Dear Don: You’ve got mail — Inland Empire (Califas) rapper YungBlu’s Letter to Donald Trump. And if you’re having trouble getting the message, Donald, YungBlu is on Facebook, the web and the Twitter.
Immigration
We didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us.
Mex Ex-Prez Vicente Fox: I have Trump-Induced Tourette’s Syndrome
(PNS reporting from MEXICO CITY) Former Mexican President Vicente Fox announced Monday that he has a rare disorder known as “Trump Induced Tourette’s Syndrome,” or TITS, in which every time he hears the name or sees an image of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, he involuntarily screams vulgarities and suffers mild convulsions.
“The condition was originally diagnosed by doctors as just visceral hatred for a bigoted, sexist, fascist, moron,” Fox said this morning at a Mexico City press conference. “But the more his popularity surged and the more I heard the name Trump, the more I cursed that mutha fu¢kn hate-mongering piece of baboon $h!t.”
Mas…Mex Ex-Prez Vicente Fox: I have Trump-Induced Tourette’s Syndrome
Donald Trump’s triumph of the will inspires campaign rally (video)
At a torch-lit evening campaign rally, GOP nominee wannabe Donald Trump shows the crowd how to handle those darn Mexicans – handle them LIKE A BOSS!
POCHO ÑEWS SERVICE PNS IS A WHOLLY-FICTITIOUS SUBSIDIARY OF POCHISMO INC., A CALIFORNIA CORPORATION, WHO IS A PERSON ACCORDING TO THE SUPREME COURT. DON’T ASK US, WE JUST WORK HERE.
Que lastima! The GOP’s Latino candidates are anti-Latino
Growing up on the mean streets of East Los Angeles, I, like many of my childhood friends, feared the police more than the local gang, Big Hazard. Specifically, we dreaded Latino police officers, since they had a reputation of being more brutal than their white peers with us — poor Chicano kids from the projects.
By verbally and physically harassing us, the Latino officers reinforced their 100 percent loyalty to their white peers and police department. Similarly, just like in my old barrio, in the Republican presidential-nomination battle, we can clearly see how the two Latino candidates, Sens. Marco Rubio (Florida) and Ted Cruz (Texas), go the extra mile to demonstrate their loyalty to their white peers and mostly white electorate with their anti-Latino immigrant agenda.
Mas…Que lastima! The GOP’s Latino candidates are anti-Latino
Latino USA: Trump is good for business – the piñata business (audio)
“Jennifer De Benito could have had any piñata she wanted for her 14th birthday party. She chose a piñata of Donald Trump. The three-foot-tall piñatas depict Trump in a business suit with his infamous blonde hair and they’re flying off the shelves on both sides of the U.S.–Mexico border,” writes Samantha Clark.
“It all started last summer when Trump said Mexico was “bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime, they’re rapists.”
“Jesús Márquez makes piñatas in Watsonville, a small farming town on the central coast of California. Márquez is from Mexico and says that although Trump’s comments are racist, they have been good for business.”
Maria Hinojosa of NPR’s Latino USA reports:
Mas…Latino USA: Trump is good for business – the piñata business (audio)
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.
Pocho Ocho top lessons of the Iowa GOP caucuses (NSFW video)
What can we learn from the Senator Ted Cruz (R-Canadia) victory Monday in the Iowa GOP caucuses? It’s time to support CANADIANS FOR PRESIDENT! [NSFW video, one F-bomb.]
And what else? How about the Pocho Ocho Top Lessons We Learned from the Iowa GOP Caucuses:
8. He who smelt it, dealt it.
7. If ifs and buts were candy and nuts, we’d all have a merry caucus.
6. I know you are, but what am I?
Mas…Pocho Ocho top lessons of the Iowa GOP caucuses (NSFW video)
Juanes and John Legend sing Bob Marley’s ‘Redemption Song’ (video)
Won't you help to sing
These songs of freedom?
'Cause all I ever have:
Redemption songs.
As part of John Legend’s #FREEAMERICA “Listening and Learning tour,” Grammy Award-winning artists Legend and Juanes visited Eloy Detention Center, Tent City, and Puente Arizona Community Center earlier this month – with pop-up performances for both detainees and their separated families. Here they are with Bob Marley’s anthemic Redemption Song.
White Wing Theme: ‘Let’s take back America – to 1955’ (video)
In a sketch from November, 1997, when this was still a joke, MadTV’s country music diva Darlene McBride (played by Nicole Sullivan) announced a concert tour to Take Back America (to 1955).
Vanessa Del Fierro is a coyote on a ‘Mexican Train’ (music video)
San Antonio sensation Vanessa Del Fierro is the alt.mariachi chingona behind Las Coronelas, whose mega-viral David Bowie cover almost blew up POCHO’s servers this week.
Vanessa also stars as an immigrant-smuggling coyote in a new video for her original composition Mexican Train. It’s a love song; too bad she’s in love with the wrong vato. Extra firme oldies points for the doo-wop backup girls, the triplets feel, and the tubular bells:
Mas…Vanessa Del Fierro is a coyote on a ‘Mexican Train’ (music video)
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
A funny thing happened on the way to ‘Bordertown’
Hola. I’m Lalo Alcaraz. You might know me.
I have been a Chicano political cartoonist forever. I know, I know, it’s God’s work, you’re welcome. Now, all of a sudden I’m a primetime TV writer and producer. Huh? Yes, the last two years in my life have been a super WTF. With ten percent LOL. #facepalm
Like it or not, I am now part of a historic pop culture moment: the first season of the first animated primetime TV show featuring a large cast of Mexican and Mexican-American characters: Bordertown.
Pocho Ocho top ways El Chapo could escape again
Mexico has recaptured fugitive drug cartel jefe El Chapo Guzman –– who notoriously tunneled out of a high security prison last summer –- but the criminal mastermind isn’t done yet.
Sources tell our correspondents that Guzman’s narcotrafficante associates are already working on plans to bust the gangster out of his next cellblock; we’ve compiled this list of the Pocho Ocho Top Ways El Chapo Could Escape Again:
8. Trained bats
7. Incredible shrinking ray
6. Those gigantor worms from Tremors
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.
