Hispanic Fanatic

I’ve toyed with the idea of instituting a Wordless Wednesday feature on this site. But of course, I update on the weekends (more or less), and I usually can’t shut up once I get writing, so just slapping a picture online isn’t going to happen.

But as an experiment, I’m going to sidestep my loquacious tendencies and simply post a photograph with minimal text.

Here we have a young Hispanic boy whose parents are taking him to a school board meeting in Arizona. This is how he was greeted at the door.

Draw your own conclusions.

OK, the Democratic president who insisted, “Si, Se Puede” hasn’t kept his promise to make immigration reform a top priority. Furthermore, he has deported more Latinos than anybody in history, despite the fact that there are fewer undocumented people to arrest.

So getting the Hispanic vote should be easy for the GOP, which continues to insist that Latinos are Republican but don’t know it. In essence, conservatives say Latinos are voting against their own interests, which is ironic considering that Republicans depend on their rural white base to do exactly that.

There’s just one problem.

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So I recently watched the horror-comedy Attack the Block, a British movie about an alien invasion of the inner-city projects. Yes, it’s as preposterous as it sounds, and while far from brilliant, it’s a fun ninety minutes.

However, I made a classic internet mistake after I saw the movie: I read other people’s comments on the film.

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The New York Times recently reported on a small rural town where longtime residents complain about “young Mexican men working construction and driving down wages, the children of laborers flooding crowded schools…and strip clubs springing up on roads that used to be dark and quiet.”

Is the town in Wisconsin, Kansas, Alabama, or even (shudder) Arizona? No, it is “a precolonial Mexican village outside Oaxaca City, filling up with fellow Mexicans.”

It seems that the urge to hate immigrants — even of the same nationality — is universal.

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Wow, I almost let MLK Day pass without directing you to an article I recently wrote for Being Latino about the great man himself.

It’s more or less about… well, you can see for yourself by clicking here.

In the meantime, take this newest of federal holidays off. And practice peace, love, and compassion toward your fellow human beings.

Yeah, that all sounds pretty good. Should be easy to do.

In America, you can be anything you want to be, and everybody has unlimited potential…

Well, if that were really true, the entire population would be nothing but rock stars, senators, Oscar-winning actresses, and NFL quarterbacks.

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Apparently, a bunch of sluts were running around my city recently.

I’m talking, of course, about the SlutWalk movement, which began earlier this year when a Toronto cop implied that women who dressed like “sluts” deserved to get raped. Outraged at the cop’s statement, women all over North America hit the streets both to protest the Neanderthal mindset that afflicts so many males, and to repurpose the word “slut.”

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“The U.S. Census Bureau expects racial minorities / people of color to make up a majority of the U.S. population in the next thirty to forty years. Do you feel concerned or hopeful about that?”

The question comes from a survey conducted by the Applied Research Center, which asked Americans their opinions about a well-publicized fact: By 2050, if not sooner, the nation’s combined population of racial and ethnic minorities will outnumber white Americans.

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Like all Americans, nothing makes me happier than arguing about emotionally loaded, extremely volatile political issues that have no clear solutions. Yes, that’s why I write about immigration so much.

However, I now realized that I haven’t been fair. I’ve simply assumed that racism — directed toward Latinos — is a primary motivating factor in the debate. But is this true?

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Like many ethnic minorities, I have been accused more than once of hating white people.

But for someone who despises the white race, I am seriously guilty of fraternizing with the enemy. I don’t want to get into the whole “some of my best friends” are this or that, but I’ll just mention that my wife (of German ancestry) would be a little peeved to find out about my deep-seeded hatred of white people.

I guess I’m also wracked with self-loathing, because (as I’ve pointed out many times) I’m half-white myself (on my father’s side).

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