by Magine Quintailla R.

Sweet smell of death

The Children Symphonic Orchestra of Mexico “ Cedars, ” City College of San Francisco and the Consulate General of Mexico, will present a concert greeting Cinco de Mayo, date in which the Battle of Puebla is commemorated, where Mexican troops defeated the French army.

The students who will offer this concert will receive music classes from endowed Mexican artísts.

The program initiates with the presentation of diverse dnce groups, later the presentation of the CEdar Symphonic Orquestra, and concludes with mariachi music.

This event will take place on Saturday, May 3rd, from 5:00 p.m at the community Health and Wellness Center gymnasium located at the Ocean Ave. Campus, 50 Phelan. Admission is free.

Festival of poetry

Several organizations from the civil society organize a festival of poetry greeting the beginning of international working class vacations.

In this activity will participaate outstanding national and international poets of the importance of Alejandro Murguía, Margarita Zamora, Jose Montoya, Nina Serrano, Leticia Hernández, Roberto Vargas, Adrián Arias, Mamcoatl, and many more.

El evento se realizará el miércoles 30 de abril, de 6:00 a 7:00 p.m. en el Centro Cultural de la Misión para las Artes Latinas, ubicado en el 2868 Mission St. Para mayor información visite el sitio www.missionculturalcenter.org.

Presentation of a Sweet Smell of Death

Guillermo Arriaga writer and professional narrator will present one of his last creations Sweet smell of death novel.

This is a fascinating novel in which passion and pride dictate each of the decisions of the personages, in this text revenge turns into destination and truth appears in its most ambiguous and devastating facet.

Guillermo Arriaga

This event will take place on Wednesday April 30, on the third fl oor at the San Francisco Main Library, 100 Street Larkin, from 6:00  to 7:30 p.m. For more information call (415) 557-4430.

Meeting of young artists of the Latin world

La Peña Cultural Center will present two of the youngest and influential composers of Mexico and Puerto Rico, Mauricio Díaz, The Bone of Mexico, and Fernandito Ferrer, of Puerto Rico.

Ambos estarán por primera vez juntos en el Área de Bahía, Díaz crea diálogos simpáticos con el rítmo de su guitarra y Ferrer se ha destacado como un pionero joven en el mundo de los compositores.

Meeting of young artists of the Latin world

La Peña Cultural Center will present two of the youngest and most influential composers of Mexico and Puerto Rico, Mauricio Díaz, The Bone of Mexico, and Fernandito Ferrer, of Puerto Rico.

Both will be for the first time together in the Bay Area, Díaz creates nice dialogues with the rítmo of his guitar, and Ferrer has stood out as a young pioneer in the world of composers.

The concert will be presented on May 1 and 8, in La Peña Cultural Center, located at 3105 Shattuck avenue, Berkeley. From 8:00 p.m. Admission 10 $. For more information call 510-849-2568 or visit: www.lapena.org.

Grand March on May 1

United Workers Without Borders invites you not to be absent at the grand march of May 1st to ask for amnesty for all undocumented workers and to declare that “ We Are hard-working people, not criminals. ”

The meeting will start at 2 p.m. at Dolores Park Pain (Dolores and 18th Sts., to then go out towards the Civic Center in front of SF City Hall, where there will be a big meeting at 5 p.m. For more information call 933-2319, e-mail: sfamnistia@gmail.com.

Another march against immigration raids

Several pro-human rights organizations are organizing a big march against immigrants’ raids taking place in the United States.

This march, which it will take as a motto “ no to the war, no to the wall, no to the raids, “ will take place on May 1, initiating from 3:00 to 4:00 p.m. with the presentation of cultural acts in the Oalkland Fruitvale Bart Plaza. It will take off from 4:00 to 6:00 p.m. on International Blvd., concluding with a cultural act from 6:00 to 7:30 p.m. at the Oakland City Hall, 1 Frank Ogawa.

by Anthony M. Stevens-Arroyo

The world’s best-dressed Mexican-hater is at it again. Lou Dobbs on his Monday, April 8, 2008 evening show attacked historical truth once again in his never-ending effort to build up his ratings.

His latest concern is about an advertisement for Absolut Vodka that uses a 1830s map of Texas and northwest Mexico before annexations by the United States. Of course, the map is factual. Those lands were part of Mexico. But truth threatens Mr. Dobbs’ small world. He believes this is an outrageous assault on the United States history because it suggests that the United States invaded, occupied and took land that did not belong to it.

The problem is that Dobbs sticks to the politically correct version of events that is taught to children in U.S. grammar schools. He appears either unwilling or unable to run a truth check for adults.

Anybody who is somebody knows that President James K. Polk “manufactured” an attack on U.S. troops to justify war against Mexico. In 1845, the president appealed to Manifest Destiny as justification for invasion, murder and robbery against Mexico and Mexicans.

While history has tried to whitewash the racism behind the rape of Texas and the lands leading to California and the Pacific, contemporaries of the time like Abraham Lincoln saw the unjustified war for what it was.

It is too late to undo the injustice by surrendering the Southwest to Mexico, but it is never too late to learn from the past. Polk’s purposefully faulty intelligence and Bush’s intended overstatements about WMD in Iraq have a lot in common.

As Santayana wrote: Those who fail to learn from the past are doomed to repeat it. Clearly Mr. Dobbs is heading for the trash heap of history.

The most striking misstatement of Dobbs and his minions is that the United States “paid” Mexico for the land from New Mexico to California. Actually, the United States had tried bluster with the mission of a plenipotentiary minister, John Slidell, in order to bribe a weak Mexican government into selling those lands before the war by threatening to take it by force otherwise.

It was a tactic that had been used by James Monroe against Spain to acquire Florida in 1821. When the Mexicans refused to sell out, war was waged, Mexico City invaded and the rump Mexican Congress forced to sign a treaty that they had no legitimate power to accept. (The same thing happened later to snatch Panama from Colombia and then build a canal).

The U.S. war party in Washington took vengeful caprice against Mexico because the country of Moctezuma had shown the audacity to refuse to sell itself out when Slidell was on his mission. Therefore, the Congress refused to authorize the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo unless the commitment of $15 million to Mexico was expressly worded so as NOT to buy the territories. That section of the treaty says that the money was “for losses incurred.” This is an expression that Mexicans took to refer to the deaths of so many of its people, since Mexican culture has traditionally valued human life more than property. So the United States did not pay for the land. It took it by force. The offi cial treaty documents prove this fact. Of course, the truth about the United States or any facts that justify Mexican rights are alien to Mr. Dobbs. The truth does not fit into his pre-fabricated categories of U.S. superiority and Mexican inferiority.

There was a time, I suspect, that Latinos and Latinas would become disturbed by the repeated errors, misstatements and race-baiting emanating from the ever-sartorial Lou. Increasingly, we recognize that it is only entertainment for the increasingly irrelevant circle of uncritical Dobbsian ditto-heads.

Studies at Brooklyn College. Author and scholar, he serves as member of the Pennsylvania(Anthony M. StevensArroyo is Professor Emeritus of Puerto Rican & Latino State Advisory Committee to the US Commission of Civil Rights in Washington. Email: stevensa@pld.com).

by José de la Isla

José de la Isla

Wilhelm Scholz, a photographer, and I meet up with Wilkin Sherris, who is selling folk paintings along the seawall on George Washington Avenue in the Dominican Republic capital of Santo Domingo. Sherris tells us his parents came from Haiti, that he has relatives scattered throughout the Caribbean and others in Miami.

Scholz and I were on an assignment that spread over two years to learn firsthand about how people are migrating across North America. As it turns out, we witnessed only the tip of the iceberg.

From a worker, we learned about the yolas, the flimsy rafts taken by people to cross the Mona Passage to Puerto Rico. Like Cuban balseros, these rafters want to get to the other side, where things are mythically better.

Ahh, going to a U.S. territory is ethnocentrically satisfying knowledge. It is comforting to think that where we live is so desirable everyone else wants to be here, although we also learn many Dominicans also leave their homeland for Venezuela and Spain and Italy.

Now data tell us we should consider leaving our national egos at the hat-check stand.

There’s a bigger picture out there. It’s not all about us. Canada and Mexico have decided to work out a new six-to-ten-month guest-worker program. Its enticements range beyond agriculture to include tourism, construction and financial services, building on the current program which includes about 18,000 farm-related workers. All this is happening while we can’t get our own guest-worker program underway.

Mexican workers are a new high-demand group in, of all places, Dubai. This month Emirate Airlines plans to begin interviewing in Mexico. Already, about 23 Mexicans work as pilots there and the airline seeks others for cargo jobs. Dubai expects tourism to increase from 40 million now to 75 million by 2015.

An airline official told Newspaper Tree, an online ­source, Mexicans are nice, friendly, work well in a team and speak English well. The lesson here is that if you raise your kids ethnocentric, you jeopardize their employment future. And if they have an attitude – well, you know the rest.

The same source reports that more than 16,000 Uruguayans left home in 2007, mostly for European destinations.

In the past decade, migration to Chile tripled to 290,000. The pattern changed from mostly Argentineans to Bolivians and Peruvians. Peruvian restaurants are all the rage in Chile. Other immigrant populations include Colombians, Ecuadorians, Cubans and Mexicans.

Costa Rica, having posted growth in high tech and tourism, is another magnet. Nicaraguans are contracted for transportation jobs. Brazil seeks professional workers for entertainment and in petroleum. Bolivians seem to be forming a new urban working class there. Work permits in Brazil are up 46 percent over 2004.

Too often in the United States our microscopes onto the world about these movements come through fuzzy, like an old analog TV set, instead of the Hi-Def we need.

Now is not a bad time for our presidential candidates to face the challenges of a hemisphere in motion by proposing realistic — and humane — solutions to receiving and sending workers. A continent-wide meeting to reach accords about migration would help.

Maybe we have had it all wrong all along. It’s not that we can become isolated and insulated. We are already. The issue is how can we become more open and accommodating of the world movement around us? And which candidate will take his or her head out of the sand?

For Wilhelm and me, a factoid now makes sense. It didn’t register then, but it does now — how the phone book in Anchorage, a town of 275,000, lists 30 Mexican and Latin American restaurants. It’s a signpost of a new geography.

[José de la Isla, author of “The Rise of Hispanic Political Power” (Archer Books, 2003), writes a weekly commentary for Hispanic Link News Service. E-mail joseisla3@yahoo.com]. ©2008

by Marvin J. Ramirez

Marvin J. Ramirez

Just recently, a friend of mine’s 19-year-old son was released from jail from charges of beating a man with his bodies. He spent approximately seven months in the joint. He came out clean, however, prior to getting arrested he was attending City College of San Francisco. Obviously, he lost the whole school semester. It seemed that it was more important to punish him that making sure that he continued in school.

I wrote a strong letter to San Francisco District Attorney Kamala Harris expressing my concern that jail would not serve any purpose in directing this young man through a path of positive future and should let him finish his school semester.

The District Attorney’s Office insisted that he was a ‘gang member,’ but apparently they were wrong. So they let him free, according to his mother.

Many youths like this young man are thrown into jails by the thousands every years, as part of money-making scheme by the prison industry, the sole purpose of its goal.

Punishment is the best recipe this industry that is growing faster that our learning institutions, while teachers are being layoff, school budget cut to the bone, and basically every year have the whole education industry beg on its knees for money.

Young people continue being warehoused like animals with the sole purpose of punishing them for their criminal behavior, which at the end is the same citizenry that they purpose to protect who is the last victimized by this blinded system of punishment.

In a released written statement, Books Not Bars says mismanaged, expensive, and dangerous youth prisons must go Books Not Bars (an Ella Baker Center for Human Rights campaign) and families of incarcerated youth throughout California call on the state to abandon the warehouse prisons’ chronic failures and build the state’s continuum of effective local and regional treatment programs for youth.

The Division of Juvenile Justice (DJJ), which is budgeted $518 million for 2008-09, has missed successive court-imposed reform deadlines since the 2004 lawsuit settlement. It has wasted $100 million on unmet reform goals. With a population of 2,072 youth — each costing the state $252,000 per year — the California Youth Prison System has become California’s budgetary black hole.

According to the statement, which was released on April 17, despite the money, conditions in DJJ prisons have remained deplorable and shameful for incarcerated youth: Education fails to meet state minimum levels, both mental health and medical care are inadequate and often delayed, and violence in facilities remains dangerously high. The miserable conditions have rendered rehabilitation impossible for youth in the prisons.

The DJJ has proven to be incapable of reform and has failed thousands of our youth in the meantime.

How do we expect youth to come out rehabilitated from this broken system?” asks Zachary Norris, Director of Books Not Bars. “Real change can only happen when we shut down the failing warehouse prisons. Only then can California shift to a local and regional rehabilitative system of care that allows youth to return to society with a chance to make it.”

In its recent budget cuts, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s only options to balance the state’s budget deficit has been targeting education, health and the most vulnerable sectors of our communities.

Unless everyone stand up and start demanding changes in the Constitution, where education receives a bigger share of the budget and never lose funding, we will continue losing funding to educate our future generations and our prisons industry growing.