­by Marvin Ramí­rez

Domestic workers march agains abuse and explotation.­ (PHOTO BY MARVIN RAMIREZ)

One of the most unprotected segment of the U.S. work force, vented their frustration Friday the 13th on this month, to tell employers: No more abuses, no more exploitation.

A colorful mass of people comprised­ mostly of women of different ethnic groups marched from 24th Street and Mission and headed to 26th to Valencia Street and returned to Mission St. to end the march at the Women’s Building on 18th Street.

The march was intended to highlight the legal victories where domestic workers have won hundred of thousands of dollars in backpay from employers who fail to pay minimum wage and overtime.

The National Domestic Workers Alliance joined hundreds of workers from Los Angeles, the San Francisco Bay Area, Boston, Washington DC, Miami, Seattle, Chicago, New York and Denver to share strategies, develop a national agenda, and march for ­domestic worker rights and dignity.

Domestic workers women march on Nov. 13 on Mission Street in route to the Women Building, where they would be attending workshops to learn how to protect their labor rights. (PHOTO BY MARVIN RAMIREZ)

Immigra­nt women who work in other people’s homes are subject to many forms of exploitation and abuse. Some employers refuse to allow sick days or pay for overtime; often wages are less than the minimum wage.

For practical purposes, says a written declaration, these women have few enforceable legal protections. So some are getting together to support and protect each ­other.

A speaker from the AFL-CIO offered verbal support, but these workers are outside the reach of the labor movement — they are banding together to learn to demand their rights and negotiate for themselves.

They are looking into the creation of a California Domestic Worker Bill of Rights and build a national movement of domestic workers.

­­

by the University of Michigan

ANN ARBOR, Michigan.— Arab and Muslim Americans continue to face an unusual degree of both discrimination and acceptance, according to a University of Michigan researcher who headed an in-depth study of the nation’s most visible Arab and Chaldean communities.

“The post-9/11 backlash against Detroit area Arab and Muslim Americans was strong and immediate,” says U-M researcher Wayne Baker, co-author of “Citizenship and Crisis: Arab Detroit After 9/11,” just published by the Russell Sage Foundation. “Detroit was drawn into the ‘War on Terror’ almost by political reflex and in many respects the impact is continuing.”

Baker, a research scientist at the U-M Institute for Social Research (ISR) and a professor at the U-M Stephen M. Ross School of Business, is part of the Detroit Arab American Study Team that includes U-M researchers Sally Howell, Ann Chih Lin, Andrew Shryock, Ronald Stockton, and Mark Tessler and Princeton University research Amaney Jamal. All are co-authors of “Citizenship and Crisis.”

In the book, the team explores how the cultural prejudices that have often marginalized the Detroit Arab community came to a head after 9/11, and analyzes how the Arab communities of metropolitan Detroit have continued to thrive despite significant backlash from the crisis.

“Arabs and Muslims living in the U.S. repeatedly face situations in which their countries of origin, or Arabs and Muslims generally, are cast as enemies of the cimaUnited States and its allies in the Middle East,” says Baker. “As a result, Arab Americans must continually prove themselves, assuring their fellow nationals that they belong here, that they are loyal, that they are not a threat to national security.”

As such, the book’s authors believe Arab Americans highlight the contradictions in the multicultural ethos that dominates the concept and practice of citizenship in the U.S. Arab Americans have been singled out for harsh treatment including selective surveillance, deportation, and detention without due process, as well as presumptive freezing of financial assets, vandalism, and personal insults. But they have also been the beneficiaries of the politics of inclusion and acceptance.

Detroit has seen the establishment of the Arab American National Museum, the expansion of Arab American community organizations, and the election and appointment of Arab and Muslim citizens to political office, the authors point out. The area has also seen new partnerships between Arab American civil rights organizations, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the U.S Department of Homeland Security, as well as the creation of Arab American and Islamic studies programs in area universities, and the founding and expansion of at least a dozen new mosques.

The Detroit Arab and Muslim communities have also faced additional challenges – the intensification of violence in Iraq, further dispossession and bloodshed in Gaza and the West Bank, a devastating Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 2006, and the continued scrutiny, suspicion, and tactical harassment of Arab and Muslim Americans by the law enforcement arms of their own government.

But the authors conclude ­that there are also good reasons for optimism, and for hope that the tensions between inclusion and stigma ultimately serve to bind the community, spurring efforts to organization and activism that are essential to the Detroit area Arab community’s success.

­

by the El Reportero’s news services

Alan García

Salvadoran authorities say at least 192 people were killed by floods and landslides that swept through the country last week.

El Salvador’s Civil Protection agency says in a statement that 89 of the victims were killed in the state of San Vicente, where days of heavy rains caused mud and boulders to sweep down the side of the Chichontepec volcano before dawn a week ago.

The agency said Sunday that dozens more remain missing. It says that more than 14,000 Salvadoran have been affected by the floods and mudslides that were indirectly linked to Hurricane Ida’s passage through the region.

Peruvian President Alan García cut short his trip to the Asia Pacific

Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Singapore, returning to Lima this morning to deal with a brewing spying case. Mr. Garcia abruptly announced his return—which comes a day earlier than had been scheduled—in order to publicly address an alleged incident of Chilean espionage involving an officer from the Peruvian Air Force. This newest diplomatic spat between the two countries had already provoked the cancellation of a meeting yesterday between President Garcia and his Chilean counterpart, Michelle Bachelet.

A Peruvian Air Force official Victor Ariza Mendoza, is accused of passing secret documents detailing Peru’s projected future military acquisitions to Chilean intelligence officers in exchange for money.

Obama’s new multilateralism founders on Honduras

When U.S. President Barack Obama addressed the Fifth Summit of the Americas in Trinidad on April 17 he pledged an era of equal partnership and a new chapter of engagement with the region that reflected his stated preference for multi-lateralism in regional affairs.

Seven months later, the administration’s patience with multilateralism appeared to have already worn thin, amid the failure of the efforts led by the main hemispheric Organization of American States (O.A.S.) to bring about a resolution to the Honduras coup crisis.

Obama has moved to re-assert the U.S. as the ultimate arbiter in Latin America, probably out of sheer frustration, but also at the cost of principle and in doing so has provoked a fresh rift with the region.

Zelaya backtracks as congress refuses to take orders

The ousted Honduran president Manuel Zelaya claims that the de facto president Roberto Micheletti breached and voided the Tegucigalpa-San José Agreement when he moved on Nov. 5 to install a ‘unity and national reconciliation’ government with himself as its head.

Few have taken note of the fact that Zelaya had by then already declared the agreement void, and had rejected an offer from Micheletti to overcome their differences.

This has thrown the international participants in the crisis into confusion.

Environmentalists alarmed by Puerto Rico policies

­SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico – Sweeping from lush mountain rain forests to pristine beaches, a corridor of land protected by Puerto Rico’s last governor hosts dozens of rare and endangered species and was championed by celebrities who helped fight off resort proposals.

Now new Gov. Luis Fortuno has revoked the reserve as part of a drive to bring jobs and investment for the U.S. territory’s struggling economy. And activists see a broader pattern of looser protection for the island’s environment.

Fortuno’s Oct. 30 order allows large-scale development inside the 3,200-acre 1,300-hectare) parcel of land immediately north of El Yunque, the only tropical rain forest in the U.S. National Forest system.

(Latin News, AP and AQ Online contributed to this report)

by Soledad O’Brlen

I have only begun to tell our stories with “Latino in America”.

Let me start by saying I think it’s an enormous victory that a major network has enhanced its coverage of our community this year, culminating in this two-part, four-hour documentary.

I am also very proud to have co-authored with Rose Arce a book about our community, “Latino in America,” published in October by Celebra (Penguin USA).

Some of the chief goals of both projects were to initiate conversations about our community, enhance our visibility and start a conversation about relevant issues. Ali the comments thatThe NiLP Network drew make me feel as if we have been successful on all those fronts, just by having engaged you.

When I began to plan our project, I saw it as a news documentary about a vast population, people with roots in some 21 countries who had distinct histories and very different experiences. There is no way to do justice to that range of experiences, even with a number of pieces and an additional four hours of documentaries.

What my team decided was that we would call it “Latino in America” because it was not to be a documentary about history or descendency, as the term Hispanic might imply, but about what happens after we’ve arrived, about an American experience we share and an identity that is born of this country, one that brings together people with roots from all over the Latin world, people who predate the U.S. or came yesterday, people who have some shared values but don’t necessarily have similar racial or ethnic roots or even language.

IT’S ABOUT REAL PEOPLE

It is a storyabout a group of Americans and their U.S experience.

We also decided that, in the spirit of CNN, we were doing a NEWS documentary. That means that we follow real people through their human experiences wherever they may take them, their ups and d:owns and how they confront the greatest issues our community is facing, whether that be by achieving their dreams or confronting obstacles.

If they falter, we watch them falten When they succeed, we are there to record the moment.

Some of you have spoken about negative and positive images in the documentary and it is clear there is vast disagreement as to what each of those means. A lot of it reflects the socioeconomic status of the person defining the terms, their own life experience and the way they see media.

EDUCATORS HAILED US

Many educators have hailed us for telling the story of what an enormous sector of our young population is facing in overcrowded and underfunded schools that do not address their unique needs as children of families struggling with a host of economic, cultural and immigration issues.

Others would rather we had highlighted only success stories and stayed away from casting a spotlight on the struggles of our schoolchildren.

The same was true of immigration stories. So many in our community told us we could not do a story about Latinos without showing how our controversial immigration debate is tearing apart families and encouraging some folks to target the most vulnerable among us. Others wanted no immigration experiences because they considered them depressing.

At the end of the day, I am a journalist and I made every effort to report the unfolding drama of human beings in our community. I take many of your suggestions to heart and because we are not a community that fails to speak up when trouble is afoot.

I feel the same about teen dropout rates, suicide and teen pregnancy. Our community suffers disproportionately from these ills. Our rates are rising. They are higher than they are for other ethnic or racial groups and they are undercutting the lives of our young people.

I am surprised how many people have written on the NILP site and others that they wondered why we’d look at these issues in our community rather than some other community.

That tells me that Latinos, even leaders who make policy decisions, live unaware of exactly what the statistics are and I feel even more strongly that even our own community needs to be educated about what’s happening to too many of our children.

We need to challenge bad schools, shabby health education, even look at our own family dynamics. Not talking about these issues is not going to make them go away, nor is doing PR for those who have escaped them going to change the reality too many face.

The challenge, and it is one I certainly find daunting, is to discuss these issues in context. I did my level best this time. I have learned a lot and I continue to listen, have an open mind and learn more. I am continuing to tour this country many months after this project is over in hopes of getting more ideas, more input, continuing to educate myself about our community and its issues. I pledge to you that I continue my mission to illuminate the many good things about our culture and our life here.

There are many stories yetto be told, about our incredible successes, our astronauts and Congresspeople and Ivy League graduates, as well as how our schools are failing our future leaders. I have just begun to tell them. And, for every one of you who wanted more, I say thank you many times over for joining me in the fight to tell our story . . . and “stand by.”

[Soledad O’Brien is a CNN anchor and special correspondent. In addition to repointing and producing that network’s ~Latino in America,” she a/so respond for the recent CNN seri­es, “Black In America.” To view the full-length version of her commentary, go to www.hispanicilak.org. To view additional reactions to “Latino in America,” including remarks by RaUI Yzaguirre, visit The NILP Network at info@latlnopollcy.org. The Natilona/ Institute for Latino Policy (NILP) /s head quarter at 101 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10013-1933. Telephone: 1-800-590-2516].