Lê’s “Gangster” Not Just Another Immigration Memoir (tags)
Lê Thi Diem Thúy was brought to this country from Viet Nam by her father in 1978, when she was six, but her book “The Gangster We Are All Looking For,” honored this year by the San Diego Public Library and PBS as the 2011 “One Book, One San Diego,” isn’t your ordinary immigrant’s memoir. Presented as a novel — which allows Lê to tap her childhood for material without having to be bound by literal truth — “Gangster” is written in an almost poetic prose style, rich in nature imagery, characteristic of many Asian writers who learned English as a second language. Introducing, reading from and commenting on the book at the Public Library downtown on February 2, Lê gave a presentation touching on a lot of the issues raised in her book, including culture clashes, the role of the imagination and language as a force that can tear people apart as much as it can bring them together.
Fernando Suárez del Solár Speaks at “Senseless Death” Screening (tags)
In 2003 Jesús Suárez del Solár became one of the first U.S. victims of the current war in Iraq -- and his father, Fernando, expressed his anger and sadness at the loss of his son by joining the San Diego anti-war movement and becoming one of its most powerful activists. On July 8 the San Diego Public Library showed “A Senseless Death,” a 2006 documentary by a French-Canadian filmmaker that told the story of Jesús and other so-called “green-card soldiers,” immigrants (both documented and undocumented) lured into the U.S. military and promised citizenship in return for becoming cannon fodder for U.S. imperalism.
How Military Recruiters Pitch to Latinos: PowerPoint Racism (tags)
According to this racializing model, "right-brain" irrational Hispanics, unsuited for "America's system of education," will vote their way into Karl Rove's projected Republican majority, and for decades to come fill the ranks of the lowest echelons of the service sector, the prison system, and the combat units of America's imperial army. Were he alive today Che Guevara, whom a CIA operative once described as "fairly intellectual for a Latin," would undoubtedly be asking progressive Latinos what they plan to do about it.
Speaking Truth to Power (tags)
I would like to acknowledge the following professors for this dialogue and article about a sensitive issue in the Chicano movement: Mario Barrera of Berkeley, Noam Chomsky of MIT, Chuck O’Connell of UC Irvine, and Jorge Mariscal of UC San Diego.
1970: Chicano Moratorium — 2005: Latinos for Peace (tags)
La Raza did its part in bringing an end to the war in Vietnam. Some of us activists of the Chicano Moratorium era are coming together with other Latino activists we have come to know around the country and with the newer generations and immigrants. We call ourselves Latinos For Peace.
The Far Right and Anti-Mexican Racism (tags)
Sensing the impending end of their white privilege, Right-Wing ideologues have been using racist imagery created by the John Birch Society and others. Patrick J. Buchanan wrote that MECA is "a Chicano version of the white-supremacist Aryan Nation... and is unabashedly racist and anti-American"