Progressive Media Advocates
These articles provide a glimpse into the lives of Latinos and Latinas in the United States. This should not be used to represent the "Latino experience". It is simply a collection of articles, written from a specific perspective. Most of the authors listed below are either Latinos, Latinas or are those who have delved deeply into the Latino experience through advanced studies.
Brent Budowsky: Texas Republicans are using a special session of the Texas legislature to launch an aggressive attack against voting rights that will backfire and ignite a wave of Hispanic voter turnout that will propel Democrats in Texas and nationally.
Victoria Defrancesco Soto: The correlation between the GOP’s Latino communications and outreach strategy is linear. The harsher and more racially negative the messaging, the fewer Latinos will stand by your label and vote for you. It’s not a complicated concept.
Blanca Guillen-Woods: For women, supporting or reuniting with family is the primary factor; a majority of undocumented Latinas said they came to the U.S. either to build a better life for their family, or to reunite with loved ones.
Rodolfo F. Acuña: Our communities are still under siege. A war is raging in Arizona. The prison industry is still agitating, and the Tea Partiers and the Minutemen types are still terrorizing Mexicans.
Rudy Acuña: We are taking a bath on immigration: it looks as if a guest worker program will be part of the grand bargain, and it is likely that there will be a long, slippery and tenuous pathway to citizenship.
Rudy Acuña: Pundit after pundit predicts that the entrance of large numbers gay and Latino voters will end the culture wars that divide the country. There is only one problem — progressives forget that the “Young Grow Old.”
Mario Solis-Marich: Over 80,000 ballots are still uncounted in Maricopa County, Arizona — the county that could reelect anti- Latino Sheriff Joe Arpaio
Charley James: From Arizona through the Confederacy, laws written by ALEC and passed by many legislatures make daily living extraordinarily difficult for Latino citizens.
Anthony Samad: Hindsight is 20/20, but it’s time to admit it — the Black Community picked wrong in 2005. It intends to pick right in 2013.
Unai Montes-Irueste: In this election, Democrats and Republicans alike care deeply about the answers to these two questions: Are you a woman? Are you Latino?
Michele Waslin: Passage of the TRUST Act would be an important step toward mitigating the harmful impact of the Secure Communities Program (S-Comm). Immigrant advocates from across the country are calling on Gov. Brown to sign the bill into law.
Pilar Marrero: Mitt Romney continues to overwhelmingly lose the Latino vote and has low levels of favorability among the majority of the Latino electorate.
Bruce Reilly: The NYPD is stopping more Black and Latino people than actually live in the city, harassing nearly 700,000 people last year alone.Statistics show that the more you Stop and Frisk, the less crime goes down.
Victoria Defrancesco Soto: Romney has yet to launch a Spanish language version of his website and has only released two Spanish language TV ads. Moreover, while these ads are in Spanish they are not unique, meaning they are simply translations of English language ads.
Rudy Acuña: Today the rights of Mexican Americans and immigrants are being blatantly violated by state and local officials in Arizona. Where are the voices of middle-class Latinos? Where is the fight back?
Randy Shaw: Barack Obama’s campaign has lots of money, but there is no way it could match Romney’s success at getting this base to align with the President.
Sharon Kyle: While most Americans are cognizant of the disproportionate representation of Black and Brown men in our prisons, fewer are aware of criminal justice system’s selective enforcement of laws and selective use of penalties which often results in racially biased outcomes.
Victoria Defrancesco Soto: The 2010 mid-term election demonstrated that immigration issues could be a potent political force within the GOP. Candidates across the country, and in particular in the South came into office by espousing harsh anti-immigration policies.
Victoria DeFrancesco Soto: Their rejection of Romney is so strong that Somos Republicans have instructed their membership to write in Ronald Reagan for President if Romney wins the GOP nomination.
Rudy Acuña: As a group Latino politicos have not been especially progressive. Indeed, they have been less than courageous when it comes to police brutality and capital punishment.
Victoria DeFrancesco Soto: Sandoval has a proven track record of garnering support outside of his party but not within the Latino community. Sandoval would otherwise be an ideal running mate.
Victoria DeFrancesco Soto: The GOP, however, shouldn’t hold its breath. The idea that Latinos are social conservatives akin to white evangelicals is simply off-base.
Alvaro Huerta: Too often, corporate-minded outsiders who never experienced poverty or attended overcrowded public schools preach to inner-city Latinos and African Americans about working hard, making the right choices and being accountable for their actions as the sole means to upward mobility.
Rodolfo F. Acuña: The nativists’ hypocrisy gives opportunism a bad name. They care nothing about the truth, they care nothing about Latino students
Vivan Rothstein: In my first act of civil disobedience, I mixed up all the index card files of clients and contracts so no one could figure out who had received which threatening letter, effectively destroying the company’s system of harassment.
Rodolfo F. Acuña: ALEC Arizona and Latino Students – In Tucson, brutalizing immigrants and Latino students is part of the grand strategy ALEC and others use to keep Mexicans in their place.
Pilar Marrero: Moral issues rank very low in Latino Voter’s minds when making a voting decision while issues like the economy, jobs, taxes and minimum wage are far more important, a new poll released today shows. That finding totally contradicts the famous Ronald Reagan belief, said in the eighties, that “Hispanics are Republicans. They just don’t know it yet.”
Pilar Marrero: Among the eight candidates, there is no one equivalent to George W. Bush who would attract a significant percentage of the Latino vote.
Randy Shaw: Obama could regain young people’s support by lowering student loan rates, enacting immigration reform and rejecting the Keystone XL Pipeline, but time—and his political capital—is running out.
Steve Hochstadt: The women’s liberation movement of the 1960s and 1970s finally made an issue of fathering. If women were going to get out of the house and into the workplace, men had to change their roles, too.
The Frying Pan: A successful mayor and council cannot be satisfied with merely coping as issues arise, but must be able to anticipate and define the city´s needs for the next four years. As our newly elected leaders prepare for their roles, we´ve asked writers to share their thoughts about what lies ahead for Los Angeles.
PCL offers monthly Open House Events on the 2nd Saturday at 2pm and 3rd Thursday at 6pm. Click here to learn more.
Friday Feedback: “The Role of the Middle-Class Revisited”
Friday Feedback: This week, Rosalio Munoz comments on Dr. Rodolfo Acuña’s article that states, “Chicanas/os and Latinos remain political pochos because once they are out of college most do not remain politically active.”