by Rigo Hernández

Yolanda López’ exhibition at Mission Cultural Center thru March 29

The San Francisco Immigration Legal and Education Network will be doing a free workshop on what to do in case that the Immigration Customs Enforcement (I.C.E) raid your home and help make a plan in case someone in your family is detained by I.C.E.

Immigration attorneys will be there to answer questions and give private consultations. The workshop will act possible scenarios as well as give information on what to do in case of animmigration emergency. There will be spanish, tag along and arabic translators and a free diner will also be provided.

The workshop will be on Thursday, March 6, at 5:30p.m. at the Judith Baker Childcare Center, at 685 Natoma St.,San Francisco, CA 94103. For more information contact Terry Valen at (415)-333-6267.

Colombian film to show paramilitary violence

The Bay Area Colombia Working Group and Fellowship of Reconciliation plans to educate people in the United States about violence in Colombia and the involvement of the U.S. in the confl ict by showing a film about paramilitary violence, Hasta la Ultima Piedra.

Hasta La Ultima Piedra a documentary fi lm, depicts the massacre of a village in San José de Apartadó that chose not to side with any group and remain peaceful.

The showing of the fi lm will be on Thursday, March 6, at 7:00 p.m. at the Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts at 2868 Mission St. San Francisco, Ca 94110. For more info go to www.missionculturalcenter.org or www.forcolombia.org, or by email at mariacarolinaguerrero@gmail.com or events@missionculturalcenter.org.

Nicaraguan-American Chamber of Commerce celebrates Women’s Day

The Nicaraguan-American Chamber of Commerce of Northern California is inviting you to celebrate with them their annual gala commemorating International Women’s Day.

Outstanding women in business and renounced bay area community leaders will be awarded. Special guest appearances will include the international show of Martha Vaughan, singersongwriter Sergio Tapia, maestro Héctor Silva, and other artist.

The event will be on Friday March 7, starting at 7:00 p.m. at the State Room, 306 Baden Ave. So. San Francisco, CA 94080. Formal dress required. Tickets are $20. Call (415)-259-1498, (510)-329-5778, or (415)-678-7372 for more info.

Salvadorian artist showcases art

Salvadorian artist Victor Cartagena will host a solo art exhibition titled The Invisible Nation/ La Nacíon Invisible.

The exhibition will include sculptural works, video and sound installations, as well as a public digital mural, which will be displayed at Galeria’s Bryant Street billboard. There will also be an artist talk with Cartagena and Roberto Varea, Director of El Teatro Jornalero and Chair of the Performing Arts Program and Social Justice Center at University of San Francisco.

The artist talk will be on April 26 at 2:00 p.m. at the Galeria De La Raza at 2857 24th St, San Francisco. Also at the Galeria, the opening reception will be on March 7, at 7:30 p.m. Galeria hours will be from Tue.-Thur. Noon-6.00 p.m.

International film festival will show over 220 films

Over 220 films from more than 90 countries will be screened in the 7th edition of the International Tiburon Film Festival in Tiburon, CA from March 13-21.

There will be special tributes to directors, John Wayne (The Searchers), Blake Edwards (The Pink Panther Strikes Again), Bob Rafelson (Five Easy Places). The opening film will be a comedy called Twins for President directed by Spanish director Miguel Angel Calvo Buttini.

For ticket information and schedules call (415)-789-8854 or visit info@tiburonfilmgestival.com.

by José de la Isla

HOUSTON– So tell me again, what’s wrong with this?

The national economy has grown 54 percent since 1993. More than 25 million jobs have been created. Average unemployment dropped from 7.1 percent in 1994 to 5.1 percent in 2007. And U.S. manufacturing averaged nearly 4 percent gains during that period, almost double the previous 14 years.

To hear Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton tell it, this wasn’t good enough and it’s time to consider a “time out” or “renegotiation” over NAFTA, the trade agreement with Canada and Mexico, and other trade deals.

They were countered by a chorus of voices. One of those that rang loud came from Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutiérrez, who wrote this zinger in the Washington Post: “Taking a ‘timeout’ on trade is akin to standing at a moment when the rest of the world is moving forward.” And he added, “Suffocating our economy isn’t a viable strategy for prosperity. Pretending we’re not part of North America isn’t a prescription for growth.”

Therein lies the trade dividing line not just between parties but the ideologies going into the selection of the next president.

You can almost hear Obama and Clinton lip-syncing Britney Spears saying, “Oops! I did it again.”

Appealing to isolationism seems to be rhetorically just too tempting to withdraw from it entirely. Playing to the crowd is enticing when the audience doesn’t feel it has benefi ted as have others.

In fairness it’s hard to tell people in some parts of the country–the ones on the down side of global trade,” It’s really not all that bad overall.” Ohio has lost about 231,000 jobs in the last ten years.

But wasn’t change-wecan-believe-in Obama’s campaign theme? Change to what? How will the country redevelop by threatening, for starters, commerce with our first and third largest trade partners? What purpose does that serve if the jobs are already gone? Someone is not leveling with us on this one and that’s the problem.

Scape-goating Canada and Mexico might feel good for a while, but that’s not going to bring lost jobs back. ­A year ago, Hillary Clinton told Time magazine she believed in the “general principles of NAFTA.” She narrowed the problems down to enforcement, noting, “I believe we need tougher enforcement of the trade agreements we already have.” She claimed the Clinton administration had brought more trade enforcement actions in one year than Bush had in six.

Enforcement is a reasonable claim. But a timeout, as she asserted later, is a different matter. Obama’s assertion to renegotiate NAFTA opens up the proverbial can of worms that many experts already shake their head over.

In the fi rst ten months of 2007, trade between the three North American countries was $742.86 billion. Bilateral trade with Mexico was $290.38 billion, resulting in a $6.7 billion surplus in Mexico’s favor. NAFTA has produced a large and growing trade deficit with Mexico. The effects on Ohio and other industrial states have been overwhelmingly negative. In 1993, the year before NAFTA started, the U.S. had a positive $2.4 billion trade balance from Ohio’s cars, trucks, and auto parts manufacturing. By 2007, it had turned into a trade defi cit of $12 billion. The Economist magazine generalizing about NAFTA correctly says, “Trade hurts some people but helps many more.”

The art of the deal isn’t with threats to cut and run where it doesn’t work well but to figure out how to spread the pain and benefi ts and turn it into a winning hand. Telling workers they need to take night school courses for a new career can be helpful but looks like a Band-aid for a heart attack.

Secretary Gutiérrez’s boast about trade is no comfort for those on the short end of those proud trade numbers. But instead of a retreat from trade, this might be a good time to steal some of the Republican’s thunder. The discussion should turn next to accelerating the development of new technologies and how we will transition into a wellpaid, sustainable, green post-industrial, education and training-centered economy. The emphasis is no longer if but how.

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

by Felipe de Ortego y Gasca

In the current flap over building a wall between Mexico and the United States, it would be well to keep in mind Robert Frost’s injunction “something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” That “something” is that a wall is a barrier.

In the case of a “wall” between the United States and Mexico, a wall is a manifestation of conflict, just as the Berlin Wall was a manifestation of conflict. A wall between the United States and Mexico will only escalate the enmity between the two countries.

Ronald Reagan’s plea to Gorbachev to “tear down this wall” referring to the Berlin Wall is not what brought down the wall. it was Mikhail Gorbachev’s response that brought down the wall. Instead of escalating the cycle of conflict, the Soviet leader chose to ignore the rhetoric of conflict and for whatever reasons took the first step in repairing U.S.-Soviet relations.

When asked about the U.S.-Mexico wall in a 2006 visit to the United States, Mikhail Gorbachev responded that the United States seemed to be building the Great Wall of China between itself and Mexico.

In the current rhetoric about controlling the nation’s borders, the question looms large: Why on the one hand did the U.S. want the Berlin Wall torn down and on the other hand does it want to build a wall between the U.S. and Mexico?

Between the 8th and 5th centuries BC, the northern states of China built a wall along their northern border to stave off Mongol penetration. In places, the 4,000-mile-long wall was 25 feet high and 30 feet wide.

In 122 AD the Roman emperor Hadrian built a wall across Britain to keep Romans safe from the hostile Picts. The wall stretched from the North Sea to the Irish Sea, 80 Roman miles long, 10 feet wide and 15 feet high.

In like fashion, in the 20th century the French built the “Maginot Line” as a walled fortifi cation against German incursions. With the use of aeroplanes, the Germans simply fl ew over the Maginot Line. General George Patton called the Maginot Line a monument ­to man’s stupidity.

Even the Berlin Wall was not impenetrable. A U.S. wall on its border with Mexico has as its objectives to keep out extra-territorial infl uences (the uninvited, the unwelcome and the unwanted) that are deemed anathema to the apodictic values of the United States.

Why not a wall between he United States and Canada? Or a wall along the Florida coast to keep out Cubans? The inference is that Canadians and fl eeing Cubans are good neighbors; Mexicans are not. A wall between the United States and Mexico is intended to keep Mongol hordes of Mexicans at bay.

Will a wall help the United States in controlling its border with Mexico? What is that lesson here? That walls are no substitute for diplomacy.

According to the International Boundary and Water Commission, the U.S.-Mexico border, 1,951 miles long, from San Diego to Brownsville, is the most frequently crossed international border in the world, with some 350 legal crossings every year.

In a washingtonpost.com article last summer, Luis Alberto Urrea quoted the Mexican consul in Tucson calling the U.S.-Mexico wall “the politics of stupidity.”

Yes, there are many Mexicans coming north into the United States. Struggling to shake off its repressive colonial past, Mexico is like most developing nations charting a course for its people across rocks and shoals diffi cult to navigate. Democracy is a process, not a product. That’s why we can’t just hand off “democracy” to the Iraqis and say, “Make it work.” Democracy takes time. After 231 years, in the United States we are still struggling with the democratic process.

Every year hundreds of thousands of U.S. citizens leave the United States to live elsewhere. It’s sometimes hard to defi ne the nature and patterns of human migration. Hispanic Link News Service.

(Dr. Felipe Ortego y Gasca is Emeritus Professor of English, Texas State University SystemSul Ross. Email him at ortegop@wnmu.edu. This commentary is adapted from a lengthier, soonto-be-published essay the author has prepared for a university publication. Readers may find it at www.hispaniclink.org). (c)2008

by marvin J Ramirez

Marvin J. Ramirez

While the U.S. presidential primaries continue in heated contests in several states, a group of Republican senators introduced a package of bills on immigration that represents harsher immigration regulations ‘but not the comprehensive approach that is needed to fix the broken system.’

One of the original negotiators during last year’s attempt to pass a comprehensive immigration reform, Sen. Robert Menéndez (D-NJ), challenged on March 5, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), the presumptive Republican presidential nominee who in the past has worked on comprehensive immigration reform, to reject this Republican approach.

In a written statement, Menéndez called on McCain to reject the content of the package.

Said the statement: “I am calling on Sen. McCain, as his party’s presumptive nominee, to reject this draconian approach to immigration reform, which would demonize the Latino community. As a past sponsor of comprehensive immigration reform who has since said he would have voted against his own bill, it is important for Sen. McCain to define his position on this cynical Republican effort. The mainstream of America knows full well that the immigration system is broken, but they also recognize that an unbalanced, narrow approach won’t fix it. We need a system that is tough but smart and civil and actually works for our economy – a system that protects the borders while protecting our legacy as a nation of immigrants. Many of the 44 million Latinos in this country will be eager to hear where Sen. McCain stands.”

Continues the statement:

difference. This is the type“The Republican Party might think this is a wedge issue for November, but their strategy only dims their chances this year and for generations to come. Latinos are not a group on the fringes of our society that can be manipulated to score political points. If this presidential primary season has shown us anything, it is that Latinos are no longer the sleeping giant in American politics – they are fully awake, active and making a ­of cynical effort that serves to deepen the divisions in our nation that we should be working to bridge.”

Sen. Menéndez’ words, however, are only part of the problems that exist in our nation. However, as a recession is starting to hit us all, no border wall, no employer sanctions, no lowering interest rates on home mortgages will cure the ills that are affecting the country. Abolishing the private corporation called Federal Reserve Bank, and reinstituting our government the right to re-start printing our money, backed by gold, will end all infl ation and will give back the dignity to every North American. The end of the problem.