La Teatrista

guerillera de la cultura

Monday, April 24, 2006

Fort Worth Latino Youth and a Revolutionary project

RAUL Y JULIEWritten by 1440 Experience
Directed by Claudia Acosta


Staged Reading: MAY 17th 7pm FREE

Rose Marine Theater
1440 N Main


Talk back session immediately following.

Teatro de la Rosas teen theater troupe, 1440 Experience, is proud to present the collaborative writing project: Raul y Julie. This bilingual play, based on Romeo and Juliet, takes a look into the contemporary Latino youth experience. Set in Fort Worth, Raul and Julie must face language, class and race issues in school and at home. Their purity aims to survive through these barriers, only to leave them with life changing consequence.

Our youth is speaking out. Our Latino youth are here to tell their story. From their minds, in their words, this original play will mark a monumental point in Northside history. Please come and support this phenomenal talent here in Panther City

Thursday, April 20, 2006

Stoogeaphilia fourandtwenty welcome

Wednesday at the Wreck

Inspired by the well slung tunes:

heavy
thunder,
rich thick red velvet
and silky honey
over warm bread

let wind fall in
over hard lines
to calm through
its breath's blow

jumpin' flames
on wood,
through paper
and concrete-
flames grab veins
and blood
with grumble
and growl

beating ancient hands
on heart
thud upon thud,
a cry from string and pulse
with a wandering eye
lost with lost of dress
found with found
closed lids
and the metal grasp
of beer held verse

and sweat
turned back
with clenched fist
over phone

finish strong
finish wild
finish hard

-4/20/06

Tuesday, April 18, 2006

G III in my rush...

I was in a rush posting GIII and should have made corrections.
It has been revised excuse me

Guerillera III

This came from one of my myspace bulletins, Jinks . A very worthy read. This is a recurring nightmare. This is one of history's most challenging lesson. First, the anihilation of Mayans and the Aztec nation (Aztec avarice became it's own demise). Native Americans in the north stripped of their lands, brutally left to crumble by disease. Africans, tossed from one country to another to serve as machinery, nothing more and still thought of as nothing more. Here, when Texas became a country, I believe the Rangers rid THEIR lands of MEZKINS:

Texas Rangers, U.S. History

Related Category: U.S. History


Texas Rangers, mounted fighting force organized (1835) during the Texas Revolution. During the republic they became established as the guardians of the Texas frontier, particularly against Native Americans. The Texas Rangers at first consisted of three companies of 25 men each. Said to "ride like Mexicans, shoot like Tennesseans, and fight like the very devil," the rangers were unique as a police force in that they never drilled, were not required to salute officers, and wore neither uniforms nor any standard gear except the six-shooter. In their first decade of operation, the rangers effectively quelled lawlessness in Texas on frequent occasions, and in the Mexican War (1846–48) they served as scouts and guerrilla fighters, gaining a wide reputation for valor and effectiveness.

In the late 1850s the rangers fought vicious battles with the Comanche, and in the Civil War, Terry's Texas Rangers gained renown. In the Reconstruction era the Texas Rangers were engaged to control outlaws, feuding groups, and Mexican marauders and were responsible for keeping law and order along the Rio Grande. In 1874 the Texas Rangers were organized for the first time on a permanent basis in two battalions; one was assigned to arbitrate range wars on the frontier, and the other was sent to control cattle rustling on the Texas-Mexico border. The heyday of the great cattle business, with its feuds and shootings, its outlaws and rustlers, was also the heyday of the Texas Rangers.



This reference was the first listing on a google search. That is in the texts books. They don't call the Texas Rangers a "vigilante violence" (artical makes an interesting statements about the sanction of minute men). They were created to protect their rightful borders by shooting any Mexican or Native American found.

I hope that this time, the endurance built by the sweat and blood of oppressed generations, will culminate to a full shift of power, a revolution that begins with the death of apathy and insular living, with offering more fine combed perspectives on the traditional glorified history to our students. Time to learn. Time to evolve:


US Deported Mexicans Before - American Dream my ass...
Body: US Deported Mexicans In Masses Before-It Was Bad Very bad
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
www.usatoday.com/news/nat...over_x.htm

His father and oldest sister were farming sugar beets
in the fields of Hamilton, Mont., and his mother was
cooking tortillas when 6-year-old Ignacio Pina saw
plainclothes authorities burst into his home.

"They came in with guns and told us to get out,"
recalls Pina, 81, a retired railroad worker in
Bakersfield, Calif., of the 1931 raid. "They didn't let
us take anything," not even a trunk that held birth
certificates proving that he and his five siblings were
U.S.-born citizens.

The family was thrown into a jail for 10 days before
being sent by train to Mexico. Pina says he spent 16
years of "pure hell" there before acquiring papers of
his Utah birth and returning to the USA.

The deportation of Pina's family tells an
almost-forgotten story of a 1930s anti-immigrant
campaign. Tens of thousands, and possibly more than
400,000, Mexicans and Mexican-Americans were pressured
-- through raids and job denials -- to leave the USA
during the Depression, according to a USA TODAY review
of documents and interviews with historians and
deportees. Many, mostly children, were U.S. citizens.

Related story: Some stories hard to get in history
books

If their tales seem incredible, a newspaper analysis of
the history textbooks used most in U.S. middle and high
schools may explain why: Little has been written about
the exodus, often called "the repatriation."

That may soon change. As the U.S. Senate prepares to
vote on bills that would either help illegal workers
become legal residents or boost enforcement of U.S.
immigration laws, an effort to address deportations
that happened 70 years ago has gained traction:

*On Thursday, Rep. Hilda Solis, D-Calif., plans to
introduce a bill in the U.S. House that calls for a
commission to study the "deportation and coerced
emigration" of U.S. citizens and legal residents. The
panel would also recommend remedies that could include
reparations. "An apology should be made," she says.

Co-sponsor Rep. Luis Gutierrez, D-Ill., says history
may repeat itself. He says a new House bill that makes
being an illegal immigrant a felony could prompt a
"massive deportation of U.S. citizens," many of them
U.S.-born children leaving with their parents.

"We have safeguards to ensure people aren't deported
who shouldn't be," says Jeff Lungren, GOP spokesman for
the House Judiciary Committee, adding the new House
bill retains those safeguards.

*In January, California became the first state to enact
a bill that apologizes to Latino families for the 1930s
civil rights violations. It declined to approve the
sort of reparations the U.S. Congress provided in 1988
for Japanese-Americans interned during World War II.

Democratic state Sen. Joe Dunn, a self-described "Irish
white guy from Minnesota" who sponsored the state bill,
is now pushing a measure to require students be taught
about the 1930s emigration. He says as many as 2
million people of Mexican ancestry were coerced into
leaving, 60% of them U.S. citizens.

*In October, a group of deportees and their relatives,
known as los repatriados, will host a conference in
Detroit on the topic. Organizer Helen Herrada, whose
father was deported, has conducted 100 oral histories
and produced a documentary. She says many sent to
Mexico felt "humiliated" and didn't want to talk about
it. "They just don't want it to happen again."

No precise figures exist on how many of those deported
in the 1930s were illegal immigrants. Since many of
those harassed left on their own, and their journeys
were not officially recorded, there are also no exact
figures on the total number who departed.

At least 345,839 people went to Mexico from 1930 to
1935, with 1931 as the peak year, says a 1936 dispatch
from the U.S. Consulate General in Mexico City.

"It was a racial removal program," says Mae Ngai, an
immigration history expert at the University of
Chicago, adding people of Mexican ancestry were
targeted.

However, Americans in the 1930s were "really hurting,"
says Otis Graham, history professor emeritus at the
University of California, Santa Barbara. One in four
workers were unemployed and many families hungry.
Deporting illegal residents was not an "outrageous
idea," Graham says. "Don't lose the context."

A pressure campaign

In the early 1900s, Mexicans poured into the USA,
welcomed by U.S. factory and farm owners who needed
their labor. Until entry rules tightened in 1924, they
simply paid a nickel to cross the border and get visas
for legal residency.

"The vast majority were here legally, because it was so
easy to enter legally," says Kevin Johnson, a law
professor at the University of California, Davis.

They spread out across the nation. They sharecropped in
California, Texas and Louisiana, harvested sugar beets
in Montana and Minnesota, laid railroad tracks in
Kansas, mined coal in Utah and Oklahoma, packed meat in
Chicago and assembled cars in Detroit.

By 1930, the U.S. Census counted 1.42 million people of
Mexican ancestry, and 805,535 of them were U.S. born,
up from 700,541 in 1920.

Change came in 1929, as the stock market and U.S.
economy crashed. That year, U.S. officials tightened
visa rules, reducing legal immigration from Mexico to a
trickle. They also discussed what to do with those
already in the USA.

"The government undertook a program that coerced people
to leave," says Layla Razavi, policy analyst for the
Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund
(MALDEF). "It was really a hostile environment." She
says federal officials in the Hoover administration,
like local-level officials, made no distinction between
people of Mexican ancestry who were in the USA legally
and those who weren't.

"The document trail is shocking," says Dunn, whose
staff spent two years researching the topic after he
read the 1995 book Decade of Betrayal: Mexican
Repatriation in the 1930s, by Francisco Balderrama and
Raymond Rodriguez.

USA TODAY reviewed hundreds of pages of documents, some
provided by Dunn and MALDEF and others found at the
National Archives. They cite officials saying the
deportations lawfully focused on illegal immigrants
while the exodus of legal residents was voluntary. Yet
they suggest people of Mexican ancestry faced varying
forms of harassment and intimidation:

*Raids. Officials staged well-publicized raids in
public places. On Feb. 26, 1931, immigration officials
suddenly closed off La Placita, a square in Los
Angeles, and questioned the roughly 400 people there
about their legal status.

The raids "created a climate of fear and anxiety" and
prompted many Mexicans to leave voluntarily, says
Balderrama, professor of Chicano studies and history at
California State University, Los Angeles.

In a June 1931 memo to superiors, Walter Carr, Los
Angeles district director of immigration, said
"thousands upon thousands of Mexican aliens" have been
"literally scared out of Southern California."

Some of them came from hospitals and needed medical
care en route to Mexico, immigrant inspector Harry
Yeager wrote in a November 1932 letter.

The Wickersham Commission, an 11-member panel created
by President Hoover, said in a May 1931 report that
immigration inspectors made "checkups" of boarding
houses, restaurants and pool rooms without "warrants of
any kind." Labor Secretary William Doak responded that
the "checkups" occurred very rarely.

*Jobs withheld. Prodded by labor unions, states and
private companies barred non-citizens from some jobs,
Balderrama says.

"We need their jobs for needy citizens," C.P. Visel of
the Los Angeles Citizens Committee for Coordination of
Unemployment Relief wrote in a 1931 telegram. In a
March 1931 letter to Doak, Visel applauded U.S.
officials for the "exodus of aliens deportable and
otherwise who have been scared out of the community."

Emilia Castenada, 79, recalls coming home from school
in 1935 in Los Angeles and hearing her father say he
was being deported because "there was no work for
Mexicans." She says her father, a stonemason, was a
legal resident who owned property. A U.S. citizen who
spoke little Spanish, she left the USA with her brother
and father, who was never allowed back.

"The jobs were given to the white Americans, not the
Mexicans," says Carlos DeAnda Guerra, 77, a retired
furniture upholsterer in Carpinteria, Calif. He says
his parents entered the USA legally in 1917 but were
denied jobs. He, his mother and five U.S.-born siblings
were deported in 1931, while his father, who then went
into hiding, stayed to pick oranges.

"The slogan has gone out over the city (Los Angeles)
and is being adhered to -- 'Employ no Mexican while a
white man is unemployed,' " wrote George Clements,
manager of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce's
agriculture department, in a memo to his boss Arthur
Arnoll. He said the Mexicans' legal status was not a
factor: "It is a question of pigment, not a question of
citizenship or right."

*Public aid threatened. County welfare offices
threatened to withhold the public aid of many
Mexican-Americans, Ngai says. Memos show they also
offered to pay for trips to Mexico but sometimes failed
to provide adequate food. An immigration inspector
reported in a November 1932 memo that no provisions
were made for 78 children on a train. Their only
sustenance: a few ounces of milk daily.

Most of those leaving were told they could return to
the USA whenever they wanted, wrote Clements in an
August 1931 letter. "This is a grave mistake, because
it is not the truth." He reported each was given a card
that made their return impossible, because it showed
they were "county charities." Even those born in the
USA, he wrote, wouldn't be able to return unless they
had a birth certificate or similar proof.

*Forced departures. Some of the deportees who were
moved by train or car had guards to ensure they left
the USA and others were sent south on a "closed-body
school bus" or "Mexican gun boat," memos show.

"Those who tried to say 'no' ended up in the physical
deportation category," Dunn says, adding they were
taken in squad cars to train stations.

Mexican-Americans recall other pressure tactics. Arthur
Herrada, 81, a retired Ford engineer in Huron, Ohio,
says his father, who was a legal U.S. resident, was
threatened with deportation if he didn't join the U.S.
Army. His father enlisted.

'We weren't welcome'

"It was an injustice that shouldn't have happened,"
says Jose Lopez, 79, a retired Ford worker in Detroit.
He says his father came to the USA legally but couldn't
find his papers in 1931 and was deported. To keep the
family together, his mother took her six U.S.-born
children to Mexico, where they often survived on one
meal a day. Lopez welcomes a U.S. apology.

So does Guerra, the retired upholsterer, whose voice
still cracks with emotion when he talks about how
deportation tore his family apart. "I'm very resentful.
I don't trust the government at all," says Guerra, who
later served in the U.S. military.

Pina says his entire family got typhoid fever in Mexico
and his father, who had worked in Utah coal mines, died
of black lung disease in 1935. "My mother was left
destitute, with six of us, in a country we knew nothing
about," he says. They lived in the slums of Mexico
City, where his formal education ended in sixth grade.
"We were misfits there. We weren't welcome."

"The Depression was very bad here. You can imagine how
hard it was in Mexico," says Pina, who proudly notes
the advanced college degrees of each of his four
U.S.-raised sons. "You can't put 16 years of pure hell
out of your mind."

Guerillera II

This is a tricky situation. I do understand this logic: to see ESL classes as a form of segregation, but is that REALLY the case? Is student advancement TRULY compromised if the assimilated are taught along side the nonassimliated?


Preston Hollow is the first suit that could spawn more research on the effectiveness of ESL programs. Is it a tool handsomely formed to protect its true functions? Or does it allow a transition from culture shock? How and why could this program differ from school to school? What other factors are contributing to minimal success of Latinos in school? Is the feared and small perception of what it means to come from another country, separated by us and them, the fundamental issue?

How can we solve multilingual education? What if all classes were taught in both languages by students teaching each other with a proper guide?


Source: "Nina Perales"


MALDEF
Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund

110 Broadway, San Antonio, TX 78205 Office: 210-224-5476 www.maldef.org

NEWS RELEASE CONTACT:

FOR IMMEDIATE DISTRIBUTION David Hinojosa: 210-224-5476

April 18, 2006 Laura Rodriguez: 213-629-2512 ext. 124

MALDEF FILES SEGREGATION SUIT ON BEHALF OF LATINO CHILDREN

Lawsuit alleges ESL used as a proxy to discriminate against minority students in
Dallas public school

SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS - Today, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational
Fund (MALDEF), the nation's leading Latino legal organization, filed suit in federal district
court against the Dallas Independent School District (DISD) and the principal of Preston Hollow
Elementary School alleging civil rights violations by segregating and discriminating against
Latino schoolchildren.

The Latino parents represented by MALDEF, Organizaci*n para el Futuro de los Estudiantes
(OFE), allege that Preston Hollow illegally uses its English as a Second Language program to
segregate Latino and minority students from Anglo students, irrespective of their language
abilities. The documents in the case show that Latino students who are proficient in English are,
nonetheless, channeled into classes masked as "English as a Second Language." Preston Hollow
organizes its general education classes and even combines some grades to ensure that Anglo
students, who comprise just 18 percent of the school, sit in majority white classrooms.

"Fifty years after Brown v. the Board of Education, it is a shame that segregation continues to
plague our schools," said David Hinojosa, MALDEF staff attorney and lead counsel in the case.
"Using ESL as a proxy to segregate schoolchildren can not be tolerated. This lawsuit is intended
to send a message that there is no justification for any school to treat Latino students any
differently than white students," Hinojosa added.

Ms. Lucresia Mayorga Santamaria, lead plaintiff and mother of three children attending Preston
Hollow, stated "The school attempted to omit Latino children from the school brochure because
they did not want the surrounding neighborhood to get the wrong impression. Well, I hope they
all get this impression: we will not stand by any longer because our children deserve the same
opportunities as all other children of Preston Hollow."

Calling on the leadership of Dallas ISD to now answer Latino parents' calls for justice, Mr.
Hinojosa added, "We condemn efforts such as these to keep white students together for the sake
of deterring white flight. We call on the superintendent and the Dallas Board to swiftly end the
segregation at Preston Hollow," Mr. Hinojosa added.

Founded in 1968, MALDEF, the nation's premier Latino civil rights organization, promotes and protects the rights of Latinos through advocacy, litigation, community education and outreach, leadership development, and higher education scholarships.

Thursday, April 13, 2006

Guerillera

Here I have a new mission: pharmaceutical companies!

Bush stopped them from negotiating with medicaid
The same medicine in Mexico and Canada is waaay cheaper and illegal to buy.
They set their own prices
Their medicines create a vicious cycle of consumption and poison.
AND WE BUY IT

We don't want to be in pain
We don't want to die too young
We can't afford to be ill
We are pushed to unhealthy limits
Somewhow some of us still survive
What the hell can we do?

Sunday, April 09, 2006

History made


Finally, a beautiful representation of the Latino Community in Texas left it's imprint today. Today, the biggest rally Fort Worth has ever seen, captured time, progress, and hope. It was about family, dignity, courage, recognition, an empowered Latino voice. Today we took a stand, today we marched in silence to make our presence stronger. This tall and peaceful stand left the media with nothing to say but, "All went smoothly". We are not animals, uncivilized and not all uneducated. This fearless day showed the world our unity, clarity and power.

Children holding signs proudly smiling, I saw familiar faces from the community I serve, restaurant workers stepping out to support, Spanish and English words painted the air together helping each other. I was shaken with an invigorating jolt of solidarity with my Fort Worth family.

A wondrous sense of honor and pride filled our Panther City streets. Flags, red, white, blue and green, washed the town with respect and duty.

Abril 9 2006

Orgullosa de ser Latina-Americana
Aqui vengo con solaridaridad
To honor the sweat and blood
gone so long unrecognized
A river of paz fertilizing
Dry lands
Planting the semillas of our dreams
Breaking ground
Celebrating opportunity
and el sueno universal
Aqui en Fort Worth
Pantera City
Took the day as the day to
Honor justice
Humanidad
Rights and dignity
Unidos hermanos, together
we left with change in our hands
Today we grabbed hold
Today it became ours
Que esta trompeta
harmoniza
with our nation of Latinos