Immigration
We didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us.
A Year Ago Today: Something is scaring the sheeple of the GOP (toon)
Alvaro Huerta, Ph.D: The day my Mexican father met Cesar Chavez
Long live the farmworkers!
My late father, Salomón Chavez Huerta, first arrived in this country as an agricultural guest worker in the mid-1900s, during the Bracero Program. The Bracero Program represented a guest worker program between the United States and Mexico. From 1942 to 1964, the Mexican government exported an estimated 4.6 million Mexicans to meet this country’s labor shortage not only in the agricultural fields during two major wars (WWII and Korean War), but also in the railroad and mining sectors.
Like many braceros of his generation from rural Mexico, my father didn’t speak too much about the horrible working / housing conditions he endured while toiling in el norte. This included low pay, overcrowded housing, terrible food, limited legal rights, lack of freedom outside of the labor camps, racism, verbal / physical abuse and price gauging from company landlords / stores.
Mas…Alvaro Huerta, Ph.D: The day my Mexican father met Cesar Chavez
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.
To win playing BORDERS, you need to beat La Migra (video)
BORDERS is a game from Gonzalo Alvarez where players walk in the shoes of an immigrant to endure the danger of a journey across the desert. You only win if you can avoid La Migra and beat the heat by hiding under bushes and staying hydrated. Many make the journey towards the border with the promise of a better life, but only the fittest survive.
Mas…To win playing BORDERS, you need to beat La Migra (video)
Savage Wild West Adventures of the Border Patrol (1951 toons)
“Heroic” Border Patrol Agents of Lore: Or “That’s Not the Migra I Know!” More Tales of Greedy “Mexicans,” “Savage” Native Americans, and “Heroic” Uber Gringos!
Pappy’s Golden Age of Comics Blog is at it again — posting delectable artifacts from American comic book history that are also revelatory chronicles unraveling the collusion of race, ethnicity, violence, and more in popular “entertainments.”
Mas…Savage Wild West Adventures of the Border Patrol (1951 toons)
Deported moms in Tijuana long for families, work for reform (video)
In Dreaming in Tijuana deported mothers fight for immigration reform in the United States. The anguish of family separation has turned them into activists who promote the U.S. Latino vote from the Mexican side of the world’s “most transited” border. [Video via Univision.]
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.
Let’s get one thing straight: No human being is ‘illegal’
“Could the president grant deferred removal to every unlawfully present alien in the United States right now?”
That’s how Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts referred to individuals lacking the proper documents to be in the country during a recent hearing on DAPA (Deferred Action for parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents).
“Alien” is the legal term to describe these individuals, but Justice Sonia Sotomayor also referred to them as “undocumented immigrants.” She objected to the phrase “illegal immigrants”, which she considers too harsh. Justice Sonia Sotomayor even explained that “illegal immigrants” associates them with “drug addicts, thieves, and murderers.”
Mas…Let’s get one thing straight: No human being is ‘illegal’
Mexican immigrant parents: From my shame to my pride
When I first applied to UCLA, I wrote in my personal essay that I didn’t have any positive role models in my violent neighborhood.
Having grown up in East Los Angeles’ Ramona Gardens housing project, I wrote that most of the adults represented gang members, drug dealers, thieves, tecatos (heroin addicts), alcoholics, felons and high school dropouts (or push-outs). I also wrote about my disdain for housing authority officials and government workers for behaving like prison wardens and guards toward us: project residents who depended on government aid or welfare.
Moreover, I decried the police abuse that I had witnessed and experienced, like the time when a cop pointed a gun at me. My crime: being a 15-year-old making a rolling stop while learning how to drive.
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.]
Regular gente plus Los Cenzontles: ‘I’m a Mexican-American’ (videos)
Mexican, American or both? Residents of Elkhart County, Indiana, talk to The Elkhart Truth.
And this wonderful music video from Los Cenzontles expresses the same sentiments in song:
Mas…Regular gente plus Los Cenzontles: ‘I’m a Mexican-American’ (videos)
By @buttronica: I ramble and maybe I’m too dark at times, but damn!
Economists say once a person has been unemployed for six months it is highly unlikely they will reenter the workforce.
It’s been a year since I was fired from my job and I feel like a BIG GIANT LOSER.
It wasn’t anything I did in particular. I thought for sure that one time I asked Floyd Mayweather if “he likes to take his work home with him” would do me in, alas, it was far more uneventful.
“We’ve decided not to renew your contract.”
“Um, OK.”
And it’s not like I’m totally unemployed. I regularly walk a dog named Jimmy Fallon — this causes great confusion when I nonchalantly say, “Jimmy Fallon growled at me today,” (though for the most part he is quite lovely, other than eating his own poop).
Mas…By @buttronica: I ramble and maybe I’m too dark at times, but damn!
Es saludo es pa Donald Trump (NSFW en Español video)
Look what we’re doing here — fixing your sidewalk so you can walk and you want to send us back to Mexico? Who’s going to do the work if we’re gone? Look at the white boy with his hands in his fucking pockets! [NSFW en Español.] (Original video apparently from @aque_tuuu_botellas on Instagram.)
Can you spot the Latino in this photograph?
I’m pretty sure I was the only redhead at the NYU Latino Law Students Association Gala in the spring of 1990. The food was delicious, my date looked stunning, and I was glad I had jumped on the opportunity when I received the LALSA invitation.
My journey to that moment began 25 years earlier. I was born in Santiago, Chile in 1965: a third generation Chilean on my father’s side (whose people came from Odessa), and first generation on my mother’s side, who arrived when she was 12 from Hungary.
We left Chile in 1970 after the election of socialist president Salvador Allende. For Mom, socialism was close enough to the Soviet regime she’d fled in Hungary.
I started kindergarten at P.S. 81 in the Bronx. With a curly mop of flaming red hair and speaking only Spanish, I immediately embarked on a lifelong career of not fitting in. I learned English fast, but I still felt like an outsider. I got into X-Men comics because I identified with the mutants.
BBC Video: That time Germany offered to help Mexico invade the U.S.
As the disputes that led to World War One were building, Germany tried to enlist Mexico’s help against the U.S.A. It didn’t turn out like the Germans hoped, and the repercussions of the Kaiser’s overture are still felt today, especially at the border.
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 Shocker! Rapists, criminals at work in California vineyards
Detras Del Muro – Behind The Wall from Kiara Ramirez reveals the shocking truth about the immigrant workers in Northern California vineyards.
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