por Margine Quintanilla

Orquesta Guayacán

Thousands of San Francisco students seek help every year with Wellness Programs in SFUSD’s high schools.

These programs provide students with coordinated physical and behavioral health services that include support groups, health education, one-on-one counseling, and other services to promote personal resilience.

A new program called Safe Passages now provides mental health services at five middle schools and two county Community high schools. The upcoming “Mental Health Awareness Day” will announce details of Safe Passages and highlight how school-based mental health services promote positive youth development.

On Thursday, May 8m from 9:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m, at Phillip and Sala Burton High, 400 Mansell St. (near Goettingen).

Friends will hold homage for Manny Larez

The friends and partner of whom in life was Manny Larez, invite you to a meeting that will take place in commemoration of his live.

This gathering will be on Sunday, the May 4 from 2:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m. at Casa Sánchez Restaurant, 2778-24th St. San Francisco.

Milagro

Milagro and her band will be visiting Oakland

After an artistic tour in Europe and Japan, Milagro and her band will cross the ocean to offer a concert, to celebrate Cinco de Mayo. The event will be this Sunday, May 4, in the Fruitvale in Oakland, from 12:00 noon. For major information visit: http://.www.milagromusic.com.

Group Guayacán will highligh the celebration of Mother’s Day

Club Roccapulco, will celebrate in big Mother’s Day, ” with a great dancing concert that will shake to the whole Bay Area, playing ” Band Guayacan “.

This holiday will be the greatest party to take place on Saturday, on May 10, from 9:00 p.m. at Club Roccapulco, located at 3140 Mission Street, SF. For major information call to the phones (415) 643-6464 and 806-2932, or visit www.roccapulco.com.

Palestinian festival of Hip Hop

The Community Palestine, it will celebrate his grandest Festival of Palestinian Hip Hop, in commemoration to 60 anniversary of the loss of his homeland.

This event will be realized on May 10, of 12:00 to 6:00 p.m. in the Square of the Civic Center, one does not lose it, renowned national and international artists will take part.

­by Tim Chávez

There are many Hispanic journalists who have earned notice and accolades for their work — not only for speaking with great personal insight on Latino experiences but in expressing the feelings of working men and women of all colors and ethnicities.

There are dozens of them, literally, with national and international awards, Pulitzer Prizes, and recognitions equal to those of other in the profession.

Yet rarely ever do U.S. television viewers get to see or hear them as pundits on the plethora of news and political analysis shows that flood our English-language information channels every Sunday. They aren’t there to broaden the awareness of what issues are important and what solutions are available to a nation that is home to a growing, increasingly visible and diverse Hispanic population, now at 15 percent nationally.

It’s as if there is a ban on brown, that Hispanics — who now outnumber blacks —aren’t significant or respected enough to be represented on roundtables such as This Week with George Stephanopoulos.

When immigration, education, foreign policy or other subjects such as presidential campaigns and administration of justice are discussed on such programs, Sunday’s chosen white and black talking heads chime in to state — too often misstate how “Hispanics” are affected or how they are reacting on major issues.

Totally ignoring our racial, economic and social diversity, they pack the 48 million of us into a simplistic sentence of analysis.

“Hispanics like Hillary, Hispanics are undereducated… Hispanics are immigrants…Hispanics are humble, happy people. They work hard and smile a lot.“

When you contact a program or network to ask for an explanation, you are reminded that to their executives, Hispanics with essential expertise either don’t matter or can’t be found. So where are these Latinos who invest in the stock market, buy homes and, as shown in the California, Nevada and Texas Democratic presidential primaries, vote in large enough numbers to turn a presidential race don’t matter. It leaves me wondering where all of the Hispanic journalists go on Sundays.

To play soccer? To church? To the little store on the corner for a pot of menudo to cure their cruda from the night before?

Along with my wife, I’m a faithful viewer of This Week. But it has always been troublesome to see no one who looks like me on the infl uential roundtable segment of experts and media members. So I called This Week’s offi ces a few times in the past two weeks: “Mr. Stephanopoulos is not available today.” I’m switched to the office of ABC News spokesperson Andrea Jones. She’s busy.

But I am provided an e-mail address to contact her. I send an e-mail and include the questions I wanted to ask, all concerning the lack of Hispanic presence on its roundtable. “What are the criteria for picking people to appear on the roundtable, and has the show tried to fi nd Hispanic experts and journalists before and been turned down.”

Jones e-mails back and says she is going to be gone but asks if my column deadline could wait until the following Wednesday for comment. I tell her “yes” and that I appreciate the chance to have a dialogue on this wrong.

That was on March 8. And despite another e-mail and phone call to her, that’s the last I heard from Ms. Jones.

This Week is far from the only offender, ironically amidst a presidential race that’s supposed to be about change. Nor is the absence of Hispanics just on Sunday morning news shows. In subbing for Larry King one day this month, CNN’s Wolf Blitzer chose to examine Sen. Barrack Obama’s speech on race for the show’s whole hour.

He featured only black and white experts. Yet for this decade, Hispanics have been the most stigmatized group of people due to the xenophobic immigration debate. Our racial and ethnic experiences are between those of whites and blacks, and there is a brown-black divide when it comes to politics and power.

I give Blitzer and CNN credit for having at least one Latina on their political analysts team. Yet Leslie Sánchez is a Republican strategist. Most Hispanics favor the Democratic Party. You need a Latino or Latina journalist, Wolf. And there are dozens of them with knowledge of politics inside and outside the Beltway.

They know what people are thinking outside as well as inside of Washington, D.C. New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson’s endorsement of Obama provides an obvious opportunity for Hispanic representation on these shows. The nation’s only Latino governor is supposed to help turn the Hispanic electorate from Sen. Hillary Clinton and Sen. John McCain.

Can he? Let’s call on some Latino voices of distinction for their perspective. Let me hear from someone who at least looks like me in a discussion about race, the presidential race, the war in Iraq, the economy and immigration. Is that too much to ask?

(Tim Chávez, a political columnist for 10 years with The Tennessean in Nashville, is a contributing columnist with Hispanic Link News Service. Contact him at timchavez787@yahoo.com.  To contact ABC, e-mail Andrea.Jones@abcnews.com  or call (212) 456-7777). ©2008

by Anthony M. Stevens-Arroyo

Pope Benedict XVI

Pope Benedict XVI arrived in the United States under the theme of “Christ Our Hope.” His overall message is cast as hope for peace, for justice and freedom. No doubt all of this will be amply covered by the mainstream media. What will probably escape mention is the importance of Latinos and Latinas to the Roman Pontiff.

In the video provided on-line by the visit’s coordinators, the pope dedicates an entire portion of his message to Latinos and Latinas – and he makes his greeting in fluent Spanish (www.uspapalvisit.org/stories/vmessage.htm ).

In other words, the pope “gets it.” The future of the Catholic Church in the United States depends on how effectively Catholicism identifies with its growing majority membership – which is Latino.

For more than 20 years, this message has been delivered by a host of Catholic activists. Initially, our declaration was greeted with skepticism by the non-Hispanic leadership of bishops and priests. Later, we had to fight with confusing numbers and statistics as to whether all Latinos and Latinas were “really” Catholic; whether we received “too much attention” that divided the Church. We had to fight the canard that as unfaithful and disloyal Catholics we were leaving the Church in droves to become Pentecostals.

Theologians like Virgilio Elizondo of San Antonio and Alan Figueroa Deck of Los Angeles emphasized the role of popular religion in making us Latinos and Latinas among the most devout of all U.S. Catholics. Sociologists like Ana María Díaz-Stevens showed how demographic growth patterns were more relevant to pastoral planning than anecdotal reports from parish priests. And the PARAL Study proved that Pentecostals had not increased their percentage of Latino and Latina believers over the past ten years. In fact, our research showed that the percentage of Protestants had actually dropped from the 1990s.

These are just some of the reasons that alone among the many languages spoken by Catholics in the United States, the Roman Pontiff gave special attention to Spanish. He clearly identifies us with his message of hope for the future. In fact, without Latinos and Latinas, the future of Catholicism in the United States would be bleak.

The task will be to put people with last names like Díaz, Rodríguez and Sánchez in leadership positions.

In very many parishes, this is already the case. Gradually the tide has been rising to higher and higher ranks within Catholicism. But by speaking in Spanish, the pontiff symbolically requested that we be not assimilated and thus lose our identity, but rather that we preserve and continue our transformation of American Catholicism. Hispanic Link.

(Anthony M. Stevens-Arroyo is Professor Emeritus of Puerto Rican & Latino Studies at Brooklyn College. Author and scholar, he serves as member of the Pennsylvania Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. Email him at stevensa@pld.com.) ©2008

por Marvin J. Ramirez

photo by Marvin J. Ramirez

El Cinco de Mayo ya está aquí, y la fiesta va a empezar.

Creo que lo que empezó a ser una celebración mexicana y un día de orgullo para los mexicanos de Estados Unidos (chicanos), ya no es una fiesta sólo para los mexicanos, sino un enorme banquete multicultural latino.

Los tacos y los burritos ya no son los únicos aperitivos ofrecidos en esta fiesta, en lugar de eso, ahora podemos encontrar comida de diferentes países latinoamericanos, incluso de países de Asia y hasta de África.

Y aunque el Cinco de Mayo tiene su raíz en la ocupación francesa de México, el cual se llevó a cabo a raíz de la Guerra México-Americana de 1846-48. Este evento se ha convertido en Estados Unidos en más que el símbolo de la batalla por la identidad de los chicanos.

Ahora forma parte del panorama cultural de los latinos, del mismo modo que el Día de San Patricio forma parte de la tradición cultural de casi todos los estadounidenses.

En el contexto histórico, Cinco de Mayo hace que los latinos se sientan como una gran familia, con afi nidades culturales, sociales, filosóficas y políticas comunes entre todos.

Cinco de Mayo también representa la determinación de los latincamericanos, quienes durante siglos han sido víctimas de abusos y han sido arrojados de su cultura y recursos naturales por el superpoder imperialista.

Cinco de Mayo marca la victoria del ejército mexicano contra el bien armado ejército francés en la Batalla de Puebla, en la cual 5,000 indios mestizos y zapotecos mal equipados derrotaron al ejército francés en la ciudad de Puebla, en México, ganando así la “Batalla de Puebla” el primero de mayo de 1862.

Aunque este acontecimiento no se celebre a gran escala en México, aquí en Estados Unidos es una celebración muy signifi cativa, que involucra desde pequeños vendedores tratando de capitalizar unos cuantos dó1ares más, a negocios grandes y corporaciones que quieren atraer al mercado hispano, Aquí, desde la redacción de EI Reportero enviamos un cálido saludo a la más grande y más infl uyente comunidad, los mexicanos.

¡Viva el Cinco de Mayo!