestly, I didn’t know that being born to Mexican immigrants on work visas violated the law or that pesky little thing called the 14th Amendment of the Constitution. If I would’ve known of your novel interpretation of our Constitution, I mean your Constitution, I would’ve pleaded in my mother’s womb to be aborted.
Oh, I forgot, Republicans don’t believe in abortions. Does the GOP make exceptions for brown fetuses?
Mas…Dear President Donald Trump: Confessions of an Anchor Baby