To combat sexual assault and domestic violence in Hispanic communities, Mujeres Latinas en Accion brings “Monologos de la Vagina” to Chicago, – a Spanish-language version of Eve Ensler’s award-winning play “The Vagina Monologues.”
A special performance of “The Vagina Monologues” hopes to raise awareness en español
by Adriana Diaz Medill Reports Chicago
April 13, 2010
Vagina: written the same in English or Spanish, is a word that most people have difficulty saying out loud in any language. But a Chicago advocate for victims believes that talking about sex, frankly and unabashedly, is an important part of solving the problem of violence against women.
Maritza Reyes is the sexual assault program coordinator for Mujeres Latinas en Accion, a multiservice agency based in Pilsen that is bringing “Monologos de la Vagina” a Spanish-translated production of Eve Ensler’s “The Vagina Monologues.”
The play comprises several stories that touch on themes including sex, love, rape, sexual slavery, domestic violence, masturbation and the female orgasm.
Reyes said sexual assault and domestic violence are issues that are very prevalent in Hispanic communities. “I think that we don’t speak about it. I think it’s sort of like ‘well we’ll take care of it within ourselves, we don’t need to involve other people’,” Reyes said. “And that ends up harming the child or the person that is sexually abused because they see it as the family is protecting the abuser as opposed to protecting the victim.”
It is estimated that only three in 10 rapes are reported. Providing a variety of social services, Mujeres Latinas en Accion is also one of 33 centers that constitute the Illinois Coalition Against Sexual Assault.
In 2009, 28 percent of rape victims that sought first-time services from crisis centers were Latino, said Sean Black, the Coalition’s communications coordinator. About 8 percent of the county’s victims spoke Spanish only, heightening the need for bilingual awareness.
The performance is part of a global campaign run by the V-Day organization, a global non-profit founded by Ensler, the playwright of “The Vagina Monologues.” Although 26 percent of the city’s population is of Hispanic or Latino origin, the only other Spanish V-Day benefit production of the monologues held in Chicago was in 2005.
Silvana Tabares, 31, of Brighton Park, who attended an English language performance of the show in Pilsen Friday, said she truly enjoyed the show. “I am very impressed,” she said. “I enjoyed every story and I learned a lot about how women should respect themselves.”
Reyes said more than 95 percent of the agency’s clients speak Spanish only and many of them have never heard of the show. “It’s such a taboo subject in the Latino community to talk about vaginas, to talk about sex and also to talk about domestic violence and sexual assault,” she said. “So we wanted to bring it to them in a format that maybe they would be more comfortable with.”
©2001 - 2010 Medill Reports - Chicago, Northwestern University. A publication of the Medill School.
Monday, April 26, 2010
Thursday, April 22, 2010
Trained to Fail
The following article is written by Yvonne Liu from the Applied Research Center, an organization that is one of Marguerite Casey Foundation's grantees. This article appeared in the magazine ColorLines and does not belong to the Marguerite Casey Foundation.
The article links and refers to a previous feature written by Claudia Rowe about Green Jobs.
Jason Smith needs a job. For two years, he’s been submitting applications and waiting by the phone for a callback. Sometimes, he gets a response, but the ratio of applicants to openings is at historic highs, so he hasn’t been hired. That wouldn’t make Smith much different from the 15 million Americans who are out of work, except that he was supposed to be among those leading us into a promising 21st century economy.
Last June, Smith graduated as a member of the inaugural class of the Oakland Green Jobs Corps. He and his classmates were hopeful for their future—they’d get cutting edge jobs and be part of a movement for climate justice. Eight months later, many sit waiting for employment. A 26-year old Black man, Smith’s living with his parents, where he moved when he lost his job. He’s among 3.4 million workers who have been unemployed for more than a year.
A year ago, President Obama was among the nation’s loudest advocates for reversing the Great Recession by building a green economy. Congress included almost $4 billion in the Recovery Act for green job training. This funding is on top of the Department of Labor’s annual training allotment, which was a combined $7.4 billion in fiscal years 2009 and 2010. Job training programs have sprung into action and workers have jumped at the chance for a new career.
But Washington stopped there. While Obama began this year vowing to focus on “jobs, jobs, jobs”, most economists agree the jobs bill he signed into law last month is too little, too late. The Senate’s plan to roll out further job creation efforts appears stalled. They can’t even agree to keep unemployment insurance going for all those long-term jobless workers like Smith. So we are facing a jobless recovery, with some estimates predicting that job numbers won’t return to pre-recession levels until November 2014. The White House has said it doesn’t expect unemployment to drop meaningfully this year.
As a result of this neglect, the experience of Smith and his training classmates is not uncommon. There are no firm numbers on how many newly trained green workers are still jobless. But stories abound of programs that turn out workers with new, promising skills—in solar panel installation and weatherization, in places like Seattle and Chicago—and who nonetheless can’t find jobs.
The Oakland Green Jobs Corps was created in October 2008 as a demonstration of how investments in renewable energy can create opportunities to lift people of color out of poverty and onto promising career pathways. When the city won $250 million in a settlement from the state’s Enron lawsuit, advocates urged the money be used to fund green jobs, specifically a local training program. They argued the money should benefit communities of color, who were hurt the most by the unscrupulous practices of large energy corporations.
The Ella Baker Center surveyed 20 employers and found that many were in the process of expanding their businesses and that the major challenge they faced was finding trained people. In October 2008, about a dozen members of the Green Employer Council—a group of employers that helped shape the job training curriculum—committed to hiring a graduate of the Oakland Green Jobs Corp. But eight months later, when Smith and his colleagues donned green helmets and received diplomas in a graduation ceremony, the employers didn’t follow through on their promise. The ongoing recession curbed their business expansion; they were no longer hiring new workers.
The lesson ought to be clear: Job training alone doesn’t create jobs. But since 1982, the federal government has argued the contrary. That was the last economic downturn in which unemployment reached toward double digits. According to President Ronald Reagan, the cause wasn’t a shortage of jobs. He said he’d “looked in the Sunday paper at the help-wanted ads” and found “as many as 65 pages,” which “convinced us that there are jobs waiting and people not trained for those jobs.” To Reagan, the era’s 9.8 unemployment rate reflected a skills gap.
This moment marked a fundamental shift in how the federal government addressed rising jobless numbers, argues University of Oregon labor educator Gordon Lafer, in his 2002 book The Job Training Charade. Reagan enacted the Job Training Partnership Act (JTPA), which altered the landscape of job training in three crucial ways.
First, the federal government moved from being an employer of last resort to a source of funding for privatized, short-term training. An earlier job training initiative, the Comprehensive Employment and Training Administration (CETA), provided both training and jobs. At its peak, CETA employed nearly three-quarters of a million adults and an additional one million youth for summer jobs.
“The only case in which training creates jobs is when businesses want to hire more people, but can’t find people with skills,” says Lafer. “This is very rarely true, especially during times of recession. Politically, training gets promoted the most when the economy is down, when it can’t create jobs.”
Reagan’s JTPA dissolved CETA’s public employment arm and redirected the money to private, for-profit job trainers. This was the second fundamental change. Previously, CETA programs operated at the city level and enabled community-based organizations to manage operations. JTPA instead empowered state governors with primary budget authority and setup private business councils, which planned the training programs at the local level.
Third, the Reagan program fundamentally changed the discourse around job training. Rather than being part of a one-two punch to get people back to work, it set up unemployment and poverty as personal failures. Only through filing individual skills deficits—especially in “soft skills,” such as discipline, punctuality, loyalty and “work ethic”—could the disproportionately Black and Latino poor and unemployed move into the middle class.
The impact on communities of color and women was grim. To begin with, funding was woefully inadequate, enough to serve only 2 percent of the eligible population. Because the federal government paid training providers for their services when they met certain outcomes, widespread “creaming” occurred by the program operators. People of color and women were skipped over as providers recruited white male workers to their programs, knowing that the latter population suffered the least in terms of barriers to employment. As a result, Black enrollment in job training fell by half in JTPA’s first year. Latino participation dropped even further. Two studies found that two-thirds of the on-the-job trainees were white men.
“Green job training is subject to the same critique as the JTPA,” says Lafer. “Green jobs are like a mantra, but nobody knows what they are or where they are.”
Wherever they are, there aren’t currently enough of them for the people that want them. Instead of continuing to pour money into training for green jobs that don’t exist, what the country needs is investments in large-scale job creation, one that will put people of color and women to work—in green jobs. Jason Smith perhaps says it best. “We need to get back to [being] a producing country, where we make things and then sell it to other countries,” Smith concludes. “So much money has been given to corporations, I just want a piece of it, I just want a job.”
The article links and refers to a previous feature written by Claudia Rowe about Green Jobs.
Jason Smith needs a job. For two years, he’s been submitting applications and waiting by the phone for a callback. Sometimes, he gets a response, but the ratio of applicants to openings is at historic highs, so he hasn’t been hired. That wouldn’t make Smith much different from the 15 million Americans who are out of work, except that he was supposed to be among those leading us into a promising 21st century economy.
Last June, Smith graduated as a member of the inaugural class of the Oakland Green Jobs Corps. He and his classmates were hopeful for their future—they’d get cutting edge jobs and be part of a movement for climate justice. Eight months later, many sit waiting for employment. A 26-year old Black man, Smith’s living with his parents, where he moved when he lost his job. He’s among 3.4 million workers who have been unemployed for more than a year.
A year ago, President Obama was among the nation’s loudest advocates for reversing the Great Recession by building a green economy. Congress included almost $4 billion in the Recovery Act for green job training. This funding is on top of the Department of Labor’s annual training allotment, which was a combined $7.4 billion in fiscal years 2009 and 2010. Job training programs have sprung into action and workers have jumped at the chance for a new career.
But Washington stopped there. While Obama began this year vowing to focus on “jobs, jobs, jobs”, most economists agree the jobs bill he signed into law last month is too little, too late. The Senate’s plan to roll out further job creation efforts appears stalled. They can’t even agree to keep unemployment insurance going for all those long-term jobless workers like Smith. So we are facing a jobless recovery, with some estimates predicting that job numbers won’t return to pre-recession levels until November 2014. The White House has said it doesn’t expect unemployment to drop meaningfully this year.
As a result of this neglect, the experience of Smith and his training classmates is not uncommon. There are no firm numbers on how many newly trained green workers are still jobless. But stories abound of programs that turn out workers with new, promising skills—in solar panel installation and weatherization, in places like Seattle and Chicago—and who nonetheless can’t find jobs.
The Oakland Green Jobs Corps was created in October 2008 as a demonstration of how investments in renewable energy can create opportunities to lift people of color out of poverty and onto promising career pathways. When the city won $250 million in a settlement from the state’s Enron lawsuit, advocates urged the money be used to fund green jobs, specifically a local training program. They argued the money should benefit communities of color, who were hurt the most by the unscrupulous practices of large energy corporations.
The Ella Baker Center surveyed 20 employers and found that many were in the process of expanding their businesses and that the major challenge they faced was finding trained people. In October 2008, about a dozen members of the Green Employer Council—a group of employers that helped shape the job training curriculum—committed to hiring a graduate of the Oakland Green Jobs Corp. But eight months later, when Smith and his colleagues donned green helmets and received diplomas in a graduation ceremony, the employers didn’t follow through on their promise. The ongoing recession curbed their business expansion; they were no longer hiring new workers.
The lesson ought to be clear: Job training alone doesn’t create jobs. But since 1982, the federal government has argued the contrary. That was the last economic downturn in which unemployment reached toward double digits. According to President Ronald Reagan, the cause wasn’t a shortage of jobs. He said he’d “looked in the Sunday paper at the help-wanted ads” and found “as many as 65 pages,” which “convinced us that there are jobs waiting and people not trained for those jobs.” To Reagan, the era’s 9.8 unemployment rate reflected a skills gap.
This moment marked a fundamental shift in how the federal government addressed rising jobless numbers, argues University of Oregon labor educator Gordon Lafer, in his 2002 book The Job Training Charade. Reagan enacted the Job Training Partnership Act (JTPA), which altered the landscape of job training in three crucial ways.
First, the federal government moved from being an employer of last resort to a source of funding for privatized, short-term training. An earlier job training initiative, the Comprehensive Employment and Training Administration (CETA), provided both training and jobs. At its peak, CETA employed nearly three-quarters of a million adults and an additional one million youth for summer jobs.
“The only case in which training creates jobs is when businesses want to hire more people, but can’t find people with skills,” says Lafer. “This is very rarely true, especially during times of recession. Politically, training gets promoted the most when the economy is down, when it can’t create jobs.”
Reagan’s JTPA dissolved CETA’s public employment arm and redirected the money to private, for-profit job trainers. This was the second fundamental change. Previously, CETA programs operated at the city level and enabled community-based organizations to manage operations. JTPA instead empowered state governors with primary budget authority and setup private business councils, which planned the training programs at the local level.
Third, the Reagan program fundamentally changed the discourse around job training. Rather than being part of a one-two punch to get people back to work, it set up unemployment and poverty as personal failures. Only through filing individual skills deficits—especially in “soft skills,” such as discipline, punctuality, loyalty and “work ethic”—could the disproportionately Black and Latino poor and unemployed move into the middle class.
The impact on communities of color and women was grim. To begin with, funding was woefully inadequate, enough to serve only 2 percent of the eligible population. Because the federal government paid training providers for their services when they met certain outcomes, widespread “creaming” occurred by the program operators. People of color and women were skipped over as providers recruited white male workers to their programs, knowing that the latter population suffered the least in terms of barriers to employment. As a result, Black enrollment in job training fell by half in JTPA’s first year. Latino participation dropped even further. Two studies found that two-thirds of the on-the-job trainees were white men.
“Green job training is subject to the same critique as the JTPA,” says Lafer. “Green jobs are like a mantra, but nobody knows what they are or where they are.”
Wherever they are, there aren’t currently enough of them for the people that want them. Instead of continuing to pour money into training for green jobs that don’t exist, what the country needs is investments in large-scale job creation, one that will put people of color and women to work—in green jobs. Jason Smith perhaps says it best. “We need to get back to [being] a producing country, where we make things and then sell it to other countries,” Smith concludes. “So much money has been given to corporations, I just want a piece of it, I just want a job.”
Wednesday, April 21, 2010
Have We Forgotten Why We Wanted Health Care Reform?
America is discontent with change. Only a couple years ago, we were calling for change, particularly in health care. Now change has come — and we are again grumbling. I witnessed this at a dinner party. The loudest dissenter was the epidemiologist, alongside the psychologist and mountaineer, who loathed being mandated to participate in a health insurance pool, and resented more the threat of a fine. I felt like I had fallen into the “Twilight Zone.” These were good people, educated people — PhD-holding, NPR-listening trusted friends. Such words would only be spoken at a tea party rally!
But these friends are not extremists. They identified with the tenets of liberalism — responsibility and empathy — but as middle class white collar workers, they were not immune to conservative fears of higher taxes and excessive government regulation. The media was saturated with such claims, claims that are frightening in a time of economic uncertainty. Fear makes us forget.
The American health care system was a child of World War II. During the war, the U.S. government capped wages to deter inflation, so private companies began luring workers with health insurance as a perk. By the time the war ended and the wage cap was rescinded, health insurance had become the standard to attract good workers, and thus America — quite accidentally — fell out of step with the rest of the industrialized nations that had already established universal health care by the 1940s.
Our market-driven health care system never made good on capitalism’s usual promise: that competition drives down costs and improves the quality of services and goods. Costs didn’t decrease with competition and eventually were the cause of 60 percent of the bankruptcies in the U.S. Quality of care paled in comparison to that in other developed nations; the life expectancy rate is 78.11 years in America, but 82.6 in Japan (did you know you’d actually live longer in Cuba than in America?). And don’t even try being a baby here; we have the worst infant mortality rate of all developed countries (Cuba trumps us in baby survival, too). To top it off – America actually spends the most on health care than all other members of the UN.
Health care never yielded the success of laissez-faire public policy typical for industries like entertainment and electronics. The World Health Organization notes this anomaly in its 2008 World Health Report: “Today, it is clear that left to their own devices, health systems do not gravitate naturally towards the goals of health for all through primary health care...Health systems are developing in directions that contribute little to equity and social justice and fail to get the best health outcomes for their money.”
The free-market U.S. health care system was not working. Do you remember how badly it was not working?
Christina Turner must remember. I found her story in The Huffington Post. The 45-year-old suspected drug-induced rape when she accepted a drink from two men at a bar and woke up hours later lying road side with cuts and bruises. Taking precautions, Turner took her doctor-prescribed month’s batch of anti-AIDS medicine. Now she is uninsurable. Insurers would not sell her a policy — telling her that maybe in a few years, they would reconsider if she could prove she was still AIDS-free.
It’s a dilemma many Americans faced: perverse insurance policies blocking access to affordable health care. Stories like Turner’s saturated the media only two years ago — but since the reform, the same media is suspicious of the change that was requested. Have we forgotten the Reuter’s investigation of insurance company Fortis?
Reuters reported that Fortis sought, found and targeted every policyholder who had contracted HIV and looked for any excuse for policy cancellation. In one case, Fortis used an obviously misdated handwritten note by a nurse, who wrote “2001” instead of “2002” to claim that the policyholder had concealed HIV as a preexisting condition. Fortis, now known as Assurant Health, made $150 million in profits alone between 2003 and 2007 by utilizing policy cancellation tactics.
And there is Mike Pyles, a 49-year-old man driven to homelessness by $230,000 in medical bills from his fight with renal cell cancer. Pyles lived out the statistic that every 30 seconds, an American goes bankrupt from medical bills.
Didn’t we used to rally at our dinner parties, denouncing the unfairness of the health care system? Instead, the epidemiologist asks me, “But if you use more health services—shouldn’t you pay more?” Bless his soul, but my friend’s innocent question is a kinder version of “Why should I pay for other people’s health? If you are the one sick, why should I pay for it?”
So I ask him, and the rest of America: “Why shouldn’t I help you? What’s so bad about you anyway that I cannot help pay for your health?”
Have we forgotten how our hearts went out to the millions of uninsured, to the bankrupt – how we once wanted to help them, how we once feared being victims of the same injustice? Now from our pedestal of optimum health, we ignore that the reform bans insurers from dropping coverage for the sick, prohibits denying coverage for preexisting conditions, and eradicates lifetime limits. We slump on our pedestal, lamenting how the reform will affect the healthy. Can we not see from our height – the old, the sick, and the poor?
Maybe with the new health care reform, we will want to help each other again.
The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Suphatra Laviolette and not of Marguerite Casey Foundation.
But these friends are not extremists. They identified with the tenets of liberalism — responsibility and empathy — but as middle class white collar workers, they were not immune to conservative fears of higher taxes and excessive government regulation. The media was saturated with such claims, claims that are frightening in a time of economic uncertainty. Fear makes us forget.
The American health care system was a child of World War II. During the war, the U.S. government capped wages to deter inflation, so private companies began luring workers with health insurance as a perk. By the time the war ended and the wage cap was rescinded, health insurance had become the standard to attract good workers, and thus America — quite accidentally — fell out of step with the rest of the industrialized nations that had already established universal health care by the 1940s.
Our market-driven health care system never made good on capitalism’s usual promise: that competition drives down costs and improves the quality of services and goods. Costs didn’t decrease with competition and eventually were the cause of 60 percent of the bankruptcies in the U.S. Quality of care paled in comparison to that in other developed nations; the life expectancy rate is 78.11 years in America, but 82.6 in Japan (did you know you’d actually live longer in Cuba than in America?). And don’t even try being a baby here; we have the worst infant mortality rate of all developed countries (Cuba trumps us in baby survival, too). To top it off – America actually spends the most on health care than all other members of the UN.
Health care never yielded the success of laissez-faire public policy typical for industries like entertainment and electronics. The World Health Organization notes this anomaly in its 2008 World Health Report: “Today, it is clear that left to their own devices, health systems do not gravitate naturally towards the goals of health for all through primary health care...Health systems are developing in directions that contribute little to equity and social justice and fail to get the best health outcomes for their money.”
The free-market U.S. health care system was not working. Do you remember how badly it was not working?
Christina Turner must remember. I found her story in The Huffington Post. The 45-year-old suspected drug-induced rape when she accepted a drink from two men at a bar and woke up hours later lying road side with cuts and bruises. Taking precautions, Turner took her doctor-prescribed month’s batch of anti-AIDS medicine. Now she is uninsurable. Insurers would not sell her a policy — telling her that maybe in a few years, they would reconsider if she could prove she was still AIDS-free.
It’s a dilemma many Americans faced: perverse insurance policies blocking access to affordable health care. Stories like Turner’s saturated the media only two years ago — but since the reform, the same media is suspicious of the change that was requested. Have we forgotten the Reuter’s investigation of insurance company Fortis?
Reuters reported that Fortis sought, found and targeted every policyholder who had contracted HIV and looked for any excuse for policy cancellation. In one case, Fortis used an obviously misdated handwritten note by a nurse, who wrote “2001” instead of “2002” to claim that the policyholder had concealed HIV as a preexisting condition. Fortis, now known as Assurant Health, made $150 million in profits alone between 2003 and 2007 by utilizing policy cancellation tactics.
And there is Mike Pyles, a 49-year-old man driven to homelessness by $230,000 in medical bills from his fight with renal cell cancer. Pyles lived out the statistic that every 30 seconds, an American goes bankrupt from medical bills.
Didn’t we used to rally at our dinner parties, denouncing the unfairness of the health care system? Instead, the epidemiologist asks me, “But if you use more health services—shouldn’t you pay more?” Bless his soul, but my friend’s innocent question is a kinder version of “Why should I pay for other people’s health? If you are the one sick, why should I pay for it?”
So I ask him, and the rest of America: “Why shouldn’t I help you? What’s so bad about you anyway that I cannot help pay for your health?”
Have we forgotten how our hearts went out to the millions of uninsured, to the bankrupt – how we once wanted to help them, how we once feared being victims of the same injustice? Now from our pedestal of optimum health, we ignore that the reform bans insurers from dropping coverage for the sick, prohibits denying coverage for preexisting conditions, and eradicates lifetime limits. We slump on our pedestal, lamenting how the reform will affect the healthy. Can we not see from our height – the old, the sick, and the poor?
Maybe with the new health care reform, we will want to help each other again.
The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Suphatra Laviolette and not of Marguerite Casey Foundation.
Friday, April 16, 2010
Grantees in the News: National Council of La Raza
Clarissa Martinez, immigration expert with National Council of La Raza (NCLR), was recently interviewed by Latino USA to discuss a new report criticizing a Homeland Security immigration enforcement program. The report found that the hotly contentious Immigration and Customs Enforcement's local enforcement program was disobeying its original agreements and lacking oversight of its officers.
NCLR, a think tank of applied research and policy analysis, is the largest national Hispanic civil rights and advocacy organization in America. Latino USA is an NPR distributed program that opens the doors of knowledge for Americans about Latinos, as well as educating Latinos about each other. You can hear it on your local National Public Radio station.
You can safely listen to the episode here.
NCLR, a think tank of applied research and policy analysis, is the largest national Hispanic civil rights and advocacy organization in America. Latino USA is an NPR distributed program that opens the doors of knowledge for Americans about Latinos, as well as educating Latinos about each other. You can hear it on your local National Public Radio station.You can safely listen to the episode here.
Thursday, April 15, 2010
The Party of Me--not Tea
Written by Alan Brinkley, who is the Allan Nevins Professor of History at Columbia University, and the author of “The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century,” a forthcoming biography.The Party of Me
The Times/CBS News Poll shows that there is broad unhappiness with the state of the economy and the performance of Congress, but on the whole the participants seem to be responding fairly normally to a weak economy with high joblessness. The 18 percent of those polled who identified themselves as Tea Party activists, however, have sharply different views — and a sharply different profile — from the population as whole.
This is a profile that matches other highly motivated protests over many decades — the supporters of Joseph McCarthy, for example, in the 1950s. Today, the target is not communism, which is no longer a major issue for the right (although “socialism” appears to have taken its place). But what seems to motivate them the most is a fear of a reduction in their own status — economically and socially.Economically, they fear that government spending and high deficits will lead to higher taxes and to inflation, both of which would threaten their own livelihoods.
It is telling that the Tea Partiers display a very high level of concern about deficit spending, but a significantly lower concern when they are asked if they would prefer higher taxes and lower deficits, or lower taxes and higher deficits. Most Tea Partiers choose the latter, which suggests that their concern is not the state of the economy as a whole, but their own economic conditions.
The other striking finding in this poll is the importance of race and diversity, something that Tea Partiers do not emphasize in their rallies and literature. But they show very clearly the racial anxiety that many of them appear to feel. This is not traditional racism, although there are almost certainly traditional racists within the movement.
The real issue, I believe, is a sense among white males that they are somehow being displaced, that the country is no longer “theirs,” that minorities and immigrants are becoming more and more powerful within society. And, of course, they are right about that. They just fear it more than many other Americans.*This piece is reposted from the New York Times.
"Si se puede!" Seattle's Immigration Reform Rally in Pioneer Square
The "We Must Act Now!" Immigration Reform Rally on April 10th in Pioneer Square, Seattle drew an impressive crowd of 7,000 people. The rally hosted a line up of speeches from politicians, community leaders, and families affected by a broken immigration system, as well as entertainment from local and statewide groups. Below is a slide show of the rally.
Check back for a written post about the rally and other facets of immigration reform.
Check back for a written post about the rally and other facets of immigration reform.
Tuesday, April 6, 2010
We On the Border Don't Count
Ann Cass, member of our Equal Voice Network, wrote this while reflecting on the very poorly organized Census effort in our area. The blog post originally appeared on this blog and is entitled "More Than Just a Number."SAN JUAN, April 5 - I have been greatly disturbed by the news that census forms will not be mailed to families who live in the colonias.
The amount of energy we have spent in getting information out about how important it is to fill out the forms so we can get more money into the Valley for infrastructure, housing, health care, education, etc. seems to be wasted, but the more important issue is that there does not seem to be a workable plan on the part of the Census Bureau to make sure that families will be counted.
They prefer to send people, enumerators, into the colonias to do the house by house data collection rather than mailing the forms out. How many enumerators are necessary to visit 900-1000 colonias in Hidalgo County, in the evening hours?
So, the forgotten people in the colonias continue not to count. I drive by the billboard erected by the Census Bureau that reads, “Be counted so we know how many hospitals we need here.” What a silly message. We all know that most people in the colonias do not have health insurance, and when they go to the hospital, they don’t count. They don’t count either when it comes to safety in their neighborhoods, lights on their streets, easy hook ups for water and sewer, having the post office notify them when their house number changes. They do count when it comes to paying their taxes, when their vote is needed to elect politicians, when universities want to do studies on low income families, and those who are undocumented do count when ICE needs to make their monthly quota on deportations. Now they don’t count for the Census?
I can’t help but remember one of the photos we had when we started our Equal Voice Campaign. It was a photo of a small child with numbered stickers all over his face. The caption was, “More than just a number.” And that is what I am thinking now. People in the colonias who are not being counted are more than just a number. If people could appreciate that, maybe colonia residents would count for everything.
Colonia residents are health care providers, that counts if it is your parent they are caring for. Colonia residents are landscapers, that counts if it is your lawn that needs to be taken care of. Colonia residents are teacher’s aides, that counts if it is your child that needs some extra attention at school. Colonia residents are construction workers, that counts if you are trying to build an office or home at a reasonable cost. Colonia residents are farm workers who pick the crops, that counts when you go and buy the fruits and vegetables in the stores which they can’t even afford to buy. Colonia residents are human beings, and that counts when we have a society that puts a value on everyone’s presence, not just a certain class.
Each and every one of the colonia residents is more than just a number!
Ann Williams Cass is executive director of Proyecto Azteca, a non-profit based in San Juan, Texas, that builds affordable homes for colonia residents.
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